In memory of The Punisher co-creator Gerry Conway (1952–2026).

I have resisted the urge, outside of epithets insinuating intoxication, to comment on the googly eyes of FBI Director Kash Patel (or as I like to call him, “Kush” Patel, because that fool has got to be smoking something). I assumed they were an immutable physical trait, a circumstance of his birth, not his character. Now, I wonder if they indicate stimulant abuse, which would vindicate his haters’ assessment of his paranoia, recklessness, mania, and evident self-destruction.

Looking at it now, I think my attacks on Mr. Patel have been restrained by pity. He is so obviously ill at ease in his skin, flailing and desperate to fit a role for which he is unqualified and unsuitable. We have all felt like such impostors, but he has so little time left to grow into the job that it feels like bullying to call him insufficient. He knows. I never had to think about him when he was a podcaster—he seemed annoying but unimportant. He should have stayed that way.

I realized just how weird and flamboyant Mr. Patel was when I first saw his red Cybertruck parading around DC with the license plate KASH 009. An ugly thing made worse by his desire to be distinctive. Call me old-fashioned, but in my day, “government gangsters,” as Mr. Patel has called everyone else with his job, drove town cars, or BMWs that blended in with corporate and rental car fleets. They did not beg the world for recognition. This shit is unbecoming.

Mr. Patel was once an ordinary fed, but after that and before he was the FBI director, he was, like me, an edgy merchandiser. His cringe K$H brand included the company Based Apparel’s K$H hoodies, beanies, scarves, and caps, the “Fight with Kash” line of tees and Gadsden-flag hoodies, K$H wine, K$H supplements marketed without evidence to “detoxify” the supposed harmful effects of COVID-19 vaccines, K$H playing cards, K$H cigars, and even K$H sneakers. Public service is not enough for this man—he must also be a lifestyle brand. Per The Atlantic, Mr. Patel has recently complained that the FBI’s official merchandise is “not intimidating enough.” If only he had majored in marketing or art instead of law, he could be happily designing his t-shirts instead of whatever the fuck he is doing now.

Mr. Patel’s book Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy, which reads like an extended podcast rant, included an appendix that is plainly an enemies list. The Plot Against the King children’s trilogy stars him as a wizard called “Kash the Distinguished Discoverer” helping the noble “King Donald” vanquish “Hillary Queenton” while the FBI appears as “slug stables in a shadowy corner of the castle” run by “Keeper Komey.”

As a t-shirt salesman myself, please be assured that you can purchase from the Partisan Hex merch shop here, home of the DONALD IS A BITCH t-shirt, without any worry that I will take a great position of power. If I am ever elevated to such a position, something has gone horribly wrong.

Iranian hackers boasted that they had penetrated Mr. Patel’s e-mail. I will defend Mr. Patel this once. They accessed a personal e-mail account primarily active between 2011 and 2018. Hardly an elite cyberattack. I reviewed the leak and found nothing of special interest. His e-mails contained photos of Mr. Patel in Cuba, sniffing and smoking cigars and waving a bottle of rum in a mirror. Who cares? They also revealed his Hilton Honors rewards account number, which is not going to hurt anyone, and that he goes by the name “spiderkash” on XVideos, a pornographic website.

Breaking into a man’s computer system and extracting private correspondence is low. Most Americans generate trails of embarrassing private correspondences as they bumble through life. How many botched love letters are in your e-mail history? If a message from Mr. Patel said he knew President Donald Trump was an ignorant slut but would endorse him anyway to get closer to the reins of power, that would have political salience, but the FBI director’s cigar-and-porn parties ought to be left alone unless he is spending taxpayer funds on them. The problem for Mr. Patel, then, is that his current indulgences are at the expense of the American people.

Mr. Patel has been critical critical of former FBI Director Christopher Wray, writing in Government Gangsters that Mr. Wray for “use[d] a government-funded jet to fly to his summer lake house in upstate New York.” Mr. Patel now regularly uses his government jet to visit his long-distance girlfriend (“LDR GF”), amateur country “sensation” and MAGA influencer Alexis Wilkins. He equipped Ms. Wilkins with her own FBI detail for protection and enlisted FBI agents to drive her drunk friend’s ass home.

The introduction to Government Gangsters say that Mr. Patel’s “family is proud to be American… value[s] hard work[,] cherish[es] fairness[,] believe[s] in personal responsibility, and… [doesn’t] think anyone has a right to special favors or special treatment,” and yet now he takes special favors as an entitlement. If they saw the man he grew into, I wonder if his family would have raised him differently—Mr. Patel and Ms. Wilkins seem too unashamedly indulgent in the perks of his office.

I am no gambler, but I would bet that Mr. Patel never marries Ms. Wilkins. Once he is fired—kicked to the curb like a dog—he will be single, too. If Ms. Wilkins cared for the integrity of their relationship, she would move closer to the District, drive to him for once. She certainly would not make him the subject of ridicule by letting herself be chartered around at taxpayers’ expense. She is supposedly a conservative influencer, but back in my day, conservatives hated taking public funds for private vices—they thought it was a moral failing. The impropriety is not subtle. Between this and former Homeland Security Secretary Puppykiller Kristi Noem’s fuck plane, I am livid. How much taxpayer money has been spent on sleazy love affairs?

Mr. Patel made a special custom challenge coin, which says KASH, but it bears the Punisher skull logo, with spider-eyes for sockets and guns for teeth. Punisher, mind you, is a comic book character who is not a superhero. He is an ex-Marine who murders scores of suspected criminals without trial. The reverse of the coin shows the FBI seal, a Tommy gun, Mr. Patel’s signature, and a blue nine. That shit drives Marvel crazy. The late Gerry Conway, who co-created the Punisher in 1974 and died this past week, told SYFY Wire in 2019:

“The Punisher represents a failure of the Justice system. It goes without saying. In a way, it’s as offensive as putting a Confederate flag on a government building. My point of view is, the Punisher is an anti-hero, someone we might root for while remembering he’s also an outlaw and criminal. If an officer of the law, representing the justice system, puts a criminal’s symbol on his police car, or shares challenge coins honoring a criminal, he or she is making a very ill-advised statement about their understanding of the law.”

Mr. Conway later told Forbes:

“It always struck me as stupid and ironic that members of the police are embracing what is fundamentally an outlaw symbol.”

There have been multiple comic and television storylines in which Frank Castle, the Punisher, rejects the association of his logo with zealous law enforcement. In Punisher #13, Castle tears the skull decal off a police cruiser and tells the officers their role model should be Captain America, not him. In Civil War #6, Captain America punches Castle unconscious. And this is who Mr. Patel chooses to identify with his brand?

My personal favorite, though, is Jason Aaron’s Punisher run, in which Castle’s wife and children, whose murders launched his crusade against crime, were resurrected. Horrified at what Castle had become, his dead wife revealed that he was always unwell, and that she was on her way to divorce him when the inciting incident occurred. This “retconned” the Punisher into the world’s most divorced, “delulu” man (other than former co-President Elon Musk).

Why does Mr. Patel role-play as Spider-Man on pornographic websites and use the Punisher’s personal sigil as his own when he clearly does not read comic books? I am sorry. I hate to “gatekeep.” But it is a stupid man who wears symbols he does not understand, and Mr. Patel does not understand the meaning of Spider-Man or the Punisher, or the moral precepts their stories are meant to impart. With power comes responsibility, not impunity, perks, or merchandising opportunities.

The Atlantic’s Sarah Fitzpatrick reported in the April 2026 article “The FBI Director Is MIA” that Mr. Patel is, allegedly, often drunk at Ned’s Club in DC, and the Poodle Room in Las Vegas, a no-phones, no-photos members-only club at the Fontainebleau Las Vegas, lined with illuminated poodle statues. I assume the theming makes more sense when drugs and alcohol are involved. He is described as getting so “lit” on these weekday nights out that his meetings are pushed to the afternoon. And sure enough, the majority of Mr. Patel’s public appearances happen after noon.

Mr. Patel’s hangovers are so great, in fact, that the FBI allegedly requisitioned breaching equipment to get access to his apartment and wake his ass up. Every time I am hungover but crawl out of bed without the help of a SWAT team, I am stunting on Mr. Patel. In another life, I would go shot for shot with him and win.

And to be clear, Mr. Patel’s job performance sucks and is erratic enough to suspect that he is in fact working drunk, high, or hungover. Hours after Charlie Kirk was shot in Utah, Mr. Patel tweeted that the FBI had “the subject” in custody—except the actual shooter, Tyler Robinson, had not yet turned himself in. The Atlantic reports FBI officials have privately wondered whether alcohol played a role in Mr. Patel’s habit of broadcasting inaccurate information about active investigations. Mr. Patel also declared he would see Mr. Kirk in Valhalla, the Norse god Odin’s bar for warriors slain in battle. An odd promise from a Hindu to an evangelical Christian unless we assume the spiritual elements of these words have no meaning. Mr. Patel did the same shit again after the Brown University mass shooting, too, announcing the detention of a “person of interest” who had to be released within hours.

The article opens with Mr. Patel unable to log into his government computer system, concluding that he had been locked out, and then calling aides and allies to announce that the White House had fired him. “It was all ultimately bullshit,” one FBI official told The Atlantic. A technical glitch, quickly resolved. Had I embarrassed myself so, I would never come to work again. America would be safer if Mr. Patel had my self-consciousness.

In the wake of The Atlantic’s article, it was reported that Mr. Patel had alcohol-related encounters with the police in undergrad, including a February 2001 public intoxication charge for “cheering too loudly,” he says, at a University of Richmond basketball game, which seems doubtful, and another arrest for public urination. That, at least, is more relatable than unconscionable or obnoxious. But if character is destiny, I doubt Mr. Patel has changed his character much since then; if he had, I doubt the FBI director would be caught on footage chugging beers in the locker room of the United States men’s Olympic ice hockey team. I hope he had fun, but I am irritated watching such an annoying, reprehensible man rack up perk after perk.

Mr. Patel was expected to be fired on April 2 alongside the notoriously corrupt former Attorney General Pam Bondi, but somehow survived. The White House is reportedly already discussing his replacement, and a former official described Mr. Patel as “rightly paranoid.” According to The Atlantic, Mr. Trump called Mr. Patel personally to complain about the Olympic locker-room footage, which I think would make any bureaucrat of character nervous. So, Mr. Patel is in the doghouse, in an administration notorious for kicking dogs to the curb.

Paranoid is all too apt, unfortunately—over the last year, there have been multiple reports that FBI agents are subject to polygraphs where they are questioned about Mr. Patel’s enemies and whether or not they were talking shit about Mr. Patel.

Mr. Patel has sued The Atlantic and Ms. Fitzpatrick for $250 million in defamation over its story. Heh. I am excited for discovery—the magazine gleefully counted its sources per assertion like a flex. The opening anecdote alone, Mr. Patel’s April IT-lockout meltdown, is attributed to nine sources. The article drew on “more than two dozen” sources, including current and former FBI officials, law-enforcement and intelligence staff, hospitality-industry workers, members of Congress, political operatives, lobbyists, and former advisers.

There is nothing more under Mr. Patel’s surface than he shows. He might be good for a beer, but he is a sycophant, and a liar, and thinks we cannot see him. No wonder he debases himself, showering Ms. Wilkins in gifts like a simp. It cannot be easy or pleasant to listen to his bullshit and excuse-making, unless he is paying for the tolerance.

Long before the FBI jet, Mr. Patel was “Coach Kash” to a Northwest DC youth hockey team, a man who showed up to practice in his suit. By the testimony of his former players, he was intense, no-nonsense, seemed to care, and was not the freak who now shows up on their televisions. Mr. Patel made himself so unlovable. He would have been happier had he stayed in the ordinary world, returned to coaching youth hockey, and found meaning in service to his community instead of robbing the taxpayer for his extravagances.

Mr. Patel brought Ms. Wilkins to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 25, 2026. He ought to have been ashamed to show his face there—it was recently reported he attempted to open a criminal investigation against a New York Times reporter for covering his relationship and hurting his girlfriend’s feelings. The WHCA ought to have disinvited his ass.

But as they say, the arc of the universe bends toward justice. During the shooting, Mr. Patel was captured on video crouched on the ballroom floor looking dumbfounded, and Ms. Wilkins was spotted by an NYT reporter in a separate room holding another man’s hand. How lewd! Hopefully, he was a security officer and Mr. Patel did not get publicly “kucked.”

Ms. Wilkins told the Daily Mail: “I was only ever holding Kash’s hand!” But then, what else could she say? She would never admit it. Now that Thirty Mile Zone has opened a DC bureau, I hope they get to the bottom of this, because if I—the American taxpayer—must fund this tawdry affair, I want the tea.

No less than the Doctor of Democracy, Rush Limbaugh, once argued that if the American taxpayer was funding Sandra Fluke’s contraception, the public was owed something in return—“the videos of all this sex posted online so we can see what we are getting for our money.” By that standard, the American taxpayer is owed at least some “hot goss.” It is an unkind insinuation, but I doubt Mr. Patel would have extended any more courtesy to somebody on his enemies list.

Curiously, Mr. Patel was specifically exempted from the WHCD shooter’s manifesto. Cole Tomas Allen’s written statement indicated that “administration officials (not including Mr. Patel)” were considered “targets.” It was unclear why Mr. Patel was spared—perhaps Mr. Allen will elaborate, because Mr. Patel’s old friends on the right now claim the shooting was an inside job and the shooter was his best friend.

This, too, is a fate Mr. Patel earned. He has been a connoisseur of conspiracies himself, and so what he has done to others, he shall receive. I never think that MAGA believe their conspiracy theories to be literal fact; rather, I see them as expressions of their discontent with individuals. If this grumbling has any meaning, he has lost the confidence of the cult ever since he helped participate in the Epstein files cover-up.

The Atlantic’s story suggested that Mr. Patel’s allies in the West Wing are keeping the storylines about the jet, the drinking, and the partying away from Mr. Trump’s attention, because Mr. Patel will surely be fired if the president ever decides to focus on them. Which means our FBI director only has his job because Mr. Trump has not gotten around to hearing about his nonsense.

Since the story was published, Mr. Patel has been making constant public appearances doing right-wing crank shit like charging former FBI Director James Comey for threatening to assassinate Mr. Trump by photographing seashells reading “8467” and absurdly indicting the Southern Poverty Law Center, presumably to clean up his boozehound image and curry favor. He has only proven his paranoia. This is the mania of a man who knows the jig is almost up, but not exactly when the curtain will fall.

The FBI’s response to the story has been to comically overcorrect. No, the FBI says, Mr. Patel is not chronically absent—he is “at FBI headquarters nearly every single day,” and when he isn’t, he is “visiting field offices… more frequently than any of his predecessors.” He must be the LEAST absent director the agency has ever had! This seems unlikely. Under Mr. Patel, the complaint goes on, the FBI has captured “twice as many” of the Ten Most Wanted “in this Administration alone as during the entirety of the prior Administration”; driven “a 20% decrease in homicide rate”; disrupted “more than 2,000 gangs and criminal enterprises”; located “more than 6,300 child victims”; and seized “more than 2,500 kilograms of fentanyl… enough to kill more than 189 million people.” So: Mr. Patel doesn’t drink, doesn’t miss work, doesn’t take vacation, and works harder than every modern predecessor. Surely he has earned a few drinks for that.

Mr. Patel wants to have two lives: one in which he is the smartest, soberest, most hard-working FBI director in history (who happens to dabble in conspiracy), and another where he rocks and rolls all night and parties every day. These cannot be balanced, and in so trying Mr. Patel further exposes what was already deducible: Kash is a fuck-up. Could be a chorus, or a rap hook. Kash is a fuck-up. Kash is a fuck-up.

When I think about the near future, when Mr. Patel will not be the FBI director, the phrase that comes to mind is “#PACKWATCH #RIPBOZO REST IN PISS YOU WON’T BE MISSED 💯💯🤣.” After a year of his exhausting drama, Mr. Patel showed he will not exceed anyone’s low expectations, and besides that, will be happier doing anything else. Perhaps he could get back on his t-shirt hustle, flex his creativity. Then, he could learn to love himself, instead of making the country suffer while he pretended to be a serious person.

After President Donald Trump proclaimed on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” InfoWars host Alex Jones, former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, and conservative commentators Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson all called for his removal from office.

Mr. Jones announced a “WAR CRIME ALERT,” quoted Mr. Trump’s words back at his audience, and wrote that Mr. Trump “literally sounds like an unhinged supervillain from a Marvel comic movie.” On air, Mr. Jones called Mr. Trump a “dementia risk” and asked his guest, “How do we 25th Amendment his ass?”

Ms. Owens tweeted that “the 25th amendment needs to be invoked,” called Mr. Trump “a genocidal lunatic,” and demanded that “Congress and military… intervene.”

Ms. Greene posted “25TH AMENDMENT!!!” and wrote that the United States “cannot kill an entire civilization” and that “this is evil and madness.”

Many such cases.

Podcast host Tucker Carlson accused Mr. Trump of trying to play God. “The message of all faith at the biggest-picture level,” Mr. Carlson said, “is you are not God. And only if you think you are, do you talk this way.”

What took them so long? Mr. Trump was crazy in 2016, when he rolled down his stupid gilded escalator spewing evil bullshit. These persons supported him after that. It was on their backs he was lifted to this position.

I saw on social media in response to a compilation of defections:

“This is your mess. You clean it up,”

“They’re the ones who did this,”

“Get the fuck out of here,”

“It’s too late.”

One particular Reddit comment caught my eye: “Until they are willing to take accountability for what they have said or done, I will never accept them.”

Were these hardcore right-wing talk show hosts and Ms. Greene looking for that poster’s acceptance? Or were they looking to stop Mr. Trump from nuking Iran? Were they looking for the left’s familial embrace? Or did they want Mr. Trump removed from power?

I do not expect this to be a popular thing to say over at Busboys and Poets or Kramerbooks, but I think it is too late to ask anybody for “accountability.”

Mmes. Greene, Owens, and Mr. Jones have already done enough deplorable things that, if we hold their crimes against them, we can never use their help. But we could let that be tomorrow’s problem! They will likely say or do terrible things in the future, might even try and harm us next week. But we can wait ‘til then to be mad at that.

I think it would be immoral not to agree to let them talk shit about Mr. Trump. It would be a sin to forsake their help when “Iranian civilization,” the existence of another country, is at stake.

If Iran is turned into a wasteland, as Mr. Trump threatened, that would be one of history’s great horrors, the loss and displacement of 90 million people. Economically, morally, ecologically, and spiritually catastrophic. Anyone who wants to stop this must try.

Ms. Owens saying “we are beyond madness” reaches people unreachable to MSNOW hosts Rachel Maddow or the Morning Joes.

Mr. Carlson saying that Mr. Trump’s mockery of Islam insults all people of faith, and that threatening of mass death on Easter is some antichrist bullshit—will be more meaningful to his millions of listeners than me saying the same.

To be clear, I am saying yes, amplify Alex Jones, even celebrate him, if it increases the sum of people objecting to the war.

We do not need to invite any of these blowhards “into the tent.” They were not asking to join—they think as poorly of us as we do them, and they would not enjoy “our tent.” But we want their tents on the right side of this.

Hardly even peace—conservative commentator Megyn Kelly said that “Trump could drop a nuke and [she’d] still vote Republican over those people [meaning Democrats].” But if Ms. Kelly would prefer there to be no mass destruction, she still ought to rebuke the president.

Mr. Trump should be removed from the Oval Office. We should stymie the destruction he calls for. If the ascendant generation of the Right’s villains will “do the work” to break the MAGA personality cult, then we must do that task together. If that cult’s former acolytes want to build their own cults with the pieces, then those will be their spoils; Democrats and all Americans of character will be rewarded with the end of the Trump show.

A comic book allusion. During the Marvel Comics crossover, “A.X.E.: Judgment Day,” the X-Men, desperate for aid to combat a space god, fought alongside a group of sentient mutant-hating-and-hunting Sentinels called Orchis. In A.X.E.: Judgment Day issue #6, after the space god is defeated, Orchis wins so much popularity from that campaign that children wore Orchis t-shirts, watched Orchis cartoons, and soon most mutants were imprisoned. Still, the planet did not get blown up.

This is to say that Mr. Carlson need not “redeem himself” to address the threat today, and he will probably profit if he does so and use those profits to promote his own evil ideology tomorrow. This is the lesser awful.

Former Representative Joe Walsh said at the 2026 Principles First Conference: “If you believe the threat is the threat,” then “we are called to do stuff that we never thought we would have to do. Deny ourselves.” The easiest things for me to sacrifice are perfect alliances and a future without sucky compromises, because we would never get those anyway.

Ms. Owens does not seek to be good by our standards. When she wages her wars against French First Lady Brigitte Macron and Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk, she invokes anti-Semitism, witchcraft, secret government plots, queerphobia. She writes litanies of libels weekly.

Mr. Jones is still derelict in repaying the families of Sandy Hook victims for using his broadcast to call them crisis actors.

Mr. Carlson will not seek forgiveness so that he can be included beside us. He is maybe on a Qatari payroll, maybe running for president, normalizing anti-vaccine propaganda and likely costing gullible Americans their lives, still promoting the same white extinction bullshit as Mr. Trump and his evil vizier Stephen Miller. He is an abhorrent and condemnable character, but it is possible to put fighting him on hold and deal with all that later.

The redemption arc of Ms. Greene has been a hard swallow, because however she arrives at the right conclusions, it always seems to be from bigoted, selfish, or conspiratorial reasons. Her work with Democrats to release the Epstein files was meant to catch Democrats in the files. Yet, by pursuing a common goal with her, Representative Ro Khanna got the Epstein Transparency Act passed, wounded the fuck out of MAGA, and turned Ms. Greene into at least a voice against genocide. That ruled, dude.

My friend Mr. G. said that the prosecution of the Iran war made even his lifelong Republican-loving, Trump-loving, Islamophobic parents turn against the president.

“They hate [Trump] now,” Mr. G. said.

I suggested Leaving MAGA founder Rich Logis’s nonprofit, Leaving MAGA.

Mr. G. sighed and said, “No, no, they don’t want to stop being Republicans, they just want the Trump show to be over before it’s too late.” Oddly, they had more willingness to attend NO KINGS than to leave MAGA. But that is still good!

On Truth Social, Mr. Trump announced his former servants had “Low IQs,” were “stupid people,” “thrown off Television, lost their Shows, and aren’t even invited on TV because nobody cares about them.” He called them “NUT JOBS” and “TROUBLEMAKERS.”

Mr. Trump said Mr. Carlson “couldn’t even finish College” and “was a broken man when he got fired from Fox.”

Mr. Trump said that “the First Lady of France is a far more beautiful woman than Candace, in fact, it’s not even close!”

Mr. Trump called Mr. Jones “Bankrupt,” and reminded everyone that Mr. Jones “lost his entire fortune, as he should have, for his horrendous attack on the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims.”

Mr. Trump referred to Ms. Greene as “Wacky Marjorie Traitor Brown,” explaining that “green turns to brown under stress.” A sick burn, to be sure.

If Mr. Carlson does not want Mr. Trump to destroy Iran or to mock Islam, that is good. I cannot say he has no right to take a good position. And if he takes a good position today, and we must fight him again tomorrow—in 2028, or 2032, or 2036, or 2040—he has a right to run, and we must beat him then.

I just do not have the time to attack people while they are yelling at the same guy as me. I consider it irresponsible not to do so when the alternative is great destruction. I am certain my heart is set here. I am somewhat certain this is the correct course of action. If I regret this sentiment later, I hope it shows I came by it honestly.

President Donald Trump threatened to murder the Iranian civilization. Congress must return from recess immediately and remove him from office, send him to a cell.

The Iran situation is serious. Why, then, does this bitch treat it as if it were subject to his whims?

I know from conversations that America’s brave men and women in uniform want to be good and honorable. I fear they have grown so cynical about politics that they assume, quite wrongly, that they can ignore it as a clown show, because somewhere in their chain of command there is a patriot in control—a figure who will stop short of ordering hell to come to earth. But Mr. Trump has repeatedly promised to summon hell to earth. “Time is running out,” he posted on Saturday, “48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them.”

Our generals studied, planned, and prepared for this war. I worry they think this is about their Grand Strategy or geopolitical logic: ending the Iranian threat deprives China of a key ally, demonstrates our resolve to defend Taiwan, et cetera, et cetera. They should have paid more attention to Truth Social than the Atlantic Council.

Military ethicist Dr. Pauline Shanks Kaurin, formerly the Admiral James B. Stockdale Chair in Professional Military Ethics at the Naval War College—who resigned to protest ex-Fox news host and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s restrictions on what could be taught there—identified what she calls the problem of the “unprincipled principal,” a phrase I think about every day.

The “principal” in the formulation is the civilian leadership: the commander-in-chief, the Secretary of Defense, the chain of authority above the uniformed military. But in 2026, that principal cannot be trusted to issue lawful or moral orders.

Our military can execute plans. Operation Epic Fury has seen our Air Force bomb targets across Iran—ballistic missile facilities, naval assets, and command infrastructure. But if, at the top of the chain of command, there is a president who demonstrates the inconstancy of a teenager on drugs, we cannot rely on that leadership to see anything through.

Consider the teenager. On a Tuesday, perhaps, he guzzles Robitussin, goes “robotripping.” On a Wednesday, he smokes Delta-8, fake weed. On a Thursday, gas station diet pills and Kratom. On Friday, hard liquor. Some prescription pills from a friend on a Saturday. On Sunday, school looms, and all his plans and homework are in shambles. That would be when he breaks out the bath salts. Many of us have endured such a classmate. We have such a temperament in the White House right now—except this president’s high is praise and adoration from the television set.

What does endless competence accomplish, when it is aimed by the aimless or evil?

“Operation Epic Fury”—which ought to have been the title of a canceled Power Rangers project (Operation Overdrive, Cosmic Fury, Dino Fury, Megaforce, Super Megaforce)—launched on February 28, 2026, the day after Oman’s foreign minister went on Face the Nation to declare that “a peace deal is within our reach,” that Iran had agreed to never stockpile enriched uranium and to full IAEA verification. Strikes began overnight.

I remain convinced that because this president is an asshole he wanted the war to begin before there could be any formal peace established, because he wanted the death, not an agreement. Mr. Trump claimed at the State of the Union that “we haven’t heard those secret words, ‘We will never have a nuclear weapon’”—which is a fucking lie. For decades, the Iranian regime has sworn off building a bomb; Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa declaring nuclear weapons forbidden under Islamic law. Perhaps they were lying—but they certainly said it, repeatedly, and Mr. Trump knows it.

Mr. Trump’s stated objectives were to destroy Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal, annihilate its navy, sever its proxy networks, ensure it never obtained a nuclear weapon. Since then, he added oil seizure to the objectives list, then dropped it; demanded the Strait of Hormuz be reopened, then told allies it was their problem; then said he was “considering blowing everything up and taking over the oil” if the Strait were not opened.

This villain posted “Praise be to Allah” on Easter Sunday—imagine if former President Barack Obama had done that. He pronounced, on Truth Social, that “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran.” Imagine if any other leader jerked off to fantasies of war crimes in public, on Easter morning.

The International Committee of the Red Cross issued a statement: “Deliberate threats, whether in rhetoric or in action, against essential civilian infrastructure and nuclear facilities must not become the new norm in warfare.”

Asked about this on Monday, Mr. Trump said: “The war crime is allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

ABC News’s Rachel Scott asked Mr. Trump what, if anything, was off the table if no deal was reached. “If happens, it happens,” he said. “And if it doesn’t, we’re blowing up the whole country.” She asked what was off limits. “Very little,” he said.

“Blowing up the whole country.” We must not be naïve about what that means. Approximately 90 million people. A genocide.

I fear the nuclear taboo erodes each time we threaten to cross that threshold. Russia, China, Pakistan, Israel—any nuclear power might, in a world where the American president says “very little” is off the table, start to fantasize about whom they want to nuke. Does an age of annihilation now loom?

Mr. Trump is surrounded by so-called prophets who fuel his God complex. Paula White-Cain, head of the White House Faith Office, who during an April 2nd Easter lunch at the White House stood beside the president and compared him to Jesus—“you were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our lord and savior showed us”—has declared, in a formulation she has repeated since the first impeachment, that “to say no to President Trump would be saying no to God.”

California megachurch pastor Greg Laurie—whose Harvest Christian Fellowship faces 23 federal lawsuits, consolidated in March 2026, alleging that a Harvest pastor carried out child sexual abuse on an “industrial scale” across a network of orphanages in Romania for a decade, and that Laurie and the church covered it up for 20 years despite repeated reports—linked the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to end-times gospel and told his audience that “as far as I can see, the next event on the prophetic calendar will be the rapture.”

I wish. I would be glad to see these freaks go to the Hale-Bopp comet or wherever they dream of, and leave the Earth the fuck alone.

Mr. Hegseth, that DUI hire, at a March 25 prayer service at the Pentagon, opened by praying: “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation.” He then continued: “Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” At a press briefing, he recited Psalm 144—“Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle”—at reporters. He has held at least ten such prayer services at the Pentagon. He refers to Iranian military leadership as “mullahs, desperate and scrambling.” He has tattooed on his body the Crusader rallying cry Deus Vult (“God wills it”), the Jerusalem cross, and the Arabic word for infidel.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation reports receiving more than 200 complaints from service members across dozens of installations whose commanders have told them, in various formulations, that Mr. Trump has been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” Thirty Democratic members of Congress have formally asked the Pentagon inspector general to investigate.

No less than Candace Owens and former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene have sounded the alarm that Mr. Trump thinks himself a messiah. On Easter Sunday, Ms. Owens called his administration “satanic,” wrote that Mr. Trump is “deeply unwell and surrounded by religious fanatics who have convinced him that he is a messiah,” and demanded that Congress remove “the Mad King.”

Ms. Greene urged “everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian” to “fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshipping the President and intervene in Trump’s madness.” She added: “I know all of you and him, and he has gone insane, and all of you are complicit.”

Even if our servicemembers would, under no circumstances, obey an order to attack critical civilian infrastructure in Iran—whether out of humanitarian impulse, moral conviction, adherence to the rule of law, or fear of the Hague—the president declared an intention to do so, which means we still collect the moral stain even if we abstain from the act, and sully ourselves for nothing.

I hold no love or compassion for the Iranian regime. That authoritarian government massacred tens of thousands of its own people in the streets only a few months ago, and it has exported terror around the globe for 47 years. I would be glad to see it gone and replaced with secular leadership. But not like this. If it is acceptable for the Iranian people to be targeted and threatened by a United States president, what stops a future adversary from threatening me, or my neighbors?

In the lobby of a DC hotel, I was drinking and watching the news beside a suited older man drinking far more. Based on his demeanor and appearance, I held my tongue, having surmised that he might be a defense contractor of the most obsequious kind—the sort who will take any war because it pays him out. But during Mr. Trump’s disastrous, slurring prime-time address on Iran, he sneered, set his drink down, and said: “Jesus fucking Christ. Grow up. Just change the regime. Instead of whatever the hell this is.”

But the war gave the Islamic Republic a new Supreme Leader who looks exactly like the old one, except younger. Even war profiteers, then, have had their hopes dashed by this war.

Across America, men are receiving deployment orders, leaving home and boarding ships bound for the Middle East. To imagine they might fight and die under the orders of men high on bullshit, dissociated from reality, is unbearable.

Why is Congress on vacation? Why did they not come back to the District, immediately, when the threats of nuclear annihilation started? Why have Republicans decided to abstain from anything resembling leadership, and given over all their judgment to a man whose brain has failed? Mr. Trump should be removed from office today. Now. Before his 8 PM deadline. If everybody starts driving now, there is still time.

Foreword

The third round of NO KINGS rallies will be held across the country on Saturday, March 28, 2026. NO KINGS 3 sounds climactic, like the end of a trilogy. For me, it is the cause of panic, because this write-up of the October 18, 2025, NO KINGS 2 rally is as late as Jim Dave Vance’s conversion to MAGA Trumpism.

Composition of this essay stalled when I realized it captured a moment of gathering, not conclusion. I waited to post it for the resolution of the 2025 government shutdown and other crises for perspective. October was a horror show, which was why I settled on such a scary title, but then Democrats won massive election victories that November across the country, which led me to revise the piece with a hopeful frame, then Senator Dick Durbin and others broke ranks to shut down the shut down, which caused more pessimism. Still, I held off on publishing. I could not determine why I was delaying, but I felt like I was still waiting for something, that time would reveal the meaning of the day.

For the 2026 New Year, I thought this piece would rally the spirit of the #Resistance through the dark and cold months. But on January 3, Mr. Trump bombed Venezuela and captured its President Nicolás Maduro without congressional authorization. Four days later, masked ICE thug Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renée Good. Seventeen days after that, Border Patrol agents shot Alex Pretti ten times in the back. Then the United States went into war with Iran, killing its Supreme Leader and putting the world economy into trauma.

If NO KINGS 2 was meant to stop the rise of a Trump Kingdom, it failed, or at least, did not succeed at that. It did raise spirits, which sounds insufficient, like a participation trophy, but that was also an urgent work. Now that those spirits are summoned and shaped, there is much for them to do.

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NO KINGS DAY Eve

On Friday, October 17, 2025, the eve of NO KINGS DAY 2, I was so zonked on melatonin gummies it felt like a holiday. I hoped the #Resistance fairy would be kind enough to bring us an undeniable cause for invoking the 25th Amendment and removing President Donald Trump from office. But then I became sleepless with horror watching Sinclair Broadcasting‘s “must-run” segment on the protest, wherein Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy “warned [the] weekend’s protests could turn volatile if radical elements like Antifa get involved.” I remember when he was a contestant on MTV’s The Real World—and as far as I am concerned, he should have stayed there.

After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, “Antifa,” short for “antifascism,” was designated a “domestic terror organization” by liars fantasizing about the existence of a sophisticated criminal network stoking dissent because they cannot imagine that Americans hate them organically. Though what trope of leader fears antifascism?

House Speaker Mike Johnson, or “MAGA Mike,” as they call him in the club, said “Hate America” rallies would be comprised of “Hamas supporters.” What nasty shit. CPAC, not NO KINGS, is the group that calls themselves domestic terrorists, and Mr. Johnson has happily spoken there.

Some Republicans do want to hurt Americans. Governor Greg Abbott pre-emptively dispatched his National Guard to the NO KINGS 2 protests in Texas. Unless he was so gullible as to believe that was necessary, I assumed the intent was intimidation. Well, I was intimidated! Not enough to stay home, but I experienced bodily discomfort. Mission accomplished?

When this administration came into power, I knew ex-Fox News host and DUI Hire, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth aspired to recreate the shooting of student activists at Kent State University. In January 2025, I asked friends in the Maryland and Virginia Guard about this over Yuenglings. They verified that, if ordered, Guardsmen would never kill American civilians. But that was another age, and based on the number of times Mr. Trump has staged the United States Armed Forces in an adversarial posture against the nation’s citizens, I worried these assurances would be tested.

Why are “normie” Republicans so comfortable this close to the line of the Boston Massacre? Would they enjoy the worst? Otherwise, why flirt with violence? If elected members of the GOP seek domination over their adversaries, we must hope they lack the stomach to be suppressors. I am sickened by today’s Republicans, and I pray they hate themselves, too.

The first round of nationwide “NO KINGS” protests in June 2025 coincided with the so-called “grand military parade“ in DC Mr. Trump scheduled for his birthday. I feared there would be a “Tiananmen Square” moment, that Americans could die. Pre-dawn, far-right private security contractor Vance Boelter killed Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, her husband Mark Hortman, their dog Gilbert, and injured State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette. A civil twilight indeed. I expected more bloody outcomes by the day’s end. Instead, the military parade featured squeaking tanks, out-of-step soldiers. Even Mr. Trump was so bored he fell asleep standing. While that was a relief, I was mistaken to think anti-climax was a victory. The president was embarrassed, but the nightmare continued.

Five million Americans that first NO KINGS DAY rallied against the GOP’s destruction of our constitutional republic, but what can defiance do uncoupled from power? Our one way out is with Democratic victories in the 2026 midterm election, if those elections are free or fair. But with troops, masked men, and blood in the streets, we should not presume freedom or fairness.

Before I became afraid, I had an outfit planned: black jeans, Doc Martens, “TRUMP IS A BITCH” t-shirt, leather jacket, fingerless leather gloves, sunglasses, and a wallet chain. The world would see me spit in the face of this evil regime. To my shame, I scrapped the look.

I saw “Antifa” once, during the 2020 Black Lives Matter rallies in DC. Antifascist street chefs cooked hot dogs on griddles, shared crock pots of soup, and wore all black, like a gothic street gang. If they were now being pursued by the state, it seemed prudent not to resemble them. Instead, I dressed like a Young Republican: khakis, a white shirt, a muted burgundy tie, and a blue blazer.

I packed, unpacked, and finally packed again safety goggles. Carrying protective gear seemed combative, but after I saw footage of smiling ICE agents pelting the giraffe-costumed musician Robby Roadsteamer with pepper balls because they disliked his YMCA cover “Trump was on the Jeffrey Epstein plane,” I prioritized my eyeballs over optics.

Rally

En route to DC the morning of the rally, I passed a Toyota Tundra with a Thin Blue Line license plate and Punisher skull sticker. No truck nuts, sadly. I prayed that guy was not planning to beat any hippie ass, because I got stuck behind an old white Chevrolet Astrovan plastered with stickers: “50501,” “Join the dark side, we have cookies,” “Save the Bay,” and “Bernie Sanders 2020.” Sadly, no “TRUMP IS A BITCH,” thanks to the Spreadshop censorship campaign that ruined our merchandise shop.

The elderly couple was going into the District, too. I considered speeding past them, but I respect oldheads too much to tailgate them. Elders are the vital part of the pro-Democracy movement until Zoomers stop calling in-person protests “cheugy.” I wished to say, “Please, you hippies, rest. Smoke your medicine. Let the next generation stop fascists.” But I cannot offer that relief. We need every fighting soul.

From Merriam-Webster: “Cheugy is a slang adjective used to describe someone or something uncool or unfashionable, especially when seen as slightly cringeworthy or trying too hard. It’s mainly used as a jokey put-down of trends stereotypically associated with millennials.”

I struggled to find parking for the first time since the Big Balls Beatdown, after which the military occupation dampened the capital’s downtown activity. I squeezed into a spot, I exited the garage, then stepped on a shoelace, and yanked it so hard I could not fix it quickly. The knot and loop were deformed, so I squatted on the sidewalk to re-lace the whole boot. Not arduous, but a task that leaves a man exposed and immobile on the corner. I was a tightly tuned ball of nerves, and could not afford looseness.

I did not imagine myself a fearless defender of democracy. I was anxious, which was fair because the administration manufactured an atmosphere of terror. I would not capitulate. I could objectively measure the force levied against me, and resented it.

At 3rd Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, musicians played a banger called “Fall of the Trump Regime.” A colorful crowd gathered around them like a hurricane of human bodies. Fuck you, QAnon. We are the storm.

The rally stage had the Capitol as backdrop. Nearby, a banner of the glaring visage of Mr. Trump hung from the Department of Labor building. Big Dear Leader vibes.

A street party advertised as “Dance against DOGE” was on the corner. “Twist and Shout” played, followed by “Somebody’s Watching Me.” It had been used to mock speech-hating FCC Chairman Brendan Carr on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, and since then, it played everywhere.

Senators Adam Schiff and Cory Booker were somewhere in the crowd. Instead of making crazy stuff up, Mr. Johnson should have been with them. He and I will never understand each other, but I want him to see me before lying about me.

Someone with a megaphone announced: “Congratulations! You are ALL ‘Antifa.’” Was he friend or foe? Was that celebration or accusation? Did he mean we were heroes or terrorists? It is not radical to care whether morons command masked goons to terrorize the citizenry. Most Americans would rather not live in such a country.

As “proof” of his theory that I and 7 million Americans were hired agitators, the president complained that shady organizations mass produced “identical perfect signs.” Had he never heard of Kinko’s? Every suburb in America is littered with mass-produced signs for mattress stores going out of business.

Most signs were handmade and earnest. Nobody can counterfeit the snark of well-conditioned MSNOW liberals and #Resistance posters. Such memetic effort deserves eternal preservation:

· “Trump is the Antichrist,”

· “Trump drew a little girl for Jeffrey Epstein,”

· “Trump is a ra_ist,”

· “NO KINGS but Short Kings,”

· “Wake the fuck up. There are Nazis in the White House,” and

· “Divided we croak.”

One placard depicted Indiana Jones punching Mr. Trump, who was dressed as Hitler. One NO KINGS banner had as its handle a submarine sandwich-shaped balloon referencing DC folk hero Sean Dunn, who splattered a cold cut on armored Customs and Border Protection agent Gregory Lairmore in the first days of the city’s occupation.

In solidarity with the Portland Frog, who had pepper spray shot through his air-intake by ICE agents, dozens of protesters came in inflatable frog costumes. It was clear everybody was having fun. I saw a gang of Squidwards, a woman “riding” a rainbow-colored chicken, a Yip Yip Martian beside a large inflatable pig in sunglasses, pink pussy hats, and T-Rexes dancing everywhere. Many attendees wore capes—American flags, Free DC, one inscribed “Sic semper tyrannis.” Why do I not own a cape? It could say: “Caesar non est supra grammaticos.”

I saw some “NO KINGS” handkerchiefs used as bandanas. I wanted one. If George Soros had supplied us with swag, as conspiracists allege, he neglected me. I would tuck it into the breast of my sport coat so that it was clearer I belonged to this throng.

One shirt announced, “History has its eyes on you.” Hamilton cringe will never die, I suppose, but nothing good has grown in its absence. A more contrarian message came from another shirt promising “Sunny days ahead.” We were in a lightless time, with little cause to expect brightening. Unbidden came the words of John McCain: “It’s always darkest before it goes pitch black.” I worried we were already in the too-late, that the bad time had already arrived and awaiting recognition.

Flags of all sizes waved across the crowdscape: American flags, Free DC flags, “Fuck Trump” banners, Palestinian, Pride, and Gadsden flags, and cosplayers hoisting the Jolly Roger from the anime One Piece on the DOL steps. That show is credited for toppling governments overseas, and youth movements have made it their icon, but it is 1140+ episodes long. I will never have time to watch it.

The crowd density was so great that I did not realize until after-the-fact that I had stood within ten feet of close friends. The same trees stymied both our eyelines to the stage.

Pastor Delonte Gholston opened the rally by declaring we were standing on holy ground. The assemblage cheered for his land acknowledgement. Finally, the revival of woke. Warmth washed gently across my face as that spirit of goodness touched us again.

James Carville would have malded if he had been there. He said after a DNC meeting in Minneapolis: “That land, what we did to Native Americans, is really well-documented. And it is a sad part of our nation’s history. Why are you bringing this up in an election?”

Mr. Carville imagines this is a rhetorical question, but I am sure any Social Studies teacher would have an answer, like “The stories of those who met similar villains may show us how they might be felled today.” That is why NO KINGS DAY 2 hammered in the grievances against the king which launched the American Revolution. In the Founding Fathers’ lives and times, of course there is some instruction in fighting for liberty against tyranny.

Mr. Gholston told a story from the Book of Daniel:

“There was a king in the land in those days, and that king’s name was Nebuchadnezzar. He was a narcissistic king. He was a prideful king. He believed that neighbors should turn against neighbors instead of loving neighbors. He believed in the occupation of territory and not the blessing of sacred land. And he told everybody in the land that they had to bow down and worship him. They erected a golden statue of him and put it on the National Mall—I mean, and put it in their land at that time. And those who were gathered there, those three sacred vessels of holiness, they refused to bow to that king.”

When Mr. Gholston said “Nebuchadnezzar,” the crowd booed. Their brains connected Mr. Trump with the Biblical despot instantly. Mine did not, because I forgot about Daniel. When the pastor named the brothers Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, I thought they were Lord of the Rings orcs.

Mr. Gholston continued: “We won’t bow to any power that traffics in fear and division… to an empire or to a regime that believes in separating us by the documentation that we carry, or the faith that we witness to, or the people that we love, or the places that we come from, because our God knows the places that we are going.”

I am not religious—”irreligious” is more accurate—but that sounded reasonable and good. I wondered if this sermon would move the hardened hearts of MAGA evangelicals, and knew it would not. They had their own mean God, who bragged about his sword and how he would make a man’s own household his foes. It seemed clear which of the two faiths meant well.

“There is a simple principle that I learned from Bishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa, who stood for decades against apartheid. And he simply taught us to look each other in the eye with a principle that we call the Sawabona principle. The Sawabona principle means I see you…. A people, a people who can see each other can remind each other of our collective sacredness. A people who can see each other cannot unsee it when our babies are being pulled out of cars on their way to be dropped off at school [or] masked ICE agents pulling up in our city and cities around the country. A people who can see each other cannot unsee… wickedness in high places [and] hypocrisy in the land.”

Are we a nation who will feign blindness? I could wear those phony khakis every day, keep my head down, lower my cortisol. It would be easier than using all my spare time to write angry newsletters. But I cannot unsee that the president is a petty gangster and a bullshitting moron who is looting and ruining this country. Knowing that harm, to look away would be complicity.

“I’m believing that there are people rising up all over this world who will not bow to hatred… corruption… hypocrisy… fear… suspicion… political violence… [or] a kind of religion that wants to be close to power but won’t empower anybody else.”

Me AF, though nobody has tried to make me bow. Mark Zuckerberg was #Resistancey during the first Trump administration, but then after Mr. Trump’s 2024 victory underwent a macho-man makeover and paid MAGA tribute. The billionaire Meta CEO possessed one of the planet’s most powerful technology companies, yet instead of combating Mr. Trump’s threat to “put him in jail” unbowed, he got on his knees and bent his head to the fucking floor. If something broke a man of his infinite means, it is hubris to assume I can resist it merely because I am a cooler dude than “the Zuck.”

Senator Chris Murphy spoke next and extolled his state of Connecticut:

“We were the first state to adopt our own constitution. In my state, we couldn’t wait to be self-governed. We couldn’t wait to throw off the yoke of control and censorship from us. Before any other state, before our founding fathers, we wrote down in Connecticut the simple words: NO KINGS.”

A yoke is a frame that fits across the shoulders of two oxen so that they can carry a plow or wagon, harnessing two things to work in tandem. I am not “yoked” by this administration because I do no work for them. But there are those who are made to do things.

“And I’m here today to share with you some unsurprising news. We are not on the verge of an authoritarian takeover. We are in the middle of an authoritarian takeover,” Mr. Murphy said. It hurt to hear. I looked to the sky and wished there was a God that might make things right again. But the world refused to change that day.

Near the Hahn/Cock statue—a big blue rooster— atop the National Gallery of Art were men in tactical gear with cameras, binoculars, and fixed counter-sniper platforms. They are not a novel sight in DC; it can be a fun game to spot their hiding spots. But after a year of dissidence, security apparatus may not be on The People’s side. I sensed the men’s covered eyes burning back on me. If the president gave the order, would their rifles aim at us? I had the persistent intrusive thought that it was at the mercy of a tyrant that we were permitted to leave alive.

“Our democracy is in peril, but it can be saved. But no one’s riding to our rescue. And I just want to be clear with you about that today. No one’s riding to our rescue. There aren’t establishment responsible Republicans that are riding to our rescue. The mainstream media isn’t riding to our rescue. There’s no oligarchs riding to our rescue. It is up to us to save us.”

Mr. Murphy neglected a critical detail. Democratic leadership cannot “ride to the rescue,” either, because they have no power to save anyone, even themselves. All we have left is the filibuster, and that could disappear with a simple majority of complicit Republicans. The voters need to come to the Republic’s rescue, if they can.

Mr. Murphy said that the president was “enacting a detailed, step-by-step plan to try to destroy all of the things that protect our democracy—free speech, fair elections, an independent press, the right to peacefully protest.” That is the state of our union.

The senator went on: “Trump does think that he’s a king… [but he] does not have the power to send masked men into our cities and pull off the streets our peaceful neighbors and throw them into the back of vans and into prisons. He never has that power.”

An oxen-driver cannot pull a wagon himself, either, but when he has his yoke handy, the wagon will be moved, no matter the cost to the beasts. Around that time, a bee set its attention on me. I respond to stings poorly, so I stayed and avoided irritating the insect before it departed. I will not give Mr. Trump the same courtesy.

Mr. Murphy meant to inspire, but when he claimed “every single one of us needs to understand that when we wake up every day, we have an obligation, a duty, a responsibility to fight hard to protect that bold experiment” my legs and lower back ached. The obligation weighs on me before every breakfast, but when I express it, everybody tells me “not to overdo it,” “I can’t do it all by myself,” or to “chill the fuck out.”

I wondered about those old hippies. Come some decades, if this political drama were not done, would I become them?

Zeteo founder and former MSNOW host, the stern but delightful Mehdi Hasan, entered next.

“I am a journalist, I am an immigrant, and I am a Muslim. I am everything Donald Trump loves. I am the Trump trifecta. I’m also a bit of a socialist. But don’t tell Stephen Miller, he alarms quite quickly…. All week I’ve heard Speaker Mike Johnson and Republican members of Congress say this rally, the NO KINGS rally, is a hate rally. A hate rally. The people who can’t get through a single day without hating on late night comedians, and overweight soldiers, and Muslim politicians, and Mexican immigrants, and Palestinian refugees, and black women, and transgender kids, and peaceful protesters, and Mr. Fucking Potato Head, they are lecturing us on hate? Really?”

When put that way, I will never understand how this GOP can face the public without shame. They would be ridiculous men, if they were not monsters.

“I’m here out of love. I’m here because I love this country. I love America. I love the First Amendment. I love our democracy. I love our diversity. Yes, our diversity. And I am not willing to sit back and watch our glorious American multiracial, multicultural, democratic experiment, our constitutional republic, destroyed by the guy from Home Alone 2.”

I will never give Mr. Johnson grace, because he never apologized for his snide remarks about this rally. If I am cruel for inferring he is a pornography addict (why else would the Speaker’s son need to monitor his Internet use?), why should I apologize? He said worse about me.

“This is a president who says he wants to be a dictator, but only for a day…. He just went to see the Egyptian President Sisi, who is a military dictator, runs one of the most repressive regimes on earth. And he went there and he said, ‘I want to praise your fantastic leadership and your low crime rates.’ This is who he loves. This is the autocratic leader he aspires to be.”

Republicans once found Mr. Trump’s praise of dictators disqualifying. It was only in 2016 that Senator Ted Cruz refused to endorse Mr. Trump at the Republican National Convention, and reminded the delegates: “We have no king or queen, we have no dictator; We the People constrain government. We deserve leaders who stand for principle.” Perhaps that version of Mr. Cruz stayed in Cancun.

Secretary of State and sycophant Li’l Marco Rubio wrote: “In just the last few days, Trump has refused to condemn white supremacism and the Ku Klux Klan, praised dictators Saddam Hussein and Moammar Qaddafi, and proposed infringing upon the First Amendment of our Constitution. That’s all after he made fun of disabled people, said China was too soft on dissidents, demeaned women, and insulted war heroes. Trump doesn’t take many clear policy positions, but when he does, they’re just as scary.”

Mr. Rubio now considers cozying up to white nationalists, flattering dictators, threatening free speech, mocking disabled people, cracking down on dissidents, demeaning women, and sneering at veterans just fine. Perhaps he will take part in some of this, too!

And of course, Vice President Jim Dave Vance once called Mr. Trump “America’s Hitler.” Now, he serves that Hitler. I hate him most of all.

Mr. Hasan called out: “Let me say to every Republican and Conservative watching, aren’t you the ones who said no more big government, no tyranny in America? So, if you believe that, what are you doing, defending masked federal agents in unmarked cars, bundling people off of the streets, including American citizens, and disappearing them? How are you okay with that? … Come over to our side, the side of no crowns, no thrones, no kings. The side of freedom, of liberty, of the Constitution. The First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment, the Twenty-Second Amendment, which says two terms means two terms. And if you’re not worried about Donald Trump trying to stay on for a third term, you should be. He’s literally selling merch.”

How could anybody of good conscience hear this and not come over to “our side?” Perhaps everyone who would, has—a depressing thought.

I fear Mr. Trump’s ambition to secure a third term less now. His feet are engorged, his hands are purple, the skin on his neck is worn and peeling away, he can barely walk, speak coherently, or stay awake in front of cameras. In another two years, at a yet more advanced age? It is more likely that infirmity ends this term than he can seize another. But we must crush him sooner, and this last deranged ambition of his makes a solid cudgel.

“We here today are not spectators. We are citizens. We are not bystanders. We are proud and patriotic Americans. And we Americans, We the People, will not allow our country to be taken over by demagogues and dictators.” I pray this resounds.

“Are you willing to be the Americans on whose watch democracy died?”

I am not, but we need more than me.

“We will out-organize them, we will out-vote them, we will outlast them.”

We must.

Deirdre Schifeling from the American Civil Liberties Union came out and praised America’s “250-year history of disagreeing in public.” “It’s not just our opinion that everyone is entitled to their beliefs without fear of punishment. It’s in our country’s Constitution,” she said, then asked: “Why is Trump trying? What is he so afraid of?”

Because of his uniquely distasteful character, people have talked shit about Mr. Trump his whole life. He behaves as a grotesque caricature but bristles at the scorn that attracts. Call it TDS if you must, but with my last breath, I will call him a lying, crying bitch.

“The best way to protect our freedom is to act free,” Ms. Schifeling declared, and if I were seated, I would have jumped to applaud. On the individual level, self-censorship is a way to be safe. As it spreads, the range of expression for all individuals becomes smaller. This is why I advised at the start of 2025 for Democrats to become disinhibited, say shit in the wildest ways they can, buy TRUMP IS A BITCH shirts, and talk loudly about politics in inappropriate places, like the checkout line of the grocery store. Only if we model the behavior of a free people will the nation know how free people act.

Sarah Parker, the executive director of Voices of Florida and 50501, implored us to “refuse to let this become our reality.”

“Democracy dies when we are silent. But democracy is reborn when we speak with courage.” Ms. Parker warned against “standing by while the country slips into the iron grip of authoritarianism,” though it is not an “iron grip.” Mr. Trump has weak grip strength, thanks to his chronic venous insufficiency, but we are asked to pretend and submit. Many do.

Afeni Evans from the DC Fair Budget Coalition declared: “The social contract in this country has been broken. Decades of movement, work, progress, and struggle have been wiped out by Christian nationalists who seek dominion over every aspect of our lives.”

That is right. Whatever features of this country that were upheld by norms, gentleman’s agreements, traditions, or kindness can no longer be assumed. How could I ever trust a Republican neighbor again? However this presidency ends, the terror only stops when we create a new covenant with each other. I cannot see how that is possible, unless half the country changes.

The crowd buzzed when the announcer cued the next speaker: “An American science educator, engineer, comedian, television presenter, inventor, keynote speaker, and author. He is a respected champion of scientific literacy, who has challenged opponents of evidence-based education and policy on climate change, evolution, and critical thinking… Bill Nye, the Science Guy.”

To my mortification, all around me people chanted: “Bill! Bill! Bill!” Mr. Nye is pretty cool, but no edutainment except for PBS’s Wishbone was THAT good. Mr. Nye easily explained the causes of the American Revolution to the audience. Perhaps if we could get him in a room with Mr. Johnson, the Speaker would understand why the country’s majority stares at his servility aghast.

“We are here for the same reason our ancestors gathered here in 1776. We want our government to run without a king,” Mr. Nye pumped his fist and chanted: “No thrones. No crowns. No kings.” Hell yeah.

“In 1776, our ancestors had enough. They declared independence from a king by means of a document stored safely right over there on Constitution Avenue in the National Archive. Although it was conceived 249 years ago, the Declaration of Independence describes a train of abuses connected with an absolute authority, a king with absolute power.”

Stored not only “right over there,” but in the Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom, alongside the Constitution and Bill of Rights (“the BOR,” as I call them), down the hall from a 1297 Magna Carta and under bulletproof glass, and lowered each night into a bunker to protect it from nuclear explosions. Few objects exist on Earth that are as well-protected.

After the Guard occupied Washington, DC, I started carrying my pocket combo Declaration-Constitution-BOR, as if for self-defense. It is remarkable to contrast the grievances against the king with not only Mr. Trump’s actions but his whole philosophy of governance and evil vibe.

“Their king had refused to honor the law. Their king had refused to let lawmakers be elected. The king had made court judges dependent on his will. They cited the king sending ‘swarms of officers to harass our people.’ Their language referred to ‘cruelty and faithlessness scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous of ages.’ Their king was trying to ‘render the military independent and superior to civil power.’ Our founders even censured King George for cutting off trade with all parts of the world. Did these actions sound familiar?”

I am begging the Democratic National Committee to make YouTube ads of this man.

“In short, the founders believed their king was, in their words, ‘totally unworthy to be the head of a civilized nation.’”

“Enabled by this president, a group of confederates has worked together to undo many of our traditions and understandings of fairness and of citizens’ rights.”

“Understandings of fairness and of citizens’ rights” sounds like an abstract harm, but the miseducation of conservative chud and crank youth is a civic wound that will kill our Constitution. Withholding funds from universities to force them to change curricula, deporting immigrant students with unpopular opinions, prosecuting political rivals and critics, firing U.S. attorneys to avenge criminals, manipulating media coverage, today’s Young Republicans think these are “tools in the box,” not egregious uses of power.

Unless we want Generations Z and Alpha and beyond to be “like this” and subject us to annoying “New Right” bullshit for another 50 years, we must make this unviable, or these students of extremist MAGA Trumpism will mistake harassment and intimidation as clever “hacks” and “cheat codes.” I am reminded of 2021-2022, when #KiaBoys exploded on TikTok. Teenagers shared videos showing how certain Kia and Hyundai models could be stolen. Footage showing the subsequent joyrides set to music like “Shake yo Nay Nay” went viral, and police departments across the U.S. reported nearly 1,000 percent increases in Kia and Hyundai thefts. If abuses of power are profitable, the #MAGABoys will show no more restraint.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, bragged about the size of the crowd. “From up here, you cannot see the perimeter. There are so many people who want to fight for our democracy and say NO KINGS. And what I’ve just been told, that in New York City, there are more people in Times Square than there are on New Year’s Eve.”

Nearly 7 million Americans participated in NO KINGS Day 2 demonstrations, 2 percent of the total population. One in 50. Is this very big or very small?

Ms. Weingarten said: “We in the labor movement are fighting for a democracy and a voice in it so we can secure a better life for all working people. All of God’s children. Better wages, affordable health care and childcare, good schools for children, and a secure retirement. Tell me, what is radical about all of that?”

If you contrast these normal goals with the Republican rhetoric towards them, the disparity is grotesque. To contort reality so meanly, it seems obvious Messrs. Trump, Johnson, et al. hate the Americans who do not bow to them.

“We want the president to spend his time solving our country’s problems, not settling scores with political opponents. We want a future that is based on fairness and justice and the rule of law, not chaos, corruption, or cruelty.”

It was interesting to compare Ms. Weingarten’s words with Mr. Trump’s awful second inaugural address. Without touching the Bible, Mr. Trump pledged to: “Bring back accountability and honesty to our institutions and fairness to our systems of justice. Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents or punish citizens for their beliefs. We will not allow that to happen.” That was a fucking lie.

Cliff Albright of Black Voters Matter led the crowd in a DC statehood chant, and snapped me awake from “gotcha” collecting. Referencing Louisiana v. Callais, Mr. Albright said “the Supreme Court heard a case that could put the final death blow to the Voting Rights Act,” which “could eliminate black representation for black communities,” and allow the elimination of at least 19 congressional seats currently protected by the VRA.

Mr. Albright warned the 2026 midterms could be rigged to “create a permanent one-party rule, at the expense of black voters in black communities. But like so many other issues that are rooted in anti-blackness, that sickness won’t just stay within a black community—it affects this entire country.”

That is my nightmare. Jim Dave Vance said that he wants “no unity” with Democrats; Mr. Trump has said he hates them—hates us! A major cause of the 2025 government shutdown was the GOP’s refusal to negotiate with Democrats. Again in 2026, Mr. Trump will not talk with the opposition. To get their desired nationwide one-party rule, Republicans need us delegitimized as well as defeated. Well, I dream the same for them. I have been accused of “dooming” when I say this to moderate friends, but we cannot wait for those outcomes to be concluded before we acknowledge that the president pursues them.

Jay Brown, Chief of Staff at the Human Rights Campaign, warned of that same dystopia: “Freedom looks like… the freedom to live, and to be, and to raise our families as we see fit. But this president, he has a darker vision for America. One where our families are told how to parent their children. Where doctors are forced to forego their oaths to do no harm. Where the government is ripping families apart and hurting our people. They’re cutting billions of dollars from HIV prevention and treatment. They’re banning our books. They’re firing teachers who use a student’s nickname. And they’re firing gay workers who put a pride flag on their desk.”

Peers of mine skipped the NO KINGS 2 protest, and stayed home, stuck to the straight-and-narrow, and seem intent to do so for the whole second Trump term because they have children. Mr. Trump’s economy sucks, and his servants are vindictive. My once-brave friends—one sported a mohawk into his twenties!—will not risk their jobs by being liberals in public. This is a rational anxiety, and I begrudge no parent prioritizing their families, so the burden falls on us to ensure that, in a decade, those young can vote, or choose their religion, marry their loves, speak freely, and access vaccines, modern medicine, and an education. Those whippersnappers better do the same for those who come after them.

Nee Nee Taylor, executive director of Harriet’s Wildest Dreams and co-founder of Free DC, “charg[ed] [the audience] to be on the front lines.” While I had been chiding my friends for staying at home with “cozy games” and Netflix, I had not expected to be challenged too. She said: “When I see you tomorrow, when I see you next month, when more of our rights are being stripped, and when more of our Black bodies are put in cages, don’t watch from the shadows. I charge you… We will not end because the day won’t end when the stage comes down and the cameras leave. The fight for our collective liberation is not contained within the presiding eye of media attention today…. Ask yourself: where will you be?”

I wanted to say that “I will be ready to go whenever / wherever / You’ll never have to wonder / we can always play by ear,” even after Mr. Trump is gone, but that may not be true.

After the elections of both Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, I took time to rest, catch up with friends, watch television, and write novellas about cool guys who smoke cigarettes and talk about existentialist philosophy, not politics. Even aware of the destruction today’s GOP aims to bring to everyone in the world I love, I was claimed by indolence in 2009-2010 and 2021-2023. Remembering this, I felt the mortification Republicans deserve.

Keya Chatterjee, co-founder of the Free DC movement, said: “DC needs to be free because what we are doing here today, right now, would not be possible otherwise. This president wants to silence dissent. He wants to silence protest. He wants to do that everywhere…. President Trump and his allies lie about this very event that we are attending right now. He tried to get us all to stay away from here. Nowhere that it is more important than here in the capital of the country. We know what authoritarian rulers do. Authoritarians try to prevent dissent in the capital. They want to control capitals. They have tried to control capitals through the history of time and space”—was she including Coruscant?—”because controlling a capital is a way to control a nation and a way to prevent the transfer of power. This president is no different from those before him, and we saw that on January 6th, right? … Today we are in our third month of military occupation by armed forces from multiple other states in DC. There are gangs of federal agents who are attacking our communities.”

It shocked me that the occupation of DC lasted so long. Soldiers still patrol our streets in March 2026, even though most of the country has turned their attention to the newer occupations in, for example, Minneapolis, Portland, and Chicago. It sometimes slips my mind, too, until I see Guardsmen in fatigues outside Dunkin’ Donuts pretending to stand lookout.

“Every single time they attack us, if we respond, we grow stronger. Every time they attack us, we grow more united, we grow our people, and we grow our resolve—and we learn what it takes to take them down.” Ms. Chatterjee’s hopeful note felt earned.

My friends who stayed home may presume that if they bunker down, things will shake out eventually and be fine in the end. Not so. We are waiting for them to show up. NO KINGS 1, 2, and soon 3 have been the largest mass mobilizations in U.S. history, but we must be bigger still.

Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin, husband and wife, cofounders of Indivisible, took the stage together, as they often do. Like a high priest and priestess of the #Resistance, or perhaps stepparents, I appreciate their efforts but find them to be more accurate than impressive, on-the-nose but building the right sets and saying the right words. If the ranks of Indivisible swell large enough, we will win.

Ms. Greenberg opened with a call-and-response: “How many kings do we have in America?”

Zero, the crowd answered, though some must have wondered if “one” was more technically correct.

“We are in the middle of a sprint by Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, their MAGA cronies, to consolidate power and bully American society into submission. They have come for corporations and millionaires, for law firms and universities, for media and civil society. They are ripping families apart, and they are shredding our Constitution while they line their pockets in the biggest heist of all time.”

We see it, yet it continues each day. I would quibble with the word “sprint”—it suggests after one more burst, the enemy will tire. I feel more fatigable.

Ms. Greenberg described the method: “They go on the attack. They make demands. They claim powers they don’t have. They bully, and they threaten to retaliate, and they see if anyone will push back. And if nobody pushes back, they win.”

That is why I am so pugnacious. If “they” win, nobody can blame me for not pushing back.

“I need you to hear me. It’s a lie. It’s always been a lie. And the greatest danger we face is not Trump. It is how we, as a society, respond to this bullying, to this chilling effect. If we preemptively obey, if we shrink back, if we make ourselves small, if we do what they want in advance—then they win.”

As a society, we never really developed a coherent response to bullies. Stopbullying.gov advises slinking away and looking for someone else to save you:

1. “Look at the kid bullying you and tell him or her to stop in a calm, clear voice. You can also try to laugh it off.”

2. “If speaking up seems too hard or not safe, walk away and stay away. Don’t fight back.”

3. “Talk to an adult you trust.”

4. “Stay away from places where bullying happens.”

None of these are applicable when the villain is the federal government. I prefer the advice I got from my father: “Punch that bitch right in the nose. Let him know that if he fucks with you, he’ll also hurt.”

Ms. Greenberg stole my line: “I’ve got something to say to Mike Johnson, Speaker Mike Johnson, who spent all week smearing regular Americans. There are nearly a dozen protests happening across your district today. And since you’ve not been doing your job for over a month now, I bet you’ve got time to stop by.”

I was annoyed someone else landed this zinger first, because it pisses me off that Mr. Johnson, one of the most powerful men in America, refuses to watch, listen, or learn what the other half of the country he ostensibly represents thinks or feels.

Mr. Levin asked who had been at the first NO KINGS Day. The crowd cheered. “No, no. I don’t think y’all were there,” he said, with a teacher’s smug laugh. “This was a quarter of a millennium ago—1775. They called it the Continental Congress. They didn’t have the branding we did. But it was the first NO KINGS Day protest.”

Do not get me wrong—the comparison is precise, but this bit might have landed better earlier, before a dozen other speakers made approximately the same analogy.

Mr. Levin described the Founders as people who “brought themselves together in opposition to this would-be monarchical ruler who was steamrolling the American public. He was occupying and invading American cities. He was terrorizing American communities. He was picking out his favorites and persecuting his political enemies.”

I note that some of the Founders were great anonymous shitposters. Their newsletters were made on presses instead of Substack, and their noms de plume were more Latinate, but the tradition is the same.

“So, what did our fellow Americans do? They put together a NO KINGS rally to give us a Constitution.”

Good. Perfect. But on the nose.

Mr. Levin: “You know who doesn’t want us to make any demands? This regime. The tech fascists, the billionaire backers—they want us lazy and pliant and docile. They want us alone and afraid and powerless. Are we powerless?”

“No,” the crowd answered.

“Are we alone?”

“No.”

Afraid though? I am absolutely scared of these psychos. If I see a guy in a MAGA hat on the same corner as me, I cross to the other side of the street.

Mr. Levin ticked off victories as proof that pushback was working:

· Elon Musk (“remember that guy?”) kicked to the White House curb like a dog after a “Bad Blood Breakup.”

· ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! was back on the air after only a few days, despite Mr. Carr’s effort to collect a scalp.

· The regime had been “quaking in its jackboots at the thought of 200,000 people in DC, outside the Capitol.”

The last was inference, but the best explanation for the propaganda campaign Republicans and their aligned media had launched.

Then Mr. Levin turned on Jeff Bezos and The Washington Post, Mark Benioff of Salesforce, Daniel Ek of Spotify, and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta. The crowd booed and a chant of “shame, shame” spread through the assemblage.

“I ask businesses, universities, churches—which side are you on?”

“Whose side are you on?” was the tagline to the Marvel Comics 2006 to 2007 crossover Civil War, which pitted hero against hero and ended in the death of Captain America. It makes me edgy. I would be satisfied if churches and businesses just sat it out.

Mr. Levin grinned. “We had a little bit of extra time in the program, and a guy in Vermont with some ideas about this wanted to come up.”

The crowd erupted into “Bernie” chants. Senator Bernie Sanders entered to music. I like him, but I was never one of the “Brothers of Bernard.” In the 2016 primary, I lent my passion to the doomed Martin O’Malley campaign to stay away from the Clinton versus Sanders drama. He is a good man, with incredible charisma born not from polish and practice but his convictions, yet I disapprove of the decade of internecine fighting he inspired. Still, he fights.

Mr. Sanders sneered at MAGA Mike: “the Republican Speaker of the House, called these rallies ‘Hate America’ events. Why does he have it wrong?”

“Hate America” is a bland slur, honestly. Totally without meaning or flavor. Back in my day, they called us the Blame America First Caucus, an insult that has teeth because it attacks a real impulse the antiwar people get sometimes. “Hate America”? I love America. I hate these Republican sons of bitches, and they hate me, too.

Mr. Sanders is right and Mr. Johnson has it wrong. The speakers said, explicitly and repeatedly, that they were there out of love. The rally was so adoring of the American Revolution it would have made a Social Studies teacher blush. Mr. Nye walked through the Declaration of Independence, Mr. Levin added us to the 1775 Continental Congress spirit, the crowd cheered for land acknowledgments, for the First Amendment, for the Constitution, for DC statehood, for the Voting Rights Act. Across time, I could hear the ghost of my hellion past sneering at me for being somewhere so achingly patriotic.

But why does Mr. Johnson have it so wrong? Mr. Sanders was kinder than me to ask the question. I was being an asshole by assuming Mr. Johnson was innately mean and stupid. Perhaps there is an answer to the “why.” Until we discover it, I will presume faith.

“We’re here because we’re going to do everything we can to honor the sacrifices of millions of men and women who over the last 250 years fought and sometimes died to defend our democracy and our freedoms.”

Mr. Sanders said nothing I had not already heard that afternoon. But he enunciated so clearly it rattled my bones. Many of the men in my family are buried in military cemeteries. To put it graphically, if this regime finalizes control of America, then they will own my father’s bones, and my grandfathers’. I hate that.

“And today, in the year 2025, in this dangerous moment in American history, our message is exactly the same [as 1776]. No, President Trump, we don’t want you or any other king to rule us.”

Even as a child, I was afflicted with oppositional defiance disorder. Nobody rules me. Schoolteachers hated the punky little donkey, but now that flaw is my lodestar.

Mr. Sanders quoted President George Washington as having called self-government “an experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” Mr. Sanders enumerated the ways that experiment was in danger:

1. A president who “wants more and more power in his own hands and in the hands of his fellow oligarchs.”

2. A president who “claims that peaceful protests in Portland, Oregon or Chicago, Illinois is an insurrection and calls in the U.S. military,” then “threatens to arrest the mayors and governors who resist them.”

3. A president who deploys “masked agents working for ICE breaking down doors, throwing people into vans without due process.”

4. A president who “sues and intimidates the media.”

5. A president who “threatens to arrest or imprison political opponents,” including the Attorney General of New York, a sitting senator, and the Governor of California.

6. A president who “undermines freedom of thought and dissent at our colleges and universities” and “attacks law firms that oppose him in court.”

7. A president who “threatens to impeach judges who rule against him.”

8. A president who “ignores Congress, refuses to spend money that Congress appropriates, and takes away money from states who voted against him.”

9. A president who “demands we redraw congressional maps to ensure that his chosen candidates win future elections.”

10. A president who “illegally fires tens of thousands of federal employees.”

These motherfuckers.

Mr. Sanders also reminded us of Qatar Force One, the $400 million plane Mr. Trump accepted from the Qatari royal family in exchange for God knows what favors. Maybe our current war with Iran, for continuity’s sake? By 2026, who remembers that? At the time, it was the largest scandal of any administration, a clear violation of our Constitution’s sacred emoluments clause. Now, it is trivia.

“Let us be clear. This moment is not just about one man’s greed, one man’s corruption, or one man’s contempt for the Constitution. This is about a handful of the wealthiest people on earth who, in their insatiable greed, have hijacked our economy and our political system in order to enrich themselves at the expense of working families throughout this country.” Then he pointed his finger: “I am talking about Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and the other multi-billionaires who were sitting right behind Trump when he was inaugurated. Remember that?”

The crowd booed.

“I am talking about the insanity of one person, Mr. Musk, owning more wealth than the bottom 52 percent of American households.”

Whenever Mr. Musk’s name surfaced, the reaction was Orwellian. Two minutes of hate, every time. He is more reviled than even Mr. Trump. There are those who say that Starlink and SpaceX should be seized and nationalized for our national security. Probably, but they should also be taken as restitution for the damage he did with DOGE alone.

“My fellow Americans, we rejected the divine right of kings in the 1770s. We will not accept the divine right of oligarchs today.”

I’d wear that on a T-shirt.

Mr. Sanders pivoted to the economic toll of what I call “the Big Bitch Bill.” “As a result of Trump’s big beautiful, disgraceful bill, which made massive cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, 15 million low-income and working-class Americans are going to lose the health care they desperately need to stay alive.” Of those 15 million, Mr. Sanders said, 50,000 would die unnecessarily every year. Fifty-thousand lives, dead not dramatically but off-camera because of cuts to their insurance. It takes one small virus to kill—a nick of the wrong razor, inhaling the wrong air, drinking the wrong water. That this country voted to trade those unlucky 50,000 for some tax breaks for some people is a sin.

“One trillion dollars in cuts to Medicaid and the ACA, a trillion dollars in tax breaks for the 1 percent. That, my fellow Americans, is what this shutdown is all about.” Mr. Sanders closed with a vision of what could be. The loudest cheers of the day came when he called for ending Citizens United. He is right—it has to end.

I hate the name Citizens United—Mitt Romney once said, “Corporations are people, my friend,” back when he was not a friend. Does he still agree with that? Unlimited donations from amorphous entities are free speech, I guess, but after Mr. Musk paid people with oversized checks to vote Republican, it has lost the benefit of the doubt.

The audience roared for guaranteed health care, for tuition-free public universities, for a living wage, for a guarantee that “never again will American taxpayer dollars be used to starve children in Gaza or any place else.” Lazy pundits say that Democrats must be “for” something, not merely “against” Mr. Trump. Sounds like we are “for” a lot; we have dreams of a better world. But they are meaningless until this techno-feudalist patrimonialist neo-monarchist Christian nationalist whatever the fuck you call it is gone.

“And now let me raise a question that I’ve been asked over and over again. Bernie, great ideas, but how are you going to pay for them? Great question. Thanks for asking.”

I closed my eyes, and felt the spell break. Yes, eating the rich is part of defeating the dark kingdom they have built. But I fear this is an ideological, not purely a class war—if the administration suddenly presented a more generous safety net, their violence would still be wrong. Mr. Sanders’s economic philosophy and morality are entwined as tight as a DNA helix, but I want to keep aspirational policies, which democracy-loving allies might debate, separated from the existential ones.

Here, I use the word “existential” to mean questions of whether or not we would exist in one year, or another two. Mr. Trump’s defenders, ever willing to beclown themselves, claimed the thematic premise of NO KINGS Day 2—that their Mandarin Mussolini seeks the power of a royal—was preposterous. Their “evidence” is that he was lawfully elected and we are allowed to assemble at all.

To the former—obviously, Mr. Trump is not literally entitled “king,” but look at how he has turned the Oval Office into Versailles. If you enter a bar bearing the classic sign “No long-haired freaky people,” a stolid bald man would be ill-received if he revealed a big, fat marijuana blunt tucked behind his ear.

And to respond to the latter, Mr. Trump would stop protests if he could. I infer that from his suggestions that protesters should be beaten, arrested, shot, hit by cars, et cetera, and his frequent characterization of nonviolent demonstrations as riots. Over that weekend, the president posted an AI-generated video of himself wearing a crown, piloting a fighter jet, and dumping gross mountains of feces on NO KINGS Day 2 protesters. This is not behavior characteristic of a leader who cherishes our First Amendment, or has any decency.

If a magic button exists that, when toggled, bans protest in the U.S., it remains unpressed not for any principle, but because it has yet to be located. Mr. Trump’s enablers must ask themselves, if ordered by their boss, would they press it? No MAGA Republican who smeared Americans on October 18, 2025, can convince me that, disagreeing with what we had to say, they would defend our right to say it. So, fuck them too.

Mr. Cruz, who happily let Mr. Trump call his wife ugly and crazy, suggested rally attendees were “fake.” The president called us “small and insignificant.” MAGA Republicans ignored our words and numbers and said we did not matter, and they govern this way, too. Our opposition exists in the real world. Why deny that? Perhaps it makes it easier for them to be inhumane if they ignore the humanity of others.

Republicans will be destroyed by the same tactics. As their movement eliminates its enemies, it will make new ones of its friends. Conservatives saw former colleagues—Bill Kristol, Joe Walsh, John Bolton, John Kelly, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, even former Vice President Dick Cheney—”unpersoned.” Are true believers certain they will never disagree with the president about anything? In which case, they plan to exercise no agency forever. Those who imagine that they would accede at every opportunity should resign from leadership—resign immediately!—and never seek any position of responsibility again.

I hate to be “trolled” by Mr. Trump’s AI slop, but I take this insult personally. If he fantasizes about using a fighter jet to dump excrement on everybody at the NO KINGS 2 protest, and I am in attendance, then he is talking about taking a shit on me, too. In which case, he deserves that which he wishes on others.

In the weeks after podcaster Charlie Kirk’s assassination, it was intimated that using too-harsh language against your political opponents is “inciting violence.” By his standards, then, did the president incite violence against me and the 7 million Americans who assembled across the country?

Mr. Trump’s presidency seems mid-transfiguration into a kingship. Two days after the NO KINGS 2 rally, Mr. Trump destroyed the East Wing of the White House so he could build a 90,000-square-foot golden ballroom—some Marie Antoinette bullshit.

It was also reported that Mr. Trump planned to “settle” his tort claims against the DOJ for “damages” stemming from his indictments. Mr. Trump was so “traumatized” by a police search (which was not as invasive as one a weed dealer would receive) that he demanded the United States government give him $230 million. He bragged that, as president, he can “make[] the decision,” even commenting: “It’s awfully strange to make a decision where I am paying myself.” We are being looted so that the president can have a palace.

I agonized that day over whether our constitutional republic already stopped functioning. Under Mr. Johnson’s speakership, the House of Representatives went out of session for 54 days, during history’s longest government shutdown (so far). Mr. Johnson refused to negotiate to end the shutdown. I thought the Congress would never reconvene, and all we had left of our government was the Executive Branch, which claims unlimited power the Constitution does not grant, and a feckless Judiciary which insufficiently restrains it. The GOP calls it absurd to claim that Mr. Trump is acting as a king, while simultaneously they work as his servants. Our framers, in their wisdom, never imagined that our governing bodies would abdicate to allow one madman to do as he wishes.

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Epilogue

Our democracy continues, though the White House is permanently scarred from the demolition. It is unglamorous, but we must survive and limp to November, then January, and soon enough we begin a reckoning. It will be a long year until then.

When I re-read this rally report, today we have more to be angry about, more to fear, more to protest on March 28. The federal government is partially shut down again, masked ICE thugs continue to maraud, the president went to war on his whims, the Treasury is still being looted, the U.S. was declared insolvent, and Mr. Carr is still a censorious ass. We are in worse than the same place.

I notice my brain keeps constructing a false framing. It treats that autumn 2025 as “the good times,” when the #Resistance was still a carnival, when we had costumes and fun before the darkness arrived. That was not so—the rally and even its silliness was a response to an America that had already gone pitch black. Despite the Republican talking points about our Trump derangement, our reflexive distaste for this president’s bullshit was wholly justified. If I saw any error at the rally, it was that Mr. Trump’s reality is worse than any hell we can imagine.

I hope this report encourages people to attend the NO KINGS 3 rally this Saturday. I am occasionally asked to explain the purpose of these protests, but that should be self-evident. Fucking show up and be counted.

President Donald Trump’s Republican Party would rather pick their voters than earn their votes, so they assembled onerous voting restrictions, ostensibly targeting Democrats, in their so-called Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (“SAVE America”) Act. The president pronounced on Truth Social: “I, as President, will not sign other Bills until this is passed.” But this piece of shit bill cannot possibly be meant to pass, because it will fuck Republican voters.

If SAVE America is signed into law, if you are currently registered to vote, no you aren’t. The bill requires states to submit their whole voter rolls within 30 days of enactment to the federal government’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program—a USCIS database originally designed to check immigration status for benefit applicants, recently overhauled by the DOGE boys (pronounced “doggy boys”) into a bulk voter-verification tool—and take “affirmative steps, on an ongoing basis” to remove noncitizens. With no quiet period protecting voters from being incorrectly removed before an election, if the system flags you—correctly or not—you are off the rolls. Please never forget that you can be the voter who is purged. If this happens to you, which it can, through no fault of your own, to re-register, you will need to prove your citizenship.

It sounds very inconvenient to be at home, minding your own business, perhaps enjoying a beer or fine cannabis, and then, because you share a name and birthday with somebody else, suddenly you need to call and argue with the government over some bullshit. Wouldn’t let that shit happen to me, though. Your boy Hex checks his voter registration on a weekly basis. I keep my rights locked down. But Americans who are not on my level will not know if they are purged from the rolls.

Name-matching systems used to purge voter registrations introduce mostly false positives. The Washington Post’s investigation of the now-defunct Interstate Crosscheck program, which was created in 2005 by the Kansas Secretary of State’s office and expanded by now-Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, found that Crosscheck’s method of matching voter records using first and last name and date of birth “fails for practically all common American names,” and documented a 75 percent false positive rate in Virginia. Researchers at Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania found that following Crosscheck’s purge strategy would impede approximately 300 legitimate registrations for each double vote prevented. The headline: “This anti-voter-fraud program gets it wrong over 99 percent of the time.” Not good! Twelve states withdrew before Crosscheck’s court-ordered suspension in 2019.

The federal SAVE program is no more reliable. NPR reports that USCIS cannot verify some categories of native-born Americans, meaning legitimate citizens could be flagged for removal. Separately, election officials encountered instances where the system classified living voters as deceased. Since an enduring myth on the right is that an army of dead voters rise to cast ballots every few years, I suspect contesting rumors of your demise will not be made a straightforward process.

When Kansas implemented proof-of-citizenship requirements in 2013, more than 31,000 eligible citizens, or 12 percent of first-time registrants, were blocked. A federal court declared the law unconstitutional in 2018, finding that over 19 years, more than 99 percent of those who got fucked were U.S. citizens.

Newer tools promoted by conservative activists are no better. True the Vote, a Texas-based conservative activist group that challenged the eligibility of 364,000 Georgia voters ahead of the 2021 U.S. Senate runoffs, provides a cautionary example. A federal court concluded that their voter challenge list “utterly lacked reliability” and found its method “verges on recklessness.” Anyone serious about cleaning the voter rolls without harming eligible voters would find a better method, notify people, and ensure mass purges were conducted in an organized fashion. They do not.

After your franchise gets kicked to the curb like a dog, to re-register to vote, or even to update your registration after moving or getting married, you would have to present, in person, “documentary proof of United States citizenship,” such as “a form of identification issued consistent with the requirements of the REAL ID Act of 2005 that indicates the applicant is a citizen of the United States.”

“A form of identification issued consistent with the requirements of the REAL ID Act of 2005” and “that indicates the applicant is a citizen of the United States” are separate clauses. The “requirements of the REAL ID Act of 2005” are:

1. full legal name,

2. date of birth,

3. gender,

4. driver’s license or identification card number,

5. digital photograph,

6. address of principal residence,

7. signature,

8. security features designed to prevent tampering, counterfeiting, or duplication, and

9. a common machine-readable technology, like an RFID or barcode.

The SAVE America Act asks for an identification with those elements which, in addition, indicates the applicant is a U.S. citizen. A standard REAL ID does not show citizenship, but rather lawful presence; noncitizens are eligible for one. The version of REAL ID which includes this information is an “enhanced driver’s license,” which only Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont, and Washington issue.

If, like the majority of Americans, your driver’s license is insufficient, the law requires you to present a passport, birth certificate, naturalization certificate, “final adoption decree showing the applicant’s name and that the applicant’s place of birth was in the United States,” or a “Consular Report of Birth Abroad.”

Even military IDs are only acceptable when accompanied by a service record showing a U.S. birthplace, so our brave men and women in uniform will need to make sure they have those on hand. DD Form 214 can be requested through the National Archives’ eVetRecs system or through VA.gov, but the waiting period for that can be as long as “within 10 working days of receipt [but] [m]any factors may alter that time including work load [and] current volume of requests.” One imagines that by creating a new scenario in which they are needed would therefore increase the volume of requests.

I have been involved in a weeklong feud on social media with a retired angler who is convinced all he will need to do is flash his license on November 3, 2026. Poor guy loves Mr. Trump more than his own family, and does not even know his hero would disenfranchise him. It is a mortal sin his party will not even give him accurate instructions on how to vote for them.

Republicans must know that the form of ID required by the SAVE America Act is unavailable in most states. If any GOP congressperson or senator is unaware, they are too negligent to be trusted with a belt or shoelaces. If they are aware but still imply that a simple ID will suffice, their constituents will notice when they are turned away—how can they stand to face them?

Online and mail registration would be a happy memory. The law requires “applicant present[] documentary proof of United States citizenship in person to the office of the appropriate election official,” so you would have to drag yourself to a county election office some weekday during pain-in-the-ass banker’s hours.

In large metro areas, this can be a dedicated facility. DC has a building on Half Street; Montgomery County, Maryland has a standalone office in Gaithersburg; Fairfax County, Virginia has one on Government Center Parkway. But in most of America, the election office is a room inside the county courthouse or community building, operated by a few clerks. Or less—a Reed College study found that small counties with fewer than 5,000 voters typically have one full-time employee handling elections, and medium-sized counties average two.

Some examples:

• Highland County, Virginia, population 2,232, runs its elections out of a trailer at 97 Highland Center Drive in Monterey. Open 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., weekdays.

• Pickett County, Tennessee, population 5,100, runs elections out of Room 2 of the Community Center at 105 South Main Street. Open 8:00 to 4:00, weekdays.

• Hancock County, Tennessee, population 6,662, lists a P.O. Box as its election office mailing address.

• Cameron County, Pennsylvania, population 4,547, the least populous county in the Commonwealth, runs elections out of the courthouse at 20 East 5th Street in Emporium. Open 8:30 to 4:30, weekdays.

Currently, only about 6 percent of Americans register to vote in person at an election office. The other 94 percent use online registration, mail-in registration, the Department of Motor Vehicles, or voter registration drives. How equipped are these little operations to handle vastly increased demand in the next eight months or less? Are all of this country’s vital records offices prepared to handle a three-to-four-month surge in documentation requests? How about the DMVs or the State Department? Of course not.

The Center for American Progress analyzed the 30 largest U.S. counties by area and found that voters living farthest from their county seat would have to drive, on average, a 260-mile round trip to reach their election office. Mohave County, Arizona is a representative horror: the 2,500 residents of Colorado City face an eight-hour round trip drive to the office in Kingman.

Senator Lisa Murkowski opposes the SAVE America Act, noting 20 percent of Alaska’s population is not on the road system. For those Alaskans, registering to vote requires chartering a flight. That would suck—sorry, your name got struck by mistake! Book a plane some weekday to get that taken care of.

Republicans pray the filibuster holds and the bill dies, because they fear punishment if they make their low-propensity voters, who hate paperwork, miserable—which SAVE America assuredly will. Meanwhile, I suspect nerdy, front-of-class Democrats will have an easier time assembling the required paperwork into their Lisa Frank Trapper-Keepers than Republicans.

All my woke feminist friends smirk: “Consider the demographic math: 84 percent of women who marry change their surnames, meaning roughly 69 million American women do not have a birth certificate that matches their current legal name. Of those two populations—married women without passports, and unmarried women with passports—which is more likely to vote Democrat?”

In seven reliably Republican states, West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, fewer than one in three citizens hold a valid passport. The Brennan Center estimates 21 million voting-age Americans lack ready access to any proof-of-citizenship document.

It happened to me, too. It is easy to lose track of your birth certificate if the last time you saw it was in a shoebox under your mom’s bed, but she gave it to you for something, and neither of you is sure where it landed after that.

A further 3.8 million adult citizens have no citizenship documentation whatsoever, no birth certificate, passport, or naturalization papers. Perhaps they were born at home without hospital records—I find it shocking that MAHA conservatives and tradfolk and homesteaders would not consider the midwives and doulas. Personal records can also be lost due to displacement or disaster, and sometimes documents are lost during a messy adoption. None of these are especially extraordinary circumstances.

Only 43 percent of Americans hold a valid passport, and getting one requires appearing in person, paying more than $100, and waiting six to twelve weeks. And renewing it is a real hassle too, and an easy expense to skip when the president has blown up the world economy with an ill-planned Iran war, gas is averaging $3.80 a gallon, and you have no plans to jet-set.

Your boy Hex can tell from personal experience how irritating figuring out your paperwork is if you do not already have it done. My family has been on this continent since the Revolution, but after I finally found my birth certificate in my own shoebox, it was destroyed by a hot coffee spill. So, I had trouble getting my REAL ID.

Replacing that ruined birth certificate was excruciatingl. I contacted my state department of vital records, but they turned out not to process those replacements. It was subcontracted to VitalChek, who runs their vital records racket in all fifty states. Their backlog was almost a month, and I waited patiently. But it never arrived—lost in the mail! Per a bullshit policy of VitalChek’s, I was required to wait another month, see if it showed up randomly, before they would send a replacement. The process took approximately two and a half months and a lot of time scaling unhelpful phone trees.

Republican talking points on the ubiquity of ID in modern life can only be meant to describe a parallel universe. Apparently, nobody on that side of the aisle goes to grocery stores, since they let Mr. Trump insist constantly that you need to show ID to check out at a Food Lion. He has repeated this claim since at least 2018, when his then-press secretary, now-Arkansas Governor Sarah Hucklebuck Sanders tried to “sanewash” his rambling by claiming he was talking about age verification for beer. Never one to be made to sound reasonable, Mr. Trump then clarified no, he definitely meant to say he thought Americans were carded buying cereal. The liquor store barely asks to see my ID, though that may be because I carry myself like a noir hero. I did recently need to show my driver’s license before IHOP let me pick up food after an overnight beat, and they even demanded I sign for it, too, which was odd.

Mr. Trump told the Republican Governors Association on February 20, 2025, that blue states would “totally disappear off that map.” How ominous! At the House Republican retreat at Trump National Doral Miami, on March 9, 2026, the president (who was also profiting his party’s forced patronage of his business) told his congressional servants the bill would “guarantee the midterms” and that they would “win every election for a long time.” On ex-FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino’s podcast on February 2, 2026, Mr. Trump warned that without action, “Republicans will never win another election.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson, or “MAGA Mike,” as they call him in the club, said on Fox Business in February 2026: “They’ve got to cheat, frankly. That’s it. They’ve got to allow illegals to participate in elections so that they can continue to win.” Nasty, racist bullshit. He is unworthy of the Speaker’s gavel. I was told by an e-sports competitor that the “Fighting Game Community” has a special phrase for that kind of bitching: “No Johns.”

Mr. Trump claims any result in which Republicans lose is fraudulent, so to avoid contradicting him, these lickspittles will never “take their L,” at least so long as he is breathing. If the SAVE America Act passed and the GOP still lost, they would invent a new fraud to cry about. Anything for the “party of personal responsibility” except take responsibility for their bad rhetoric; costly, reckless adventurism; abdicated leadership; and failed economic and social policies.

Right now, all augurs predict the GOP will experience historic losses in November. They could even see Senate seats in Texas and Alaska slip away. They need some excuse, since admitting Mr. Trump’s governance is unpopular, he has the temperament of a bitch, and his tariffs fucked the economy, would call into question why that whole party supports this bullshit without question.

Mr. Trump, that Mandarin Mussolini, that dotard, that orange clown, pushes this haphazard nonsense into the air to enfever fear, uncertainty, and doubt—because inflaming his goons the same way he did when they stormed the Capitol arouses him, and he hopes for violence and extralegal actions to ward off his ever being held accountable for anything in his fucking life.

Changing elections requires retraining the more than 600,000 poll workers and 20,000 full-time officials across the country, which is expensive, time-consuming, unfunded, and certain to have hiccups. But the bill takes effect immediately upon enactment. With no implementation runway ahead of the November midterms, any “wrinkles” will cost Americans their franchise. Anything at that scale rushed at that speed will be as wrinkled and malformed as the president’s—anyway, and red state governors will pretend Mr. Trump’s legislation is not inconvenient, so they will not conspicuously stymie bad effects on their constituents.

Republicans want you to have an ID to vote, but also for getting an ID to be frustrating, annoying, and difficult:

• Alabama: Passed a strict voter ID law in 2011. The following year, the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency closed 31 Driver License examining offices statewide. Al.com columnist John Archibald tallied the results: every county in which Black residents made up more than 75 percent of registered voters lost its Driver License examining office. Eight of Alabama’s ten majority-Black counties saw closures. Twenty-nine of the state’s 67 counties were left entirely without one. The Brennan Center estimated 250,000 to 500,000 registered Alabama residents lacked the ID needed to vote. The state eventually agreed to reopen some offices one day per month, which is still pretty damn inconvenient.

• Texas: After passing SB 14, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found in 2016 that the law had a discriminatory effect on Black and Hispanic voters. In some rural Texas counties, the nearest DMV office was more than a hundred miles away.

• North Carolina: In 2016, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the state’s voter ID law, finding that the legislature had targeted Black voters “with almost surgical precision” by reducing early voting days, eliminating same-day registration, and narrowing acceptable ID forms. N.C. State Conf. of the NAACP v. McCrory, 831 F.3d 204 (4th Cir. 2016).

This all sounds terrible. I prefer to lick an envelope and be done.

The voter ID debate has gone on for longer than some of its proponents have been sucking air, so Republicans know by now that it disproportionately affects poor people and urban citizens, particularly elderly non-drivers. And married women have certainly told them that their names do not match their birth certificate. But we already know the Party of Lincoln does not care about those groups, because they have had time to find acceptable solutions to these troubles and will not.

But what about MAGA Joe who lost his wallet? In some states, replacing your real ID is not a same-day operation. You must wait at least two to four weeks, longer with a backlog. Is “sucks to be you” the Republican Party’s official response to that?

If Republicans wanted to pass voter ID without bad effects, they would require an ID voters can even possess, expedite the process to get that ID, expand the state’s capacity to issue it, and implement mechanisms to identify and help residents having trouble.

Republicans falsely describe the impact of this legislation and imply it will present no friction. If their intention were not to remove eligible voters who cannot jump through every hoop, are they too stupid to understand that their process is bottlenecked in a dozen ways? In that case, they should resign immediately and seek remedial education.

To presume Republicans merely wish to improve the voting process requires ignoring their announcements that with their legislation in play, they will win. “If we change the rules, we will win every time!” Sounds sketchy as fuck.

Republicans have alleged that Democrats rely on illegitimate votes, but the Associated Press examined six states Trump contested in 2020 and found fewer than 475 alleged instances of fraud out of more than 25 million ballots cast—a number that would not have changed any result. Investigations and audits after that election, many conducted by Republicans, found no evidence of widespread fraud. I have never heard a Republican apologize for lying about that election, or admit they said things that were not so. Sorry, Mario, the fraud must be in another castle. If they cannot admit past errors, accuracy is not what they aim for.

If only voters capable of solving the paperwork puzzle of re-registering in a short window were allowed to vote, the Republican Party would purge its own voters from the rolls. They would be fucked. Their goal, then, must not be to do that. They just want something to bitch about: “We would have won, if not for the meddling ghosts and aliens! If only we had passed this, we would not have been humiliated in the midterms!”

Because I am gracious, I say let them have that. It makes them look crazy. But instead of arguing over whether voter fraud exists—negligible amounts do—I hope more opponents of this legislation try walking themselves through the process and describing it.

At the February 21-22, 2026 Principles First Summit in National Harbor, Maryland, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was seated onstage with the organization’s founder, Heath Mayo, for a discussion of President Donald Trump’s disastrous approval numbers, the Republican Party’s future after Trump, and of course, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s 2016 debate meltdown. Mr. Christie also revealed something he should have mentioned two presidential elections ago.

Discussing the Jeffrey Epstein case, Mr. Christie revealed that Mr. Trump had offered him the position of Labor Secretary before giving it to Alexander Acosta, the former U.S. Attorney whose “sweetheart” plea deal with Epstein sentenced the predator “to 18 months, but he could be out every day. He just had to sleep there, like as if it was a hotel. And he went to work every day.” When the Epstein matter inevitably resurfaced during Mr. Acosta’s confirmation hearings and forced his resignation in July 2019, Mr. Trump was furious at Mr. Christie.

“I didn’t understand exactly why he was that angry, but he was really ripped…. Trump came to me and said, it’s all your fault,” Mr. Christie told the audience. “If you had just said yes, I would have never gotten this guy and none of this stuff would have come out.”

Mr. Christie paused for effect. “I still didn’t understand why he was so mad. I didn’t know about his relationship with Epstein at that point.”

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Full remarks posted below for context.

Mr. Mayo and the audience laughed, but the substance of the anecdote is not funny. Mr. Trump was enraged that the Epstein case had resurfaced publicly, angry that “this stuff” came out, and looking for someone to blame.

Mr. Christie says he did not understand the significance of Mr. Trump’s fury at the time—but had he really never heard that old aphorism, “a hit dog hollers?” That was 2019. Mr. Christie endorsed Mr. Trump for reelection in 2020 and did not share this anecdote during his own presidential campaign in 2023 and 2024, when he positioned himself as the Republican field’s most vocal Trump critic. He did not bring it up when the Epstein files became a national flashpoint. He told it, for the first time, as entertaining insider gossip.

Mr. Christie also revealed at the conference that he did not vote for president in 2024. The audience booed. “For you, it was binary,” he told them. “For me, it wasn’t.” So even thinking Mr. Trump was weirdly protective of Epstein was not enough to get Mr. Christie in a voting booth. Mr. Christie knows the kind of men who occupy the highest offices in the country, even criticizes them, yet truly damns them too late to change outcomes.

Full Chris Christie Epstein remarks

“Let’s differentiate between answers and prosecutions. So I’ll do answers first, then I’ll do prosecutions.

On answers: it was a bunch of rich, predominantly white guys who are masters of the universe, have made more money—think about what all of these men who have been exposed so far have in common. They’re professionally successful. They’re extraordinarily wealthy. And most of them are incredibly geeky, right? Like, these guys could not close the deal ever in their lives. Could not close the deal. So now they become really rich and they’re thinking, I’m really rich now, I gotta find out how to close the deal. And they look at Jeffrey Epstein and they go, he knows how to close the deal. I’m going to hang with him. What more do you need to know? The character of these men is awful.

And so, on what we need to know—may there be more names and all the rest of it? Yes. But you’re gonna hear the same story over and over again. Every time a new name comes out, like, I saw the video of Les Wexner’s deposition where he was talking about, “I didn’t know that Jeffrey Epstein stole a billion dollars from me.” Like, you know what? The scary part is I actually believe him. He had that much money that he just didn’t miss it. And his relationship with Epstein was so important to him that even if he knew, he didn’t care. So you’re going to see more of these kind of guys.

Now, on the prosecution front, though, this goes way back. I was the U.S. attorney in New Jersey when the Epstein case started. I want you to think about that. We’re talking about 2007. I mean, 19 years ago. And I remember when the plea agreement was reached. All of us amongst the U.S. attorney community would talk with each other about cases that were going on in other places. When I saw that Alex Acosta came to a plea agreement with a guy who was accused of pedophilia, where he turned the case over from the feds to the state, and they sentenced him to 18 months, but he could be out every day—he just had to sleep there, like as if it was a hotel. And he went to work every day. And a United States attorney under George W. Bush agreed to that deal. And a Justice Department agreed to that deal.

And so, you know, Trump is just a continuation and expansion of that problem. Epstein got Alan Dershowitz and a whole bunch of other lawyers who did whatever they did with Alex Acosta, who—again, this would have disappeared. It disappeared all through the Obama years. You didn’t hear Eric Holder ever talk about Jeffrey Epstein, did you? Not once. So all through the Obama years, it disappears.

Trump comes in. The only reason it comes up is because Trump makes Alex Acosta the Labor Secretary. Great decision. So he goes into hearings, and the Democrats bring up Epstein and that plea deal. And then Acosta has to resign. And so it bubbles back up again. And now Trump’s—and I was around at the time, so I know how angry he was. I didn’t understand exactly why he was that angry, but he was really ripped. And the reason I know about it is because he offered me Labor Secretary first, and I turned it down because I didn’t want to go in his cabinet. And he then gave it to Acosta. So when Acosta caused all these problems, Trump came to me and said, “It’s all your fault. If you had just said yes, I would have never gotten this guy and none of this stuff would have come out.” I still didn’t understand why he was so mad. I didn’t know about his relationship with Epstein at that point. And really very few people did.

So my concern is that for most of the people who can be prosecuted, should be prosecuted, we’re beyond the statute now. You need to know this stuff goes back 19 years. And every one of those administrations—Bush 43, Obama, Trump 45, Biden, and Trump 47—all own it. Now, Trump has made the Justice Department unrecognizable, and we would know more of the information about these people if people that were not bought and paid for by the president were not running the Justice Department. But that’s what we got.

And I don’t think—I think it’s amazing that Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna and others have gotten done what they’ve gotten done in light of all this. It really is. Because, remember, Pam Bondi and Kash Patel both told us a year ago there were no Epstein files. There was nothing in there. Now there’s three million pages plus, right? So I guess it just showed up. Maybe it was like in an office at the FBI that no one had looked in for a while.

So we got to give credit. Congress deserves almost no credit for anything right now. I mean, seriously, in that same AP poll, Heath, you know what Congress’s job approval is? This is impossible in one respect. Four percent. So I think two things. My God, how could Congress only have four percent approval? Then I think, how do they even have four percent approval? Like, who are those people? I’d love to interview those people. “Okay, so you think Congress is doing a great job?” “Yep.” “Tell me why.” I think those would be some fascinating answers, who those four percent are. It’s Nancy Mace voting for herself.

Could be. Could be Nancy. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t want to be in Congress anymore. She doesn’t even like Congress. Think about how bad Congress has become when Marjorie Taylor Greene goes, “No, this is too much of a shit show for me. I’m out of here.” I mean, this is incredible. She’s like, “No, this has gone too far. This is absurd.” You can’t imagine you could live that long.

But in the context of all that, Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie—without the two of them, we wouldn’t know what we know now about the Epstein files. We wouldn’t. The Trump administration would have never released it.”

Author’s note: Mr. Christie told this anecdote so casually I assumed it was one he had shared on ABC or CNN or wherever he talks these days. While typing up the Principles First Summit 2026 report—which is shaping up to be another novella like the 2025 Report, I realized I could not find another version of the telling to compare it against. This seems criminally unreported.

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On Wednesday, January 28, 2026, Jeff Bezos announced layoffs of 16,000 Amazon employees, in addition to the 14,000 made unemployed in recent months. Two days later, he released the MELANIA movie to flop in theaters. Amazon MGM paid $40 million for the rights (more than double Disney’s $14 million bid), and another $35 million in advertising, but will not make $10 million on its opening weekend. Short of a “miracle,” it will never break even. That money ought to have been spent paying a thousand employees a $75,000 salary for a year.

The only way that shit was anything but a bribe for Mr. Bezos to earn President Donald Trump’s favor would be if the movie were good, good enough that Amazon believed it could be successful. That seems implausible. If it were watchable, interesting, or salient, I could accept that someone tried to make a film that deserved to “break even” with $150 million in sales globally. Otherwise, if it sucked, well, the suction is the corruption. Mr. Bezos was capable of watching MELANIA before releasing it. He could have evaluated whether it was good. It was not. If he thought it was a worthy film, he is the worst judge of quality in Hollywood since HBO bungled A Game of Thrones’ final season. If Mr. Bezos knew it was a bad movie, one he would loathe watching, then the $35 million marketing spend was not intended to sell tickets for a documentary his company’s data likely predicted would fail. I doubt the target audience was the movie-going public, even AMC Stubs A-List members who feel obligated to watch four movies a week. The marketing was a $35 million declaration of fealty, meant to “show support” or “pay tribute.”

I decided to be fair-minded and watch MELANIA myself before accusing Mr. Bezos of bribing the First Family. My instinct was that he did, but it was not impossible that a veteran director like Brett Ratner, who worked on Rush Hour, X-Men, and Red Dragon, could make the story of an immigrant supermodel turned billionaire turned First Lady interesting. Most Intro to Creative Writing students could. He did not.

I thought Mr. Ratner would have tried harder. He was plucked out of cancellation for this project. He had been a pariah to Hollywood since it was exposed that he:

· Masturbated in front of Olivia Munn while holding a shrimp cocktail in one hand,

· Physically forced then-19-year-old actress Natasha Henstridge to perform oral sex,

· Followed women into bathrooms,

· And was known as a creep, sex pest, and serial offender in his industry.

Not good!

But because the president wants a Rush Hour 4, Mr. Ratner was given a second chance with the Trumps, the Ellisons, and Mr. Bezos as his patrons. He ought to be embarrassed that this was the best he could produce for them with unlimited resources. Excellent cinematography, beautiful sound, absolute dogshit movie. As his reward, on the same Friday as the theatrical release, the Trump Administration’s trickle of Epstein files revelations showed photos of Mr. Ratner posing with Jeffrey Epstein and two young women on a couch. What timing!

I am sympathetic that AMC and Regal Cinemas must have felt compelled to show MELANIA, regardless of whether they expected butts in seats, so they did not get singled out for hurting the First Lady’s feelings. Then I remember what they charge for tickets and bottled water, and my compassion recedes.

Looking at showtimes in the greater DC, Maryland, and Virginia area, no theater gave the film an insufficient number of time slots, but most showings were empty. Zero viewers. I found a few screenings with a single other reserved seat, and one with two. (I debated booking a seat behind them for this story, but thought that might be inappropriate if it were a hot “date night.”) Tempting as it would be to watch it alone—one six-foot-tall donkey alone in the theater, free to crunch popcorn and guffaw as loud as I would like, swig “Writer’s Tears” whiskey from a discreet flask—I wanted to see what sort of audiences it attracted. Finally, I found one with twenty-one other people (approximately ten actually showed) at 10 PM on a Saturday. Real biopic hours.

Sadly, it was not really a biopic or documentary. It was, according to reviews, “designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch and proffered like a medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.” “gilded trash remake of The Zone of Interest,” “Cheeseball Infomercial of Staggering Inertia,” “a multimillion‑dollar vanity project to inflate the egos of Donald Trump and his spouse,” The Bulwark’s Sonny Bunch called it hagiography, but I think even that oversells it. “The writings of the lives of saints,” after all, include interesting details.

To be clear, I gave no money to this movie. I consider the Trumps as demons sucking America dry. I would never willingly pay them anything. First, I had a strong margarita from a chain Mexican restaurant, then bought a ticket to a one-night showing of The Two Towers Remastered, and then snuck into MELANIA instead. I was surprised that none of the juvenile delinquents smoking outside the mall had the same idea. When I was such a wild-eyed chaos bringer—live fast, die young, fight The Man, et cetera—me and my boys would have gone in jeering until the mall cops trespassed us. But I suppose we were “built different” from the youth of today.

For some reason, the auditoriums were not labeled with the movies that were playing. Was that a new thing, or a special accommodation made to stymie my plan? I was able to find the showing anyway by following the most miserable-looking man in a ratty jacket and ballcap, but the only other evidence I had that I found the right theater was how barren it was.

“Your escape begins now,” an AMC announcer said, before sending us to the world I wanted to escape from.

The movie opened to First Lady Melania Trump’s high heels—a frequent motif. There were an unusual number of shots of her shoes. I wonder why? Did Mr. Ratner recruit the Nickelodeon foot guy, Dan Schneider, for this project? I felt chilled realizing yet more Hollywood predators may get a second life by converting to MAGA Republicanism.

I cannot think of a more uninspired start to this film than the extended shots of Mrs. Trump walking down a hallway, looking stoic, riding in a car, looking stoic, getting into a TRUMP-branded jet, looking stoic, all while “Fly Away” by Lenny Kravitz played. “Fly Away” is a silly pop hit about fleeing to be free with someone you love, leaving everything behind, going to the stars. Here, it indicated she was boarding a plane.

“Everyone wants to know, so here it is. Twenty days in my life.” Mrs. Trump promised the audience. The big question anyone asks about her is: “Where the hell is she?” She is absent, not intriguing. Some assume she and Mr. Trump are separated and only appear together at scripted times. This headcanon was not dispelled by the next song choice: Michael Jackson’s (another sexual predator!) “Billie Jean Is Not My Lover.”

In another scene, Mrs. Trump warmly greets her household staff and tailors in Trump Tower. Quite relatable. I am glad they all get along! She directs them to hem and alter clothes to her specifications—”here it needs to be much tighter,” “straight right here on the side,” “can we do a lapel a little bit bigger or not”—while lecturing the viewer about her “serious design approach,” that “it is important that timeless elegance shines through every element of the Inauguration’s decor, style, and design.” Riveting stuff.

The First Lady is not wrong—history will preserve her image as enabling and presiding over countless horrors, including the recent murders of Renee Good by masked ICE thug Jonathon Ross and Alex Pretti by Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez, the inhumane treatment of immigrants and children, as well as the 383,050 deaths caused by the dismantling of USAID. She is providing a service to future textbook publishers by ensuring that the graphics are just so.

Mrs. Trump then inspected the stationery for the Inaugural invites and approved the color red for the envelope before moving on to discussing the dinner menu, which included golden eggs and caviar—staples in the diet of the Forgotten Man of America. Has nobody warned her of Marie Antoinette’s poor reputation?

Despite my low expectations, I was disappointed. Instead of showing us her tastes in carpets, tablecloths, brocades, flowers, or dishware, I thought Mrs. Trump could have shown America her depths. Instead, she proved yet again that she could polish her façade. For once, I worried for her—is it worse than that? Is the façade all there is of her, or all she wants to be?

Mrs. Trump described her work during the first Trump presidency, when she “restored the Rose Garden, built the tennis pavilion, redesigned the bowling alley, the Queen’s Bedroom, and ‘upgraded everything.’” Since then, the Rose Garden and the East Wing have been destroyed. I wished the film showed that instead. Both the restoration process and its subsequent demolition would have been a rich, interesting narrative.

Tham Kannalikham, a Laotian‑American interior designer, told Mrs. Trump:

“We came here when I was two, immigrated from Laos. We came here to America because my family wanted opportunities, equality, and everything good about what America represented. And so, this moment signified everything that my parents believed in America.”

The very things Mrs. Trump’s husband seeks to destroy. Mrs. Trump heard Ms. Kannalikham with a stone face, ignored her story, and responded instead by explaining that she wanted the presidential seal engraved on a Slovenian chalice. That was the most striking thing about MELANIA for me, the First Lady’s total disinterest in anything or anybody other than her immediate family and interior decorating. I think if you wanted to convince the American People that there was nothing under Mrs. Trump’s surface, that she was a vacuous solipsist, this is what you would craft.

One scene showed Mrs. Trump taking her husband’s “victory” phone call regarding the electoral certification. Mrs. Trump indicated to her husband that she had not watched it live but would “see it on the news,” and otherwise rushed him off the phone while he appeared to blather. The scene was as embarrassing in the full context of the movie as it was in the trailer. Did Mr. Ratner think this positively portrayed the president? Mr. Trump was rarely on screen, but when he was, he was depicted as a rambling old man whom Mrs. Trump indulged and brushed off. The audience snickered at that. I wonder if Mr. Trump’s Grandpa Simpson-style rambling is even seen as pathetic by his paying fans now.

During footage of former President Carter’s funeral, Mrs. Trump instead monologued about her mother’s death a year prior. Nothing profound or specific, just that she loved and missed her parent. Was it too much to expect she would have something to say about Mr. Carter? It felt tasteless that she seemed impatient to leave one funeral so she could mourn someone who mattered more to her.

Then again, Mrs. Trump did not immigrate to the United States until 1996, fifteen years after Mr. Carter left office. She likely had no real memory of or emotional connection to the 39th president. So why include the footage? I am sensitive about this disrespect because the night before, I had frozen in a four-hour nighttime queue outside the United States Capitol to pay my respects at the late President Jimmy Carter’s viewing. If she had no interest in attending, she could have stayed home.

That same night, Mrs. Trump went back to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City (with her film crew) to light a candle for her mother, the death she did care about. I cannot tell if Mr. Ratner set the scene to audio of a live choir singing, or if there was a choir physically present but off-screen and singing for only her. While the sound quality was, again, quite excellent, this was an uncomfortable ambiguity. She took a blessing from the priest, then exited to a crowd of fans and her security detail.

This scene astounded me in its total narcissism. I respect that Mrs. Trump grieved for and honored her family. But does a cathedral need to close down so that she can have a personalized and tailored moment for that grief? Is that a paid service, or one only offered as a tribute to the wealthy and powerful? I expect the average New Yorker cannot request such a private ceremony.

You would expect such a sequence to be used to share touching anecdotes. There must have been plenty—Mrs. Trump’s mother, Amalija Knavs, lived in the White House during the first Trump term. A Slovenian First Grandma, one year older than Mr. Trump himself, and staying with the family—now she would have made an excellent movie subject! But all we got were platitudes from the First Lady.

Instead of specific memories or meaningful stories, Mrs. Trump’s voiceover returned with more generic language:

“From a young age, I watched my mother’s hands at work. Her patience and skill taught me that beauty comes from dedication and that even the smallest detail matters…”

Mrs. Trump’s father came on the screen. Finally, a monologue from someone else. He said: “I married my darling Amalija for 57 years.” I pulled up the reclining red leather seat. I was ready to learn his story, but Mrs. Trump’s voiceover rolled overtop of him, and I never got to see what he had to say about his late wife. Her own father’s grief was subordinated to… whatever the hell this is:

“The love my parents shared for over 60 years was the foundation of our home. It shaped me and taught me what lasting love looks like. Everything I am began with them. I cherish all the incredible memories I have of my mother. There are moments that happen every day that remind me of her… My beloved mother was the richest thread in my life, weaving warmth, wisdom, and grace into every moment we share. Mourning the loss of my mother will always remain. The mourning never leaves. It simply lives alongside me.”

Perhaps it would have felt more poignant had those moments made it into the movie. I imagine a freshman Creative Writing professor at the chalkboard, sneering: “Show, do not tell! What warmth? What wisdom? What grace? Show examples. Yes, yes, your protagonist misses her mother, but what does she miss about her specifically? You say moment, moment, moment, but they mean nothing to the audience without an example!”

Another sequence showed Mrs. Trump talking to France’s First Lady Brigitte Macron. They talked about Mrs. Trump’s “Be Best Initiative,” an anti-cyberbullying campaign that never fails to piss me off since her husband is the world’s most notorious practitioner of cyberbullying and a role model to every noxious piece of shit troll online, but I digress. Mrs. Trump said to Mrs. Macron:

“Do you know that in the United States, an average child spends eight hours on the screen? Mental health, anxiety is just growing all around the world because of cyberbullying. I know that you established a cyberbullying initiative. How is that? Is it successful in France? Did it have much success?”

If we were wanted to believe Mrs. Trump’s engagement with world leaders on the topic is meant to yield genuine fruit, Mr. Ratner instead proved her ambivalence. Why would she not ask for a briefing, or even Google, what France had or had not accomplished before starting the call? For that matter, even a low-budget PBS documentary would have included some footage of Mrs. Trump participating in Be Best efforts, at least so the audience knew what the hell they were, instead of rattling factoids.

One quick scene showed Mrs. Trump watching footage of the LA wildfire on FOX. She said, “It is impossible to see these images and not be horrified at the utter devastation and catastrophic loss. I think about the families, the children who have lost everything, the homes, the schools. All the structures no longer exist. It is unimaginable.” She “thinks of the children,” but does not tell their stories. Evil Vizier Stephen Miller, one of her husband’s closest advisors, saw his childhood home destroyed in the blaze. Even that wretch might have earned some pathos. Still, when Mrs. Trump called the wildfire “unimaginable,” her husband mocked, blamed, and stoked conspiracies about the victims and complained about DEI, delta smelts, and Gavin Newsom. While Mrs. Trump talked about sympathy for the victims, her husband caused them more pain.

One strong sequence was Mrs. Trump’s meeting with Aviva Siegel, an Israeli woman who was taken hostage on October 7 and held for 51 days in Gaza. She described being held “underneath the ground… with no food, no water, no oxygen” and her fear for her husband, who was still captive.

Mrs. Trump described that conversation: “Meeting Aviva was very emotional, you don’t forget those people, those people come home with you, and you remember them.”

Glad she remembers people who are experiencing profound suffering?

“My creative vision has reached its final version, exactly as I imagined,” Mrs. Trump said while wearing the infamous Inaugural hat. What all of America asked after the Inauguration was why she intended to dress like Carmen Sandiego, or less charitably, the Benadryl Hat Man, not if that was her intention.

“This is my last flight as a private citizen before stepping back into a very public life. After the inauguration, everything becomes more structured… fewer quiet moments.” The camera followed Mrs. Trump through the palace-like resort and club Mar-a-Lago, the so-called “Winter White House,” which used to send Jeffrey Epstein masseuses “gratis” and where Ghislaine Maxwell recruited Virginia Giuffre and other girls into sex trafficking. Mrs. Trump called it “more than a home,” describing “warm sunshine, family, and friends.” Mrs. Trump explained that between all of her houses, “New York to Palm Beach to Washington, DC, essentially [she] find[s] peace in each location.” No matter which place with paid help she sleeps, she enjoys herself. Most people would be satisfied with that. It reminded me that after Mr. Trump passes, the U.S. government should seize Mar-a-Lago and sell it for architectural salvage as restitution for all that family’s looting of the Treasury.

In one scene where Mrs. Trump appeared with her husband, he interrupted the Inaugural planning to complain about TV coverage: “Why did they have to put the [College Football Playoff National Championship] at the same time [as the Inauguration]? They probably did it on purpose.” Again, snickering in the audience. For the whole movie, we saw Mrs. Trump nitpicking these arrangements, but in a few minutes with Mr. Trump in the room, he derailed everything to gripe about ratings. This gave me a mean-spirited laugh, but I was surprised to hear that same scorn from his supporters.

I wonder now if this were secretly like the scenario the Amazon Washington Post’s Monica Hesse describes, where “There were five of us total in the audience and afterward three of us tried to interview each other and that is when we realized we were all journalists on the job.” I am surprised Mr. Bezos still allows that kind of commentary.

“What a payroll I have. Well, we appreciate the job you do at Mar-a-Lago. It has been fantastic. So, I want to just thank all of you. And remember, the customer is always right.” Mr. Trump said to the Mar-a-Lago staff, while “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears played ominously. Such a strange choice. Mrs. Trump must be aware of the public debate over whether her husband aspires to be a fascist or a dictator. Why “lean in”?

I never imagined I would write these words, but whenever The Donald entered a scene, I was relieved. Unlike his stilted wife, even the stupid things he said felt substantial or interesting or, heaven help us, funny. The film made no attempt to give him the same inscrutable dignity as his wife, which made him comic relief in a film that needed it. If this movie had allowed Mrs. Trump a comic sidekick—a snappy assistant, or even her stumbling boor of a husband—scenes could have been saved.

Mrs. Trump and her film crew, along with her husband, Vice President Jim Dave Vance and his wife Usha, and the president’s entourage, visited Arlington Cemetery for a wreath-laying ceremony honoring soldiers who died during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Mrs. Trump described the place as “not just a sacred burial ground, it’s the soul of our American soldiers from every generation and every walk of life, forever, together.” A shame that Mr. Trump desecrated it at another wreath-laying ceremony for the same soldiers during the campaign. His advance team member, Michel Picard, and deputy campaign director, Justin Caporale, shouted “get out of the way, you fucking bitch” and assaulted a cemetery employee. The campaign later smeared the employee as “unstable,” “deranged,” and “mentally ill.”

“Each headstone tells a story of courage, of love, of country, and of a life given in service to something greater than oneself: America. It is a powerful reminder that freedom is not free. As First Lady, I carry each of their memories in my heart with humility and gratitude.” Mrs. Trump said about the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Could she recount one? Seems a cheap trick to honor the dead by saying “We honor them!” “Insert honor here!”

On Inauguration Day, Mr. Trump told the staff of Blair House that he “left a [big] tip up there, so whoever goes first.” Great line. Perhaps he could have given it to his wife, so that she could say just one cool thing for her movie. Then again, was there a tip? How big was it? Was it $20? $100? $1,000? A piece of paper that says, “Don’t trust any wooden nickels?”

Another voiceover from Mrs. Trump reminded us she loved her son Barron, felt proud of him, and wished he had a great life. Most parents want that for their kids. Barron had no real speaking roles, except to come out in the Inaugural Parade at the Capital One Arena, smirking while James Brown’s “A Man’s World” played. That felt ominous. For all his mother’s love, the Andrew Tate MRA world that boy is exploring will surely turn him into a new monster if he cannot find his way free. I pray he does. Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark mentioned that we are approximately ten years out from Barron becoming a “significant public figure,” and it is not too late for him to make himself a good one.

As footage of the Inauguration played, Mrs. Trump’s voiceover continued: “Walking into the Capitol’s Rotunda, I felt the weight of history intertwined with my own journey as an immigrant.” Mrs. Trump’s “journey as an immigrant,” which is interesting, had no part in this movie. However “the weight of history” “intertwin[ing]” with that made her feel, the audience had no way of seeing or understanding. And if it is never possible for the audience to do more than guess at that interplay, why mention it at all? I suspect Mrs. Trump thought these were cool, profound words, but she does not share what they mean to her.

Mrs. Trump also said, “Everyone should do what they can to protect our individual rights. Never take them for granted. Because in the end, no matter where we come from, we are bound by the same humanity.” Fuck her. These are not bad values—I share them—but it is because I share those values that I had to sit through this garbage in my hunt for whatever insights will end this authoritarian regime. She supports her husband in assaulting individual rights and disrespecting the “same humanity” of people in America precisely because of “where [they] come from.”

“Here we go again!” Mrs. Trump said to the camera before entering the Inauguration ceremony at the Capitol Rotunda. Cute line. Were it not in the trailer, I might have chuckled. By now, it was already a cliche.

“My proudest legacy will be that of peacemaker and unifier.” Mr. Trump said, and in my theater, the audience’s laughter was uncomfortable. Mr. Trump will not have that legacy. Not after invading Venezuela, bombing Iran, and threatening to take Greenland from Denmark by force. The camera cut away from the inaugural address to yet another scene of Mrs. Trump walking, as if her attention migrated elsewhere. She hates his ass, doesn’t she?

I expected a hagiography. This was less than that. A story that shows no conflict, no challenge, no gravity, no friction, just a woman looking her best and inspecting décor, making careful plans that come exactly into fruition because of the dedication and hard work of her employees. Every opportunity for something more interesting was denied.

January 20, 2025, the second Trump Inauguration, is among the worst dates in American history, alongside Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and the damnable January 6 insurrection. I expected that reliving it in the context of the last year would make me want out of my skin. Instead, I was bored. Mrs. Trump’s affect is so dull I cannot even muster hate and contempt for her. I could feel more anger for a mannequin.

“[Inauguration Day] was so rich with meaning and [] each moment was historic and filled with purpose.” Mrs. Trump gushed. They forgot to show that meaning. Instead, all the audience learned was her tastes in aesthetics, which were already visible. “I will move forward with purpose and of course with style.” We saw the style, not the purpose. As the movie rambled to its ending, there was one quick scene of Mrs. Trump smiling and doing a little YMCA dance while looking at the camera. It occurred to me that it might have been the one real flash of personality visible in the nearly two hours. After all that, there could be something below Mrs. Trump’s surface that we will never see. So, what did they (try) to charge me $20 for?

In the closing moments, a montage of First Lady portraits were presented before the film cut to a photo of Mrs. Trump modeling for her own, where she notoriously looked like a “boss bitch” on the cover of a business paperback nobody would buy at a hotel FedEx Office.

The credits rolled and the lights came up. Everybody seemed exhausted, not buzzing with patriotic fervor or happiness. I was the only one who stayed through the credits, perhaps expecting a Marvel-style “stinger.” The credits opened with text factoids about Mrs. Trump’s “accomplishments” and how she is “redefining the role of America’s First Lady”—details that would have been included in a more worthy movie—before showing the names of the poor souls who had to work on this.

If Mr. Ratner wanted me to leave this movie thinking that Mrs. Trump seriously wanted to improve the lives of children, he failed. If he wanted me to leave thinking that Mrs. Trump understood the weight of American leadership, he failed. If he wanted me to leave thinking she cared about this country’s political traditions, history, or freedoms, he failed. If all he wanted me to know was that Mrs. Trump dresses well and can plan event space on an unlimited budget, then this dull fucking waste of time did not need $75 million in funding.

Because it sucks, MELANIA was a corrupt bribe. Mr. Bezos ought to resign from Amazon in disgrace for this, and from his own pocket, surrender the $75 million so that the company can rehire every single person laid off whose salary could have been paid with the money thrown away on this nonsense. He will not, of course, but he should consider finding some way to mitigate the shame this brings on himself, Amazon, and America.

It demonstrates the determination of the Trump-Vance regime to sanctify the killing of Renee Nicole Good in her Honda Pilot by masked ICE agent Jonathan Ross. This is not merely bluster and obfuscation; the administration has constructed another world where the victim is the villain, and if this story is successfully rewritten, more Americans will die.

Mr. Vance squawked at the WH podium:

“That woman [who died] was there to interfere with a legitimate law enforcement operation in the United States of America. What that headline leaves out is that that woman is part of a broader left-wing network to attack, to dox, to assault, and to make it impossible for our ICE officers to do their job… sometimes using domestic terror techniques…. She was trying to ram this guy with her car. He shot back. He defended himself…. [R]amming an ICE officer with your car […] justifies being shot.”

Mr. Vance knows the footage is genuinely ambiguous, but he feigns that it is indisputably exculpatory. There is no widespread agreement that Ms. Good “tried to ram” Mr. Ross with her car. Mr. Vance may well be describing a parallel universe. I watched the videos and believe my eyes, not the vice president’s. I replaced my failing old monitor with a 5K Ultrawide, hoping I could find the truth in the extra pixels. It is still unclear and certainly not obvious—I do not see the “vehicular weaponization” the administration describes. I want to. I want very much to conclude that ICE agents are not allowed to murder with impunity, but I cannot.

To be clear, nobody should run over federal agents. Dreadful things should happen to anybody who tries. Even though I routinely call masked ICE agents “thugs,” I want to see them tried, not injured. But the administration is more bloodthirsty.

I doubt there was contact between Mr. Ross and the Honda Pilot. But even if the SUV touched him, it could only have been a slight, gentle nudge. President Donald Trump claimed Mr. Ross was “run over” by the Pilot. That is a lie. It absolutely did not happen. Since Mr. Trump misled the public once already, it would be willfully dumb to give him any benefit of the doubt. Or as the old saying in Tennessee goes: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.”

Mr. Vance desperately wants us to take his word over our senses.

“But the simple fact is, what you see is what you get in this case. You have a woman who is trying to obstruct a legitimate law enforcement operation. Nobody debates that. You have a woman who aimed her car at a law enforcement officer and pressed on the accelerator. Nobody debates that.”

It is “debated.” Mr. Vance was debating it right then. The video shows the vehicle’s wheels turned all the way away from the officer. I wish I knew whether Ms. Good was obstructing any legitimate law enforcement operation, but no evidence of the lead-up to the incident is public. She could have been a protester, sure, but the Department of Homeland Security said, “violent rioters [were] blocking ICE officers,” and there was no violent riot present. So, I have no reason to take the administration at its word alone that she was obstructing anyone as part of a riot that did not happen.

Republicans claim, essentially, that anyone impeding immigration enforcement gets what they get. “Fuck around, find out,” they brag. FAFO was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2025, defined as “an expression of warning or schadenfreude.” It is not tenable for the official position of this government to be that its opponents deserve death or any other bad outcome that comes to them.

If Mr. Trump or his servants were wise, they would fucking stop with this rhetoric. They will not. Instead, Mr. Vance suggested those outraged by masked ICE thugs were domestic terrorists. Stupid. If each of this administration’s critics today desisted from opposing the excesses of Mr. Trump’s immigration enforcement, a teenager tomorrow in a Home Depot parking lot who saw men in “shiesties” harassing day laborers would talk shit. DHS, ICE, and CBP will never be beyond or without critique.

There will always be protesters. That is immutable. Mr. Vance’s attempts to conflate demonstrators and activists with violence may even energize them further. So, will the administration always reserve the right to kill them? Because if the federal government says today it has the privilege to shoot anyone viewed as disrupting its operations, that is a demand for the power to do so again tomorrow, and forever.

Do Messrs. Trump and Vance really see no alternative?

Mr. Vance said:

“And we cannot say that when a far-left fringe is inciting violence against our brave law enforcement officials, that we’re no longer going to enforce the law. That’s rewarding the very people who are engaged in this garbage.”

The Trump administration is happy with how things turned out and is not seeking to prevent another event like Ms. Good’s death, which means it permits recurrence.

In 2017, Mr. Trump’s evil vizier Stephen Miller ranted to CBS’s Face the Nation:

“[O]ur opponents, the media, and the whole world will soon see… that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”

No. Wrong. They will. So long as anybody has authority, there will be an American who questions their power.

Mr. Vance has similar fantasies:

“[Mr. Ross] is protected by absolute immunity. He was doing his job…. The unprecedented thing is the idea that a local official can actually prosecute a federal official with absolute immunity.”

Unless Mr. Ross’s job was “killing women,” shooting Ms. Good was outside the scope of his duties.

Mr. Trump told The New York Times, when asked if anything limited his powers:

Unquestioned power. Absolute immunity. There is no reason to believe someone’s insistence that they cannot be constrained, especially in a country whose great Founding Fathers agonized over the separation of powers. When a villain says, “Nothing can stop me,” they mean that they fear punishment and hope you will let them get away with their crimes.

ICE agents have no “absolute immunity.” If federal law enforcement is never accountable for anything, the horrors of that ability would be well-known and well-feared. Mr. Vance says “absolute,” but he is referring to “Supremacy Clause immunity.”

The Supreme Court in the 1890 case In re Neagle framed it thusly:

“[I]f the prisoner is held in the state court to answer for an act which he was authorized to do by the law of the United States, which it was his duty to do as [agent] of the United States, and if, in doing that act, he did no more than what was necessary and proper for him to do, he cannot be guilty of a crime under the law of the state.”

But that same paragraph also says:

“There must always be a preliminary examination by a committing magistrate, or some similar authority, as to whether there is an offense to be submitted to a jury.”

So, there is a mechanism to establish if an officer is a scofflaw or if his actions were “reasonable and proper.” Lawfare explains:

“Courts conduct a situation-specific inquiry into both the scope of the federal officer’s authorized duties and whether the officer’s actions were reasonable (or ‘necessary and proper’) in carrying out a federal duty.”

Mr. Ross may or may not be immune, but a court determines that—it is not as definitive as Mr. Vance claims. Immunity is a defense to be asserted, not some inherent quality that precludes examination. One wonders why the vice president would confidently make a procedural statement so false—is he ignorant? Has he imagined his whole life that a pissed-off Park Police could roughly handle him if he were caught putting on his guyliner after dark in a national park? Or is he attempting to stymie the investigation?

Of course, Mr. Vance is trying to stop the investigation. The administration’s behavior is exactly what you would expect if you suspected it was going to do a cover-up. Not only did Mr. Ross flee the scene in his van, but the Daily Mail reported “[g]un-toting feds in ski masks swarm[ed] the ICE agent shooter’s home to retrieve belongings as the house sits empty amid claims he has gone into hiding.” Would it surprise anyone if Mr. Ross was moved out of Minnesota to be unavailable to law enforcement, like any other gangster “lying low?”

According to a conversation between Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and one-man news team Aaron Parnas, “State investigators are being barred from accessing key evidence, including ballistic evidence, Good’s car, and other materials, by federal authorities, with the FBI now handling the investigation and limiting state access. This means Minnesota officials do not currently have custody of the car, the gun, or the shell casings from the bullets fired by ICE agent Jonathan Ross.”

The officer involved in the shooting is in the wind, and the evidence is under the control of a federal government whose principals have already given their conclusions and misstated facts to support them. Sus. Is it any wonder that Minnesota wants to run its own parallel investigation? Mr. Trump’s attempt to put his thumb on the scale has done Mr. Ross a disservice, too—even if the officer is cleared, nobody could trust that the conclusion was not predetermined.

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On that same Thursday, Luis David Nico Moncada and Yorlenys Betzabeth Zambrano-Contreras, Venezuelan nationals whom both DHS and Portland officials describe as having “nexus” with the Tren de Aragua gang, were shot by federal agents. Again, in a car. Again, DHS claims the driver attempted to ram agents with the vehicle. It could be true, but how can anyone believe the Department, when it lied about Ms. Good one day before? This is not meant as a rhetorical question, or to draw any conclusions about Mr. Moncada or Ms. Zambrano-Contreras—they may well be crooks—but to show that the rampant dishonesty of this government undermines the legitimacy of any state violence.

It may be the case that stepping in the path of cars to justify shooting at the drivers has been a tradition of Border Patrol officers for more than a decade, as indicated in a 2013 U.S. Customs and Border Protection Use of Force Review conducted by The Police Executive Research Forum:

“It appears that CBP practice allows shooting at the driver of any suspect vehicle that comes in the direction of agents. It is suspected that in many vehicle shooting cases, the subject driver was attempting to flee from the agents who intentionally put themselves into the exit path of the vehicle, thereby exposing themselves to additional risk and creating justification for the use of deadly force…. The cases suggest that some of the shots at suspect vehicles are taken out of frustration when agents who are on foot have no other way of detaining suspects who are fleeing in a vehicle. Most reviewed cases involved non-violent suspects who posed no threat other than a moving vehicle. There is little doubt that the safest course for an agent faced with an oncoming vehicle is to get out of the way of the vehicle.”

This could have been prevented, frankly, if DHS had taken the recommendation from that report to change the “shooting at vehicles” policy to:

“Agents shall not discharge their firearms at or from a moving vehicle unless deadly physical force is being used against the police officer or another person present, by means other than a moving vehicle.”

I also thought it was interesting just how abjectly disparaging Mr. Vance was towards Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (who should be Vice President). Mr. Vance called him: “a guy who just quit because his fraudulent activities have been uncovered,” “a joke,” “unbelievabl[y] incompeten[t].” Sickening to see Mr. Vance’s overindulgence in spite and scorn when, during the 2024 Vice Presidential debates, Messrs. Vance and Walz were so polite to each other that Mr. Walz was criticized for bringing the best out of Mr. Vance. Obviously, that was only a performance—a shame.

I never expected much from Mr. Vance, but if he were a real politician, and not an authoritarian aspirant, he would make a private call to Mr. Walz, leaning on their shared camaraderie at the 2024 debate, and coordinate a response that does not ask Americans to take sides. That better world is never to be.

So much of this criticism would have been preempted had the administration said, “We will investigate and see what the facts are.” The most obvious reason to volunteer preemptive exculpation is for Mr. Trump to let his thugs think they are untouchable. Do not put it past this president to award Mr. Ross some bullshit medal at the upcoming State of the Union. If the slaying does not become unambiguously politically poisonous, Republicans will brag about it for the next decade.

Representative Jasmine Crockett posted on Facebook:

“Renee Good was murdered in broad daylight, and Republicans are acting as if it is ok. Where is your decency? Where is your humanity? When will y’all develop a backbone and actually represent the people that sent you here?”

I fear Ms. Crockett, by appealing to a common morality with today’s Republican Party, is speaking into a void. They loved this broad daylight murder.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who loves killing puppies, delivered remarks over the weekend from behind a podium that said: “One of ours. All of yours.” Whatever that means seems ominous—I assume when Ms. Noem learns exactly how many times I have called her an idiot, or mocked her affair with Corey Lewandowski, or suggested that she should be tried in The Hague, I will share the same fate as whatever will happen to “All of yours.” For this administration, there is an “us,” there is a “them,” and there are no limits or laws as to how the out-group shall be handled.

On New Year’s Day, the Hexmobile was rear-ended at a traffic light. When I saw the other driver was an elderly Latino man, with Maryland historic plates and a thick accent, I decided against reporting the scrape to the police—I am otherwise meticulous about filing insurance claims, but in this instance, I let it go. Even the possibility that police attention could attract ICE was more than my heart could bear. I feared for my own safety, too—I had a draft of the forthcoming essay: “Throat GOAT Donald Owes America the Epstein Files” on my passenger seat. This shit is why. An agency allowed or even encouraged to use unchecked violence against the regime’s enemies is a risk to everyone, not only immigrants.

Hold onto this moment. Do not disbelieve your eyes. Demand investigation. If Ms. Good emerges after an honest accounting as a villain, so be it—at least the administration will have been forced to unearth the truth. And if Mr. Ross is a murderer, he should go to jail. Mr. Trump’s goons must not be allowed to kill Americans and lie about them—when they do so, it must come at a cost for them, or else it will for us.

[JIM DAVE VANCE] Well, good afternoon, everybody. And I want to echo some of what Karolyn said about what we’re doing to combat the rampant fraud that exists in our immigration system, thanks to failed politicians and thanks to people who allow the American taxpayer to be taken advantage of for far too long.

I think it’s important to understand why this matters to the American people. I am a father of three young kids, a lot of kids, a lot of people in my generation. What is that going on there? Is that normal?

Okay. CNN installed this broken camera just to throw me off my game, but it’s not going to work.

[JIM DAVE VANCE] So here’s the simple fact here. If you’re a young parent struggling to afford childcare in the United States of America, there are programs that we have to make it easier for your kids to get in daycare, for your kids to get in preschool. Those programs should go to American citizens, not be defrauded by Somali immigrants and others, make it hard for you to get the access to the resources you need, but number two, making it easier for people who shouldn’t even be in this country to fleece the United States and our taxpayers to begin with.

We have actually activated a major interagency task force to make it possible to get to the heart of this fraud. We have Department of Agriculture resources that are focused on snap fraud, so that people who need food benefits can get them, but illegal aliens and other fraudsters don’t. We have over 1,500 subpoenas that the Department of Justice has issued to get to the heart of the fraud ring. We’ve done almost 100 indictments, mostly Somali immigrants, but also a few others. And of course, we’re looking in with broad investigatory authority to a number of the instances of wrongdoing that we’ve seen. in Minneapolis.

But we also want to expand this. We know that the fraud isn’t just happening in Minneapolis. It’s also happening in states like Ohio. It’s happening in states like California. And so what we’re doing in order to help coordinate this remarkable interagency effort from the Trump administration, but also to make sure that we prosecute the bad guys and do it as swiftly and efficiently as possible, is we are creating a new assistant attorney general position who will have nationwide jurisdiction over the issue of fraud.

Now, of course, that person’s efforts will start and focus primarily in Minnesota, but it is going to be a nationwide effort because, unfortunately, the American people have been defrauded in a very nationwide way. I want to thank a couple of people for their cooperation, in particular Pam Bondi, our Attorney General. First of all, for getting a lot of resources to Minneapolis to start to investigate and prosecute this fraud, really at an industrial scale. We’ve never seen fraud like this in the history of our country.

Pam has been doing a great job to get the resources there to uncover it, but importantly, creating a job like this often takes months, sometimes even longer. When we realized that we needed this associate attorney general position, Pam got this person up and running in about a week.

We’re going to make the nomination, hopefully in the next few days. We’ll obviously let you guys know who that is when we do it. I’ve talked to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who has promised me swift confirmation for this official. But this is the person who is going to make sure that we stop defrauding the American people.

Here’s one final thing I’ll say about this. I’ve heard a lot of people say that we need a special counsel to investigate fraud in the United States of America. I actually agree, and that’s what this position does. It has all the benefits, all the resources, all the authority of a special counsel, but with two crucial differences.

Number one, it will be run out of the White House under the supervision of me and the President of the United States.

And number two, it’s actually constitutionally legitimate. As you guys may know, the special counsel statute has some major constitutional questions. When we get the bad guys, we want to make sure we get them permanently and they don’t have some legal technicality they can get out of, which is why we set it up as an associate attorney general.

I’ll take some questions, but I want to just one final observation here. When I was actually walking out here, somebody sent me a photo of a CNN headline about what happened in Minneapolis. And this is the headline. I’m just going to read it. “Outrage after ICE officer kills U.S. citizen in Minneapolis.”

Well, that’s one way to put it, and that is the way that many people in the corporate media have put this attack over the last 24 hours. And I say attack very, very intentionally, because this was an attack on federal law enforcement, this was an attack on law and order, this was an attack on the American people. The way that the media by and large, has reported this story, has been an absolute disgrace, and it puts our law enforcement officers at risk every single day.

What that headline leaves out is the fact that that very ICE officer nearly had his life ended, dragged by a car six months ago, 33 stitches in his leg, so you think maybe he’s a little bit sensitive about somebody ramming him with an automobile. What that headline leaves out is that that woman was there to interfere with a legitimate law enforcement operation in the United States of America. What that headline leaves out is that that woman is part of a broader left-wing network to attack, to dox, to assault, and to make it impossible for our ICE officers to do their job.

If the media wants to tell the truth, they ought to tell the truth that a group of left-wing radicals have been working tirelessly, sometimes using domestic terror techniques to try to make it impossible for the president of the United States to do what the American people elected him to do, which is enforce our immigration laws.

The president stands with ICE. I stand with ICE. We stand with all of our law enforcement officers. And part of that is recognizing that you people in the media, not everybody in this room, but many people in this room have been lying about this attack. She was trying to ram this guy with her car. He shot back. He defended himself. He’s already been seriously wounded in law enforcement operations before. And everybody who’s been repeating the lie that this is some innocent woman who was out for a drive in Minneapolis when a law enforcement officer shot at her, you should be ashamed of yourselves. every single one of you. Questions.

[REPORTER] The Press Thank you, Mr. Vice President. I wanted to read a quote from Tim Walz earlier today. He said, “When things looked bleak, it was Minnesota’s first that held the line for the nation on July 3rd, 1863. And I think we may be in that moment now.” Can you comment on his rhetoric and Mayor Jacob Frey and whether they want to see unrest in Minneapolis?

[JIM DAVE VANCE] Well, that’s very tough rhetoric from a guy who just quit because his fraudulent activities have been uncovered. Look, Tim Walz is a joke. His entire administration has been a joke.

The idea that he’s some sort of freedom fighter, he’s not. He’s a guy who has enabled fraud and maybe, in fact, has participated in fraud. That’s what this new assistant attorney general position is going to find out.

I don’t care what Tim Walz says. I care about getting to the bottom of this fraud for the American people, and I care about enforcing the nation’s immigration laws. That’s what we’re going to stay focused on.

[REPORTER] Democrats have accused ICE of murder. They’ve said they’re targeting Americans. They’ve told ICE to get the F out of Minnesota. This is going to stoke the fire against ICE agents, and you’re talking about ICE agents right now being concerned about them. What, if anything, is the administration going to do to make sure these folks are protected during these protests? Should DHS sort of revisit their procedures here? I mean, nobody wants to see an American killed. Are there changes that need to be made to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again?

[JIM DAVE VANCE] Look, first of all, of course nobody wants an American citizen to be killed. This is absolutely a tragedy. But it’s a tragedy of the making of the far left. They have radicalized a very small segment of the population, taught them that ICE agents are engaging in wide-scale violation of people’s rights, what our ICE officers are doing is deporting the millions of criminal aliens that were let in during the Biden administration.

So, number one, we have to say, as a matter of leadership — and I would appreciate if the Democrats would join me on this — let’s be honest about the fact that we have way too many illegal aliens in this country. Our ICE officers should be supported in doing their job.

You’re trying to actually marshal the far-left lunatic fringe to engage in doxing, to try to make it impossible for them to enforce the law, and in some cases, actually to engage in acts of domestic terrorism against our law enforcement officers.

When you talk about different plans, different protocols, different policies, I forget exactly how you asked the question. Here’s the simple fact. What we’re going to do is make it easier for the American people’s administration to enforce the American people’s law. And that means that Democrats have to stop rallying the mob against legitimate law enforcement operations.

And that means that we are going to get tougher. And that’s what this AAG position is about. We’re going to get tougher at the people who are defrauding the United States by inciting violence against our law enforcement officers. That’s one of the things that we’re going to do. We’ve already started that work at the Department of Justice. We’re going to keep on doing it. And this new AAG position is going to kick that into high gear.

[REPORTER] Vice President Vance, you just suggested that this woman who was killed, Renee Good, is part of a broader left-wing network. Who do you think is behind this broader left-wing network?

[JIM DAVE VANCE] Well, it’s one of the things we’re going to have to figure out. But here’s the way that I put it. When somebody throws a brick at an ICE agent or somebody tries to run over an ICE agent, who paid for the brick? And who told protesters to show up and engage in violent activity against our law enforcement officers?

You see just with this most recent terrible incident in Minneapolis, you see friends of this woman’s or other people who are eyewitnesses saying basically that she was there to engage in obstruction of a legitimate law enforcement operation. How did she get there? How did she learn about this?

There’s an entire network, and frankly, some of the media are participating in it, that is trying to incite violence against our law enforcement officers. It’s ridiculous. It’s preposterous. And part of our investigatory work is getting to the bottom of it. Who’s funding it? Who’s supporting it? Who’s cheerleading it? And, of course, if there’s a legal activity related to that, we’re going to get to the bottom of that and prosecute it where we can.

[REPORTER] Mr. President, thank you for taking questions today. Is there a risk with you describing her as a deranged leftist, talking about very specific facts of these events, when an investigation is just beginning? Are you preempting a thorough investigation by drawing such conclusions? And have you received any information beyond the videos we’ve seen publicly about this individual, her specific acts, that has informed your point of view?

[JIM DAVE VANCE] Well, first of all, the Department of Justice is going to investigate this. The Department of Homeland Security is already investigating this. But the simple fact is, what you see is what you get in this case. You have a woman who is trying to obstruct a legitimate law enforcement operation. Nobody debates that. You have a woman who aimed her car at a law enforcement officer and pressed on the accelerator. Nobody debates that.

I can believe that her death is a tragedy while also recognizing that it’s a tragedy of her own making and a tragedy of the far left who has marshaled an entire movement, a lunatic fringe, against our law enforcement officers.

I think what is clearly happening here, and it’s going to keep on happening unless the Democrats wake up and say, you know what, you don’t have to agree with our immigration policies, you don’t have to agree with what the President or the Vice President believe about immigration enforcement, but why don’t you take this to the ballot box? Why don’t you vote? Why don’t you organize?

Instead, what some of them are doing, what some of them are doing is encouraging people to get violent with our law enforcement officials. It’s disgraceful and it’s got to stop.

[REPORTER] Just to follow up on that question, and again, thank you for taking questions, Mr. Vice President. There’s clearly a lot of emotion in Minnesota, across the country, over this incident. You’re calling Rene Good a deranged leftist. There’s been heated rhetoric that we’ve also heard from officials. What responsibility do you and the President have to diffuse some of the tension that we are seeing play out in Minnesota, bring down the temperature as this investigation is unfolding?

[JIM DAVE VANCE] What we have a responsibility to do is to protect the people who are enforcing the law and protect the country writ large. Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, you deserve to have the people’s laws enforced in the United States of America.

Now again, I’m not happy that this woman lost her life. I’m not happy that this woman was there at a protest violating the law by interfering with a law enforcement action. I think that we can all recognize that the best way to turn down the temperature is to tell people to take their concerns about immigration policy to the ballot box. Stop assaulting and stop inciting violence against our law enforcement officers. That’s the best way to take down the temperature.

And we’re not—look, we’re not going to give in to terrorism on this. And that’s exactly what’s happening. People trying to antagonize, to commit acts of violence. They throw bricks at them. Sometimes they shoot at them. Sometimes they dox them. Sometimes they go to their place of residence and harass their families. This is classic terrorism.

And we cannot say that when a far-left fringe is inciting violence against our brave law enforcement officials, that we’re no longer going to enforce the law. That’s rewarding the very people who are engaged in this garbage. The actual reward that they just got is a new assistant attorney general who is going to prosecute and investigate this stuff even more aggressively than before.

[REPORTER] Thanks for taking my question. So the head of Minnesota’s investigations agency says that the U.S. Attorney’s Office has essentially cut off the state investigations agency’s access to the investigation. What is the precedent for that? And why shouldn’t the Minnesota officials on the ground have access and evidence to work on this investigation?

[JIM DAVE VANCE] First of all, I wish the state officials in Minnesota would investigate why you have so many people who are using their vehicles and other means to actually interfere with a legitimate law enforcement operation. The precedent here is very simple. You have a federal law enforcement official engaging in federal law enforcement action. That’s a federal issue.

That guy is protected by absolute immunity. He was doing his job. The idea that Tim Walz and a bunch of radicals in Minneapolis are going to go after and make this guy’s life miserable because he was doing the job that he was asked to do is preposterous. The unprecedented thing is the idea that a local official can actually prosecute a federal official with absolute immunity. I’ve never seen anything like that. It would get tossed out by a judge.

So what I’d like Minnesota to focus on is the real issue, that they’re encouraging people. Minneapolis officials are encouraging people to commit violence against ICE officials. It’s ridiculous. It’s got to stop.

[REPORTER] You said earlier that there’s a left-wing network to attack, to dox, to assault, and make it impossible for ICE officers to do their job. You told my colleague just now that there’s an investigation going on to that network. So, if everything that you say is true, How does being part of that network justify being shot?

[JIM DAVE VANCE] Well, being part of the network doesn’t justify being shot, but ramming an ICE officer with your car, that’s what justifies being shot. It’s not a good thing, by the way, but when you force somebody to engage in self-defense, it’s almost a preposterous question. I’m not saying that funding some of this stuff justifies capital punishment. Nobody would suggest that. The reason this woman is dead is because she tried to ram somebody with her car and that guy acted in self-defense. That is why she lost her life and that is the tragedy.

Now, there may be other violations of the law and other penalties that are associated with those violations of the law. For example, if you are funding violence against our law enforcement officers, I’m not a prosecutor, my guess is that’s not the sort of thing that earns capital punishment, but it should sure as hell earn you a few years in prison if you’re funding the effort to try to assault our law enforcement officers.

What is, I’m sorry guys, what’s going on here? You guys are meant to report the truth. How have you let yourself become agents of propaganda of a radical fringe that’s making it harder for us to enforce our laws? You just asked me a question that presumed that the reason why this woman died is because she was engaged in legitimate protest. She tried to run somebody over with her car, and the guy defended himself when that happened. Next question. I said next question.

[REPORTER] There’s not the slightest doubt in your mind having viewed it that this the victim—you still believe that she deliberately tried to ram him despite despite seeing this video?

[JIM DAVE VANCE] Look, I don’t know what is in a person’s heart or in a person’s head, and obviously we’re not going to get the chance to ask this woman what was going on.

What I am certain of is that she violated the law. What I am certain of is that that officer had every reason to think that he was under very serious threat for injury or, in fact, his life. What I’m certain of is that she accelerated in a way where she ran into the guy. I don’t know what was in her heart and what was in her head, but I know that she violated the law, and I know that officer was acting in self-defense.

That raises an interesting point, though. Look, if people want to say that we should have a legitimate debate about, you know, what was she really doing, right? Was she panicking when she drove into this officer, or was she actually trying to ram him? That’s a reasonable conversation.

What’s not reasonable is for so many of you to plaster all over the media that this was an innocent woman and that the ICE agent committed murder, which is what many of you have said explicitly and some of you have said implicitly. That’s what I have an objection to. The idea that this was not justified is absurd, and I think everybody knows it in their heart.

[REPORTER] It seems like political violence is ratcheting up and riots could be around the corner. What steps does the administration have planned to try to unite America? Average people on both political sides are so tired of fighting with each other, and I think all the journalists in this room could agree with me, that we don’t want to be part of the problem.

[JIM DAVE VANCE] I appreciate that.

[REPORTER] Do you have any words to unite America?

[JIM DAVE VANCE] You know, I know you don’t want to be a part of the problem, and I think that’s true of a lot of you. I’m not sure it’s true for everybody, because the reporting over this has been one of the biggest scandals I’ve ever seen in media. I’ve never seen a case so misrepresented and misreported when you have a guy who was defending himself and is now being treated as some sort of federal assassin by so many of the people in this room.

First of all, let me say about crime. You mentioned violence. One of the things we’re proudest about is that you saw violent crime over the last year drop by 20 percent. Why has that dropped by 20 percent? Is it because we’re attacking our law enforcement officers, or is it because we in the administration are empowering our law enforcement officers to enforce the law?

I think that’s one of the ways you take down the temperature, is you make people feel more secure and safe in their person and property. That’s why we care so much about protecting our law enforcement, because it accrues to the benefit of the entire national community. I think that we can absolutely talk about the ways in which, you know, we can lower the temperature by discussing differences in a reasonable and rational way.

Again, I’m happy to talk with any congressional Democrat or any of you about our immigration policy, about why I think it’s necessary, about why I think it’s in the best interest of the country, about why the President of the United States was elected to actually enforce the border for the first time in at least four years.

So here’s the problem. That’s not the debate so many people are having. They are actively covering for people who are committing acts of violence against federal law enforcement. It is preposterous. The way to take down the temperature is to stop it.

Have your debates about policy. Attack me. Attack the President of the United States. Don’t attack our law enforcement officers. They are trying to do the job the American people demanded that they do. They are not policy actors. They are enforcing the law. They should be treated with a modicum of dignity and respect. And the fact that they’re not is why incidents like yesterday happened.

The one final point I’ll make about this is, look, there’s a part of me that feels very, very sad for this woman, not just because she lost her life, but because I think she is a victim of left-wing ideology.

What young mother shows up and decides they’re going to throw their car in front of ICE officers who are enforcing legitimate law? You’ve got to be a little brainwashed to get to that point to where you’re willing, not just to protest, that’s fine, not peacefully protest, but throw your vehicle in front of legitimate law enforcement officers and drive your car into them. To get to that point, you have to be, I think, radicalized in a very, very sad way. I certainly wish that she hadn’t got there. I know there’s an ICE officer right now who very much wishes he was not put in the position where he had to fire a gun to defend his own life.

[REPORTER] Thank you, Mr. Vice President. What’s your message, following on that, what’s your message to the leaders in Minnesota, the governor of Minnesota, the mayor of Minneapolis, to calm down the situation on the ground, on the streets. What’s your message also to those protesters who saw that video in a completely different way than you saw that video?

[JIM DAVE VANCE] Well, first of all, I think if you watch every angle of that video, there is one angle where if you squint, you can maybe tell yourself that it’s not clear what happened. But when you look at all angles of that video, it is very clear that her vehicle went right for the guy, she actually collided with him, and then that’s, of course, when he fired his shots. That’s obvious, okay?

So what I’d say to the protesters is, by all means, protest peacefully, but make this about ideas. make this about disagreement with our policy. Don’t use your protest as a justification or an encouragement for people to go and incite violence and participate in violence against our law enforcement officials.

To the people on the ground in Minneapolis, meaning the local officials in Minneapolis from Tim Walz on down, I’d say, look, Why can’t you just disagree with a given piece of immigration policy without turning law enforcement into the enemy?

Think about, for example, a criminal law where a police officer goes and arrests somebody because they violated a criminal law. If you’re mad about that, go and protest the politician who passed that law. Don’t attack the police officer who’s just doing their job.

We had a wide-open border under Joe Biden. I happen to think it’s a good thing the President of the United States has closed it down. If you think that’s a bad idea, criticize this administration for a policy decision. Don’t attack our people for enforcing the law, because I guarantee you go to ICE, there are black people and white people, there are Democrats and Republicans, there are patriotic Americans who are trying to enforce the law. Attack me, lay off of our ICE agents.

[REPORTER] You called on Tim Walz to resign. Can you late out the case as to why--

[JIM DAVE VANCE] Look, I think Tim Walz should resign because it’s very clear that he knew about the welfare fraud in Minneapolis, or at the least he looked the other way.

This is not like Lex Luthor, right? This is not movie villain fraud. This is the lowest IQ possible fraud. This is, we’re going to take kids, or sorry, we’re going to take the absence of kids and set up a daycare center where there are no children, and we’re going to call our early childhood education center the Quality Leering Center. By the way, if you can’t spell learning, maybe you shouldn’t be in early childhood education.

But people got rich off of this. We know that there were schools who either had no enrollment or at least they overstated their enrollment. Tim Walz, either it was unbelievable incompetence or he was in on the fraud. That’s one of the things we’re gonna get to the bottom of.

[REPORTER] Thank you, Mr. Vice President. Can you explain the difference between this associate attorney general and a special counsel? And do you envision this being a permanent position or having more of a limited scope?

[JIM DAVE VANCE] Well, it’s going to be permanent until we get to the bottom of what’s going on, so I think it’s going to last for at least the remainder of the administration. What’s different about it from a special counsel is if you remember the Jack Smith case where the special counsel was found unconstitutional, one of the big issues there is that that person was not an appointed person.

Completely aside from all the other issues that the person was a lunatic and that the case had no merit, there was a fundamental constitutional issue, which is that he had not been appointed by the President and he had not been confirmed by the United States Senate.

An Assistant Attorney General, what that’s going to allow us to do is appoint this person, have them confirmed by the Senate. That’s one difference. The more substantive difference is that this person is going to be part of a very broad interagency White House that’s being led from the President of the United States on down. And that’s going to give them the resources, the access to material and information to make this person more effective.

I think a lot of people have asked, how are you really going to get to the heart of the fraud? We’ve been asking ourselves that question for the past couple of months. And we think this is the critical piece at the Department of Justice to really ramp this fraud investigation into high gear.

[REPORTER] Vice President Vance, I wanted to ask, what’s your message to far leftist agitators who feel emboldened to obstruct ICE activity in Minnesota and around the country?

[JIM DAVE VANCE] Well, I think they shouldn’t feel emboldened because now they have an assistant attorney general who is going to prosecute and investigate their fraud and their violence more aggressively than it has ever been investigated in the United States of America. We are doing so much to try to find the financing networks and the domestic terrorism networks that legitimate this violence, that fund this violence, and that, of course, engage in the violence. These people should not feel emboldened, because they have, for the first time, maybe in American history, an administration that is not going to tolerate political violence of any kind from anywhere.

[REPORTER] So what do you mean when you say investigation? Do you mean investigation of the shooting yesterday or of the fraud that’s happening in Minneapolis?

[JIM DAVE VANCE] Okay, look, DHS, as I understand it, has an investigation already ongoing. I know that other organs of our government are looking at this. So yes, there is certainly an investigation that’s happening right now, of what’s going on there.

So the investigation, in some ways, has already been ramping up into the anti-fraud element for at least a few weeks. What we’re trying to do is supercharge it and make sure there’s a designated person within the Department of Justice who completely controls that particular focus.

[REPORTER] Just to follow up on that, Mr. Vice President, on the agent, is he still on duty or has he been placed on leave, on administrative leave? And what really was the target of the operation on Wednesday?

[JIM DAVE VANCE] Well, first of all, it was a legitimate law enforcement operation. We were going door-to-door to try to find criminal, illegal aliens and deport them from the United States of America, because if you come to our country illegally in violation of our immigration laws, then we have the mandate and, in fact, we have the legal duty to enforce those immigration laws.

Whether he’s been placed on administrative leave, I don’t know the answer to that question. I’d refer it to the Department of Homeland Security, and they can follow up.

I will say, look, I would appreciate everybody saying a prayer for that agent. Look, in the past six months, he has been hit twice by a motor vehicle. One time, the first time, it led to over 30 stitches and very serious injuries to his legs.

This is a guy who’s actually done a very, very important job for the United States of America. He’s been assaulted. He’s been attacked. He’s been injured because of it. He deserves a debt of gratitude. And I think the media prejudging and talking about this guy as if he’s a murderer is one of the most disgraceful things I’ve ever seen from the American media.

[REPORTER] Mr. Vice President, what is your specific role in the future of Venezuela? And I’m wondering, could you confirm reports that the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, was kept out of the planning for the operations because of her past concerns about military involvement in Venezuela?

[JIM DAVE VANCE] So I’ve heard a couple of things. One, that I was kept out of the planning for the Venezuelan operation, that’s false. And another, that Tulsi was kept out of the planning for Venezuelan operations, that’s completely false.

Look, we’re all part of the same team. And one of the things that is really amazing about that operation is that we kept it very tight to the senior Cabinet-level officials and related officials in our government, and we kept this operation secret for a very long time. I’m very proud of that. I think it suggests that the team works very well together.

Looking ahead, what is my role? Look, my role is going to be whatever the President asks me to do. Well, every single, or I should say every other day, I’m chairing the meeting that we do on this among White House principals to talk about next steps to try to ensure that Venezuela is stable, and as the President has directed us to do, to ensure that the new Venezuelan government actually listens to the United States and does what the United States needs it to do under our country’s best interest.

So I’m going to be as involved as the President wants me to be. So far, that’s been very involved, and I’ll keep on doing that so long as the President asks me to do it.

[REPORTER] All right. Are there any indications you talked about the network? Are there any indications that the lady who was shot – I know there are different reports from there. Her wife said they were new to the area. Are there any indications she may have been a paid agitator, or maybe that there are others that were brought to the area, considering everything that’s going on in Minneapolis?

[JIM DAVE VANCE] I wouldn’t say that she was paid. I don’t have the evidence to say that one way or the other. What I do know is that she was violating the law.

And if you just look at the eyewitness accounts, they were saying she was there to prevent the enforcement of the law. She was trying to obstruct a legitimate law enforcement operation. That much is obviously clear. The rest of it, of course, is part of the reason why we investigate this stuff.

[REPORTER] Even beyond the War Powers resolution today, Congress has bucked President Trump on issues like tariffs. Are you concerned that President Trump is losing his grip on Republicans in Congress? And what are you going to do about it?

[JIM DAVE VANCE] Now, I’m not concerned at all. First of all, we talked to some of the senators who were going to vote the wrong way, in my view, on this resolution today. Much of their argument was based more on a legal technicality than any disagreement of policy. If you look at the people who actually voted, every single one of them has supported the administration’s plan. Second of all, as the president, I believe, himself has already said, Every president, Democrat or Republican, believes the War Powers Act is fundamentally a fake and unconstitutional law. It’s not going to change anything about how we conduct foreign policy over the next couple of weeks, the next couple of months. And that will continue to be how we approach things. Go ahead.

[REPORTER] So we are seeing, regarding Iran, we are seeing the protests in Iran these days. The citizens are begging for help from the U.S. and Israel, naming streets in the city after President Trump. It seems there is an opportunity here that may not come again. Will the United States stand by the citizens of Iran? And if Israel decides to strike again, the nuclear sites in Iran, is the U.S. expected to take part?

[JIM DAVE VANCE] Well, look, we certainly stand by anybody who’s engaged in peaceful protest, anybody who’s trying to exert their rights for free association and to have their voices heard.

Obviously, the Iranian regime has a lot of problems. And as the president of the United States has said, the smartest thing for them to have done, it was true two months ago, it’s true today, is for them to actually have a real negotiation with the United States about what we need to see when it comes to their nuclear program. I’ll let the President speak to what we’re going to do in the future, but we certainly stand with anybody across the world, including the Iranian people, who are advocating for their rights. I’ll take just a couple more questions.

[REPORTER] Concerning Venezuela, how would you assure the Caribbean region that they will remain a zone of peace? Because some member states in the region are concerned.

[JIM DAVE VANCE] Well, look, the President had a very productive phone call with the President of Colombia yesterday, and we continue to talk at all levels of government with a number of our friends in the Caribbean region. I actually think this is really good.

One of the ways that you establish peace in your own hemisphere is to make it clear that the United States is going to be respected, that the United States is willing to take power away from criminal cartel organizations and give it to legitimate governments. That’s how we see the future of the Western Hemisphere, and we think it’s going to be much more peaceful than it was certainly under Joe Biden.

[REPORTER] On Greenland, do you have a message for European leaders? Many in Europe reject the idea that the island could be forsaken.

[JIM DAVE VANCE] Well, first of all, Secretary Rubio, I believe, is meeting with the leaders of Denmark and Greenland next week, I want to say it is, but maybe it’s the week after that. We’ll continue to deliver some of these messages in private, some of them in public.

But I guess my advice to European leaders and anybody else would be to take the President of the United States seriously. What has he said about Greenland? Set to the side the crazy overreactions that I’ve seen from the press and from certain people in Europe, what has the President said?

Number one, Greenland is really important, not just to America’s missile defense, but to the world’s missile defense.

Number two, we know that there are hostile adversaries that have shown a lot of interest in that particular territory, that particular slice of the world.

So what we’re asking our European friends to do is to take the security of that landmass more seriously. Because if they’re not, the United States is going to have to do something about it. What that is, I’ll leave that to the President as we continue to engage in diplomacy with our European friends and everybody on this particular topic.

And again, thank you all for listening. And I just ask you, look. This is politics, and often Republicans get in arguments with the press about things, and I understand that. I think it’s really irresponsible for you guys to go out there and imply or tell the American people that a guy who defended himself from being rammed by an automobile is guilty of murder. Be a little bit more careful.

We’re going to talk about turning down the temperature, which I know the President wants to do and I certainly want to do. One of the ways we tone down the temperature is to have a media that tells the truth. I encourage you all to do that. God bless you.

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On Wednesday, 01/07/2025, masked ICE thug Jonathon Ross killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, and the Trump administration lied about it. Video shows federal “officers” in gaiters approaching her Honda Pilot as she backs up and turns her wheel to drive away, but then Mr. Ross steps away from her passage, towards her driver’s window, and shoots her in the head repeatedly. The Pilot rolls forward and collides with a parked vehicle. Mr. Ross, visibly unhurt and unshaken, sauntered lazily away playing with his cell phone, got into his cream-colored SUV, and fled the crime scene.

Reportedly, a doctor pleaded with agents to let him render first aid to Ms. Good, but was rebuffed. These cold-blooded sadists shot her in the head, watched her die, and now smear her name.

All available angles are shown synchronized by intrepid redditors.

The president and his servants watched footage of Ms. Good’s murder, resolved to treat the victim as the aggressor, and accused a dead woman of domestic terrorism. An honest or fair investigation would not predetermine conclusions in advance, especially when the footage released to the public so completely contradicts the “official story” that I doubt the people who concocted it even looked at the clips.

Ms. Good was a 36-year-old widow of a war veteran, a poet, and kept her car glove compartment packed with “stuffies.” Feigning that she was a violent radical may buy the administration a news cycle or two of confusion, but it will not be borne out under scrutiny.

Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin lied that “rioters” confronted ICE agents during an operation, and said that Ms. Good was “[a] violent rioter[]” who “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them.” Except that no footage shows a riot. “An ICE officer, fearing for his life, the lives of his fellow law enforcement and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots.”

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said at a press conference: “They’re already trying to spin this as an action of self-defense…. Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody directly—that is bullshit.” He went on: “ICE, get the fuck out of Minneapolis… We do not want you here. Your stated purpose for being in this City is to create some kind of safety, but you are doing exactly the opposite.” “People are being hurt, families are being ripped apart, long-term Minneapolis residents… are being terrorized, and now, someone is dead. That’s on you. It’s also on you to leave. It’s on you to make sure that further damage, further loss of life and injury is not done.”

The shooting was at 9:30 AM; Ms. McLaughlin’s statement was at 12:45 PM. Are we expected to believe that DHS determined this in three hours? Typically, officer-involved shooting investigations require securing crime scenes, collecting evidence, canvassing for and interviewing witnesses and officers, and obtaining and reviewing video. If Ms. McLaughlin expects the public to disbelieve their own eyes and take the government at its word alone as to whether or not a civilian was murdered, she badly misjudges the American people. That footage will and should be picked apart for months.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said: “We have someone dead in their car for no reason whatsoever,” and called the public to protest. “The desire to get out in the protest and to speak up to this administration of how wrong this is, that is a patriotic duty at this point in time.”

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker demanded DHS Secretary and puppykiller Kristi Noem resign: “For months, Trump’s DHS has wreaked lawless havoc in our neighborhoods. Tear gassing infants, families, and police. Firing their weapons at peaceful citizens. Killing innocent people. It’s brutal, unconstitutional, and out of control. It must stop. Kristi Noem must go. Now.”

Ignore the dinosaur.

President Donald Trump tweeted: “The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.” Nobody was run over in the footage. So, he either did not watch the video and is bullshitting based on what his evil vizier, Stephen Miller, told him, or he sees things on the screen that did not exist. In both cases, he is unfit for office. He should be impeached and removed by Friday.

I want to give The New York Times credit here. They not only pressed Mr. Trump on the fact that the incident was not what he described, but they even sat down, watched the video with him, and told him so:

“Mr. Trump’s aide Natalie Harp brought a laptop over to the Resolute Desk to show us what he said would be evidence of the woman’s wrongdoing.... As a slow-motion surveillance video of the shooting played on the laptop, we told him that this angle did not appear to show that an ICE officer had been run over.

‘Well,’ Mr. Trump said. ‘I — the way I look at it …. [i]t’s a terrible scene… horrible to watch. No, I hate to see it.’”

The stammering and platitudes are evidence of dissembling. If he did not know before, Mr. Trump now knows he is helping cover up police misconduct and persists anyway.

My assumption here is that the atrocity is the point. After all, it would be beneficial for the president to throw Mr. Ross “under the bus,” right? It would be easy to give up the agent, to say, like “Border Czar” Tom Homan (who accepted a $50,000 cash bribe in a Jimmy John’s bag): “Let the investigation play out… and hold people accountable based on the investigation.”

Nobody would complain if an agent who went rogue and fired into a civilian’s car was stripped of his badge and gun, and the public would be happy to see the administration hold someone accountable. And while Mr. Ross deserves a vigorous defense, it does not need to be from the highest offices in the land. Since it would be less politically expensive to do the right thing, I assume the administration wants the worst outcome—protests, distrust, chaos, fear—because it is the worst outcome.

Ever since Rumeysa Ozturk was grabbed and put in a car by masked goons in a video indistinguishable from a kidnapping, I suspected that ICE agents enjoy hurting women. There have been too many occasions where these big men in masks and full military kit “roughed up,” brutalized, and now even killed women who protested, recorded, or generally existed nearby them.

• CBS News Chicago reporter Asal Rezaei was minding her own business inside her news truck when a masked ICE agent deliberately fired a pepper ball into her vehicle’s window at close range.

• Congressional Candidate Kat Abughazaleh was “violently picked up and thrown to the ground” by ICE in Chicago.

• In Maryland, Montgomery County Councilmember Kristin Mink was “grabbed” and menaced by black-masked ICE agents while filming.
  https://www.facebook.com/reel/884127587274861/

• Rep. Adelita Grijalva, the final signature on the discharge petition that triggered a floor vote for the Epstein Transparency Act (which Mr. Trump’s administration has violated), identified herself as a member of Congress and was “sprayed in the face by a very aggressive agent, pushed around by others.”

• Not a woman, but I still think it’s fucked up they pelted Robby Roadsteamer, a musician in a giraffe costume, with pepper balls.

See also:

• https://www.partisanhex.com/p/ices-mask-thing-is-fucked-up

• https://www.partisanhex.com/p/october-2025-horror-show

On the same day that Ms. Good died, the administration also claimed the damnable January 6 insurrectionist Ashley Babbitt was “murdered in cold blood” by Capitol Police. Seconds after screaming armed rioters smashed the glass of the windows into the Capitol’s Speaker’s Lobby with their fists and a Trump flag, Ms. Babbit was shot by an officer who would have otherwise been torn asunder by that mob.

The ICE agent who shot Ms. Good appeared uninjured, but the administration claims he was “run over.” 140 Capitol Police officers were injured by Trump supporters on January 6, and Republicans blamed the police. In both cases, Mr. Trump is exactly wrong—but then, anybody still in service to him is in the habit of calling evil good and good evil.

I can imagine a new angle for the video where I am wrong, where Ms. Good is really Ms. Bad, and she put her pedal to the metal to send that officer to Hell. And if the administration were showing the same willingness to pause before concluding, so would I. But that caution is a weakness. While waiting to prove whether or not the evidence of my eyes and ears is exactly accurate, the regime has already decided what they want the truth to be and will use the time to propagandize their adorers.

Nobody is surprised that an American citizen was killed by these villains—if anything, most shocking was that it took so long for this to happen. Mr. Trump’s flirtations with having his own Tiananmen Square or Kent State incident have been on display for a decade. Our democracy now faces a crucible—will we investigate and prosecute this? Will justice be done? Will anybody who supported, endorsed, or defended this before the truth was known resign in disgrace? Or will we be a country that guns down its citizens and slanders them regardless of what is real and what is false? Minneapolis, unfortunately, has had an answer to that last question since George Floyd’s murder, even after Derek Chauvin’s conviction.

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In September when America started killing what were either fishscale cocaine smugglers or fishermen’s boats coming out of Venezuela, I was so angry that I shouted “He can’t keep getting away with this!” and brought both my fists down on my IKEA Langkaptan tabletop, breaking it into two. I subsequently spent the next month trying to rebuild my office.

On New Years Eve, I canceled plans to attend a party after I discovered yet more damage from that desk collapse—my LG-27UD68-W PC monitor developed lines of blue-and-green dots running through the blacks. It resembles a nylon stocking. A corner of the screen has lost light. I consulted Anthropic’s Claude to troubleshoot the problem, but instead it wrote creepypasta:

“Looking at the LCD display content itself in the lower left corner of the screen, I can see what appears to be a dark shadowy figure or silhouette overlaid on or appearing within the Lorem Ipsum text.

It looks like there might be a human-like shadow or dark shape visible in that area of the displayed content - almost like a person’s silhouette or shadow is appearing on the screen itself, which would be unusual and potentially unsettling.

Is this what you’re referring to - that there appears to be an unexpected shadow or figure visible within the actual display content that shouldn’t be there?”

An ill omen.

On New Year’s Day, I went to MicroCenter in Fairfax to look at displays, but I had no luck. The monitor selection at the store was in disarray, with most of them already mislabeled, off, burned-in, flickering, or showing images of the wrong resolutions. The associates were as haggard at their shelves dealing with customers urgently trying to beat GPU and RAM price rises. Between AI datacenters destroying the hardware market and the disastrous Trump tariffs pushing prices yet higher, it is a bad time to be a gamer. A bad time for everybody, truly. Another ill omen.

On the night drive home, the Hexmobile was rear-ended at a stoplight. I saw the other driver was an elderly Latino man with Maryland Historic plates, and his accent was thick. I saw no damage to my bumper, but it was not so light a strike that I could be confident. I could not bring myself to call the police to document the accident before exchanging insurance. If somehow that call triggered a visit from ICE, I could not live with myself. More selfishly, I doubt your boy Hex would make it out of such an incident unscathed with a near-complete copy of ‘Throat Goat Donald Owes America the Epstein Files” on the passenger seat. So, I let it go. My stomach is still twisted with sickness that I must factor in how masked government thugs might interfere with something as routine as a fender bender.

At least the weekend after NYE is historically sleepy, I told myself. I avoided straining my eyes working on a failing LCD and spent Friday catching up on laundry and finally mating my socks, which have not matched for a month. By 2 AM, I was only half-done. I changed into a pair of pajamas and tucked myself into bed.

My phone buzzed, buzzed, buzzed with breaking news alerts.

Explosions were reported throughout Caracas, the capital of Venezuela. Low-flying aircraft spotted. Social media posters said they saw U.S. Army helicopters. Is this war? I assume so, but the White House will not comment. Where is Congress? Are they enjoying the sleep I could not get and now will not get?

Donald Trump repeatedly claimed to be the “anti-war president,” to be the “president of peace.” He simpers and begs nearly every day for a Nobel Peace prize. He is a fucking liar. A President Kamala Harris would not be bombing Caracas right now. Assuming these are US strikes, the American People did not consent to this military action. Congress must claw back whatever warmaking powers enabled this. The U.S. president cannot have the ability to arbitrarily kill overseas without the consent of the House and Senate, or to implement regime changes because they feel like it.

In 2020 Joe Biden said he wanted to save the soul of America. Most people did not know what he meant. This is what it looks like for the nation’s soul to be lost. This dark world was completely preventable. Worsening must be prevented now. Impeach, remove, convict this bastard. At 4 AM on Saturday morning on a holiday weekend: we do not know what the hell is going on, but we do know it is Hell.

Postscript—Just to be clear, Venezuela exports cocaine, not fentanyl, so everything the admin says about saving tens of thousands of lives from narcoterrorism is bullshit.

It feels like an eternity ago, but 2025 opened with two acts of terror. A vehicle-ramming and shooting on Bourbon Street in New Orleans that killed 14 people and injured dozens more. In Las Vegas, 37-year-old veteran Matthew Livelsberger was driven mad by ChatGPT and news reports about drones and UFOs or something, and detonated a Cybertruck in front of the Trump Tower International Hotel. Ill portents. By the end of the year, the podcaster Charlie Kirk was killed, Principles First received a bomb threat, masked ICE thugs visited untold violence on Americans and migrants alike, Washington DC hosted a North Korea-style military parade for the president’s birthday, the government shut down for months, and a brave man and woman of the United States National Guard were shot outside Farragut West Metro—in addition to the usual string of school shootings and terror. I have no reason to imagine 2026 will be less shadowed.

Though I must—the calendar is a tyrant—I am still not ready to review this year. I have not finished writing “Throat Goat Donald Owes America the Epstein Files,” or “No Kings 2: Rise of the Trump Kingdom”—not because I am lazy or distracted, but because that damnable Donald Trump and his sycophants will not cease generating new outrages long enough to let me properly document the last ones. Just this morning, The Wall Street Journal broke news that Mr. Trump was having masseuses do “outcalls” to Jeffrey Epstein—on the house! Gratis! A man cannot even go to Costco to pick up a Kirkland brut for the holiday without nearly missing a story. I understand why The Parnas Perspective’s Aaron Parnas and The Bulwark’s Tim Miller look like the world’s most beleaguered men.

That relentless pace was one of the worst lessons of 2025. With this Trump administration, quantity is more useful than quality. “Sloppy Steve” Bannon, Jeffrey Epstein’s public relations flack, told us in 2018 their strategy was to “flood the zone with shit.” Like a fool or a citizen of a functioning democracy, I sifted through that sewage looking for patterns, for meaning, to make this make sense. But there is always another breaking event that recontextualizes everything I thought I understood. I hardly sleep anymore.

And it is shit. Last night, Mr. Trump complained he deserved his name on the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts more than the Kennedys did and retweeted attacks on the family, on the same day JFK’s granddaughter Tatiana Schlossberg died of cancer at 35. And as I tucked myself into bed, he continued to rant like a sleep paralysis demon: “[O]ur Country is ‘hotter’ than ever before. Isn’t it nice to have a STRONG BORDER, No Inflation, a powerful Military, and great Economy??? Happy New Year!” None of this is true—the economy has crashed out under Mr. Trump’s illegal tariffs, our military is misused and demoralized, prices continue to rise, and employment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics seem worse than we know, with every new month bringing more downward revisions to the previous month’s “juked” job report. Under his watch, we wake each day to a worse world.

When 2024 closed, my New Year’s advice for Democrats was: Be worse. Be less inhibited. Drink more. Smoke more. Get back in touch with American vices. Stop being so damned nice about the dismantling of the Republic. Some heard this call. Governors Gavin Newsom and JB Pritzker understood. Even Joe Walsh has evolved into as strident a defender of liberal democracy as you will find, posting daily that the next Democratic president must tear down Mr. Trump’s bullshit ballroom. He is correct.

Some Democratic voters wasted the year practicing excessive self-care. “I’m not even watching the news, can’t keep up with that shit, gotta keep my head down, focus on me, take care of my own people, protect my peace.” No more. 2026 is an election year. Midterms are coming. Put away the video games. Cancel Paramount+, Netflix, HBO, Crunchyroll, whatever kills your time. Get rid of your couch—you should not need it (and whatever you do, do not leave it anywhere Jim-Dave Vance might find it). My advice for 2026: Be prolific.

What does it mean to be prolific? The dictionary tells us: “Marked by abundant inventiveness or productivity.” ABC: always be communicating.

We are at a disadvantage because we want to be accurate, to be right, to know what we are talking about before we open our mouths. That works against us. This regime spams social media with the vilest content at every hour and uses artificial intelligence to accelerate the production of lies. Their comms team steals music from artists like Sabrina Carpenter, MGMT, and Olivia Rodrigo, and slaps it on snuff films of Customs and Border Protection and ICE agents beating and arresting immigrants and protesters, and they post them across the whole Internet. I am convinced the government’s social media teams are abusing gas station ephedrine and biker crank. How else do they maintain this volume?

To supplement that, MAGA trolls on Twitter get paid for engagement, so it is best practice for them to vomit “hot takes” as fast and as often as their texting thumbs permit. So, we are processing yesterday’s garbage while they are busy creating the next tragedy.

I was disturbed in 2024 by how much of 2015-2021 America forgot—I trusted we had an enduring national memory, that what happens once has happened forever, but so much of that history was recorded in tweets and digital ephemera that disappeared into the aether. Mr. Trump was disqualified the moment he descended that golden elevator and called Mexicans rapists, yet somehow that was forgiven and made license for worse evils. To me, this is a testament against grace.

So, this must not be digital-only. The physical world is also a forum. I have previously advised: Talk loudly about politics on your cell phone in the middle of the grocery store checkout line. Purchase a “DONALD IS A BITCH” or “FUCK DOGE” T-shirt and wear it in public. Put your thoughts directly into the eyes of strangers. Continue to do this.

I do not know how one legally replicates what Trump supporters did in 2021 when they covered every gas pump with stickers of Joe Biden saying, “I did that.” That was vandalism. I would never deface my corner gas station—the proprietor is a good man and has always helped me when I needed it. But we should look to that for inspiration.

In 2026, create friction. The Trump-Vance regime wants its authoritarian takeover to proceed without resistance. It must not be. If their “New Year” is half as “happy” and successful as 2025, liberty will die, as the cliché goes, on our watch. So, when you are sitting in a Jiffy Lube lobby, and they are playing Fox News—do not only roll your eyes. Say: “This is bullshit.” Say: “Turn that off. I don’t want to hear it, and neither does anyone else.” Say: “Have you started working on my car? Or can I just leave? Because I’ll find a new mechanic before I watch Fox.” Let that be your rule: When you typically roll your eyes, say something instead.

Buy a laser printer—a good, sturdy Brother—and print articles from The New York Times, The Bulwark, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, perhaps even Partisan Hex (don’t forget to like and subscribe!), and mail them to relatives who need to read them. Leave them on your neighbor’s doorstep, on train seats, in McDonald’s bathrooms. Take a cue from the nightclub promoters of old and tuck them under windshield wipers.

Somewhere in this country tonight, while you pop champagne and watch balls drop, people will do invisible work to resist this administration, to protect America from its president. But are there enough of them, and are they strong enough to do this work without thanks? They could use the knowledge that there are more of us in their corner. If “Moms for Liberty” or other MAGA infiltrators are coming to your school board—are your weeknights free? Can you go? Can you speak? Can you support those who will? What can you do? Try to spread one message of resistance each day. Like a diet, exercise plan, or budget, if you make a habit of it now, the results will be greater than if you start scrambling come summer.

I want to thank my readers for supporting this project, though to be truthful, it is my hope that this project provides support for my readers. At times, I have felt sheepish receiving messages asking if I had been black bagged yet, when I was in fact just struggling to finish the final details of a project, but it is reassuring to know that I am not alone. On the May 1 “Mayday” rally in DC, National Education Association President Becky Pringle recalled a battle cry from Brazil’s antifascist resistance between 2019 and 2022: “No one lets go of anyone’s hand.” She urged us to let that be our call. That can be more difficult for me than I would admit if I were not day-drinking mimosas. (How I long for Santana Champ again!) Not because I cannot perform acts of solidarity—that is easy for me—but because, as a chain-smoking donkey in a leather jacket, I do not assume I will need it from others. So, thank you—I appreciate you bearing with me through this project.

Stay safe tonight. Don’t drink and drive.

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On Sunday, December 14, 2025, Director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were found in their home stabbed to death by their son. When the news broke, my hands were stiff and twitching, inflamed from typing “Flowers at Farragut,” a reflection on the death of Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, the National Guard soldier who was shot outside a DC Metro on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and already more death was in the air. A “golden age,” President Donald Trump calls it—perhaps for carrion.

The previous day, a mass shooting at Brown University killed two students, and nine others were wounded. FBI Director Kash Patel—or as I call him, “Kush” Patel, because that fool has to be smoking something—for the second time this year, bragged that the culprit was in custody after detaining the wrong man. When questioned about this failure, President Donald Trump blamed the school.

The whole globe seemed to be in a state of mass violence. In Sydney, Australia, an ISIS-inspired antisemitic attack on a Hanukkah gathering at Bondi Beach left at least a dozen people dead and more than forty others wounded. In Syria, an ISIS-linked ambush killed two U.S. National Guard soldiers and a civilian interpreter and wounded several more of America’s brave men and women in uniform.

And how did our president respond to these tragedies? Did he give them the sobriety, respect, and urgency they demand? Of course not. Mr. Trump responded to the murder of Mr. Reiner and his wife not with condolences but by tweeting that Mr. Reiner was “tortured,” “struggling,” “paranoi[d],” and suffered from “massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind-crippling disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome.” He suggested, without evidence, that Mr. Reiner’s outspoken criticism of Mr. Trump “dr[ove] people CRAZY” and contributed to his death, that Mr. Reiner was, in the president’s formulation, so annoying that someone just had to kill him.

Fuck this president. Fuck him.

When asked about his post, the orange clown described Mr. Reiner, the two-time Emmy winner and Oscar nominee, as “deranged” and “very bad for our country.” I feel the same about him.

To my surprise, even Republican lawmakers called the comments “inappropriate” and “disrespectful.” (Though I am sure by Christmas, many will claim that every Johnny Six-Pack on Main Street talks this way about the recently departed.)

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.): “Rob Reiner and his wife were tragically killed at the hands of their own son, who reportedly had drug addiction and other issues, and their remaining children are left in serious mourning and heartbreak. This is a family tragedy, not about politics or political enemies… and should be met with empathy.”

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.): “Regardless of how you felt about Rob Reiner, this is inappropriate and disrespectful discourse about a man who was just brutally murdered. I guess my elected GOP colleagues, the VP, and White House staff will just ignore it because they’re afraid…. I challenge anyone to defend it.”

Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.): “Regardless of one’s political views, no one should be subjected to violence, let alone at the hands of their own son. It’s a horrible tragedy that should engender sympathy and compassion from everyone.”

Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.): “I’d expect to hear something like this from a drunk guy at a bar, not the president of the United States. Can the president be presidential?”

Rep. Stephanie Bice (R-Okla.): “A father and mother were murdered at the hands of their troubled son. We should be lifting the family up in prayer, not making this about politics.”

To those Republicans: Condemn the comments if you must. Or don’t. I don’t care about your dismay. What I care about—what you should care about—is that the president of the United States celebrates the murder of his critics. Condemn that. And if you have any conscience left, recognize that you are complicit in his hate if you will not impeach, convict, and remove him. If you find this conduct unconscionable but will do nothing to stymie its inevitable escalation, resign in disgrace. Give your seat to someone who will.

If Mr. Trump suggests that Mr. Reiner deserved to die at the hands of “MAGA”—even though MAGA was not involved in his murder—who else would he like to watch die? Would he enjoy it if something were to happen to me, or you, or anybody who does not enjoy the abuse?

Our “lamestream media” seems incapable of focusing on the undeniable reality that Mr. Trump is a sadist who relishes using his power and platform to inflict pain on Americans. This is nothing new. This is not a lapse in judgment or an unfortunate tweet. On January 6, 2021, damnable rioters beat Capitol Police officers with flagpoles. Michael Fanone was assaulted, dragged through a crowd, tased in the neck, and had a heart attack. Insurrectionists searched for his weapon so they could shoot him with it. Upon his inauguration this year, Mr. Trump pardoned every one of them. Just one month later, at the Principles First Summit in DC, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio came to video himself harassing Mr. Fanone again, for old time’s sake. I doubt Mr. Trump disapproved.

In 2016, protesters showed up at Mr. Trump’s rallies to criticize his rhetoric about immigration, because it was, and I will use the technical term here, racist as shit. Then-candidate Trump told his supporters he would like to “punch [them] in the face,” and “knock the crap out of them.” He promised to “pay [their] legal bills”—bail them out, erase the consequences, if they assaulted other Americans exercising their First Amendment rights. How the hell did Republicans rationalize that it would not get worse from there?

Why is Mr. Trump coy about condemning white supremacist terrorism? Why, during the 2020 campaign, when asked directly to denounce white supremacists and militia groups, did he tell the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by?” Not “stand down.” Not “you are a stain on this nation.” “I condemn white supremacists.” Four words. Eight syllables. Seems easy—unless you like them. Unless you love them. Unless you fantasize about them hurting people in your name.

Mr. Trump has bragged he “ha[s] the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump … the tough people,” and warned that if his opponents “push,” “it’s going to be very bad.” Why did no one ask: “Mr. President, what does it matter how tough your supporters are unless you want them to fight someone?”

Mr. Trump plans, on any pretext he can manufacture, to put the National Guard into as many American cities as he will be allowed. He has bragged about Guard troops “pounding” teenagers for “disrespecting them.” The Department of Defense told The Intercept that anecdote was “bullshit,” it did not happen, and that is not what those who put on the uniform are trained to do. But Mr. Trump wishes it had, and it will happen in the world he wants to build.

If Mr. Trump thinks it is understandable that someone would kill Rob Reiner—if he thinks Mr. Reiner’s criticism was so intolerable that violence against him makes sense—then his most unhinged supporters will take that as encouragement, permission, and instruction.

This ought to be the front page of every newspaper, every day, until he is removed from office: Donald Trump wants to hurt you. Republicans are not so detached from reality that they cannot hear this. Those who disagree stay silent because they do not want to be targeted by Mr. Trump’s supporters. (Ms. Greene reported that after criticizing the president’s concealment of the Epstein files, “[she] got a pipe bomb threat on [her] house, … on [her] construction company, multiple pizza doxxing deliveries, and a direct death threat, multiple direct death threats on [her] son.”)

And those who agree with Mr. Trump await his orders.

This president is unfit for office and a danger to this Republic. He incites violence, he fantasizes about violence, and when Americans die, he mocks them. Those who serve in this administration, those who enable this man, and those who stay silent, must never be allowed to say “We didn’t know! We were deceived!” when the worst happens. By now, they know.

On Wednesday, November 26, 2025, the day before the Thanksgiving holiday, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan asylee, drove from Washington state to Washington, DC, and shot two West Virginia National Guardsmen outside the Farragut West Metro. Twenty-year-old Specialist Sarah Beckstrom is dead and laid to rest with full military honors; twenty-four-year-old Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe is grievously injured but recovering. This White House has not sounded so gleeful since the assassination of Turning Point USA podcaster Charlie Kirk. They must have thought, “This will surely change the subject from the president’s swollen feet and mental decline, the Epstein files, rising grocery prices, and the failure of the James Comey prosecution!”

There is no known reason why Mr. Lakanwal, who fought since he was fifteen alongside CIA-backed “Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams” or “Zero Units” in Afghanistan before escaping to the U.S. through “Operation Allies Welcome” and having his asylum approved by President Donald Trump’s Department of State, killed and wounded American servicemembers. Something dark, I suspect—Zero Units were elite Afghan special operations teams that carried out night raids against insurgent, al Qaeda, ISIS, and Taliban targets during the war. The Associated Press reports he had severe mental health problems, was not “functional as a person, father and provider,” and was prone to “periods of dark isolation,” “reckless travel” and suicidality.

The Trump administration rightly called this terrorism, but instead of blaming the terrorist, they saw in this disaster an opportunity to scapegoat other groups of innocent people. Evil.

When I reminisce, I think of the War on Terror as 2001 to 2008, the Bush years, when Green Day was pop, marijuana was very illegal, Stephen Colbert was still Stephen Colbert, and the name “Scooter Libby” made me giggle, but “America’s longest war” was only concluded a few years ago, in August 2021.

On the day of the shooting, I was sorting the Hexmobile’s trunk in a DC parking garage when my phone buzzed with alerts of a gunman. Were there more? Would this be bad? I checked my holiday luggage, which doubled as a go-bag: a thin blanket, two changes of clothes, three balls of socks, some Clif Bars, a bottle of Maker’s Mark, and an old ThinkPad. In a worst-case scenario, if I could find a reasonably priced Marriott, I was ready to be locked down. Because of the holiday, there was no need—feds were stuffing their turkeys instead of clogging the roadway—but when things go bad, escaping the District can be a nightmare.

I flashed back to September 11, 2001. When the planes hit the towers, classes at schools near DC halted, and the whole DMV was thrust into sclerosis. Students were dismissed for the day—everybody needed to get the hell home, especially if you had family near the Pentagon—but we could not yet leave because the buses were stuck in hours-long bumper-to-bumper traffic. The sun was out when the towers fell, but it was night long before we saw our beds. The world we woke up in was worse than we knew then—it led to this one.

Meanwhile, Vice President Jim Dave Vance cheerfully yapped to hundreds of America’s brave men and women in uniform at Fort Campbell that he hates turkey, said anybody who claimed to like turkey was a liar, before serving them turkey. Not atypical for him—he called Mr. Trump “America’s Hitler” only a few years before endorsing him. For once, I can relate to Mr. Vance. The aftermath of what his administration categorizes as an act of terror is a poor time to practice irreverent comedy. We share that fault, but the vice president should be held to higher standards than I.

I know Farragut West. When I was Ms. Beckstrom’s age, I fell at the same spot because I was drunk as hell. I slumped in every station entrance downtown before I was twenty-one. Happy hours did not check identification if you looked overworked enough. Most of those places are gone now, replaced by juice bars and gyms. Near L Street, there used to be a Borders bookstore. I would use their Wi-Fi, talk shit about Republicans on Reddit, then sink into a chair and nap before finding the next party. I wasted my twenties because the city was safe enough to be stupid in the same place where she fended off a murderer.

On the Saturday night after the shooting, I canceled plans to drink with college classmates to go to the scene of the crime and try to understand it. There was a memorial to Ms. Beckstrom at the 17th and I Street entrance to Farragut West Metro, with more than a dozen bouquets of red and yellow roses and mixed pink, peach, and white flowers; a red poinsettia; a heart-shaped wreath; American flags; a quilt captioned: “Patience,” “Kindness,” “Faithfulness,” “Gentleness,” “Love,” “Joy”; a blue IBM mug; small figurines; service insignia; a West Virginia baseball cap; a green Christmas stocking; and many sunglasses. Was she so young that “wears sunglasses” was still her signature trait? Shards of a decorative mirror were arranged intentionally on the ledge. I dared not touch them.

All weekend, soldiers and District residents took this same pilgrimage. Many left handwritten notes of gratitude, sorrow, and condolence:

“SPC BECKSTROM,
THANK YOU FOR THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE YOU MADE FOR OUR COUNTRY AND OUR FREEDOMS! WE WILL NEVER FORGET!”

I had not brought a gift, so I offered a moment of silence. I have no religion except love for the Constitution, so calling it “prayer” feels alien. But the least I owe her is to let the weight of the moment hurt me.

I wanted to see if anybody got mixed up and paid tribute at the wrong spot, so I cut through the park at Farragut Square to get to the other Metro entrance at 18th and I Street. I stopped at the statue of Admiral David Glasgow Farragut. Tourists and out-of-towners will not know this, but in times of crisis, DC locals will often stop and consult these stone figures for patriotic inspiration. The Commander of the West Gulf Blockading Squadron was a legend—he captured New Orleans and secured the Mississippi River from the Confederacy, but his name disturbed me that night. It invoked his famous cry: “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” A dangerous motto in the context of the present. Instead, I suggest slowing down and avoiding mines.

If anybody wants to honor Ms. Beckstrom with something other than the administration’s misguided fire and fury, Farragut West Station could be dedicated to her. DC has both a Farragut North and West. Do we need two? One could be Farragut Station and the other Beckstrom Station. That seems right. Let the corner be a monument so everybody working downtown will, instead of going “full speed ahead,” remember human lives were lost because the government misused its powers. No bureaucrat en route to execute the president’s orders should arrive at his office without a reminder that this tragedy happened because GOP leaders lacked the will to oppose Mr. Trump’s bloodthirsty delusion that he can set the military against the citizenry.

An example of that misuse: FBI Director Kash Patel, or as I call him, “Kush Patel,” because that fool has got to be smoking something, is already “in the barrel” for demanding an FBI SWAT team (which responds to such shootings) guard his long-distance girlfriend, National Anthem-singer Alexis Wilkins, and drive her drunk friends home. Maybe Ms. Beckstrom’s murder was preventable if the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated something federal instead of babysitting Mr. Patel’s “boo,” or if its counterterrorism division was countering terrorism instead of conducting bullshit investigations of Senators Elissa Slotkin and Mark Kelly, as well as Representatives Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, and Chrissy Houlahan, for reminding servicemembers not to follow illegal orders. Mr. Patel ought to resign for this corrupt, unconscionable incompetence.

At the second Farragut West station entrance, a Metro police officer parked and stared at his laptop screen—how soon in the aftermath our hypervigilance slackens. The escalator ground, groaned, and squealed, and that noise was amplified and echoed in the wide, vacant concrete forecourt outside the moving stair’s mouth. A memorial sign was posted on the nearby elevator:

“PRAYERS AND LOVE TO THE NATIONAL GUARD SOLDIERS & THEIR FAMILIES. HEARTBROKEN & STRONG WITH YOU.

WHY ARE THEY HERE?”

A good question. Ms. Beckstrom renewed her deployment twenty-four hours before her life was lost. Senseless. She guarded a Metro next to the park, CQ hotel, Truist bank, Subway, and an upscale liquor store—a place with little to do but errands and work. She died heroically, but nothing on those blocks was worth her life.

“Operation D.C. Safe and Beautiful” makes the city and nation less so. The National Guard’s deployment to the capital is wrong. The president’s use of the military for domestic law enforcement violates every American ideal. DC is not a war zone, but the “mission” invites chaos that makes it one. As Batman creates the Joker, armed men in the street attract those who want to fight them.

Ms. Beckstrom’s Marine ex-boyfriend, Adam Carr, told NBC Washington that “people would spit at her, throw things at her and cuss her out and wish death upon [the Guard] and just simply be outrageous and assault them.” Maybe that happened on occasion, but I doubt with regularity. I am in these streets every day. Guardsmen typically stand in pairs on the sidewalks outside donut stores, coffee shops, or other businesses with public restrooms. The occasional rapscallion may be rude, but in the months of watching soldiers loiter at chain restaurants, people give them practiced disapproving looks, ignore them, and pose with them for selfies, but nobody spits.

The administration will use Ms. Beckstrom’s death to advance very bad shit. Republicans hope Americans accept this tragedy as retroactive justification for their plans. After the shooting, Mr. Trump already had outrageous demands unconnected to the real details of the event, and he spent his Thanksgiving holiday spewing racist bile. Entirely unrelated communities of immigrants and refugees, such as Somalis, were “catching strays” and queued for demonization before any investigation was convened.

Why did Mr. Trump start ranting about the Somalis? “Hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia are completely taking over the once great State of Minnesota. Somalian gangs are roving the streets looking for ‘prey’ as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone.” This is not real, relevant, or sane.

Governor Tim Walz, who Mr. Trump called “seriously retarded” in the same diatribe, responded that the president ought to “release [his] MRI results.” I concur.

How did this country allow itself to be governed again by such villains? The damnable attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, the rhetoric of ethnic cleansing, brutish attacks on immigrants by masked ICE thugs, cruelty, sadism, racism, hatred—none of this tripped our civic immune system? What have we done to deserve a world where all pain is an opportunity to cause more hurt? So many deaths are exploited by right-wing operatives, including Kate Steinle, David Dorn, Eliza Fletcher, Laken Riley, Charlie Kirk, and Iryna Zarutska. Once a crime happens, commentators license themselves to remix their most dehumanizing thoughts.

Before Ms. Beckstrom passed from her wounds, Mr. Trump demanded a “review” of every Afghan admitted under former President Joe Biden (though again, it was his administration that gave Mr. Lakanwal asylum), ordered the State Department to stop processing Afghan visas, then raved that he would “permanently pause migration from all [t]hird [w]orld [c]ountries,” “terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions,” and “remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our [c]ountry.”

Venomous nonsense. Fuck him. “Most” immigrants are not “on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels.” People from “all [t]hird [w]orld [c]ountries” did not do this, nor does nationality make anyone “incapable of loving [America].” If he wants rid of anyone not a “net asset,” he can get the hell out. Mr. Lakanwal did this. Nobody, especially not arbitrarily chosen ethnic groups—should be punished in his stead. Random denaturalization, deportation, and more masked ICE thugs are non sequiturs, make nobody safer, and, in the net, increase horror.

Mr. Trump ordered five hundred more troops to the capital. Why, when the ones already here are neither needed nor wanted? This is not rational. Nothing additional soldiers could have done would have deterred Mr. Lakanwal’s assault, because he likely did not plan to return alive. A crazed but trained combat veteran came to shoot Guardsmen—more would have only made them easier to find.

The president’s goal is to punish the city. Mr. Trump hates Washington, DC; he calls it a “lawless” “wasteland,” a “dirty and disgusting” “death trap,” “one of the most dangerous cities anywhere in the world,” “horribly run,” a “filth[y] and decay[ing],” “graffiti-stained,” “shithouse,” a “nightmare of murder[,] crime,” “bloodshed, bedlam and squalor,” “Hell on Earth.” I feel the same about his White House. He confabulates that the Guardsmen are “his” violent, skull-cracking stormtroopers—at the strange September 30 gathering of the generals Mr. Trump hosted with Secretary of Defense and DUI Hire Pete Hegseth (described by TechDirt as a “two-person circlejerk”), Mr. Trump fabricated a story about “military guys” “pounding” teenagers for being “disrespectful.” (“10, 12, 15 [‘Tren de Aragua’] kids, and these military guys walk up to them, and they treat them with disrespect, and they just got pounded. They just got pounded.”) The Intercept quotes Defense officials saying this did not happen and was “obvious bullshit.” But it seems like the president wishes to see it

The so-called “Big Balls Beatdown” of former DOGE employee Edward “Big Balls” Coristine on 1400 Swann Street NW, short blocks away from a Trader Joe’s and Jeni’s Ice Cream, was the casus belli for the Guard deployment. Former President Elon Musk lied when he announced Mr. Balls fell valiantly protecting a stranger—a damsel in distress!—from a carjacking. The DC Metropolitan Police report at once contradicted him and identified that woman as Mr. Balls’s girlfriend and co-worker. Why a fake story, except to advance a cause that honesty could not? Mr. Musk never apologized for falsifying a narrative to support the “federalization” of the nation’s capital, though it would have made no difference if it were true. Mr. Balls is not a victim that the citizens of the District would surrender their freedom to avenge.

When the president initially called on the United States National Guard to occupy DC, liberty seemed on a razor’s edge—was this a “stunt” or the “end of America?” The first “show of force,” intimidation, and photo-ops collapsed into parody thanks to one brave man, Sean Dunn, who threw a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection officer and made the whole effort look ridiculous. “Ain’t shit” was what people up and down 14th Street said about the occupation after United States Attorney and ex-Fox News Host Jeanine Pirro risibly sent a team of armed federal agents in riot gear to arrest Mr. Dunn for “assaulting a federal officer.” He was later acquitted.

During the first days of the occupation in August, federal agents set up vehicle checkpoints on K Street, Massachusetts Avenue, and other major roads, stopping and searching cars for minor traffic violations (pro tip: check your tag lights). Not ideal for a six-foot-tall donkey in a leather jacket with a stack of “TRUMP IS A BITCH” stickers and draft essays including “Throat Goat Donald Owes America the Epstein Files,” and “No Kings 2: Rise of the Trump Kingdom” in his passenger seat. I expect more hassling now, so I detailed the Hexmobile over the holiday weekend—even using one of those “CarX Ooey Gooey Cleaning Gel” crevice tools.

I hate unreasonable searches and seizures—I am a Fourth Amendment superfan, and I still have not forgiven the overzealous campus police officer who opened my bag of hamburger rolls looking for drugs when I was en route to a 4/20 picnic. Americans deserve to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, and I am especially concerned about papers, which are organized in a specific fashion.

In 2008, DC Metro Police piloted a program where they randomly rifled through bags at station entrances. This was unwelcome, invasive, and inconvenient. If you asked the officer who tried to search my briefcase, I was the most annoying about it—he let me go after I insisted that my manuscripts stay collated.

The second Saturday after the shooting was DC’s first snow of the season. I went again to Ms. Beckstrom’s memorial to take photographs, this time at 3 AM. I am uncomfortable haunting places where friends and family grieve. I am more at ease at night when I can document unhurriedly.

The scene was wet but mostly undamaged. The memorial had grown over the week to include a banner that said “IN HONORING OF A FALLEN HERO SARAH BECKSTROM,” with her portrait and a message of support from the Afghan Uzbek community in the U.S.; two standing wreaths made of white chrysanthemums, white roses, and pink carnations around another poster of her face; and yet more memorial boards—one of Ms. Beckstrom in uniform, one in a graduation cap, and three of Mr. Wolfe. Another ten or so bouquets lined the pavement with new notes and little flags. Red and blue balloons were tied to a condolence sign, and around fifty tea lights dotted the display.

I went to look at the shattered mirror on the ledge. What was its purpose? Why was it still here? I touched my finger against one of the knife-like shards, then pulled back. In the frigid air, blood welled, but I felt no wound. I shoved that hand into my coat pocket and went back to inspecting the main display. I pressed my knee to the cold, dank sidewalk and crouched. Someone had stood up The Last Giant, a CD anthology of music by John Coltrane. Next to it was a snow-covered, spiral-bound sketchbook. Its pages were damp, and pink and green inks were smeared. It was used to communicate dates and times for vigils and contained a child’s drawings. I thought about a small boy or girl, learning the reality of violent death and terrorism for the first time. I flipped the pages carefully, considering how I could convince the station manager to dry it with one of their industrial fans.

A discomfort rooted between my shoulder blades and into the nerves of my neck. I was watched. An SUV had parked in the middle of 17th Street, though the light was green. The driver’s eyes fixed on mine, and there was enmity in his gaze. He might have been an unmarked police, a fed, a mugger, another blogger, a concerned citizen, or nobody. I left the block to escape his view and heard his engine quietly ignite. Why was it shut off at 3 AM in downtown DC in the snow? In hindsight, I had forgotten that automatic start-stop technology existed, but you cannot be too careful in an occupied city.

I hopped back into the Hexmobile and took the US-50 corridor out to the highway. In my rearview, I noticed an MPD vehicle U-turn and braced myself before it instead pulled into the Ivy City hotel lot. Likely, I had imagined adversaries—another bad trait of mine I recognize in this government—but it is strange for a driver to stop and glare at pedestrians. Most fates portended by that were ill.

I experienced this foggy panic before, during the summer of Pokémon Go. I noticed a big, black car in my shadow, creeping onto each block as I did. I prepared to beg for my phone and wallet, but then saw they were catching Pikachu. I uninstalled the app the next day.

I hate that I felt forced into a sneaky, defensive posture, like a teenager smoking weed, while interacting with a public display. If the administration operated in good faith, I could have approached the man in the SUV and said: “This display could be ruined by the elements; let’s do something about it.” In that better world, he and I could have gone to a 24-hour department store and split the cost of a canopy tent. But Walmart is no longer open 24 hours, and I could not trust that he would not “black bag” me.

Gentle readers must think it was inflammatory to say Republicans have enjoyed the aftermaths of this terror attack and the Kirk assassination, but please consider how the regime gives that impression. Responsible politicians have been careful, compassionate, and precise, but Mr. Trump and his servants instead relish the opportunity to be their grossest selves. If they were mourning, they would have mourned. Instead, they regurgitated every vile canard they ever practiced, insisting the U.S. has been “importing” people from “failed states who do not share our values,” and ranting about “demigration” to “send[] people back by the millions.” Bluntly, they are giddily more racist.

When Mr. Kirk was shot dead at his debate booth, Mr. Miller branded left-wing groups “a vast domestic terror movement” and vowed the administration would “use every resource [they] have at the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks” “in Charlie’s name.” Notoriously corrupt Attorney General Pam Bondi then signaled her plans to “target” speech that “praises, rationalizes, or makes light of” the podcaster’s death as “hate speech.”

The administration thought they gained cause to “obliterate” their political rivals’ organizations and punish dissent, but that political capital dissolved after they wasted it trying and failing to remove Jimmy Kimmel Live! from broadcast. To most of America, Mr. Kirk was a political entertainer, like El Rushbo, Joe Scarborough, or Jon Stewart, not a saint—his death also did not make a military takeover by the Trump regime acceptable.

This administration may be stuffed nuts-to-butts with goons who bitch about Star Wars Episodes 7-9, but the American people have seen Star Wars Episodes 2 and 3, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. TVTropes.com has lists of books, movies, and television programs where events are exploited by those seeking power. If anything, we over-index on “false flags.” We are a paranoid country, suspicious that secret cabals will incite incidents for nefarious reasons. On AM radio, every school shooting is an “inside job,” part of a story whose ending is taking AR-15s from “patriots.” Canon on the left is that former President George W. Bush misled the public about weapons of mass destruction to “sell” the Iraq invasion for oil, or Halliburton, or something. If proposed solutions to a crisis happen to align with a politician’s Christmas list, exploitation is an obvious conclusion.

I went to the memorial a third time on the two-week anniversary of the shooting. This time, the walk was colored red and blue by police lights at every intersection. I counted dozens of dark-colored SUVs, and while none were the man who spooked me, any of them could get me. Nothing was “going down,” but the accumulation of strobing was a mood.

To resolve my nerves, I called Mr. J., a friend who used to have a mohawk. I thought a chat would relax me, but he was more jangled—he confessed he was nauseated with worry about National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), which explicitly claims to target wrongthink: “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

Mr. J. said, “They are making lists.”

I laughed, “I thought they made that list in 2002,” then reminded him that he worked every day, and on weekends, he went to Costco to buy his children cheap hot dogs. He spent his rare free hours posting memes about the president that were no spicier than Late Night with Stephen Colbert and Saturday Night Live. He goes nowhere unusual and does nothing criminal. Sure, he might listen to Anti-Flag, but he was no Antifa Supersoldier.

Mr. Trump’s press releases and orders were worded to imply that liberal and leftist ideologies will be policed, but while I fear this administration’s malice, I scoff at the thought that they could execute their threats.

At the Comey hearings, I saw fake U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan rattle like a marionette after she was called a puppet. This clownish DOJ could not even adequately persecute its most hated political enemies. What hope do they have to stop Mr. J. or me from talking shit, our #1 protected right? Nobody will convince a jury that a wisecracking guy is equivalent to a terrorist. Political shitposting, known in the Revolutionary era as pamphleteering and broadsiding, is our nation’s oldest anonymous art, practiced and perfected by our Founding Fathers. While the threat is serious, laughing it off is not bravado—Americans ought not give away their fear cheaply.

A multicolored, striped woven mat was laid on the ground in front of the public tribute. Neatly arranged on it were service coins and medallions, a Princess Aurora Funko Pop, another framed photograph, and small wood blocks. The display had expanded further to include a cross, a black memorial mailbox, crime scene tape, pink and orange teddy bears dressed like astronauts, more flowers, more flags, and the mirror shards again. Softly illumining the sidewalk was a small Christmas tree in a faux-barrel pot, topped with a large silver bow and decorated with white lights. That was probably a gift from family or friends—for them, the Yuletide is bloodstained. Whatever joy they planned for Christmas, they left at the corner.

When does this stop? Nothing happens that the Trump regime will not call proof that they should harass and brutalize their enemies, any enemy, even the giraffe-costumed Roddy Roadsteamer. It fucks me up to look at this shrine so clearly built with love and see in it the foundations for ethnic cleansing. I doubt that the smiling girl—woman, soldier, specialist—photographed would want her face to be the banner under which people who were innocent of her death were hurt. Though even if she did, or her family does, it would still be wrong.

When will our politicians be punished for using tragedy to support their worst ends? I have only seen that happen once—when Mr. Birden’s jeer “a noun, a verb, and 9/11” so magnificently savaged “America’s drag queen ex-Mayor” Rudy Giuliani’s career that he became a drunk.

In the aftermath of the World Trade Center’s collapse, the national mythology says Americans came together listening to Enya’s “Only Time.” I remember it differently. I was an early and vocal critic of the Iraq War. When the Bush administration pretended the invasion would be fast and free, I was hung up on “blowback”—the idea that every action has a reaction, every bullet creates a mourner, and every mourner is a future enemy. It is clearly a truism, but the U.S.’s reckless foreign policy made it seem novel and revolutionary before my drinking was legal. For that, I was called “Johnny Walker,” and it was whispered that I rooted for the Taliban. (Shouting: “Gotcha! The Taliban are in Afghanistan, not Iraq!” scored me no points either.)

Nobody has been a greater friend to the Taliban than Mr. Trump. He called them “tough” and “smart,” invited them to Camp David, set thousands of their warfighters free from prison, and practically agreed to turn Afghanistan over to them. While Mr. Biden may have “fumbled” the withdrawal, enough blame is not aimed at his predecessor and successor, who promised the Islamist warlords the very conditions they would exploit.

I was not wrong, though that is a joyless told-you-so. Mr. Bush’s March 2003 speech in support of the invasion invoked 9/11 six times. When the “shock and awe” campaign began, and cruise missiles first struck Baghdad, 70 percent of the country had been wrongly convinced that Saddam Hussein had been involved in the World Trade Center attack. In hindsight, Americans recognize they were deceived, and even in death, former Vice President Dick Cheney did not escape critique for repeatedly claiming Iraq had “long-established ties” to Al-Qaeda. The president, our Mandarin Mussolini, has attempted to repeat this trick at home at least three times now, and will continue to do so unless stopped.

The Trump-Vance regime lusts for more reasons to turn the weapons of government against the citizens. Wherever a death is tragic or violent, you can presume Messrs. Trump and Miller will ask themselves: “How does this profit us?” Mr. Balls’s big beatdown purchased an occupation, and Mr. Kirk’s assassination was exchanged to justify a persecution apparatus. Ms. Beckstrom’s death will pay for whatever fresh atrocity Mr. Trump had waiting in his shopping cart. His objective is not “public safety” or “order”—he wants the chaos, crackdowns, tear gas, and arrests. He wants the fear. He wants Americans hurt.

Each of us must make clear that this shit cannot be done in our name. Nobody is protected from random catastrophe—while I am nobody’s hero, if I became both sympathetic and the victim of a crime, what would that be used to endorse? Tomorrow, I could be run over by a drunk Canadian with an expired passport. If the administration wanted to make that a “thing,” a pretext for some next new horror show or injustice, they could never name their law after me, because I have strict instructions to be buried in a “TRUMP IS A BITCH” t-shirt.

Admiral Farragut’s order assumed torpedoes were obstacles to overcome, but steering us into them is this government’s objective. The USS Hartford was a warship built to advance and absorb damage. Our Republic once seemed sturdy, but we cannot damn the torpedoes, weather damage, and hope to survive to a better day, when House and Senate Republicans find the courage to impeach, convict, and remove their mad king.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

I am aware of TPUSA from Facebook and YouTube advertisements where Mr. Kirk’s face was pasted beside provocative quotes, “baiting” users to click and see the context. For example:

No thanks! I never listened to their podcast, either—it sounded obnoxious.

Netizens of good character were once taught: “Don’t feed the trolls!” That aphorism served me poorly. Online antagonists like Mr. Kirk became a professional class, and irritating the Internet is now a real political job. If I had known this was a lucrative skill to refine, instead of a juvenile mentality I needed to outgrow, I could have spent more of my twenties blogging instead of drinking, smoking, and enjoying life in every way the Good Christian Conservatives hated. I am an excellent bombast—few can ride a villain’s nerves like your boy Hex—but Mr. Kirk launched a career of it when I thought it was a vice.

I also had an adversarial relationship with TPUSA’s spam campaigns. Last autumn, I went “full Karen” and called to harangue their office because I was receiving unsolicited SMS. I keep it real—I do not like it when people play with my phone—and I made them knock that shit off.

After Mr. Kirk’s death, fundraising messages impersonating his widow, Erika Kirk, cluttered my inbox, despite prior instructions never to contact me. Because I am a considerate person, I postponed calling to tell them to fuck off for the second time. I will wait until an appropriate grieving period has passed, but I always waste an equal amount of spammers’ time as they do mine.

If you receive such unsolicited e-mail, Dear Reader, please report it to SpamCop. SpamCop is one of the Internet’s longest-running anti-spam services.

TPUSA’s annual AmericaFest was on my radar because its afterparties sounded like “bangers.” It reportedly became a debauched weekend where conservative youth influencers get “sloppy drunk” and “what happens at AmFest, stays at AmFest.” In a Twitter dispute, one right-wing influencer accused another of getting “fingered in the middle of a hotel lobby.” I fail to see in such conduct “Christian values.” See:

After the killing, the body politic acted like damn morons—the president, the vice president, members of Congress, television hosts, podcasters, “influencers,” talking heads, and social media posters alike all spouted hyperbole. I had opinions, too, but I measured them instead of speeding into discourse. If every American were so disciplined, this country would not be sliding into Hell. Right away, the president sat on the Fox & Friends couch and announced the government would target “radical left lunatic organizations” responsible for the killing. Except that no organization was “behind” the lone-wolf sniper, and “the left” is not an organization. Most of us do not know or like each other.

Mr. Kirk was a “shock jock,” an entertainer. He catered to a certain audience and produced vitriolic podcast “hot takes” and viral clips of debates with blustering kids. “Content” like that earns enmity but should not carry a death sentence in a free society. Liberal creators were accused of contributing to his murder for being “haters,” which is stupid. If “people who dislike you” are murderers, I am endangered by every grey-haired patriot who complains at the Tysons Corner Center (“where the stores are”) about my “TRUMP IS A BITCH” T-shirt (censored by our Spreadshop store). I hope none of those Reaganites kill me!

I abhor political violence. That is why I do not do it, do not promote it, and expressly decry it. The closest I have come was after shouting “He can’t keep getting away with this!” while reading an article about Mr. Trump’s strikes on boats that are either carrying Venezuelan fishers or fish-scaled cocaine. I slammed my fists on an Ikea LAGKAPTEN tabletop and broke it into two cardboard halves. I spent weeks rebuilding the Partisan Hex office after the tantrum. Fortunately, having nowhere to type prevented me from making any ill-considered remarks on Mr. Kirk’s assassination before the right-wing cancel culture mob built online databases of Mr. Kirk’s critics they wanted to see hurt, harassed, punished, fired, or worse, such as the Cancel the Hate app or the defunct CharliesMurderers.com.

I did not revel in Mr. Kirk’s death or his family’s pain, as histrionic Republicans claim was typical. I will not feign that I saw none of that—one manic jerk on Bluesky posted: “RIPBOZO PACKWATCH 100 100 REST IN PISS YOU WON’T BE MISSED.” I chose to be charitable. I researched how Mr. Kirk responded to political violence so that I could honor his words when I called for peace.

Shockingly, he was less than respectful when his ideological enemies needed kindness. Paul Pelosi was injured in a hammer attack in October 2022, for example, and Mr. Kirk said of his assailant:

“If some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy [who put an elderly man in the hospital] out [of jail].”

Mr. Kirk was no exemplar of compassion for your enemies. So, when we are commanded to show him respect, we are expected to grant him more grace than he awarded Mr. Pelosi. Well, I always do that. Nobody gives others more grace than they deserve than me.

The podcaster has been transfigured into a martyr and messiah. Churches aired AI-generated “messages from the afterlife” to their congregants using his voice. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called Mr. Kirk his “soulmate” and compared the assassination to that of his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy, as well as Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., who Mr. Kirk called “awful… not a good person,” that “most people disliked” and “said one good thing he actually didn’t believe.” Haters wrote the same about Mr. Kirk. Still, to those Bluesky posters who hit up ChatGPT with Deep Research requests to build an arsenal of mean factoids with which to “dunk” on Mr. Kirk before his body was cold, I say we should aspire to a world where nobody does “oppo” on the recently departed.

President Donald Trump, who cannot let tragedies be wasted, blamed Mr. Kirk’s death on “vicious and horrible and politically savvy” “radical left lunatics,” then pledged to go after “their” funding. His ghoulish vizier, Stephen Miller, ranted: “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people…. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”

Except they were talking that blah blah blah when the killer was still loose and unidentified. Mr. Kirk might have been murdered by antifa super soldiers enthralled to an insidious strain of “leftism”—whatever the hell “leftism” means, the term is useless from over-attribution. If the assassin were a member of any posse, that still required evidence before asserting, and none existed. Weeks and months later, the orange dotard and his toadies still regurgitate that baseless claim when they want to be asinine, and they expect Americans to take them at their word.

The Trump administration saw Mr. Kirk’s death as an opportunity to advance malicious goals that were already “on the agenda.” Earlier that year, after the firing of Stephen Colbert, the president warned that late-night host Jimmy Kimmel was “next.” Following Mr. Kirk’s death, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr pressured ABC affiliates to remove the former Crank Yankers star from broadcast. During the few days when Mr. Kimmel was canceled, it was clear that those fools thought there were no limits to their power. Jimmy Kimmel Live! was back on the air less than a week later.

So, too, I assume, the president’s ranting statements blaming George Soros, the Ford Foundation, and various NGOs for civil unrest and yapping about RICO were drafted in advance. By the by, Mr. Trump was accused of RICO alongside Mr. Soros in 2008, and his Chicago properties received substantial investments from Mr. Soros in 2004. The president knows from that personal experience that Mr. Soros is another billionaire gambler playing the same games as Mr. Trump’s friends and donors. Based on the amount of money MAGA Inc. is taking in—nearly half a billion between 2023 and 2024—is Mr. Trump sure he wants to accuse anyone of financing murder with political spending? That could hurt Trump-affiliated groups, whose intra-faction stochastic terrorism is a regular feature of their information environment. See: Garbage person Megyn Kelly once huddled for “16 months” “under armed guard” to protect her children from Trump supporters. She has since forgiven the president and now beats her chest beside him.

A memorandum designated “Antifa” as an organized terror group, despite being neither organized nor a group (though fascists are terrified of them). It explains the rationale, though not well:

To characterize the villainy described, imagine a blue-haired, genderqueer, pierced-up punk 23-year-old slaps on their fingerless typing gloves and says on Discord: “I hate that Twitch Streamer Mr. Magaman Jackson. Here is a list of reasons he is a piece of shit, and memes about how he sucks. I Googled his nasty ass. Here is his address in Ohio. Will nobody rid me of this turbulent streamer? I mean, someone should kill him in the name of radical socialism!” This Republican theory treats even the initial shit-talk as “pre-crime”—it would ruin the GOP if ever applied to them.

Notoriously unstable Representative Nancy Mace, who in recent months has challenged Representative Jasmine Crockett to a fistfight and melted down screaming at the police in the middle of an airport, said: “This is the predictable result of the left’s rhetoric. They have normalized political violence, they have demonized their opponents as evil, and now a patriot is dead. Let’s not mince words: Democrats own this.”

I do not. I “own” nothing except DEEZ NUTS. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer or House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries probably could not match Mr. Kirk’s name with his face, so they cannot “own this” either. But it is interesting that “demoniz[ing] opponents as evil” is the Mace standard. It is not difficult to find Republicans, including Messrs. Kirk and Trump as well as Ms. Mace, wildly “out-of-pocket.” For example, one week after saying this, Ms. Mace tweeted that Representative Ilhan Omar was an “enemy of the state” and called for her deportation, which is inflammatory, and Mr. Trump often uses the word “evil” to describe Democrats, #Nevertrump Republicans, and celebrities he dislikes. As the Beltway aphorism goes: “If not for double standards, Republicans would have none.”

This asymmetry is not a hypocrisy to be caught. It is a design by evil men like Mr. Miller, who I expect will one day be caught cackling and calling himself an “artisan of pain” or something else ridiculously macabre. Republicans want to hurt, but do not wish on themselves what they inflict on others.

The so-called “Party of Personal Responsibility” traditionally was philosophically opposed to the practice of collective punishment, where groups are penalized for the actions of individuals, but today they sort all their critics, including even neoconservatives like Bill Kristol, Adam Kinzinger, and Liz Cheney, into an amorphous, vague blob of “leftists.” We account for our own actions, not those of anyone sharing our political alignment. The type of person who snipes a podcaster is unlikely to say, “I don’t want to get Stephen Colbert in trouble!” What’s that got to do with him? It is remarkable how quickly the “rugged individualists” embraced collectivism and labeled Americans as “Charlie’s murderers” for speaking ill of him. Words are not bullets. Disrespect is not homicide. Meanness is not on a continuum with terrorism.

Social media was unusable for most of September because of ranting partisans demanding a second Civil War after they were “triggered” by comments on TikTok making fun of Mr. Kirk. It is insane to see adults conflating inflammatory text boxes with half of America. According to this collage of right-wing Twitter stitched together by Meidas Touch, Internet goons called the assassination of Charlie Kirk their “Reichstag Fire.” Fucking Christ, that was an ahistorical horror, not an aspiration. Democracy ought not be dismantled because of “mean tweets.”

Those crying blood-for-blood are not only losers, trolls, Russian bots, and shock jocks. The Daily Caller’s editor-at-large Geoffrey Ingersoll’s essay “Enough Is Enough … I Choose VIOLENCE!” “call[ed] for violence … [e]xplicitly,” naming “wildly disproportionate” “ultra-violen[ce]” and “blood in the streets” as appropriate “reinstitut[ion] [of] public debt for anti-social and subversive behavior.” Such a Christ-like fellow deserves everything he prays to be done to others.

Tyler Robinson, the killer, was not found through the work of FBI Director Kash Patel (or as I like to call him, “Kush Patel,” because that fool has got to be smoking something). Mr. Robinson’s father recognized him on TV and persuaded him to surrender. Until then, those two days of ambiguity turned the political aether into a feverish hell of paranoid discourse and hate. We could have waited for Mr. Robinson’s day in court to determine what is true and false about him. We still can. Instead, the country hyperfocused on finding out which “team” he could be assigned to. Was he a rightoid, a Marxist, an incel, or a drag queen?

None of those. Mr. Robinson is a chronically online loser whose brain is rotted by furry pornography, violent computer games, and the chat program Discord. He dressed like Pepe the Frog for Halloween. His bullet casings were engraved with memes, jokes, or other Internet culture detritus: “Notices your bulge, OwO, what’s this?” (referencing a cartoon where two grotesque men engaged in cybersex while roleplaying as sexy foxes or cats or something), “If you read this you are GAY lmao,” “O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,” (an Italian anthem brought to popularity by Netflix’s “The Money Heist”). Drawn on another bullet was a command sequence from the “looter shooter” Helldivers 2, captioned “Hey Fascist, catch!” He spent all his time on Discord, which is where he posted his confession and apology before turning himself in. His voter registration was inactive and unaffiliated—he did not vote in 2024. So why would Democrats bear any responsibility for a gamer who never donated, volunteered, voted, or even socialized with them?

In the chaos following the shooting, right-wing media seized on a false ATF bulletin cited by Mr. Patel claiming the bullets were engraved with ‘transgender ideology’—whatever the hell that means. The Wall Street Journal ran that story before retracting it when the actual inscriptions were memes. But to the relief of bigots who had been hunting for any trans connection, Mr. Robinson’s roommate was transitioning, and it seems the two were in a romantic relationship. ‘That settles that! Left wing!’ is what I am sure conservatives cheered, but that seems dumb. Caring about a transgender person is not an ideology.

Over that September weekend, the Kennedy Center held an event honoring Mr. Kirk. The president skipped it to go golfing again (according to

https://didtrumpgolftoday.com/

, approximately the 60th golf trip he took since Inauguration). Mr. Trump cares less about celebrating Mr. Kirk’s life than he does profiting off his death. Mr. Kirk was important enough to direct “fire and fury” at random targets, but not enough to change the president’s weekend plans.

On the Kennedy Center stage, Senior Advisor for the U.S. Agency for Global Media and two-time electoral loser Kari Lake cried that “Five years earlier, [Robinson] was a Trump supporter. Then we send our kids off to college and they brainwashed him. I am making a plea to mothers out there, please don’t send your children into these indoctrination camps.”

Mr. Robinson attended one semester at a Utah public college and is in his third year of an electrician apprenticeship. For all her tears, Ms. Lake neglected to read even a single article before going into a spotlight and “winging it.” Is this the rigor she applies to her projects at Voice of America? She could have called any VOA employee and said, “Hook me up with an outline. I don’t want to look like a fucking idiot!” She did not.

My colleagues on the left also engaged in unproductive behavior—Redditors wearing detective hats saw “frog-posting gamer on Discord” and concluded he was an incel from a conservative family, probably a “groyper.” They wanted to say: “Not one of us. He was yours!” The temptation is misguided. Nobody makes everybody associated with them guilty. The exercise of assigning group affiliations to lone actors is worse than a sloppy means toward justice, because “cracking down” on broad target groups necessitates that the innocent be punished.

There should be no difficulty reconciling Mr. Robinson’s 2A-friendly upbringing—his family photos feature big smiles and bigger guns—with his willingness to kill a MAGA icon. It is not complicated through a non-ideological lens. If he loved a trans woman, as his texts suggest, perhaps he resorted to violence as a misguided romantic gesture, like twenty-year-old idiots do. Mr. Kirk’s rhetoric about the transgender community was unkind—of course Mr. Robinson took offense to insults on his lover’s behalf. Youth prone to passions imagine their feelings are the center of the world.

Under the keyboard, there was a note that allegedly read: “I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I’m going to take it.”

I, too, made foolish romantic gestures at his age. I plotted a forbidden liaison with the art-student daughter of a defense contractor. He disapproved of his daughter having an affair with an outspoken, chain-smoking, bad-boy liberal, but I thought it would be quite cool to carry on the romance as a “back door man.”

I snuck through the yard in the dark to that lover’s window so I could invite her “cruising” in my old Hexmobile. Except I tripped on a pile of lumber and unleashed wood bees on myself. It was bad. One flew up my “George W. Bush Is a Miserable Failure” T-shirt. I stripped it off while running away. She was not impressed to see me drive home half-naked and yelping. Going forward, my calls were unreturned.

Mr. Robinson likely saw transphobia as an obstacle that the purity of his feelings could defeat. Mr. Kirk, the villain in his love story, got shot. I am surprised “Second Amendment stalwarts” who dress like cowboys are unable or unwilling to imagine a 22-year-old acting like one.

On Monday, September 15, Vice President Jim Dave Vance hosted the Charlie Kirk podcast and claimed he wanted “no unity with the left” because “they” were harassing Mr. Kirk’s widow and children, mocking his death, and taking his words out of context.

Nonsense. I did not. Every major Democratic leader expressed condolences, condemned the attack, and well-meaning knaves in swing districts even advanced legislation declaring October 14 “Charlie Kirk Day.” If, heaven forbid, something happened to my personal hero, Keith Olbermann, would a single Republican give him the same honor?

Where online was the vice president of the United States reading so much mean shitposting? He has job responsibilities, doesn’t he? How deep was he in the replies? Mr. Vance requested that the audience contact the employers of anyone celebrating, rationalizing, or justifying the death of Mr. Kirk. Snitching. Posts that count as “celebrating” or “justifying” say, roughly: “Charlie Kirk said shit I don’t like.” But if nobody objected to Mr. Kirk, his career as a shock jock would not make his family millionaires.

Megyn Kelly (who, again, spent 16 months under armed guard) tweeted (though I want to say “shrieked”) at The Bulwark’s Tim Miller she “D[ID] NOT CARE” that White House Border Czar and cartoon thug Tom Homan was videotaped accepting a bag containing $50,000 cash. She said:

I did none of that, and neither did Tim Miller. But reasoning with Ms. Kelly is futile. She has also suggested Mr. Kirk was killed by a witch’s curse. How spooky! She seems unwell.

I read too many variations of this: “U leftists R rly quick 2 point fingers after u POKED THE BEAR??! It iz ALL u guys’S fault 4 calling every111 literally HITLER & saying St. Kirk ‘got what he deserved’ & posting Joker memes!”

“You guys?” “We” “poked the bear?” Until his assassination, I never typed Mr. Kirk’s name. I had no relationship with the man. How could I provoke anything? If we were meant to feel responsible for every utterance by every crank who votes like us, Republicans would be maddened by tell-tale guilt.

If a 22-year-old right-to-repair activist shot at an Apple store and left a manifesto complaining about his iPad Pro’s repairability, nobody would suggest shutting down iFixit, going after Louis Rossmann’s advertisers, or doxxing Redditors complaining about planned obsolescence. Only perhaps John Deere executives might declare that violence was the predictable result of “anti-corporate rhetoric” and demand crackdowns on DIY forums.

Then again, Mr. Trump does not need his reasoning to be convincing; the “why” is an excuse for pre-written orders. Mr. Trump only needs something to blame for what he will do. I think he is not trying to win an illegal third term in a free, fair election, nor does he plan for his successor to win their term against an intact opposition. If this is chess, he plans to destroy all the Democratic knights, bishops, and rooks in advance of the game, so that they must play with fewer pieces.

This assassination did not give the right unlimited political capital. They spent more than they earned and wasted much of it on score-settling with late-night shows. Hubris and erratic prioritization will be their undoing. I am more “plugged in” to politics than the average voter, and I still could not be bothered to care about Mr. Kirk while he was alive. The fantasy that individuals more indifferent would accept a government takeover of network TV and exiling shitposters from the workforce because a podcaster was shot is delusional, even for today’s GOP.

We cannot look away from Mr. Trump’s declarations that the Democratic Party will “disappear.”

He said that in 2026, there will be no blue states, accused critics of treason, and suggested that right-wing terrorism somehow supports law enforcement, while comedians’ monologues are left-wing terrorism and hate speech. Mr. Trump is not “overreaching,” or “misreading his mandate.” He is making threats, not gaffes. “Bad optics” no longer matter to him. He often calls for the prosecution of political opponents, judges, investigators, senators, congresspeople, governors, ex-employees, and celebrities. Even if that “turns off the voters,” that would be a non-factor in the GOP’s electoral luck if their opposition is crippled.

Early in the 2025 MAGA Republican government shutdown, Mr. Trump said, into microphones and in writing, that he would target funding cuts and layoffs at blue states and “Democrat programs.” The president wants to hurt the Democratic half of Americans, and put work into planning ways to do it. He withheld disaster aid from traditionally Democratic states and threatened to steal funds from Maryland meant for rebuilding the destroyed Key Bridge because he was irrationally angry (his feet hurt) about being invited by Governor Wes Moore to go walking. He put troops on the streets of Washington, DC, Chicago, and Portland, and tweeted about having “his people” run New York City. This is not “politics as usual.” The ruling regime is pitching to turn America into a one-party state. That is something from which we may not be able to return.

The GOP wants no opposition and absolute impunity, which is impossible. If every Democrat vanishes overnight, tomorrow a teenager would realize Mr. Trump is a bitch, and the cycle begins anew.

Mr. Robinson’s story has been so lacking in intrigue that fringy-sounding (but successful) fever swamp influencers prefer Candace Owens’s version, an elaborate conspiracy in which Mrs. Kirk was an Israeli spy and the French Foreign Legion, in alliance with Mossad, was coming for Ms. Owens next, as dictated by Mr. Kirk’s ghost.

Mr. Kirk’s stances toward guns and political violence may seem to invite schadenfreude, but that should be resisted. Reveling in the wailing of widows and children is a sickness I cannot fathom—I barb my words, but despite my dark rhetoric, these moments bring me grief, too. I pray for an America where we leave each other alone, instead of using force and fury to compel and control those with whom we would never consort. TPUSA is a noxious organization, and I have as little use for them as they have for me.

The latest “hot goss” has been that Erika Kirk and Mr. Vance are starting a courtship that will end in the vice president’s divorce from Second Lady Usha Vance. I do not endorse this lurid tabloid speculation, though I keep a bag of popcorn reserved for further developments. It is disrespectful to “ship” in the middle of a tragic moment (the way, after the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, Messrs. Trump, Kirk, and Don Jr. suggested assailant David DePape was Mr. Pelosi’s scorned lover).

Photographs of Mr. Vance and Mrs. Kirk are indistinguishable from tawdry book covers, but any man holding another woman by her waist while her hands are in his hair looks like a rake. I am not interested in how a widow processed her grief on stage—none of my business!—but the vice president must know immediately guest hosting the podcast and embracing Mr. Kirk’s wife will stir up gross whispers that he is also “profiting” from his friend’s death.

I think certain conservative influencers cannot live without the additional income, traffic, and engagement the assassination brought them, so they must resort to ploys to keep that attention. For Halloween 2025, a photo circulated of high school math teachers in Arizona wearing white T-shirts stained with fake blood and the text: “Problem Solved.” This is clearly a running joke, as they wore the same shirts in previous years. Yet Twitter addicts, including “Based” Senator Mike Lee, demanded the teachers’ firing because they believe any bloody shirt anywhere is now a sly joke at Mr. Kirk’s expense. It has been more than two months. Most Americans are not thinking about Mr. Kirk at all.

Democrats will not accept blame for a crime no Democrat committed, and if Republicans punish half the country, build databases, fire Internet commenters, and treat all criticism as terrorism, that logic will destroy them, too, and an intra-societal cycle of vendettas involving killing content creators is not good for your boy Hex.

If convicted of the murder, the state of Utah will seek the death penalty for Mr. Robinson. This is unfashionable to say, because there are existential moral problems with executing people under conditions of less than 100 percent metaphysical absolute certitude of their guilt, but I think that would be right. It should end with him. I recognize that endorsing capital punishment without warning may seem jarring. I wanted to avoid the subject—the topic merits more time and thought than I can offer—but in Utah, Mr. Kirk “has a right to be executed by a firing squad.” We cannot look away from that.

We entrust the monopoly on violence to the state. Mr. Robinson, in executing a public figure, broke that contract. In response, conservatives spoil for vigilantism, too, and gun stocks, sales, and permit applications “went to the moon.” That means that the pro-democracy coalition must also invest money in security for their own events, speakers, and persons—pat-downs and metal detectors outside events like CrookedCon, WelcomeFest, and Principles First are not free, and make it difficult for cool guys to slip in and out of the venue to smoke. This should not become the world. Men will need armed guards to have public lives if the people start warring physically over influencers. And thanks to Mr. Kirk’s trailblazing, shitposting is also a public life now—nobody should consider themselves insulated unless they are silent.

Even if you hate Mr. Kirk, find his whole life and career distasteful, still condemn his killing and killer. The GOP, who canonize the podcaster, fantasize about an elaborate antifascist Illuminatus dispatching creepy gamer guys to do their murders, and conveniently, their program for destroying that fictional organization involves hurting their political opponents. The correct thing is to blame the boy who committed the crime; truth is the strongest counter to propaganda. Let Mr. Robinson receive maximal justice for what he has done. Let all who commit the violence that Republicans exploit be so condemned. Say they deserve Hell. Otherwise, conservatives think they are entitled to extract whatever righteousness or fury they can from these events and direct that fire toward unrelated actors, generally as informed by their personal prejudices.

To address the obvious: This essay was published in December. Mr. Kirk was killed in September. There are practical reasons for this three-month delay: my desk was destroyed; I thought it wise to avoid the most heated version of the argument; the fall news cycle was so bleak—I have described it as “Democracy’s Autumn” and a “Horror Show” that it was a struggle to keep up; I compulsively revise projects that touch sensitive matters; I hoped there might be one additional piece of information that tied the whole story together; I experience difficulty wrapping up the final details of a project.

But I also—not naively, but foolishly—hoped that the flop of the Kimmel firing might reduce the hysteria, chill out the bullshit. The recent shooting of National Guardsmen Sarah Beckstrom and Andrew Wolfe outside of Farragut West Metro, and the subsequent attempts to use that as pretext for the most vile immigration actions yet, prove that respecting traditional boundaries around politicizing tragedy is surrender to those like Messrs. Trump, Vance, and Miller, to Nancy Mace and Megyn Kelly, who will freely pick any corpse and fashion its bones into weapons, mix its blood into poison. At my most genteel, I let them have their grief, but in that space, they showed grief is not their desire. They wanted what they always wanted: to hurt people.

Previous installments:

Gray Wednesday: Comey’s Arraignment.

Gray Wednesday Part 2: Lindsey Halligan, Puppet

On Monday, November 24, U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie dismissed lying-to-Congress and obstruction charges against former FBI Director James Comey and some bullshit mortgage stuff against New York Attorney General Letitia James, not because the prosecutions were vindictive—though they were—nor because at least Mr. Comey’s grand jury was corrupted—though it was—but because so-called acting U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan, “a former White House aide with no prosecutorial experience,” was “unlawfully” and “defective[ly]” appointed and “had no lawful authority to present the indictment[s].”

Two months, two trips at rainy civil twilight driving to the Eastern District of Virginia courthouse to watch justice be done, the heavens fall, et cetera, were reduced to anticlimax—I expected the conclusion to clarify whether days ahead are darker or brighter, but we remain in this seemingly endless gray muddle. As foretold in the queue at the Albert V. Bryan United States Courthouse on November 19, “everything evaporated.” Yet the clouds did not part; it grew no warmer, and the sun still did not show.

I looked forward to seeing Mr. Comey tried, the government’s witnesses sputtering, Ms. Halligan’s expression when her prosecution failed, and Mr. Comey’s when he walked out vindicated—the moments when justice’s face is uncovered. I planned to go to The Westin Alexandria Old Town bar next to the courthouse and note what disgraced prosecutors drink.

Mr. Comey is the former director of the FBI, an acclaimed crime novelist, and an attorney. He has the best lawyers to protect him. Letitia James, John Bolton, and Senator Adam “Schwifty” Schiff also have the power, connections, and abilities to secure their exonerations. (Though I have heard the case against Mr. Bolton may be more legitimate.) Mr. Comey is lucky he ran afoul of a president who leads a gang more inept, bumbling, and bungling than the Beagle Boys. Good for him.

For the rest of America, this is not a victory—this was the best-case scenario for which the Trump-Vance regime could have hoped. This case ought to have been judicially rebuked as a malicious prosecution to set a standard, since President Donald Trump intends more revenge trials. Dismissal over grand jury improprieties was my second-favorite option. Dissolving on the grounds of illegitimacy allows our Mandarin Mussolini to feign the charges had merit, say, “And we would’ve gotten away with it, too, but for those meddling judges!”

Lawfare’s Ben Wittes said: “To put it bluntly, the government and Halligan here got off on a technicality.” I hate that. It does not encourage a better world, nor does it deter any bad behavior. It only gives legal analysts like Glenn Kirschner another steady week of NBC appearances. (No shade on Mr. Kirschner! Justice matters!) Mr. Wittes complained that while the defense for Mr. Comey was now moot, it should not be “mooted out in terms of accountability for the government actors who made these travesties happen” since the “garbage investigations” into the president’s political foes are continuing absent a reason for them to halt, and that “it cannot be that if you set out maliciously and illegally and on the president’s behalf to rid him of meddlesome priests”—turbulent! Turbulent!—“the worst that happens is that you fail and the priests walk free.”

While Mr. Wittes compares the Trump goons to Henry II and his knights, I think of them more like comic-book villains. White House and DOJ spokespeople swore they’ll be back, they’ll get that James Comey if it’s the last thing they do, and we haven’t heard the last of them! Meanwhile, they could not successfully prosecute the man for whom the would-be headsmen ground their axes for eight years. As always, their evil and stupidity exist in balance and opposition, competition, and complementation.

If they were wise, the Trump administration would see this as an opportunity to save face, accept defeat, “take the L,” and use government resources for something other than the president’s vendettas. Ms. Halligan should return to Florida and rubber-stamping insurance settlements. She is not competent, charismatic, or charming, so what value does she bring the Commonwealth of Virginia, except screwing up more paperwork? She will eventually have a life after Trump, and she may wish for a good reputation and career then. Maybe she imagines herself haunting the Fox News or Newsmax green rooms, but she is as minimally-talented on television as she is at prosecuting. Even if her reward is a fellowship at Heritage or some other conservative no-show job, on her current course, her prospects are dim. She will not be cherished in the annals of the far right for accomplishing nothing.

Ms. Halligan only had two qualifications. (1) This role was bestowed on her so she could execute tasks the president needed done that no career prosecutor would do. She could not. (2) The Dunning-Kruger effect blinds Ms. Halligan from realizing her maladroit fuckuppery makes her a scapegoat. It seems doubtful that she has any value to Mr. Trump except to be used, so she will be discarded once she is useless. Ms. Halligan earned miserable failure, not glorious defeat. She did not “go down swinging”—her name became synonymous with the ability she demonstrated.

There is a rumor that Mr. Trump’s legal hitmen, “Eagle Ed” Martin and Bill Pulte (the weird dude who creeps through mortgage paperwork), are “in the barrel,” and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche is investigating their work on the mortgage fraud case against Mr. Schiff. Mr. Martin and his allies claimed on Twitter that this inquiry is intended to make that prosecution more solid, a real “bomb,” but this administration seems more likely to self-cannibalize.

Mr. Blanche is likely making plans for a future Department of Justice where he is the “top cop,” and the notoriously corrupt Attorney General Pam Bondi, Ms. Halligan, Messrs. Martin, Pulte, and the rest of their goons are kicked to the curb.

I speculated before that the regime’s incompetence may give us hope. If their strategy was not to bring weak cases to inconvenience the targets of their rage, then these fools believed their cases were strong. We have all seen C-students who, from the back of the class, pass in incomplete work. This administration might like us to believe that they are unfairly graded, but I think they are less like a struggling teenager and instead more closely resemble a teenager railing cocaine off their Social Studies book and going on a clown show of a “bender” while nobody can convince them they are fucking up. If these Republicans do not think that they need to save face, they will faceplant repeatedly.

This is contrary to the popular sentiment of dread that goes, “the good guys won today, but the bad guys learned what they must improve. They will become better at fascism, improve their abilities. Next time, they will cross their T’s and dot their I’s.” MAGA could grow more competent, more effective, but I tend to think that could make them less dangerous.

The dirtier, rainier, more confused reality might be that this is the best they can do, but what if they keep on like this? The more effective evil administration would be a mercy because, to maintain its credibility, it does not take up these nonsensical cases. Does this seem like a government capable of such a thing? Can we survive the murky, lightless days?

On that “forking path” between choosing slapdash vengeance or acting normal, the president has chosen mean, venal stupidity over America’s interests. After six Democratic lawmakers released a Facebook video reminding U.S. military personnel that the Uniform Code of Military Justice allows refusal of unlawful orders, Mr. Trump cried like a bitch that it was “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” “treason,” and spent a sleepless night spamming calls for them to be “hanged.” Stephen Miller, his hyperventilating evil vizier, breathlessly ranted the PSA as evidence of a Democratic “insurrection.” Senator Elissa Slotkin was informed by the Senate’s Sergeant at Arms that the FBI’s counterterrorism division opened an investigation into her. Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense, ex-Fox News host, and DUI hire Pete Hegseth (recently reported as screaming “kill them all” while ordering a missile strike on either a Venezuelan drug boat or a fishing vessel) directed the military to open an investigation into Senator Mark Kelly and contemplated whether he ought to recall him to active service so that he may be court-martialed. However petty or pathetic any particular political prosecution or weaponizing of justice may be—however laughable—these villains have worse fantasies.

FBI Director Kash Patel, or as I call him, “Kush Patel,” because that fool has GOT to be smoking something, is under scrutiny for having an “elite” FBI SWAT team, who might typically respond to mass shootings or terror attacks, serve as a personal protective detail for his long-distance girlfriend, country singer Alexis Wilkins. Mr. Patel must know, in his heart, that if she prefers he waste tens or hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars per booty call instead of moving to DC and “playing house,” Ms. Wilkins does not intend to marry him. The expense adds up, but I suppose Mr. Patel is happy to charge it to the American people. Meanwhile, this taxpayer wonders if those Bureau employees could have spent their time investigating something federal.

On the cold Wednesday before Thanksgiving, November 26, 2025, two National Guardsmen were shot near the Farragut West Metro station in downtown DC. The shooter was Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan who previously worked with CIA-backed Afghan paramilitary units. Twenty-year-old Specialist Sarah Beckstrom died from her wounds; 24-year-old Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe was grievously injured. Video here via XCancel.

This White House’s response was elated—finally, something to change the subject from the president’s swollen feet and mental decline, the Epstein files, the “economic cock and ball torture” of his tariffs, rising grocery prices, and the failure of these prosecutions. Mr. Miller had not seemed so gleeful since the assassination of Turning Points USA podcaster Charlie Kirk. Finally, a narrative they know: racism and authoritarian overreach. Five hundred more National Guardsmen will be deployed to D.C. To do what? Loiter at the Farragut stations, protect ATM lobbies, happy hour bars, shoe and luggage stores? The soldiers already stationed in our city are so bored with the occupation that they mostly do groundskeeping.

This was terrorism. Mr. Lakanwal drove from Bellingham, Washington, to the District of Columbia to kill brave men and women in uniform. Could that have been prevented had the FBI not been busy helping coddle Mr. Patel’s girlfriend? Had the Department of Justice not spent months prosecuting Mr. Trump’s personal and political enemies? Had counterterrorism resources been used for something real, instead of trying to execute Senate and Congressional Democrats? What else did they miss? Mr. Trump wants a police state. They should be policing and not whatever the fuck they are doing. The murder of those Guardsmen is a consequence of this administration’s improper focus—the president’s hands are stained with the blood of soldiers killed under his watch.

I will continue to mock the revenge tour since it is objectively ridiculous, but we should be under no illusion that it is harmless. Beyond chilling discourse—I built an additional review step into my revision process to check for “things assholes might twist out of context”—wasting government resources flailing and failing to crucify the president’s antagonists costs society in dull nickels and dimes as well as tragedy. For example, this Thanksgiving weekend, I had to take time to clean, organize, and detail the Hexmobile. Five hundred National Guardsmen need something to do, and checkpoints are the kind of busywork that makes authoritarians feel powerful. My car was a mess of strewn papers, drafts of my forthcoming essays, “Who the Hell Was Charlie Kirk Anyway?”, “Throat Goat Donald Owes America the Epstein Files,” “No Kings 2: Rise of the Trump Kingdom,” as well as my report on Crooked Con, the Pod Save America convention, and ibuprofen bottles (because this administration can be a real pain in the neck!). I prefer to be secure from people sorting through my papers or possessions—one of the pocket Constitutions in my floorboard promised me that. I lost this time to protect myself. How many other so-called “enemies of the people” had to do the same?

If I fall on the president’s hit list because my takes are too spicy, or perhaps I uncover a truth that the regime dares not allow to see the light of day, I will not be represented by superstar attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, nor will I be supported by half the country’s white-shoe lawyers and media. Will Mr. Comey stand for me? Will Mr. Comey continue standing now that he has won reprieve, or will he focus on writing his next novel?

The instinct is to end this essay on a note that projects an outcome that differs from the present. I resist that fade to black: “And so the rain will continue, the days will be gray, but the sun will emerge, burst through the clouds, and bring warmth to the land.” Or: “We won today, but it is winter. December nears. The days grow colder and darker. Where shall we be in four months?” Change is not inevitable. A gloomy status quo can persist for some time, and its collapse may not be the one most foreshadowed. If this regime claims they need to learn nothing, they did nothing wrong, the fascism they have now is adequate, why improve?

In Part I, I asked how many more such gray days we need to suffer. I am left with the answer I already knew: as many as it takes, as we can survive. The price of Mr. Trump’s incompetence is blood, time, and freedom. Mr. Comey paid with months of legal fees and stress; Ms. Beckstrom paid with her life. However much more this costs, we must keep the ledger. I should not need to care for Mr. Comey, but if I let his fate go, neglect to witness what happens to him, what else will I forget? This administration tried to forge its grand jury indictment just to make it look more impressive. If nobody is making notes, unrecorded truths will be lost and forgotten in the miasma.

Previous installments:

Gray Wednesday: Comey’s Arraignment.

On Wednesday, November 19, 2025, I checked and rechecked the court calendar to verify that oral arguments were still happening for former FBI Director and crime novelist James Comey’s motion to dismiss on the grounds of vindictive prosecution. Acting United States Attorney Lindsey Halligan should be too mortified to show her face again after her inexplicably weird 33-hour text message marathon with Lawfare’s Anna Bower about her bullshit prosecution of Letitia James, followed by Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick’s blistering report on Ms. Halligan’s “fundamental misstatements of the law that could compromise the integrity of the grand jury process.”

According to Magistrate Judge Fitzpatrick, the grand jury was misled—that is how some non-partisan “sanewasher” would put it. Ms. Halligan misled the grand jury. According to that report, it was intimated to them that Mr. Comey’s Fifth Amendment rights were somehow incriminating, which is a clear constitutional error. They were promised that if they indicted, there would be better evidence at trial than they had seen. This is not a reasonable and normal way for grand juries to operate. That Ms. Halligan thought this would slide spoke to her manifest disqualification—I did not think it could get worse for her, but it did.

President Donald Trump foolishly took his prosecution of Mr. Comey to real court instead of Twitter, a battlefield where the former FBI Director could lose. Mr. Trump’s hubris persisted even when the former Acting United States Attorney for Virginia, Erik Siebert, who was a real prosecutor, told him his case sucked. Mr. Trump could have said: “Well, back to the drawing board!” Instead, he claims he fired Mr. Seibert. Mr. Seibert claims he resigned. Perhaps both events happened simultaneously, and we will never know the truth. Now Mr. Trump has a half-baked case and completely cooked U.S. attorney.

Another gray Wednesday, but brighter than the last. I was excited to see Mr. Trump’s profaned and debased Department of Justice sputter and spit as they tried to account for themselves. It was worth waking up at 5:00 a.m., driving the Beltway inner loop in a rainy rush hour, and standing in a security line outside the Albert V. Bryan United States Courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia.

Ms. Halligan has no business in the Eastern District of Virginia. Maybe she believes in herself, plans to fake-it-’til-she-makes-it, but it seems doubtful she will make it, and she puts little effort into faking it. If Mr. Trump wanted a serious lawyer, he could find one. As Mr. Trump’s former personal attorney, she was picked for her loyalty, not ability. For the role of United States Attorney to go to somebody who was not, and never had been, a prosecutor, is obviously wrong. But is it wrong in a way that is beneficial to long-term civic health because it is obvious, or simply more degradation and diminishment about which nothing can or will be done? Either their ignorance and incompetence will be this regime’s undoing, or it will be ours.

In Better Call Saul Season 5, Episode 4, “Namaste,” the titular attorney, Saul Goodman, asked a witness to identify his client, then revealed that the person beside him was an imposter disguised as the defendant. He was summoned to the judge’s chambers, then returned and told his romantic and legal partner, Kim Wexler, that he had gotten the beautiful word he was looking for: “mistrial.”

Similarly, I wondered if Ms. Halligan’s “chicanery” was not in pursuit of an outcome that puts Mr. Comey in the slammer with the Beagle Boys and every other criminal whom his FBI put away, but rather for the case to be dismissed so that Mr. Trump could declare he would have won, if not for those meddling judges. I was wrong. The hearing was so weird and embarrassing that I must conclude no, they are actually really bad at this.

Compared to the cold rain, the courthouse lighting felt warm. Security was smoother and faster than it had been the last time. The motions hearing did not portend to be the same circus as the arraignment, and why would it? Everyone wants to watch the perp walk and the trial, but the nitty-gritty is for sickos. Some in the queue were bragging about how much more “lit” the October line was. Someone even said, “You had to be there.”

These were seasoned, dedicated court watchers, some of minor fame—Talking Feds’ Harry Litman, MSNBC’s Glenn Kirschner, Lawfare’s Roger Parloff, Anna Bower, and Molly Roberts—practically star-studded if you spend your time on Substack.

From conversations I overheard, there was a sense that the grand jury “stuff” Magistrate Judge Fitzpatrick wrote the night before was spicier than the malicious prosecution motion we were there to see, and some in line started to chat about cases they would rather be watching—United States v. Letitia James, No. 2:25-cr-00122 (E.D. Va. 2025), United States v. Kilmar Armando Ábrego García, No. 3:25-cr-00115-1 (M.D. Tenn. June 22, 2025), and J.G.G. v. Trump, No. 1:25-cv-00766-JEB (D.D.C. filed Mar. 15, 2025), Judge James Emanuel Boasberg’s hearing on the Alien Enemies Act. FOMO has infected every possible slice of life, if even court reporters now suffer it. Or perhaps this administration’s legal slop has exhausted the press. Well, I hope to reduce their worry. I may have no legal training, my punctuality may be unreliable, and my insights are erratic, discursive, and irreverent, but I will step into the gap.

Ms. Halligan’s “incompetence” was another common topic of chatter. “Everything is going to evaporate,” I heard someone say. I assumed they meant the charges were so weak as to disappear under bright light, but they were talking about a vodka spill. The Trump administration’s haphazard handling of matters was so amateurish these legal eagles seemed more bored than outraged. I can relate—I once had a Taco Bell order of three tacos go so badly that the tacos were shoved into each other like a matryoshka. That was an interesting fiasco. This was more akin to someone handing you a bag of trash. It is no novelty how this went so wrong, only gross.

“If this is dismissed today…” was another common refrain. There was even some speculation on how Ms. Halligan could resign and keep some dignity. Does she know that she should feel shame? That even her haters and neutral observers are embarrassed for her? If he had a heart, Mr. Trump would give up his pursuit of vengeance and spare Ms. Halligan the indignity of this role.

Someone else suggested that perhaps Ms. Halligan was “in over her skis.” I hear this phrase in DC with increasing frequency, enough that its meaning has gone from evocative to limp. What caused this explosion in usage? Have we had an uptick in skiers, or did this show up in one notable tweet or podcast that embedded itself in the Beltway DNA? I suspect the answer is blander: Many out-of-their-depth Republicans are fucking up.

I keep thinking back to Mr. Trump’s McDonald’s Summit, which Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark deconstructed in excruciating detail. Mr. Comey is being prosecuted on the whim of a man who thought 25,000 people, including Google’s Sundar Pichai and Sergey Brin, squeezed into a drive-thru, who has so lost his inhibition that in one day he called a reporter “piggy,” downplayed the murder of Jamaal Khashoggi, called for ABC’s broadcast license to be revoked, and most recently called for Senators Elissa Slotkin and Mark Kelly, as well as Representatives Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, and Chrissy Houlahan to be put to death.

I could have slept in, but because the president is both malevolent and mentally degenerating, America bears the cost. Anybody else would be sectioned for inflicting themselves on the world so incoherently, but he cannot be humored—he must be stopped. Does he know how poorly this is going for him?

I thought U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff, who presided over the arguments, had real star quality. He was smart, incisive, and witty. Once he even made me belly-laugh, which earned me some dark stares in the overflow room, where spectators watch via video feed when the main courtroom is full. If he tires of this nonsense and wants to start his own television show on the model of Judge Judy Sheindlin, I will happily subscribe to whatever service sells it.

Mr. Comey’s defense was straightforward. The government cannot use the power of prosecution to express animus, to punish speech, or as a “cudgel to damage and intimidate his political opponents.” But for Mr. Trump’s vindictive motive, the case would never have been brought, so it should be dismissed. His attorney, Michael Dreeban, cited Mr. Trump’s retaliatory tweets and calls for prosecution. He then stipulated that when Mr. Comey stopped talking publicly, the president went silent, which seemed dubious. That jackass never shuts up.

Mr. Dreeban dropped one throwback that sent me into a flashback: Mr. Trump’s 2017 threat that Mr. Comey “better hope there are no tapes,” to which the former FBI director reportedly exclaimed: “Lordy, I hope there are tapes!” Seven years later, the closest we have gotten is Showtime’s 2020 drama The Comey Rule, starring Jeff Daniels as James Comey and Brendan Gleeson as Donald Trump, available streaming now on Showtime/Paramount+. As always, Mr. Trump disappoints.

Mr. Dreeban also cited the now-infamous e-mail to Attorney General and notoriously corrupt bimbo Pam Bondi listing the political enemies he wanted prosecuted, which Mr. Trump accidentally posted to Truth Social instead of e-mailing her, somehow. “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” the message read, but prosecutions like this kill not only his scant credibility, but also that of prosecutor Tyler Lemon and Mses. Bondi and Halligan. People are less scared now that they see this is all the ability that the weaponized DOJ can summon. As ever, hope is born from Republican stupidity.

Jesus Christ. A few days prior to the hearing, Mr. Trump also tweeted out a “hit list” of his “Russia HOAX Treason Club” (reminder for 🐍Tulsi Gabbard🐍: “Russiagate” was not a hoax), and Mr. Comey had an X on his head? Could this be more of a cartoon?

Man, the advertising on Truthsocial is pretty sketchy, isn’t it?

Mr. Dreeban compared Mr. Trump’s actions to King Henry II’s stochastic incitement for the Archbishop Thomas Becket’s assassination, “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” to which Judge Nachmanoff retorted, “We all agree Henry II can’t be binding precedent.” Is it meddlesome priest? I thought it was turbulent priest. I will go mad trying to pin down the most correct version of this quote, but not, perhaps, as mad as Mr. Comey’s lawyer must feel explaining Mr. Trump’s sloppy, obsessive targeting of his political foes. (“I am your retribution!” was a campaign pitch.)

Mr. Lemon gave the government’s case, which got off to a rough start. Mr. Comey was “indicted because he lied,” according to the prosecutor, which was a great line! But he followed that up by saying that Mr. Comey had been properly indicted by a grand jury, to which Judge Nachmanoff interrupted with, basically, “About that…”

How badly this administration has warped the DOJ. Taxpayers are stuck paying lawyers to rationalize Mr. Trump’s slapdash venom—had he avoided inserting himself so personally, thus forcing Mr. Lemon to profess the president’s alibi instead of any facts, I wonder how dangerous the prosecution would have been.

When Mr. Siebert’s refusal to prosecute came back up, Judge Nachmanoff asked the government for the declination memo. Marble-mouthed Mr. Lemon at first claimed he did not know if such a memo exists. Judge Nachmanoff was skeptical. “Did you seek out a memo to see if one existed?” he asked, then “squeezed” from Mr. Lemon that the Deputy Attorney General had instructed him not to talk. No snitching! Mr. Parloff’s notes capture the exchange:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G6JMKIsXkAAXvzJ.jpg

Mr. Lemon stated a rational position, that mutual hostile rhetoric cannot be a “shield” to prosecution, or else one could pick fights to get charges dismissed. Sort of like how Mr. Trump, in 2016, said that the Mexican-American Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel could not fairly serve as his trier in the fraud case against the scam college Trump University because of his nationality, as Mr. Trump said a lot of racist shit about Hispanics during that campaign. Well, damn. They are onto my plan to claim my DONALD IS A BITCH shirt (available now at the Partisan Hex webstore) is the real reason anyone tells me to stop doing anything, and thus if someone says I cannot smoke and drink where I want to smoke and drink (the Ronald Reagan International Trade Center), it is a violation of my civil rights.

Mr. Lemon suggested that regardless of how awful Mr. Trump was about Mr. Comey, only Ms. Halligan’s animus should count for vindictiveness. That seems too narrow to be plausible—if everyone is out to get you but the prosecutor has no “beef,” it is no problem if they reluctantly “just follow orders” to bring the hammer of government on your head? Mr. Dreeban countered that it was implausible to think anyone without prosecutorial experience and with a directive from the president would, four days into the job of U.S. attorney, prosecute a complex case that career prosecutors declined. And also, the whole country saw the orange clown barking orders.

Judge Nachmanoff asked the defense that, if they thought she was acting to execute the president’s enmity, if they would call Halligan a “stalking horse” or a “puppet.” Mr. Dreeban demurred, but later Mr. Lemon argued that Ms. Halligan was not a puppet. (Flashbacks to 2016: “No puppet! You’re the puppet!”)

The interim U.S. attorney’s response freaked me out. She nodded so vigorously that her body shook like a marionette.

Judge Nachmanoff said the presumption of regularity is not a given because of Grand Jury concerns, at one point noting discrepancies in ink color as evidence that the grand jury was a fucking mess. The prosecution had to huddle. I did not know why Mr. Lemon was so rattled—as a proper writer and editor, I carry black, red, and blue pens, as well as washi tape and five colors of highlighters, everywhere I go.

I knew I was missing something important—I saw knuckles clench around pens and heard gasping, furious scribbling through the overflow room. It was explained by the judge more clearly: the full grand jury had not seen or signed the same version of the indictment that was filed—the “document [] was never shown to the entire grand jury or presented in the grand jury room.” I suppose her reasoning was that “While the Fifth Amendment says, ‘No person shall be held to answer for a capital or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, but it never says that presentment cannot have some light forgery after-the-fact, like a poor student’s report card! Lindsey is very clever.” The whole case could be as phony as a degree from Trump University.

Ms. Halligan was called to the podium, where she was mumbling, passive-aggressive, and nasty—she interrupted Judge Nachmanoff once, then petulantly threw an “okay” at him like a teenager. If I had spoken to a judge like that in traffic court, when I was a hellion, I doubt I would be driving the Hexmobile today. If she is not experienced as a prosecutor, lacks warmth, charisma, charm, grace, or tact, and even botched the grand jury, what good is she to anyone? Afterwards, Ms. Halligan stayed very still, presumably thinking the judge was like a tyrannosaurus and might not notice her if she never moved.

Judge Nachmanoff declined to rule from the bench and gave both parties homework: submit briefs addressing Gaither v. United States, which held that a grand-jury indictment must be presented to all jurors, by 5 p.m. An anticlimax, but I doubt the proceedings will end in Mr. Trump’s favor. If I gambled, I would bet the case gets tossed before trial. Polymarket agrees.

When his cloud lifts, will Mr. Comey return to his retirement or work to protect anybody else similarly “caught up”? I came out for him. Will he do the same for Letitia James, Kat Abughazaleh, Robby Roadsteamer, or the Democratic lawmakers that Mr. Trump decreed must be hanged? Will the judiciary accept the task of smashing this corrupt regime with their gavels? Can this administration get its act together and at least hire some competent thugs, so we do not have to suffer both authoritarian slide and secondhand embarrassment? This farce shows a path the light breaks back into our civic landscape, by proving that, for all Mr. Trump’s power, without any direction, wisdom, or competence, his government is small, weak, and stupid; it cannot even settle his petty scores. This is possible, if the law keeps its strength and will to protect itself.

How many more such gray days will there be over the next three years? I will be at the Dropkick Murphys protest in DC on November 22, wherein the assembled will “peacefully descend on the seat of power in Washington, DC to demand unmistakably that this lawless administration come to an END.” I hope to see everyone there.

https://www.mobilize.us/mobilize/event/869555/

Next installment:

Gray Wednesday Part 3: In re Comey dismissal, Blue Monday, Black Friday

At a 7-Eleven in Crystal City/National Landing/Arlington during morning civil twilight on November 10, I filled up my vintage X-Treme Gulp mug of coffee—52 ounces, black—when I was approached by one of that store’s regulars who did something boring-but-essential over at National Airport (DCA). I had chatted with him about current events the last time I was in this town at this time, too, and knew he and I were on the same page about our disdain for President Donald Trump and the extremist MAGA Republican Party.

He asked me: “Hex, is it true? Did the Dems cave on the shutdown?”

I put the lid on my drink and closed my eyes. “I suppose that depends on your definition of ‘cave.’”

“So, it’s over?” He looked towards the fluorescent lights, though I knew he was thanking the heavens. I blinked. Not the reaction I had expected.

“Not yet. The House may not pass the revised bill. Or the president could veto it. Lots of things could happen—” While I rattled off procedural errata, his fists tightened. It was not even 6:30 a.m. and I had already been inundated in my group chats and social media feeds with Substackers, pundits, and other editorialists calling Democrats “feckless cowards.” Lost in the muddle were workers who were working unpaid during the longest government shutdown in American history (surpassing the previous record of 35 days, also held by Mr. Trump).

During the March fight over a different continuing resolution to fund the government, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer voted for cloture against most of the members of his party. I declared he caved and that this must be his last term. That funding expired on October 1, 2025. Democrats refused to vote for cloture until the GOP agreed to extend ACA subsidies cut by the Big Bitch Bill. In the absence of those subsidies, many Americans will see their premiums double or triple.

The last time I saw the price tag on an undiscounted insurance plan, I decided I did not need health insurance—if I got sick, I would have had to “enroll” in what Alan Grayson called the Republican healthcare plan: “die quickly.” Sometimes, when confronted with a price tag, even for something “essential,” all you can do is turn your pockets inside out and make a big, sad face. Mr. Trump’s Big Bitch Bill will force an estimated four to five million Americans into that position.

For 40 days and 40 nights, Democrats did not vote for cloture. Mr. Trump expected them to fold immediately and was surprised when they did not. He cut funding for infrastructure in New York and other blue states, laid off 4,000 or so federal employees, and declared he would cut “Democrat programs.” When that did not move the needle, he targeted food stamp recipients. SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, has an emergency fund, but the administration instead claimed there was no money.

This pain could not have been an attempt to bring Democrats to the negotiating table, because House Speaker Mike Johnson, or “MAGA Mike,” as they call him in the club, kept Congress closed for almost 60 days—no negotiation was possible. The House of Representatives was out of session for so long that I worried whether it had dissolved. Was the coup closer to completion than anyone noticed? I cannot put it past today’s GOP to derelict their every duty to protect Mr. Trump from the release of the Epstein files. Mr. Johnson has been a disingenuous, deplorable figure throughout this whole ordeal—I hate that his caucus has enjoyed their two-month paid vacation, those looters.

Mr. Trump also refused to meet with House and Senate Democrats for weeks (some suspected on account of his ailing physical and mental health). After he did, he posted AI videos depicting House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in a mariachi hat and AI-altered voice clips of Mr. Schumer complaining about “woke bullshit.” Where there is no good faith, honest negotiation cannot occur.

As of November 2, SNAP benefits were frozen. A court ordered the administration to pay out the benefits, but instead of acceding, Mr. Trump appealed to the Supreme Court. These evil men would rather starve the Americans than give them affordable healthcare. Republicans are repugnant, reprehensible reprobates.

Air traffic controllers have been unpaid for 40 days, too. Many have stopped showing for work, resulting in degraded service. If you were in an airport over the weekend, you have complaints about the timeliness of your flight.

I doubt this stopped FBI director Kash Patel—or as I like to call him, “Kush Patel,” because that fool has got to be smoking something—from taking his private FBI jet from Washington, DC, to Nashville, Tennessee, every weekend for “romantic liaisons” with his “long-distance girlfriend” the “country music sensation” Alexis Wilkins. I fear one or both may be “leading the other on” or unable to commit if she will not at least agree to move within driving distance. And since We the People are financing this extravagant courtship, it is my business to say so!

Meanwhile, the brave men and women of the United States Armed Forces at home and abroad, military families, federal workers, and SNAP recipients stand in bread lines. Food pantries around the country are bare.

A handyman service I have done business with in the DMV e-mailed its customers to announce that, after COVID, inflation, tariffs, whatever the fuck DOGE did, and now this government shutdown, they closed their business. They could not weather Mr. Trump’s disastrous economy. How many other businesses will follow? A local carpet and mattress store has a going-out-of-business sign too, though as far as I can tell, they always do.

While Americans are hungry, the president mocks them by enjoying opulent parties. The first was a Great Gatsby-themed party, complete with burlesque dancers. Looked fun!

A friend of mine complained, “Do these Republicans understand the optics?” Then, more cheerfully, “Perhaps we will get them in the midterms. After all, if they are so misguided as to how they are perceived…” I reminded him that for Mr. Trump and his Republican servants, “the cruelty is the point.” They know what they look like, and they think it is hilarious.

After receiving criticism for that first party, Mr. Trump did not dial back further lavish adventures. He held another party, a big “opera and truffle” feast with an exotic Trump chocolate cake, the next weekend. He did not say, “Let them eat cake.” He said, “Watch me eat this mf-ing cake.”

As we reach mid-November and December looms, D.C. has started to see frost warnings. Soon will be the season when Americans will need LIHEAP, the Low Income Heating Assistance Program—yet another critical social safety net impacted during government shutdowns. Americans will not only be hungry, but grow cold, too. In some cases, that means frozen pipes, destroyed homes, frostbite, hypothermia, and death.

Mr. Trump’s party was “blown out” by the elections on Tuesday, November 5th. The best Democratic off-year elections in history! After the ass-beating, Mr. Trump realized that people hurt by the shutdown would not vote Republican. But unlike a responsible person, he eschewed negotiating in favor of throwing a tantrum and demanding an end to the filibuster (which I love; I am a great filibuster fanatic).

Eight Democratic defectors voted for cloture to begin the process of ending the shutdown. They are:

Dick Durbin (D-IL), Senate Minority Whip (!)

Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)

Maggie Hassan (D-NH)

Tim Kaine (D-VA)

Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV)

Jacky Rosen (D-NV)

John Fetterman (D-PA)

Angus King (I-ME)

For those who say the party caved, I do not wholly disagree, but it is unhelpful for Democrats to dampen their own spirits and disparage themselves. We are a party rebuilding after the Great Loss in 2024—falling into a new funk is a mistake.

We chose a medium option. This was not the worst-case scenario—that would be if we had passed the continuing resolution as it was. The best-case scenario would be that the ACA, Medicaid, and SNAP cuts would be reversed, that Mr. Trump would be run out of town by a mob wielding pitchforks, and MAGA Mike Johnson would retreat to a monastery for the rest of his days.

We should have expected never to get a best-case scenario. The revised CR will curb the negative effects of the shutdown itself, extend SNAP funding until 2026, fund the government through the holidays and into the next year, protect federal employees during this and future shutdowns, and force Senate Republicans to vote on the ACA subsidies.

I do think that if the vote goes ahead without a veto or a filibuster, Senators Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and Thom Tillis would agree to the extension. Senator Josh Hawley only helped pass the Big Bitch Bill because he was promised the opportunity to restore the slashed healthcare funding later, so he would either be a “Yea” or a hypocrite. If Republicans gave a shit about their constituents, they could pass it.

Now, will MAGA Mike Johnson allow this vote to take place in the House? Who knows? He has already implied he would not, because he is incapable of acting in good faith. These Democratic defectors may well have been “played” like Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football in the comic strip Peanuts. I have no optimism that, after seeing Americans starve with no remorse, MAGA Republican extremists will now grow a heart. But there is a chance.

I am interested in hearing why both senators from Nevada and New Hampshire voted this way before I issue any hot takes, because, perhaps, they know their states better than I do, and they see something in their data that I do not. I understand that Mr. Kaine represents a state stuffed nuts-to-butts with Feds who need to be paid to eat and pay their rent and utilities, and therefore cannot begrudge him. Mr. Fetterman betrays Democrats for his own personal entertainment. Mr. King is inscrutable to me. But why Dick Durbin?

Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin’s vote to end the shutdown is troubling. His boss and long-time former roommate, Mr. Schumer, voted against cloture. Why has the Minority Leader’s Minority Whip broken? Even though Mr. Schumer is on the right side of this, his failure to control his own Whip, to keep his caucus in line with his judgment, disqualifies him from leadership. The Democratic base and even casual observers have no confidence left in Mr. Schumer’s leadership.

Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi will retire at the end of this term. Mr. Schumer ought to make his plans, too. He has given this country decades of service, but he no longer inspires and cannot unify or manage his caucus. We must have new leadership. Until the next term, Democrats have no power—except for this filibuster, which is ended—so now we will have nothing else to do but scrutinize our leaders.

The grim truth is that Republicans will starve voters to get what they want, and Democrats will not. While some voices wish our party had the stomach to hurt the American People the way Republicans do, to be honest, I vote Democrat because we are the party that does not do that.

When you are negotiating with hostage takers, and you take a hostage too, but only the enemy faction is willing to watch a hostage die and they are such sickos that they would receive sexual satisfaction from watching both hostages die, you will need different leverage if you want a good outcome. After the longest government shutdown in American history, we found no other lever. In which case, all we can do is try to minimize harm. I doubt that an indefinite shutdown would be good for Democrats, or anyone.

Some commentators believe that 99% of government shutdowns end right before the other side caves, that if there were more chaos, if we hit the final breaking point, then Republicans would become good. I think if we let things reach that breaking point, they break. I do believe the Democratic base wants that bedlam to satisfy their political id. I do respect that, and eventually this lust for chaos will need satiation. To borrow from The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, we should ask ourselves if we want the shutdown to continue because our aims will be achieved, or because it is emotionally satisfying?

Not everybody agreed to starve, freeze, or go without pay for “the cause.” If we make such life-crushing decisions on behalf of our countrymen, we have an obligation to ask, “Will this even achieve the desired result?” If it will not, how long should this go on? This affair has made plain obvious deficiencies in Democratic leadership, which ought to be rectified, but we should allow ourselves to feel satisfied with the outcome. We have been blessed with split-screen photographs of Americans in bread lines while Mr. Trump demolishes half the White House for a 90,000-square-foot ballroom—some Marie Antoinette shit—and drools lazily in his gilded resort with strippers. If all we got from it were those photos, that would be enough. They will ruin Mr. Trump today, they will ruin him in history books, and they will ruin him through eternity.

Up next is the discharge petition for releasing the Epstein files—our partisans should ready for that fight now.

Housekeeping notes: I have write-ups in progress of last weekend’s CrookedCon, the No Kings II rally in Washington, D.C. on October 18th. Please look forward to them!

I have spent months thinking about President Donald Trump’s feet. These are not words I ever wanted to type, but I suspect his tootsies are the pivot on which history turns. He looks unwell—I hope Jake Tapper is authoring a sequel to his book “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.” All Labor Day weekend, people Googled “Is Trump dead?” because after weeks of looking like shit, he stopped making public appearances, the flag outside the White House was lowered to half-mast, and Truth Social crashed. A website even emerged: http://www.istrumpdead.com.

The people wanted to know!

Mr. Trump’s ankles—nay, cankles!—swell through his compression socks. It is impossible not to notice. Even if you do not zoom in on photographs of politicians’ socks, some journalists do so intrepidly. When the president’s hand is not badly painted with orange or white concealer, it is purple and black with bruises. His raccoon eyes are slits, less than half-open more than half the time. His penguin-like gait, unsteady and drifting, calls for a handrail.

He mumbles, rambles, confabulates, mistakes the television for reality, and falls asleep at inappropriate times and places, including during the anticlimactic “Grand Military Parade” he demanded for his birthday.

On February 24, 2025, photos from a meeting with France’s President Emmanuel Macron showed an ugly discoloration stretched across the back of Mr. Trump’s right hand. When asked for an explanation, White House Press bimbo Karoline Leavitt said the orange clown “has bruises on his hand because he’s constantly working and shaking hands all day, every day.”

A bullshit non-answer. “Shut up and accept he’s great!” That made me more suspicious when I was otherwise inclined to extend grace—I typically believe a man’s body is his own business, and it would be distasteful to scrutinize his every human frailty if their consequences were not inflicted on everyone I love.

In April 2025, the White House released the “results” of the president’s “annual physical” from physician Captain Sean Barbabella. It was weirdly effusive and listed nothing of substance:

“President Trump remains in excellent health, exhibiting robust cardiac, pulmonary, neurological, and general physical function. His active lifestyle continues to contribute significantly to his well-being. President Trump’s days include participation in multiple meetings, public appearances, press availability, and frequent victories in golf events. President Trump exhibits excellent cognitive and physical health and is fully fit to execute the duties of the Commander-in-Chief and Head of State.”

April 13, 2025 Memorandum from the White House Physician

The October 2025 report, which was also described as an “annual physical,” shed no light either. It did not mention his CVI, bruising, or swelling ankles, and instead said his “comprehensive laboratory studies” were “exceptional,” and that his “cardiac age” was 14 years younger than his physical age. The summary: Strong cardiovascular, pulmonary, neurological, and physical performance. While the October release did not mention an MRI, Mr. Trump has since come forward to say he had one (without explaining why) and that it was “perfect.” He also bragged about an “intelligence test” he was administered, though what he described was a “very tough” dementia test. Why has nobody explained to him that this is an embarrassing thing to tell the public?

Mr. Trump’s “bills of health” have historically been tailored to his vanity. In 2016, Mr. Trump’s doctor, the late Harold Bornstein, released a statement (dictated to him) that Mr. Trump was “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” In early 2017, Mr. Bornstein had his practice raided, ransacked, and “raped,” to ensure no copies of Mr. Trump’s medical records were loose in the world. The “breach” that prompted this was an “unauthorized disclosure” that Mr. Trump was prescribed the hair-growth medication Propecia.

Mr. Trump’s first-term White House physician, Dr. Ronny “Candyman” Jackson, praised the president’s “incredible genes” and suggested that he “might live to be 200 years old.” He was rewarded with nomination as Secretary of Veterans Affairs, then withdrew after an NPR investigation revealed he liberally dispensed narcotics like a vending machine, and later endorsed by Mr. Trump for the congressional seat he now occupies as a total sycophant.

The use of superlatives in these memoranda—“healthiest individual ever elected!” “liv[ing] to be 200 years old!”—necessitates reading them as political narratives, not objective assessments. So, I shall politicize them. These statements are not, and cannot be, literally true. They are unscientific, hyperbolic claims meant to project an image of extraterrestrial vitality and vigor.

On July 17, 2025, Ms. Leavitt announced Mr. Trump had “chronic venous insufficiency” (CVI), “normal cardiac structure and function,” no “deep vein thrombosis or arterial disease,” and “[n]o signs of heart failure, renal impairment, or systemic illness.” She claimed again that the hand bruising was “soft tissue irritation from frequent handshaking and the use of aspirin.”

The April report stated there was “no swelling” and “unimpaired” blood flow to the president’s extremities. But his July diagnosis of chronic venous insufficiency is defined by poor blood flow that leads to swelling in the legs. Were those earlier records falsified, or was the decline precipitous? I am inclined to believe that the April and October 2025 releases were fake, and that Mr. Trump’s physical condition is “covered up” (as was, and I am shamed to admit, that of former President Joe Biden).

The regime insists that Mr. Trump shakes so many hands that it chronically injures him, but he loathes the custom. He wrote in his 1997 book “The Art of the Comeback” that he was a “clean-hands freak” who “often [thinks] of taking out a series of newspaper ads encouraging the abolishment of the handshake,” which he also called “barbaric” and a “curse[] of American society.” If I hated a habit so much that I put it in a book, and it hurt me, and it made people start planning for a life after I was gone, I would do it less.

On August 15, during the Anchorage summit where Mr. Trump rolled out an actual red carpet for Russian President Vladimir Putin, his swollen cankles were on “full display” next to the other dictator’s visibly slimmer extremities. After all Messrs. Trump and Putin have done for one another, I thought perhaps Mr. Putin could have been such a gentleman as to offer to rub those throbbing toes with horse chestnut “Light Legs” cream.

Later, Mr. Trump free-associated to the bewildered cast of Fox & Friends that he “want[ed] to get to heaven,” noting that “he wasn’t doing well” and was “on the bottom of the totem pole.” For once, he was correct—if there is a Hell, assuredly a spot is reserved for his ass. In September, Mr. Trump’s fundraising messages asked his supporters to “help him get to heaven.” What the fuck? This unprompted complaining about the afterlife has only increased in frequency—why is that on his mind?

On August 25, his hand was almost black. Comparison was made to the wights in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, of which the penultimate book, “The Winds of Winter,” remains incomplete.

Perhaps Mr. Trump’s health concerns drive his chaotic behavior—frantically building monuments to himself while his executive functions and mobility are diminished. He now maniacally chases legacy—he openly thirsts for a Nobel Peace Prize, has paved over the Rose Garden his absentee First Lady designed and replaced it with what The Bulwark’s Tim Miller calls the patio of an Au Bon Pain. Amid a government shutdown where SNAP is set to expire for millions of Americans, U.S. troops are in food lines, and federal workers have been unpaid for more than a month, half the White House has been torn down to create a golden 90,000 square foot ballroom—some Marie Antoinette shit.

Does that sound like a man who plans to leave? Maybe that answer has some pathos. He might be unable to make many more weekend trips to Florida. Airplanes, even Qatari luxury jets, notoriously exacerbate blood clots.

When Dear Leader’s chronic venous insufficiency was disclosed, I suspected he revealed his illness to distract from the recent revelations about the birthday poem he wrote for his former “closest friend,” the notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. (T-Shirt available here.)

A common ploy—it called to mind Harvey Weinstein coming into court pushing a walker capped with tennis balls. Now, I think the White House knows of an eventuality that will be impossible to hide.

As the Mid-Atlantic weather cooled to a perfect temperature for an autumnal stroll, Maryland Governor Wes Moore invited Mr. Trump to walk with him through Baltimore and see the progress Charm City had made on public safety.

The president flipped the fuck out like a crazy person, called the governor’s constructive overture “rather nasty and provocative,” and threatened to send the military to Baltimore and steal funding earmarked for the Key Bridge rebuilding.

I now understand what “triggered” him so. Earlier that week, Mr. Trump promised to “walk a beat” with DC police and the National Guard. I planned to play a prank and sit on the curb of Pennsylvania Avenue with a water bottle in a brown paper bag. I would get caught “drinking in public,” slyly reveal my deception, then leap to my feet and reveal a TRUMP IS A BITCH t-shirt (currently censored by Spreadshop at the Partisan Hex webstore). Instead, Mr. Trump distributed fast food to Guardsmen at Union Station. He said he would walk a beat, but walked zero beats—because, I expect, his feet hurt. So, when Mr. Moore invited him to go walking, he thought he was being provoked. Which means he is sensitive about his feet.

I wonder—while he was visiting Union Station, did Mr. Trump see the big FUCK TRUMP tent erected by the nonviolent, antifascist collective FLARE USA outside Union Station? Is that why Park Police dismantled the permitted protest encampment in early October? Is the president such a petty wimp, or did his servants seek to defend his honor?

Alex Jones, notably afflicted by the opposite of the TDS that ruined me, has noticed Mr. Trump’s condition, too. The conspiracy superstar ranted:

“I predict Trump is going to have some type of collapse in the next twelve months at the current trajectory…. [The] ankles, straight on shot, they are big. They are swollen. They’re like really big. They look like—my neck’s nineteen-and-a-half inches—his ankles look like they are about fifteen inches around. That’s not a good sign for the heart and the rest of the body.”

He continued:

“I’ve seen a lot of signs of Trump declining. And so, he’s on a lot of the time, but like a light bulb is starting to go out. It gets brighter, it gets dim; it goes in and out…. [Y]ou can watch the decline into the evening, and then also these morning interviews. So, it’s late at night, he sounds like he’s drunk… [a]nd then it is early in the morning, he doesn’t sound too hot.”

The White House released another memorandum from Mr. Jackson in response to this speculation—a bit odd, as the Candyman is no longer the president’s physician, just a simping congressman: “I can tell you unequivocally: President Donald J. Trump is the healthiest president this nation has ever seen…. I continue to consult with his current physician and medical team at the White House and still spend significant time with the President. He is mentally and physically sharper than ever before.” What does Mr. Jackson receive in exchange for this nonsense?

Vice President Jim Dave Vance, who once called Mr. Trump “America’s Hitler,” told USA Today that he had “on-the-job training” to take over for his boss. I was surprised to hear that—throughout 2025, he has taken at least eight vacations: a ski trip in Vermont, Italy and India, Greenland, Disneyland (which was shut down for his pleasure), North Dakota, Ohio (where a river’s water levels were raised to enhance his kayaking experience), a luxury manor in the United Kingdom, and likely more. Meanwhile, I have taken zero vacations because I have responsibilities beyond shitposting. I assumed this meant his influence in the White House waned and that nobody wanted him stinking up the place—kicked to the curb!—or perhaps that he was avoiding the “blast radius” of increased scrutiny on Mr. Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein (Mr. Vance’s mentor, Peter Thiel, took the pedophile’s money to build the Palantir systems which power Mr. Trump’s police state). Now, I think he wants to enjoy his finite free time while anticipating an imminent increase in responsibilities.

On September 9, Mr. Trump announced he was going to eat at a restaurant in the District of Columbia to celebrate his “successful” occupation of the American capital and “prove” the city was now safe. Mr. Trump chose Joe’s Seafood one block over from the White House. Inside, he was met by activists who called him the “Hitler of our time” and said he was “not welcome.” If the Commander-in-Chief had walked that block himself, the logic of the stunt would be coherent. Instead, he rode a motorcade to a building nearly next door. In my view, you either ride across town or walk the block. A parade of cops and cars traveling a short distance from the most fortified building in the country proves nothing except that drivers were available.

Mr. Trump probably did not travel on foot because his feet hurt. The “President of Peace’s” aversion to the outdoors is also evident in the August attempt to destroy the White House Peace Vigil in Lafayette Park. It is a shabby little tent, but it means well and has been there since 1981. Leave it be. Yet Mr. Trump claimed to be unfamiliar with it and ordered its removal. The vigil has been in the same place for the entirety of both his administrations, proving that the fool has never gone as far as the fence of the North Lawn.

If the administration wanted to “set the record straight,” they would scramble to release a statement without fabrication or superlative to explain what the hell is going on. Why have they not? It does no good to “leave us in suspense.” (“You fools! I was only pretending to suffer from an edema!”). So I assume the answer is: they cannot.

It matters that Mr. Trump’s mortal form is worse than the public knows, because, unlike Mr. Biden, who was assisted by teams of experts, Mr. Trump demands to be recognized as a singular genius, a dictator with total supremacy over the decision-making process. Yet it appears that the man is not well enough to know what the world looks like.

In late September, shortly before the invasion of Portland by ICE and the National Guard, Mr. Trump said that in a conversation with the mayor of Portland, he was boggled to learn that he was “watching things on television that are different from what’s happening,” referring to violent unrest and fires he believed to be current. His temporal confusion stemmed from repeated broadcasts on Fox News showing b-roll footage of protests and riots from 2020, and under the delusion that the city was “war-ravaged,” he ordered the National Guard and militarized ICE agents to combat protesters dressed like inflatable frogs and singing giraffes. The U.S. president makes decisions that will shatter lives while operating from a fundamentally distorted perception of reality.

If this man is unfit for his job, which he is—which he would be even if he were at the peak of his physical and mental health—he ought to be removed via the mechanism in place to do so: the 25th Amendment of the United States.

Section 4:

“Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”

I loathe saying this, but I would welcome a President Jim Dave Vance right now. Mr. Vance, reprobate that he is, at least knows when he is lying.

Sanae Takaichi, the new Japanese prime minister, rigorously prepared for her critical first meeting with the Mandarin Mussolini. As that nation’s first female prime minister and also a heavy metal drummer, it was important for Ms. Takaichi to demonstrate her credibility and assertiveness on the global stage, advance defense and trade priorities, and establish a good relationship with the so-called Leader of the Free World. All that stress was for nothing, because when she met with Mr. Trump in Tokyo’s Akasaka Palace, he was out to fucking lunch. Video shows her leading him around a room like an elderly dog: slow, confused, disengaged, distracted, wandering off. A genuine embarrassment.

Where does this leave the United States? While ostensibly a superpower, our president visibly decays (for the second time in a row), and the world knows Mr. Trump is deliriously at war with half of America. Without the executive function to self-censor, he goes abroad and essentially tells the troops how much he hates the rest of us here at home. Does he know our allies and enemies can hear him? While other nations may still view the United States as possessing great ability, under our current leadership, we are unable to exercise those capabilities logically or coherently.

I do not relish the death of the king. If it were my choice, I wish Mr. Trump would never die, and instead would be imprisoned beneath the Earth until the end of days.

Without him, his cult has no centralizing factor—when he is revealed as mortal, will his followers understand that they have worshipped a man as organic and fallible as they? It would be preferable that Mr. Trump be honest with the public, that his glamoury is finally dispelled by disclosure instead of crisis. A subset of his supporters will never view him as susceptible to old age or illness, no matter how old or ill he becomes. They frighten me because what they cannot believe will inevitably be.

Unlike the president, Americans must be clear-eyed—someone has got to be! The people elected a leader no less mad and infirm than the Emperor Caligula, or the Kings Nebuchadnezzar II and George III, and our country is and will continue to suffer for it until his biology intervenes, or someone with the constitutional power to act chooses reality over loyalty.

Below is a software-assisted verbatim transcript of the October 18 NO KINGS rally in DC. My report and reflections on the event are forthcoming, but as I have been told today’s youth find showing up to in-person protests “Cheugy,” I wanted to give them the opportunity to relive it from the comfort of their own phones.

1. Pastor Delonte Gholston – Lead Pastor of Peace Fellowship Church (Washington, D.C.)

2. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT)

3. Mehdi Hasan – Journalist and Editor-in-Chief of Zeteo

4. Deirdre Schifeling – Chief Political & Advocacy Officer, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)

5. Sarah Parker – Executive Director of Voices of Florida and 50501

6. Oliver Merino – Immigrant rights advocate, Immigrant Legal Resource Center

7. Afeni Evans – Community Organizer with the DC Fair Budget Coalition

8. Bill Nye the Science Guy

9. Ai-jen Poo – President of the National Domestic Workers Alliance

10. Randi Weingarten – President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)

11. Zion Stewart

12. Cliff Albright – Co-founder of Black Voters Matter

13. Jay Brown – Chief of Staff, Human Rights Campaign (HRC)

14. Shawn Skelly – Retired U.S. Navy Commander & former Assistant Secretary of Defense; Board member, Human Rights Campaign

15. Nee Nee Taylor – Executive Director of Harriet’s Wildest Dreams

16. Keya Chatterjee – Co-founder of the Free DC movement and former head of US Climate Action Network

17. Leah Greenberg – Co-founder and Co-Executive Director of Indivisible

18. Ezra Levin, Co-founder and Co-Executive Director of Indivisible

19. Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT)

Pastor Delonte Gholston – Lead Pastor of Peace Fellowship Church (Washington, D.C.)

If you came because you believe in peace today, come on and make some love out here. Let every hate-filled heart know that we are gathered here today for the purpose of extending and being people of peace. If you believe in that, why don’t you make them hear it one more time in here today?

As has been stated, my name is Pastor Delonte Gholston. I am the pastor of Peace Fellowship Church in Northeast DC. I’m born and raised here. Went to elementary school eight blocks away at 3rd and D Street Southeast. I’m so grateful to be able to stand in this moment.

I want to first, before I say anything else, remind us that we are standing on holy ground. I know that you thought that you came just to stand on Pennsylvania Avenue, but before there was a Pennsylvania Avenue, before there was a 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, before there was a 3rd and Pennsylvania Avenue, there were the Nacotchtank people. There were the Piscataway people. There were the Powhatan people here in this region, trading and living in peace with one another until people wearing collars like me decided to displace them.

And so we gather to remember that the land that we stand on is sacred land, and we acknowledge those who have come before us. We acknowledge the descendants of formerly indentured servants who then became slaves and traded with those Indigenous Americans on this land. And so you are standing on holy ground. Amen.

I want to give honor and gratitude to our Creator God and to each representative of our Creator who has gathered here today. I especially want to thank the representation of DC clergy who stand behind me and stand with me on this stage today. Showing you—come on and give them some love.

Standing with me today is Pastor Mark Thomas. Standing with me is Rabbi Esther Lederman. Standing with me—yeah, come on, give them love—standing with me today is Pastor Christopher Zacharias, Reverend Anthony Moore, Reverend Gayle Fisher-Stewart, Ms. Stephanie Thomas Gordon, Brother Sim J. Singh Attariwala, Reverend Terrance McKinley, and Sister Nada Zohdy. If I butchered anybody’s name, as we say in our tradition, please charge it to my head and not to my heart.

In my tradition there is a story in the book of Daniel in the third chapter, a story that you can find in the Hebrew Bible. It’s about three brothers named Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. And there was a king in the land in those days, and that king’s name was Nebuchadnezzar. He was a narcissistic king. He was a prideful king. He believed that neighbors should turn against neighbors instead of loving neighbors. He believed in the occupation of territory and not the blessing of sacred land. And he told everybody in the land that they had to bow down and worship him.

They erected a golden statue of him and put it on the National Mall—I mean, and put it in their land at that time. And those who were gathered there, those three sacred vessels of holiness, they refused to bow to that king. And I just believe that we have a few folk who are here today who are willing to stand with me and simply say we will not bow.

No, we won’t bow to any power that traffics in fear and division. We will not bow. We won’t bow to an empire or to a regime that believes in separating us by the documentation that we carry, or the faith that we witness to, or the people that we love, or the places that we come from, because our God knows the places that we are going. Our God is not concerned about where we came from. The God I serve takes us wherever we came from and tells us that you are the beloved of God.

I desire, I encourage you brothers and sisters, siblings, that are gathered here together, look to your right, look to your left. There is a simple principle that I learned from Bishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa, who stood for decades against apartheid. And he simply taught us to look each other in the eye with a principle that we call the Sawabona principle. The Sawabona principle means I see you. And right now, I encourage you, siblings that are gathered here, use your eyes. Use your eyes. Look to your left. You don’t have to say a word. Look to your right. Embrace that loved one that’s there with your eyes and show them even now as we gather here, I see you.

A people, a people who can see each other can remind each other of our collective sacredness. A people who can see each other cannot unsee it when our babies are being pulled out of cars on their way to be dropped off at school. A people who can see each other cannot unsee mass ICE agents pulling up in our city and cities around the country. A people who can see each other cannot unsee wickedness and spiritual wickedness in high places. But a people who see each other cannot unsee hypocrisy in the land. But a people who are determined to see each other will collectively say we will not.

And I can see those three boys standing there, standing in clear defiance to the edict of an unjust ruler. And I can still hear them saying with me, saying with you, saying with people gathered all across this country today, to say that because I see my neighbor, we will not bow. Because I love my neighbor, we will not bow. My neighbor, we will not. Because greater is the one that’s in me than the one that’s in the world.

I gotta say one name. That name is Bishop Kenneth Moles. None of you may know who he is. None of you may have never heard his name. But I was a boy, I was raised in the Baptist church. And every now and then we also whistled it down the street to Greater Mount Calvary Holy Church. And that means when folk fall out and folk, folk, folk, folk get happy and folk dance all over the church. And there was a man there named Bishop Kenneth Moles. And he simply said these words. He said, because our God is the greatest power, we will not be defeated.

And I’ll say it again. I know you may not have seen you in Sunday school or Sabbath school or at the mosque or at the temple, but our God is the greatest power. And any kind of religion that is bound up and caught up in fear, any kind of religion that is bound up and caught up in hate, any kind of religion that is not characterized by love, beloved of God, throw it away. Throw it away. Throw it away.

But I am believing that there are people rising up all over this nation. There are people rising up all over this land, this sacred land. I’m believing that there are people rising up all over this world who will not bow to hatred, who will not bow to corruption, who will not bow to hypocrisy, who will not bow to fear, who will not bow to suspicion, who will not bow to political violence, who will not bow to a kind of religion that wants to be close to power but won’t empower anybody else. We will not.

[Announcer] Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the junior senator from Connecticut who is leading the fight against Trump’s authoritarian power grab in the Senate and understands the only thing with the power to stop would-be despots from converting a democracy to an autocracy is mass mobilization by the people. Welcome Senator Chris Murphy.

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT)

You all know where you are, right? You are in the people’s capital. I want to bring you greetings from Connecticut, the state that invented the submarine, the helicopter, the hamburger, the wiffle ball, and PEZ. On our license plates, though, there’s a very simple statement. It says, Connecticut, the Constitution. We were the first state to adopt our own constitution. In my state, we couldn’t wait to be self-governed. We couldn’t wait to throw off the yoke of control and censorship from us. Before any other state, before our founding fathers, we wrote down in Connecticut the simple words, no kings.

And I’m here today to share with you some unsurprising news. We are not on the verge of an authoritarian takeover. We are in the middle of an authoritarian takeover. But Trump has not won. Our democracy is in peril, but it can be saved. But no one’s riding to our rescue. And I just want to be clear with you about that today. No one’s riding to our rescue. There aren’t establishment responsible Republicans that are riding to our rescue. The mainstream media isn’t riding to our rescue. There’s no oligarchs riding to our rescue. It is up to us to save us.

Now recently, when I gave this warning that we are in the middle of that totalitarian takeover, one of my colleagues said, well, you know, be careful. You don’t want to scare people, but you guys can handle the truth, right? You guys deserve the truth, right? The truth is that Donald Trump is the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America. The truth is that he is enacting a detailed, step-by-step plan to try to destroy all of the things that protect our democracy—free speech, fair elections, an independent press, the right to peacefully protest.

But the truth is also this: he has not won yet. The people still rule in this country. Today, and today all across America, in numbers that may eclipse any day of protest in our nation’s history, Americans are saying loudly and proudly that we are a free people. We are not a people that can be ruled. Our government is not for sale.

I want to be honest with you about what’s going on, and you know it. As we stand here today, the government is shut down, and shutdowns are painful. They hurt people. And frankly, that’s why there was not a single government shutdown when Joe Biden was president and Democrats were in charge of Congress. Because we acted like adults, we negotiated with Republicans, we found common ground, we kept the government open. But today, Trump is telling Republicans that they shouldn’t even show up in Washington, D.C. The House Republicans have been on an unplanned vacation from D.C. for five weeks.

And there’s a couple reasons for that. First, they’re trying to cover up for rich billionaire pedophiles. But second, because Trump does think that he’s a king, and he thinks that he can act more corruptly when the government is shut down. But he cannot. He doesn’t have new powers, extra powers in a shutdown. The president of the United States, during a shutdown or even when the government is open, does not have the power to send masked men into our cities and pull off the streets our peaceful neighbors and throw them into the back of vans and into prisons. He never has that power. Whether it’s a shutdown or not, the president of the United States does not have the power to use the FCC and the Department of Justice to censor our speech, to tell us that we cannot speak truth to power when we are protecting our democracy. He never has that power.

And let me just say that I’m very proud of my Democratic colleagues who have drawn a line in the sand. And let me just speak for myself for a moment about this shutdown. I will not vote for a budget that throws millions of people off their health care just to pay for a tax cut for billionaires and corporations. And I will not vote for a budget that doesn’t put some serious checks on President Trump’s destruction of our democracy. In fact, no Democrat has a moral obligation to vote for a budget that just pays the bills for Donald Trump’s political witch hunts. So this is a moment for the people to work with me in this Capitol to draw a moral line in the sands. And this is a moment for all of you to stand up and speak up.

Listen, President Trump thinks that he can bully us into silence. He thinks that he can intimidate us into sitting this fight out. But judging by the number of people here today, judging by the number of people standing up all across this country, he thinks he can silence us, he thinks he can bully us, but he cannot and he will not.

And the last thing I want to say to you is this. It’s a simple thing. I get it that when you wake up in the morning, like me, you are filled with anxiousness, with anger about what is happening in this country. But I also want you to feel something else. Because this experiment, 250 years in, this bold, revolutionary experiment of self-governance in a nation that is a melting pot, where we are stronger because our difference is from each other—that is a miracle that it has lasted for this long.

And every single one of us needs to understand that when we wake up every day, we have an obligation, a duty, a responsibility to fight hard to protect that bold experiment. So I wake up every day filled with that same anger and anxiety, but I feel lucky that I am on earth at a moment where I can stand up on my two feet and have something to say about maybe the most defining fight of our lifetime—to protect American democracy from ruin. I feel anger and anxiety, but I frankly feel joy that I have something to say and that I can tell my kids and my grandkids that when the moment came, I stood up to protect and save American democracy from ruin.

And so you got a lot of awesome speakers here today. I heard a rumor that a guy named Bernie Sanders is in the house. I understand the role that I play. I’m just the opening act for Bernie, all right? But listen, I’m just, I’m super proud of being here with you. I’m optimistic. I’m bullish about our ability to win this fight, and it’s because 400 years ago, in the small but mighty state of Connecticut, we wrote down on a piece of paper a really simple idea: In America, the people rule. In America, there are no kings. Thanks, Washington, D.C. I appreciate it. Go out there and fight for our country.

[Announcer] And now, let’s give a warm welcome to Mehdi Hassan, founder and CEO and editor-in-chief of the new media company Zateo.

Mehdi Hasan – Journalist and Editor-in-Chief of Zeteo

Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, friends, my name is Mehdi Hassan, I am a journalist, I am an immigrant, and I am a Muslim. I am everything Donald Trump loves. I am the Trump trifecta. I’m also a bit of a socialist. But shhh, don’t tell Stephen Miller, he alarms quite quickly.

Can I just say it is so heartwarming to see so many of you out here in DC today. DC make some noise! We need to make sure today that they hear us in the White House and in the Capitol. All week I’ve heard Speaker Mike Johnson and Republican members of Congress say this rally, the No Kings rally, is a hate rally. A hate rally. The people who can’t get through a single day without hating on late night comedians, and overweight soldiers, and Muslim politicians, and Mexican immigrants, and Palestinian refugees, and black women, and transgender kids, and peaceful protesters, and Mr. Fucking Potato Head, they are lecturing us on hate? Really?

I’m not here out of hate. I’m here out of love. I’m here because I love this country. I love America. I love the First Amendment. I love our democracy. I love our diversity. Yes, our diversity. And I am not willing to sit back and watch our glorious American multiracial, multicultural, democratic experiment, our constitutional republic, destroyed by the guy from Home Alone 2. Not going to do it. Because I did not inherit America. I did not inherit America. I chose America. I wasn’t born here. I immigrated here. And we immigrants, we love this country often more than the people who were born here. Because we chose to move here, live here, swear an oath to the constitution here. An oath that the guy down the street violates every morning and every night.

The great irony is, of course, that Donald Trump is the son of an immigrant, the grandson of an immigrant, and married to an immigrant. In fact, two of his three wives were immigrants, proving yet again that immigrants will do the jobs that even Americans are not willing to do. I immigrated here from the United Kingdom. You want to talk about no kings? The UK still has a king. King Charles III. But even he has less gold in his palace than Donald Trump has in the Oval Office right now. Even King Charles has more respect for democratic norms and traditions than the whiny authoritarian manchild trying to send troops into as many blue cities as he can.

This is a president who says he wants to be a dictator, but only for a day. Well, we are now 271 days into his wannabe dictatorship. He just went to see the Egyptian President Sisi, who is a military dictator, runs one of the most repressive regimes on earth. And he went there and he said, I want to praise your fantastic leadership and your low crime rates. This is who he loves. This is the autocratic leader he aspires to be. And of course, he was in Egypt hailing his Gaza peace plan, which is a ceasefire, yes, but not a peace plan.

Donald Trump, the man who uses Palestinian as a pejorative, as a slur, has no plan for Palestinian freedom, no plan for Palestinian statehood, no plan for justice for the Palestinians who have been massacred and starved and genocided and ethnically cleansed for the past two years, including the past night. Meanwhile, Israel for the past week has violated the ceasefire again and again, killing Palestinians with impunity. Yesterday they killed seven Palestinian children during the ceasefire. There is no peace in the Middle East because, as Dr. King said, peace is not just the absence of violence, it is the presence of justice.

So these are dark times. Genocide abroad, fascism at home, which is why it’s so crucial that we gather, we organize, we rally like this. We mobilize, we pluralize, we bring people into the tent, we register voters, we defend voters, we become voters if we’re not already. And you know, they say we don’t reach out to the other side, we don’t reach out to Conservatives or Republicans, that we’re in an echo chamber. Well let me say to every Republican and Conservative watching, aren’t you the ones who said no more big government, no tyranny in America? So if you believe that, what are you doing, defending masked federal agents in unmarked cars, bundling people off of the streets, including American citizens, and disappearing them? How are you okay with that?

And if you’re not okay with it, then come over to our side. The side of the Democrats. The small D Democrats, not the big D Democrats, not the Democratic Party. Those of us who are from all parties and none. But those of us who care about saving America so that we can get to our 250th birthday and still be free when we reach 250 years. Come over to our side, the side of no crowns, no thrones, no kings. The side of freedom, of liberty, of the constitution. The First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment, the Twenty-Second Amendment, which says two terms means two terms.

And if you’re not worried about Donald Trump trying to stay on for a third term, you should be. He’s literally selling merch. So I worry about free and fair elections in 2028. But then I say, why should I worry? I see all of you here today. What is there to worry about? We here today are not spectators. We are citizens. We are not bystanders. We are proud and patriotic Americans. And we Americans, we the people, will not allow our country to be taken over by demagogues and dictators. We will not stand for it.

So let me ask you this. I need to hear you. Are you willing? Are you willing? Up to this, are you willing to sit back and let Trump shred our freedoms? I can’t hear you DC, they need to hear you in the White House. Are you willing to let Trump shred our freedoms? Are you willing to sit back and bend the knee to fascists and white supremacists? Are you willing to be the Americans on whose watch democracy died? Good, because people power is our last line of defense.

Remember this, Donald Trump has never, ever, not in three elections, won a majority of the vote. Never. And I’ll say this to you. I’ll say this to you. Here’s the matter they are scared of. There are more of us than there are of them. We are the majority. Say it with me. We are the majority. They’re not loud enough today. Come on, louder. We are the majority. Yes, we are.

And we have no intention of losing our country, our democracy, our freedoms to that twice impeached convicted criminal and his gang of grifters. No way. We will out-organize them, we will out-vote them, we will outlast them. Because when I see you all out here today, when I see you all out here today in your thousands, in millions across the country, I have hope. I have faith that America can defeat this fascist threat, this authoritarian mania, this MAGA cult, and save our freedoms. And I also have faith and hope that one day, one day soon, the Palestinians will be free.

Thank you very much for your time. God bless you all.

[Announcer] Ladies and gentlemen, let’s give a warm Washington, D.C. welcome to Deirdre Schifeling, Chief Political and Advocacy Officer of the American Civil Liberties Union, who leads the ACLU’s policy, campaigns, and organizing work to fight for civil rights and liberties nationwide. And Sarah Parker, Executive Director of Voices of Florida.

Deirdre Schifeling – Chief Political & Advocacy Officer, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)

Hello, everyone. Hello, D.C. You look so beautiful. I wish you could see yourselves from here. You look amazing. You look powerful. I’m Deirdre Sheafley. I’m the Chief Political and Advocacy Officer for the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union, and a proud Washingtonian. I’m so thrilled to be here with you, my community, today, doing the most patriotic and American thing that we can do—peacefully, lawfully protesting the Trump administration’s abuses of power and exercising our First Amendment rights.

After all, our country has a 250-year-old history of disagreeing in public, and we are not about to stop now. For more than 100 years, the ACLU has defended our country’s freedom, especially the First Amendment freedom of speech. It’s not just our opinion that everyone is entitled to their beliefs without fear of punishment. It’s in our country’s constitution. It’s the cornerstone of our democracy. Our basic American freedoms are not something that any president can take away from us.

So why is Trump trying? What is he so afraid of? This moment is so much bigger than a political disagreement. It’s about standing up for our rights and the future of democracy. The democracy we want is a country of freedom, a country of equals, a country of due process and laws that apply to everyone. Not a country where masked ICE agents kidnap people out of their beds in the middle of the night, where they zip tie terrified children together. No. Not a country that tells schools and universities to teach ideology instead of facts, and certainly not a country that sends armed troops into our cities to scare us into silence.

I refuse to allow that version of our country to be silenced, and I know you do too. The courage that we are creating here today across the nation is contagious, it’s powerful, and it’s exactly what they’re afraid of. I want to tell you something I’ve learned. The best way to protect our freedom is to act free.

I was in my hometown of Buffalo, New York a couple months ago, and I saw a new billboard up from the Buffalo Public Library. It said, Free People Read Freely. Free People Read Freely. Four words. I was so struck by the simplicity and the power of that statement and by the fact that the public library felt the need to make it. Free people read freely. They think freely. They protest freely. They act free.

The best way to protect our freedom is to act free. Thank you for doing that today. Thank you for your courage. It’s powerful, and it’s contagious. We live in a democracy, and we are going to act free. And with that, I’ll turn it over to Sarah Parker.

Sarah Parker – Executive Director of Voices of Florida and 50501

My name is Sarah Parker, and I’m the executive director of Voices of Florida and a national coordinator with 5051. But most importantly, I am a southern black woman, a proud Floridian, and a mother. I was taught to speak up for what’s right, and to stand against injustice, to place my little hands over my heart, and to believe liberty and justice for all amidst something real. But what I once believed America was, is being crushed under the boot of this administration.

I should be at home with my children, raising them to believe in the promise of this country, not standing here demanding the right that should never have been up for debate. I am honored to be here today, but this is not what I dreamed of. I never dreamed I’d be standing on a stage like this while millions of people are forced to march and protest peacefully in the streets because we refuse to stand by while this country slips into the iron grip of authoritarianism.

And I ask this administration now: when we say, with liberty and justice for all, who is all to this administration? Because this administration has made it painfully clear. It sure as hell ain’t the people who need access to abortion care. It damn sure ain’t the people and their families being ripped apart by deportation and kidnapped in the dead of night. It’s not our LGBTQ communities and BIPOC communities being criminalized just for existing. And it damn sure ain’t the people marching for justice while the National Guard is unleashed on peaceful protesters in their own streets.

Contrary to popular belief, the fabric of this country wasn’t woven by oligarchs, corporations, or power-hungry politicians. It was stitched together by workers, by immigrants, by black and brown communities, by women, by queer folks, and by people who refuse to stay quiet in the face of injustice. This movement was made by the people. This movement, No Kings, was named by the people. This movement is the people. And newsflash to this administration and for the people who need it, this country was built on protests.

Some of the most important changes in our history happened because of everyday Americans dressed like us. And now, those in power are trying to unravel it, thread by thread, taking away rights, stripping away dignity, rewriting what freedom actually means. They’ve tried to silence us with fear. They’ve tried to gaslight us with lies. And politicians have stood in front of the cameras, smugly, I may say, peddling smear after smear. Because it’s easier for them to smear the American people than to recognize what they’re doing to this country. And where I come from, we call that cowardice.

We refuse. I refuse to let this become our reality. It is our duty. It is our right as Americans to dissent when democracy is under threat. Let me be clear. Democracy dies when we are silent. But democracy is reborn when we speak with courage. And authoritarianism cannot withstand truth. It crumbles under the power of love and dissent. And as leaders before me have said, courage is not the absence of fear. It is the choice to act despite of it.

And for what it’s worth, I am proud of each and every courageous leader that is taking the streets today. We are peaceful because we know that’s how real change is created. We are fighting because we love our communities and we love our country. We are using our voices because it is our right and an American right. And anyone who says otherwise is not only lying to the American people, they are lying to themselves, and I don’t know how they sleep at night.

And like we say in the South, a hit dog will holler, and I’m hearing a lot of hollering coming from the Capitol building. The American people are pissed. And I would like to say before I go, I want to thank every last one of you. I want to thank all the organizers of 5051. I want to thank Political Revolution, who’s a national partner. But I want to thank our children. I want to thank our teachers. I want to thank your hearts for doing this and being out here in the street when they tried to make you afraid.

The message today will be crystal clear, and they won’t be able to ignore it. There will be no kings in America, not today, not tomorrow, not ever. Thank you.

[Announcer] Please welcome to our stage Oliver Marino from Immigrant Legal Resource Center and member of El Colectivo de Familias Migrantes. and Afeni Evans, Community Organizer with the Fair Budget Coalition.

Oliver Merino – Immigrant rights advocate, Immigrant Legal Resource Center

Thank you. Good morning. Earlier this year, as the Trump administration began its anti-immigrant attacks from the White House, the Colectivo de Familias Migrantes, a group of families and organizers, came together to find community and ways to protect each other. We knew what was coming, and why we needed to fight back, organize, and take care of each other.

In the last few months, we have witnessed masked ICE agents, National Guard, and DC’s own Metropolitan Police Department work together to abduct our community members. People have been detained while going to work, at local parks, in front of schools. Hundreds of people have been separated from their families, their loved ones, and our community. This is still happening.

Just a few blocks from here, people have been racially profiled, handcuffed, and put in vehicles and taken—sometimes transferred to detention centers hundreds of miles away, in states like Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia, away from family and away from legal counsel. And to be clear, here in D.C., the anti-immigrant attacks have come not only from the White House, but also from our own mayor, Mayor Bowser.

Mayor Bowser tried to repeal D.C.’s Sanctuary Values Act, a local law that limits collaboration between MPD, the local police, and ICE. But while politicians have failed us, it’s been D.C. residents that have stepped up. We have seen our people go out and film acts of abuse in the streets, share know-your-rights information, provide mutual support to families of people detained, and organize to protect their immigrant neighbors.

This is the moment to show solidarity, to reject attempts to dehumanize and criminalize our immigrant community, to hold our elected officials accountable, and to force them to stand up to an authoritarian administration that does not care about due process and people’s constitutional rights. In order for the Trump administration to carry out its plans, it needs compliance from the public and from local governments. We must not comply.

We need to do all that’s in our power to protect immigrant families and our neighbors. We need us. We need you. We need each other to protect families, not feds. Thank you.

Afeni Evans – Community Organizer with the DC Fair Budget Coalition

Peace, y’all. My name is Afeni, and I’m a community organizer with the Fair Budget Coalition here in D.C. And this is my appeal.

In 1792, when the French monarchy was abolished, the people established a new, a new republic. And that one didn’t quite work out. It was a military dictatorship. Yikes. It was abolished in 1848, and a second republic was established. But that one didn’t quite fit. So the third republic was erected in 1870. That republic didn’t smell right, though. So they tried a fourth republic in 1946. And the republic that we are witnessing right now in France was established in 1958.

My fellow Americans, I am here to tell you that the social contract in this country has been broken. Decades of movement, work, progress, and struggle have been wiped out by Christian nationalists who seek dominion over every aspect of our lives. Long before ICE started terrorizing our streets, the police were gunning down black people in their homes, their cars, and in the streets in front of their communities. The construction of cop cities and the strengthening police state have threatened our urban centers for years. This current escalation in state violence is nothing more than an extension of the violence that marginalized communities have been bearing the brunt of.

This republic was sold as our American dream, home of the free, land of the brave. Yet it has reduced the outcome that we are currently experiencing—a system that edifies oligarchs and creates false monarchs. The society that we live in is what got us here. It is what brought us to this fever pitch. But we do not have to stay here.

Now, more than ever, we need to reimagine a society that holds all of our humanity to the highest priority. We need a humane economy. We need well-funded public education. We need affordable housing and health care that does not bankrupt families that are just trying to get by. We need strategic youth investment in music, arts, and recreation. Our children need access to clean water and fresh food.

In this moment, we need community. We need compassion. We need love and radical imagination. And most, most importantly, we need each other. Because the social contract has been broken. But we, the people, must revive it. We, the people, can be stewards for a land of the free. We, the people, can be brave and make this broken house into a home for all of us.

Because we are the source of power in this country. Our labor, our taxes, and our faith keep this system going. So we must have the revolutionary hope that collectively we, the powerful people, have the capacity to create something better. I’m here to tell you that we must be audacious in our pursuit of fulfilling that generational mandate. Because with public sentiment, nothing can fail. And without it, this system cannot succeed.

[Announcer] And now welcome to the stage, an American science educator, engineer, comedian, television presenter, inventor, keynote speaker, and author. He is a respected champion of scientific literacy, who has challenged opponents of evidence-based education and policy on climate change, evolution, and critical thinking. Please welcome Bill Nye, the Science Guy.

Bill Nye the Science Guy

We love that song. Hello, DC. Fellow citizens. It is wonderful to see so many of us out here today. We are here for the same reason our ancestors gathered here in 1776. We want our government to run without a king. Our government is based on ideas, embodied in the Constitution. Among other remarkable features, it guarantees our freedom to speak, as we’re doing here today. Rather than doing one monarch’s bidding, we have agreed to form a democracy, to work together, and to follow the laws that derive from it. No thrones. No crowns. No kings.

As many of you know, I am a native Washingtonian. I grew up here within the city boundaries. And when you grow up here, the affairs of the federal government are very much a part of your life. I remember well sitting on my father’s shoulders and waving to astronauts as we as a nation celebrated their accomplishments back in 1964. In 1964, that was the first year my parents could vote for president as citizens of the District of Columbia. We still do not have voting representation in the district. Someday, perhaps.

I remember well Martin Luther King’s dream and Resurrection City, the plywood structures on the National Mall erected to house protesters who came to town demanding equal rights and opportunities, barely a month after Dr. King had been assassinated. I remember well the Vietnam War. The mall was shoulder to shoulder, much as it is today. Traffic stopped citywide. The protest movement expanded. There were protests around the country, and the war was ended. We are protesting in the same fashion today. Only today, the stakes are higher. Rather than abandoning a war against an elusive, perhaps sometimes imaginary foe, we are confronting the possible end of our republic.

We are here to tell our lawmakers that what’s going on in our government is wrong. They must stop the abuses of this petulant president and his circle of sycophants. No thrones. No crowns. No kings. This president and his associates cannot tolerate dissent. To them, our free speech is frightening. They are arresting people and denying due process in courts. They tried to silence television hosts. They’re trying to fire our indicted civil servants, prosecutors, judges, even their own cabinet members.

But in this land, these sorts of actions are not new. In 1776, our ancestors had had enough. They declared independence from a king by means of a document stored safely right over there on Constitution Avenue in the National Archive. Although it was conceived 249 years ago, the Declaration of Independence describes a train of abuses connected with an absolute authority, a king with absolute power. No thrones, no crowns, no kings.

Their king had refused to honor the law. Their king had refused to let lawmakers be elected. The king had made court judges dependent on his will. They cited the king sending, quote, swarms of officers to harass our people. Their language referred to, quote, cruelty and faithlessness scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous of ages. Their king was trying to, quote, render the military independent and superior to civil power. Our founders even censured King George for cutting off trade with all parts of the world. Did these actions sound familiar? 249 years later—no crowns, no thrones, no king.

In short, the founders believed their king was, in their words, quote, totally unworthy to be the head of a civilized nation. No thrones. No crowns. No kings. Although the United States has been the world’s leader in science for decades, this president … has failed to accept scientific facts. Contrary to Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, they do not promote the progress of science. They suppress it to the detriment of our health, well-being, and international competitiveness. It is a formula for failure.

How did we get here? It hasn’t been one instance of abuse of the power of executive order by this president. It hasn’t been just one twist in a court ruling. Instead, it has been years in the making. Enabled by this president, a group of Confederates has worked together to undo many of our traditions and understandings of fairness and of citizens’ rights. And they’ve done this through an odd legal tactic—to overwhelm our court system with legal game after legal game, trying to hold or impound money secretly in order to let legal deadlines pass, to pretend that people they don’t know, from different backgrounds, are somehow not quite citizens and not worthy of respect under the law.

No thrones. No crowns. No kings. Let us now raise our voices. We are here demanding a return to the rule of law. Let the world know that we will suffer no king. We will put the United States to lead the world in fair governance. Together, no thrones. No crowns. No kings. Thank you all. Let’s change the world.

Announcer] Ladies and gentlemen, now please welcome Ai-jen Poo, a care advocate and organizer who serves as executive director of Caring Across Generations and president of the National Domestic Work Alliance and Care in Action. And Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

Ai-jen Poo – President of the National Domestic Workers Alliance

Hello, DC! Let me hear you say, no kings! I’m so proud to share the stage today with my brilliant friend and sister hero, Randi Weingarten. And I bring greetings from the great city of Chicago. And I bring love from the caregivers all over this country.

Caregivers and workers who guard the safety and well-being of our children and enable the dignity and agency of older people and disabled people in our lives all over this country. We are out marching in cities and towns all over this country today because we see what’s happening. Parents unable to afford life-saving medicine for their children. Caregivers losing their health care and their ability to take care of the people they love. Disabled people forced into institutions because their caregivers have been taken by ICE. Mothers violently torn from their children by armed, masked men with no due process.

This administration has broken the law, lied, stolen our care, and is attempting to steal our constitutional rights and freedoms. They think they will get away with it. They will not. There are no kings in America.

And you know what else I see? I see parents, caregivers, and teachers working together to make sure that immigrant children can go to school safely. I see unions and families organizing together and winning in states like Michigan, where 32,000 home care workers just won a union. And in New Mexico, where child care is now free for everyone who needs it.

It’s the bravery of everyday people coming together to protect each other, to push for a good life for our families in America. We can win! We are the caring majority, and we are greater than the cruelty of wannabe kings. So let’s remember the strength of our numbers today. Let’s remember that we are not alone. We are the caring majority. And let us continue to be brave.

Are you with me? Are you with me?

Randi Weingarten – President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)

Thank you, Washington, D.C. From up here, you cannot see the perimeter. There are so many people who want to fight for our democracy and say no kings. And what I’ve just been told, that in New York City, there are more people in Times Square than there are on New Year’s Eve.

I want to thank my colleague and friend and sister, Ai-jen, for all of her advocacy. And she knows, like I know, you cannot do any of the things that Ai-jen talked about if we do not have a democracy. And today, we are saying, we are fighting for our democracy. We in the labor movement are fighting for a democracy and a voice in it so we can secure a better life for all working people. All of God’s children. Better wages, affordable health care and child care, good schools for children, and a secure retirement. Tell me, what is radical about all of that?

But today, I speak not only as the proud leader of a 1.8 million member union of people who make a difference in the lives of others, but I speak as a teacher, a high school social studies teacher. Yes, let’s hear it for the teachers of America. A teacher who taught students about the Constitution and its underlying principle, we the people. We the people are a country that is governed by the rule of law, not the rule of one man. We are governed by fairness, not fear or favor.

Now this idea, as you’ve heard before—so you can go and say to your kids right now, this is your homework for the weekend, okay?—this idea has been a constant for 249 years, since the Declaration of Independence, and the notion made famous by the Gettysburg Address of a government by, for, and of the people. Say it again: by, for, and of the people.

Now, we know the founders were not perfect. But they had one abiding principle, and that is and was that we as a nation should never, ever again be ruled by a tyrant or a king. That was as true today as it was back then. And that is why, that is why millions of people today from all walks of life are turning out at these thousands of events. Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Black, Brown, White, this 68-year-old Jewish baby boomer, Muslim small business owners, Christian Gen Z-ers—this is, as Aung San Suu Kyi said, we are the majority of America.

And what do we want? What do we want? We want the promise of America for everyone. We want a voice in our future. We are standing up in peaceful, patriotic protest, just like our founders called out. No thrones, no crowns, no kings. We are standing up because we don’t want our streets militarized. We don’t want our neighbors disappeared by masked agents. We don’t want our colleges forced to sign loyalty oaths. We don’t want—wait, what?—we don’t want public officials arrested on trumped up political charges.

And, this is a little different, we want our federal government to fix the healthcare crisis that was created by the big ugly bill Republicans passed in July. We want a president who will keep health care premiums down, bring down the cost of groceries and housing, strengthen public schools, make college affordable, and embrace workers’ rights. Again, what is radical about any of that? Exactly.

We want the president to spend his time solving our country’s problems, not settling scores with political opponents. We want a future that is based on fairness and justice and the rule of law, not chaos, corruption, or cruelty. So, I’m going to end with a couple of labor slogans here. Because my friends, we are in an existential fight. And right now, we all have to organize and be stronger and bolder because no one is going to save us but ourselves.

We’ve got a lot of sayings in labor, but the first one is, when we fight, we fight. When we fight, we win. When we fight, we win. And the second is the people united will never be defeated. The people united will never be defeated. The people united will never be defeated or divided. Either one is fine. So, are we united tonight? Will we fight for our democracy?

[Announcer] Now, please welcome the co-founder of the Black Votes Matter Fund, and one of the leading voices of the Black Votes, Cliff Albright. He is joined by 10th grader Zion, a youth student advocate from the Trigger Project.

Zion Stewart

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Zion Stewart, and I’m from Dabney Street, Southeast, better known as Trauma City. I grew up around a lot of trauma and violence, like many kids in my neighborhood. I got connected to the Sugar Project through one of my mentors. Going through Sugar University, I felt something I never felt before—a safe space. People who believed in me and a chance to learn the real causes and the disease of gun violence.

More police doesn’t fix what’s really going on. It just adds more confusion and chaos. It doesn’t heal our pain. It doesn’t give us opportunities or make us feel safe in our neighborhoods. Saying fuck Trump or fuck ICE will be what he expects from me, but that’s not what we need. What we need is prevention, support, and spaces where black youth can thrive.

If every home had the support it needed, if every community member was emotionally aware and mentally healthy, if schools didn’t push us towards the prison pipeline, and if the city investigated me before the first time I was profiled, we wouldn’t be here. You are the solution, not the problem. We deserve to be understood, not blamed or preyed upon. Free DC, we are prevention. Thank you.

Cliff Albright – Co-founder of Black Voters Matter

Last time I was here, speaking at a rally like this, was 2021, for the Freedom Rides, where Black Voters Matter and dozens of other organizations organized for voting rights legislation, like the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancing Act, and the For the People Act. And HR 51, D.C. Statehood!

When I say D.C., you say Statehood. D.C.! Statehood! We organized for those voting rights because we knew that we’d be in a moment like this. A moment where we have a wannabe dictator and a do-nothing Congress trying to take away our voting rights. Trying to cancel elections and purge voters from the rolls. We knew it was coming.

Just this week the Supreme Court heard a case that could put the final death blow to the Voting Rights Act. It could eliminate black representation for black communities, and it can create at least 19 seats that are currently protected by the Voting Rights Act that would be eliminated by many of these red states. And this is happening at a time when we are seeing mid-decade redistricting in places like Texas and Missouri, because we have somebody who wants to be a king.

We have somebody who, just like he said to Georgia, “Go find me 11,700 votes,” he’s trying to tell these states, “Go find me 10 extra congressional seats or 15 seats or 20 seats.” And this could create a permanent one-party rule, at the expense of black voters in black communities. But like so many other issues that are rooted in anti-blackness, that sickness won’t just stay within a black community—it affects this entire country.

And so we join you in saying, no kings. But we gotta go beyond no kings, because the last time that call was made in 1776, one fourth of this country’s population was enslaved. And so we’ve got to go beyond no kings. We’ve got to recognize that they have used divide and conquer ever since that time in 76—or ever since 1619—to keep us divided, to divide those who were enslaved from those who were poor whites, to divide us from those Indigenous brothers and sisters. They’ve been using that divide and conquer tactic, and they’re still using it today to keep us divided, all of our communities.

But I’ve got some good news for you. Because what I know is this: if divide and conquer is one of the oldest tricks in the books, then by definition one of the most revolutionary acts of resistance is simply to be united. For us to stand together, to stand together, to sing together, to laugh together, to fight together.

Power to the people, yes, because what I also know is this: their hate cannot beat our love. And when I talk about our love, I’m not talking about a Valentine’s Day kind of love. I’m talking about a radical love. I’m talking about a—you might have to flip over the money-changing tables—I’m talking about a love that is merged with power because those two things are not opposite; they go together.

As Dr. King told us, power without love is reckless and abusive, but love without power is sentimental and anemic. That’s what I’m talking about. He went on to say that power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. And justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. That’s what we need.

And when we have that kind of love and power, when we walk in that kind of love and power that sees all of our communities—from Vermont all the way to New York, from L.A. all the way over to D.C., especially Southeast D.C.—when we walk in that kind of love and power, there ain’t nothing that a wannabe small, petty dictator can do to stop us. Because when we walk in that kind of love and power, there’s nothing that we can’t do.

But we’ve got to believe we’ve got that power. Do y’all believe? Do you believe? Let me hear you say, I believe. Let me hear you say it with all your heart from the depths of your soul, say I believe. Let me see you put a fist up and say it so loud that the wannabe small man in the White House can hear you—say I believe.

And when we believe that, we will truly build the society that we want, and that society will have no kings. Thank y’all.

[Announcer] Now, please welcome Jay Brown, Chief of Staff for the Human Rights Campaign, and Shawn Skelly, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Readiness in the Biden administration and co-founder of OUT in National Security.

Jay Brown – Chief of Staff, Human Rights Campaign (HRC)

Hello, DC! My name is Jay Brown, and I’m with the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ civil rights organization in the country. And I’m here today as a proud transgender American. I’m here to say this is my country, too.

You know, like so many of you, I came here today with my family and friends. My twin sister is somewhere out there in that crowd of people. And growing up, we—you know—she fit the mold of what people expected. You could say I broke the mold. But our parents loved us just the same. You know, we didn’t know anybody transgender. We didn’t even know the word. But they gave us the love and the support that we needed to thrive, and now I’m a dad with an amazing family of my own. And I gotta tell you, that’s what freedom looks like—the freedom to live, and to be, and to raise our families as we see fit.

But this president, he has a darker vision for America. One where our families are told how to parent their children. Where doctors are forced to forego their oaths to do no harm. Where the government is ripping families apart and hurting our people. They’re cutting billions of dollars from HIV prevention and treatment. They’re banning our books. They’re firing teachers who use a student’s nickname. And they’re firing gay workers who put a pride flag on their desk.

But we’re all here because we believe in a better America. We believe in a country where kids can get equality and be free from bullying. Where love is love. Where freedom is afforded to all and not reserved for the wealthy few. That is America at its greatest. That is our America.

And on behalf of HRC’s 3.6 million members and supporters, I’m here to say that America does not and will not ever have a king. The truth is, no one rally is going to save us. No court ruling, no single election will save us. We have to save ourselves. We have to build workplaces that are safe, classrooms that are welcoming, communities where we see each other not as our enemies, but as our neighbors.

And we must always resist the temptation to believe only in the worst of this country. That’s what he wants. He wants us to be defeated. Are we going to be defeated? No. He wants us to be silent. Are we going to be silent? He wants us to be scared. Are we scared?

You know, we have the power to build a better tomorrow. LGBTQ plus people, we live in every zip code and are from every background. We were born here and we immigrated here. We come from red families and from blue families. And we are here to say that this is our America too.

No one knows that better. No one knows that better than my friend and a tireless public servant who’s on stage with me today. A true patriot who knows the cost of freedom. I’m proud to pass the mic to former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Readiness and our HRC board member, Shawn Skelly.

Shawn Skelly – Retired U.S. Navy Commander & former Assistant Secretary of Defense; Board member, Human Rights Campaign

Good afternoon, D.C. As Jay said, I’m Shawn Skelly, a retired Navy officer, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, and I serve on the board of the Human Rights Campaign. I’m an out, proud trans woman who loves our country, who’s put my life on the line for our country and our rights, and I will fight for it now, using all the rights that the Constitution gives us, and I swore an oath to defend.

I was proud to recently serve alongside thousands of transgender service members who have served with honor, skill, and courage. They have protected us while their own Commander-in-Chief and Secretary of Defense have vilified them and denied their right to exist. Anyone who serves in uniform deserves so much better than what this tainted chain of command has to offer.

This administration targets these brave Americans because of its wanton campaign to drive me and all of my transgender brothers and sisters out of our country, out of our society, out of the protection of our laws, and into some dark, dangerous corner that they are inventing.

This wannabe autocrat can’t allow transgender Americans to serve honorably and successfully in our military, which is the highest regarded institution in America, when they have chosen all transgender Americans—already some of the most at-risk and vulnerable people in this country—to be their autocratic other. The people will be feared, scorned, and blamed because of their shameless lies, hateful lies that they tell about the danger that trans people supposedly bring to our society and somehow upset the utopia that the dear leader promised us is around every corner.

The American people respect those who put on their uniform, who protect them, and serve at the risk of their lives for people we don’t even know. We’re here today because generations of Americans have bet their lives and their families’ future on the promise of a more perfect union.

The oath I took ten times over 35 years of service in uniform and as a civilian means to every person who ever took it in good faith. And I’m going to quote the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley: We don’t take an oath to a king or a queen or to a tyrant or dictator. We don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator or to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution. And we take an oath to the idea that it’s America and we’re willing to die to protect it.

To put it simply, no kings. We demand justice for our transgender service members. We demand justice and civil rights for every transgender American. We demand justice and democracy for every single American. No kings! Thank you.

[Announcer] And now, please welcome to the stage Nee Nee Taylor, Executive Director of Harriet’s Wildest Dream, and Kea Chatterjee, Executive Director of Free DC.

Nee Nee Taylor – Executive Director of Harriet’s Wildest Dreams

I hear y’all say, welcome to D.C. I’m Nee Nee Taylor, I’m the co-founder and executive director of Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, named after our ancestor, Harriet Tubman. I am also the co-founder of Free D.C. I was born and raised right here in Southeast Washington, D.C.

As many of you know, we are in a state of grief for the loss of our freedom fighter, Assata Shakur. We honor her life, her courage, and her teaching. She told us that we need a revolution of the mind and a revolution of the heart. These words still lead me. Because this work begins in how we show up for one another, how we care for one another, and how we show up for one another.

Washington, D.C. is a Black home. We come here to Washington, D.C.—you came here to Washington, D.C.—that’s what you stepping in for. Home built by Black hands, held together by Black love, guarded by generations who refuse to leave. The people of D.C. have been teaching, protecting, and fighting for this city long before most of you stopped paying attention.

We have been living and breathing the consequences of racist policies, displacement, and over-policing since post–Civil War. We have been demanding and calling for D.C. to become a state. We need D.C. statehood now! D.C. statehood now! D.C. statehood now!

Our freedom watchers were up at the D.C. courts until the cell block closed, two o’clock in the morning. They were watching hearing after hearing after hearing of our neighbors being kidnapped over the weekend. We also have 300,000 Black women who have been fired in the last few months. Most of those are federal workers right here in the district. And we just listened to lawyers arguing at the Supreme Court that fixing the system to make it fair for Black people somehow harms white people. This is what we’re up against.

Black people’s freedom is being threatened by a felon democracy and punched by white fragile supremacy. Here in D.C., we have been organizing, protecting, and building long before cameras arrived. If you want to help, listen to those who have been doing this work before Trump came into office—before all of this came to play. Listen to the ones who’ve been on the ground ever since 400 years ago.

I see all of you right here, and y’all see me—all the applauses, and yet, when you are called to meet, when I call you to meet impacted Black people, where will you be? Ask yourself—where will you be? When our movements need funding, where will you be? When you are invited to teach, to share your skills, to support, strategize, and to defend Black people in public—where will you be? Think about what you do when you are called for it.

Community is responsibility, structure, and work. It’s both a noun and a verb. It’s the people, and it’s the people in motion. It’s how we build safety for each other. It’s how we keep us safe. Who keep us safe? We keep us safe. Who keep us safe? We keep us safe.

Black people have been carrying the moral weight of this world for generations. We have stood in the gap for every fight against oppression from Palestine to right here in D.C. because we believe everyone deserves to be free. We are not free until all of us are free.

And I’m gonna leave you with what a sister called me once again—”weapons of mass destruction and weapons of mass love.” She said it’s not enough to change the system, we must change ourselves. That kind of change requires that we hold the line for one another, protect Black people in public and in private. I see you, I see your faces, just like you see mine.

When I see you tomorrow, when I see you next month, when more of our rights are being stripped, and when more of our Black bodies are put in cages, don’t watch from the shadows. I charge you. I charge you to be on the front lines. I charge you to fight.

And we will not end because the day won’t end with this stage—when the stage comes down and the cameras leave. The fight for our collective liberation is not contained within the presiding eye of media attention today. So again, ask yourself, where will you be?

My charge is: you don’t comply. I want you to say no to the kings. We call them oppressors. And I want you to help us to free the land, to free the people, and free us all, and free D.C. Free D.C.! Free D.C.! Free D.C.! Free D.C.!

Keya Chatterjee – Co-founder of the Free DC movement and former head of US Climate Action Network

All right, my name is Keya Chatterjee. Thank you so much, Nee Nee. I am, with Nee Nee, one of the co-founders of Free D.C. and the executive director of Free D.C. And we are the movement to protect D.C. home rule and win lasting dignity for the 700,000 people of D.C.

Let me hear you, D.C.! Who out here is here today for a Free D.C.?

So, D.C. needs to be free because what we are doing here today, right now, would not be possible otherwise. This president wants to silence dissent. He wants to silence protest. He wants to do that everywhere—and we saw him try to do that this week. President Trump and his allies lie about this very event that we are attending right now. He tried to get us all to stay away from here, but did we do that?

Our right to protest is important everywhere, really it is, but there is nowhere that it is more important than here in the capital of the country. We know what authoritarian rulers do. Authoritarians try to prevent dissent in the capital. They want to control capitals. They have tried to control capitals through the history of time and space—because controlling a capital is a way to control a nation and a way to prevent the transfer of power.

This president is no different from those before him, and we saw that on January 6th, right? We saw that. And this president started attacking D.C. again the day he took office again. Today we are in our third month of military occupation by armed forces from multiple other states in D.C. There are gangs of federal agents who are attacking our communities.

And we’ve heard from so many people today that they’ve attacked our unhoused neighbors. They’ve attacked our immigrant neighbors. They’ve attacked Black and brown neighbors. They’ve attacked our cultural institutions. They’ve attacked thousands of people who serve as federal workers. They’ve tried to take over our local police department. They put a disgraced Fox News host in charge of our local prosecutions. And on top of that, their allies in Congress are trying to pass dozens of bills—more than two dozen budget riders—that take away basic rights from the people who live in the capital of this country.

This president is trying to instill fear among the people here. Exactly. Exactly. We won’t let him. We know better than that. We know what to do, right? We know what to do. The people of D.C. are joyful. If you could see what I see right now, you would see an amazing crowd all the way back to the White House—full of joy.

The people of D.C. are powerful. We are going to use that power. We have what it takes here in D.C. not just to resist this tyrant, but to actually take him out of power and win. And I want to say—I’m not just talking about voting. I’m not just talking about attending rallies. I’m talking about organizing now like our lives depend on it.

When we act collectively—just, I mean, if you could see the number of people here, plus think of all the people in all the other cities—when we act collectively, we have so much more power than we realize. We have way more power than they do.

We have power as workers. Who here is in a union? If you’re not in a union, get in a union. Talk to your coworkers about collective action. We have power as consumers. We can choose to either fuel the companies that are profiting off our oppression, or we can starve those companies. We have power as jurors. We have seen that these indictments they are trying to get—they are failing, right? Our people understand the assignment. We see that this administration’s charges are unjust.

We have power as taxpayers. We are all right now collectively funding this regime, and we have the power to slow that down, right? We know what’s on our license plates here in D.C.—what’s it say? That’s right.

And we have power as community members. We can engage in our sacred duty to protect one another, to support one another in solidarity, and to reject this cruelty agenda that we’re seeing unfold.

And if those are things that you want to be a part of, and you aren’t already, come find the Free D.C. Action Tents—they’re over to the right. I know it’s so crowded, you can’t even see where I’m waving here—but they’re in John Marshall Park, over to the right. And you can join the effort and the power it takes to win.

We’re also at FreeDCProject.org. What we have seen over the last 10 months is that every single time they attack us, if we respond, we grow stronger. Every time they attack us, we grow more united, we grow our people, and we grow our resolve—and we learn what it takes to take them down.

We’re building unity. We’re building power. And we are going to demand full power over our local money, our D.C. National Guard, our local laws—and ultimately, yes, we will be admitted as the 51st state of the United States of America.

It is not going to be Canada. It’s not going to be England. It’s going to be D.C. And our entire national democracy will always be at risk until that happens—until we actually protect the capital of this country.

That means that everyone across this country needs a Free D.C.—from Ward 1 to Ward 8, from Los Angeles to Chicago, from Memphis to Portland. We are more united now than we have ever been. We are united against deploying the military against our people. We are united against attacks on our democracy. And we are united against this agenda of cruelty that we are seeing unfold before our eyes.

Together, we—the people here today, and all our friends we organize—are going to bring it to an end. Free D.C.!

[Announcer] Washington, D.C., please welcome to the stage Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin, co-founders of Indivisible.

Leah Greenberg – Co-founder and Co-Executive Director of Indivisible

Hi everyone, it’s great to be here with you today. I’m Leah.

[Ezra Levin] Hey, I’m Leah’s husband.

[Leah Greenberg] And we are the co-founders of Indivisible. We support a movement of thousands of local Indivisible groups organizing in every state of the country. These are regular people who understand that saving our democracy is too important to be left to the politicians, and it’s going to take all of us.

Now I’ve got a question for you. How many kings do we have in America?

We are in the middle of a sprint by Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, their MAGA cronies, to consolidate power and bully American society into submission. They have come for corporations and millionaires, for law firms and universities, for media and civil society. They are ripping families apart, and they are shredding our Constitution while they line their pockets in the biggest heist of all time.

And the way they do it is they go on the attack. They make demands. They claim powers they don’t have. They bully, and they threaten to retaliate, and they see if anyone will push back. And if nobody pushes back, they win. And then they go on to the next attack. They are doing everything they can to convince us that they are all powerful, that they are inevitable, that they will win.

And I need you to hear me. It’s a lie. It’s always been a lie. And the greatest danger we face is not Trump. It is how we, as a society, respond to this bullying, to this chilling effect. If we preemptively obey, if we shrink back, if we make ourselves small, if we do what they want in advance—then they win.

Now we saw them try this play this week. Mike Johnson, Stephen Miller, their cronies on Fox News. They have spent the last week on the attack against No Kings, smearing all of us—smearing all of us as anti-American. They tried to scare us out of gathering here today.

And I’ve got a question for you. Are we afraid? Did they scare us off? Are we going to back down?

That’s right, because what we are doing here today is as American as apple pie. We are standing up for our rights. We are standing up for our freedom. We are here because we understand that when a tyrant threatens your right to free speech, you call his bluff and you stand up. In every action and every day, we defy the regime.

So I’ve got something to say to Mike Johnson, Speaker Mike Johnson, who spent all week smearing regular Americans. There are nearly a dozen protests happening across your district today. And since you’ve not been doing your job for over a month now, I bet you’ve got time to stop by.

Ezra Levin, Co-founder and Co-Executive Director of Indivisible

Leah Greenberg, everybody. My God. Look, Leah is my spouse. She’s my partner. She’s the co-executive director of Indivisible. She’s the real strategic brains behind Indivisible. We are indebted to her for her strategic vision. I’m biased, but I think we all agree.

Look, I’m just here to tell a story. And I think it’s important for us to tell the story of these First Amendment rights that Leah is talking about. And this story I want to tell is about the first No Kings Day.

Who here was at the first No Kings Day? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. No, no. I don’t think y’all were there. This was a quarter of a millennia ago. This was 250 years ago—1775. They called it the Continental Congress. They didn’t have the branding we did. But it was the first No Kings Day protest.

What they did—they brought themselves together in opposition to this would-be monarchical ruler who was steamrolling the American public. He was occupying and invading American cities. He was terrorizing American communities. He was picking out his favorites and persecuting his political enemies. He didn’t believe in democracy at all.

Can you imagine? Can you imagine such a ruler over America? It was bleak. It was bleak. So what did our fellow Americans do? They put together a No Kings rally to give us a Constitution. That’s what they did. That’s our history. Whose history? Whose history? Ours! Whose history? Ours!

Look, this is a big experiment in self-government—a government of, by, and for the people. Nobody here is under the illusion that this was a perfect union. That’s not what we created. This was a compromise—a compromise of rich men, of white men, of slave-holding men. But this imperfect union that they put together, it also gave us some fundamental rights to make it more perfect.

Who has been using those rights? The abolitionists. The suffragists. The heroes of the Civil Rights Movement. The leaders at Stonewall. The leaders in the Dreamer Movement. And all of us here. All of us here. Whose rights? Our rights. Whose rights? Our rights.

Ben Franklin—that lovely Benny—what did he say? Benny told us all, when asked what they had created, he said, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Who’s going to keep this? Who’s keeping this republic? That’s right. We love this country enough to demand more of it.

You know who doesn’t want us to make any demands? This regime. The tech fascists, the billionaire backers—they want us lazy and pliant and docile. They want us alone and afraid and powerless.

Are we powerless? No! Are we alone? No! Damn right we’re not. As I stand here today, Elon Musk—remember that guy?—he’s out of the White House. Jimmy Kimmel, back on air. And for the last week, this regime has been quaking in its jackboots at the thought of 200,000 people in D.C., outside the Capitol, where Mike Johnson isn’t working and hasn’t been for the last month.

You know what it turns out? You know what it turns out? It turns out that we’re braver than the billionaires. Who’s braver than the billionaires? We are! Who’s braver than the billionaires? We are!

This is my favorite part, folks. I get to name some names. Jeff Bezos—who took a respected pro-democracy institution that had the slogan “Democracy dies in darkness,” and he turned the slogan into corruption, capitulation, cowardice, shame.

Mark Benioff—y’all see this guy in the news? The head of Salesforce who’s welcoming troops into San Francisco. This guy, this guy who is begging, begging to give artificial intelligence to ICE to triple their size. Shame.

Daniel Ek—you don’t know who Daniel Ek is, do you? The CEO of Spotify, which right now is robbing from musicians and running ads to recruit for a secret police force that terrorizes our communities.

Mark Zuckerberg. End of story. Need I say more?

But we’re not just booing, y’all. We’re not just booing. We’re organizing. This is a movement of everyone in this country who is taking a side. We are taking a side. It is a time to choose that side.

Are you on the side of the MAGA forces, of the Nazis, of the billionaires? Hell no. So I ask businesses, universities, churches—which side are you on? We’re on the people’s side. Which side?

Look, nobody on this stage has told you there’s no need to have fear. We see what this regime is doing. We see them rattling their sabers. We see them sending troops into communities. We see them zip-tying children and dragging them out of apartments. We see this.

This movement—the 200,000 of us here—this movement is not a fearless movement. It’s better than that. It’s a brave movement. The other side wants to suppress dissent, chill free speech, and come after their opponents.

We’re not here because we’re fearless. We’re here because we’re better than fear. We’re braver than billionaires, and we’re bigger than ever before. We’re going to win this, y’all, because we believe, as all Americans believe, we don’t do kings here.

How many kings? None. How many kings? None.

Now, we had a little bit of extra time in the program, and a guy in Vermont with some ideas about this wanted to come up.

[Announcer] Washington, D.C. Are you ready? Here we go. Please welcome the senior senator from the great state of Vermont, the Honorable Bernie Sanders.

Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT)

Thank you, Washington. Thank you, Indivisible. Thank you to the millions of Americans. From our smallest towns to our largest cities, in every state in our country who are gathering today at thousands of rallies. Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the House, called these rallies, hate America events. Why does he have it wrong? Millions of Americans are coming out today not because they hate America. We’re here because we love America. We’re here because we’re going to do everything we can to honor the sacrifices of millions of men and women who over the last 250 years fought and sometimes died to defend our democracy and our freedoms.

In 1776, with extraordinary courage, The founders of our country announced to the world that they would no longer be ruled by the King of England, a king who had absolute power over their lives. They demanded freedom. And to bring that about, They fought a bloody war against the British Empire and the most powerful military in the world. Tens of thousands of Americans died in that eight-year war, but our forefathers fought on and they won. And in 1789, after winning that war, they did something extraordinary. They established the first democratic form of government in modern history. They said loudly and boldly to the entire world, No more kings. In America, they said, we the people will rule. And today. And today. Today, in the year 2025, in this dangerous moment in American history, our message is exactly the same. No, President Trump, we don’t want you or any other king to rule us. Thank you very much, but we will maintain our democratic form of society. We will not move toward authoritarianism in America. We, the people, will rule.

When he was sworn in as the nation’s first president, George Washington called this attempt at self-government, quote, an experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people, end quote. My fellow Americans, in an unprecedented way, that experiment is now in danger. It is in danger when we have a president who wants more and more power in his own hands and in the hands of his fellow oligarchs. It is in danger when we have a president who claims that peaceful protests in Portland, Oregon or Chicago, Illinois is an insurrection and calls in the U.S. military. And then threatens to arrest the mayors and governors who resist them. It is in danger when we have masked agents working for ICE breaking down doors, throwing people into vans without due process, and taking them to God knows where. It is in danger when we have a president who sues and intimidates the media, who wants no criticism of him and his policies, and who undermines the First Amendment of our Constitution, the very foundation of American democracy.

Our country is in danger when we have a president who threatens to arrest or imprison political opponents who stand against him, including the Attorney General of New York State, a sitting U.S. Senator, and the Governor of California. It is in danger when we have a president who undermines freedom of thought and dissent at our colleges and universities. and who attacks law firms that oppose him in court. It is in danger when we have a president who threatens to impeach judges who rule against him. It is in danger when we have a president who ignores Congress, refuses to spend money that Congress appropriates, and takes away money from states who voted against him. It is in danger when we have a president who demands we redraw congressional maps to ensure that his chosen candidates win future elections. It is in danger when we have a president who illegally fires tens of thousands of federal employees right here in Washington, D.C. and throughout our country and rips up union contracts. Workers have fought for and won.

It is in danger when we have a president who grossly violates the Constitution by accepting gifts from foreign leaders, including a $400 million plane from the royal family of Qatar, and then allows that family to build an Air Force facility in Idaho. Let us be clear. This moment is not just about one man’s greed, one man’s corruption, or one man’s contempt for the Constitution. This is about a handful of the wealthiest people on earth who, in their insatiable greed, have hijacked our economy and our political system in order to enrich themselves at the expense of working families throughout this country. Yes, yeah, I am talking about Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and the other multi-billionaires. who was sitting right behind Trump when he was inaugurated. Remember that? The very same billionaires who funded his campaign, who have bestowed gifts upon him, and who have seen huge increases in their wealth and power since Trump took office. Yeah.

Yes, I am talking about the insanity of one person, Mr. Musk, owning more wealth than the bottom 52% of American households. I’m talking about the incredible injustice of the top 1% in America now owning more wealth than the bottom 93%. I’m talking about the richest people in America becoming much, much richer while 60% of our people live paycheck to paycheck struggling every day to pay their rent and mortgages, pay for child care and education, pay for their health care and prescription drugs, afford decent quality food for their kids, and maybe, just maybe, put aside a few bucks for their retirements. I am talking about our nation. the richest country in the history of the world, having the highest rate of childhood and senior poverty of almost any major country on earth. I am talking about our great nation, having 85 million Americans uninsured or underinsured. and 800,000 people who are homeless, including people a few blocks from here.

All the while, while Mr. Musk is on his way to becoming a trillionaire, I am talking about the incredible danger of the richest people in this country pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into artificial intelligence and robotics, which in the next decade will decimate tens of millions of jobs for the American working class. I’m talking about a billionaire class who believe that they have the divine right to rule and who not only want massive tax breaks for themselves, but who reject any form of accountability or checks on their power. My fellow Americans, we rejected the divine right of kings in the 1770s. We will not accept the divine right of oligarchs today.

And now let’s take a look, a brief look, at where we are today, where we are today on the 18th day of a government shutdown which is depriving millions of federal employees of the paychecks they desperately need and deserve. Let me cut to the chase and tell you exactly what this shutdown is all about. As a result of Trump’s big beautiful, disgraceful bill, which made massive cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. Fifteen million, fifteen million low-income and working-class Americans are going to lose the health care they desperately need to stay alive. My friends, studies suggest that of the 15 million people off of the health care they presently have, 50,000 of them will die unnecessarily every single year. 50,000 Americans will die unnecessarily every single year.

But that’s not all. As a result of that same terrible piece of legislation, over 20 million Americans are going to see on average a doubling of their health insurance premiums through the Affordable Care Act. In my state of Vermont just the other day, people received notices from insurance companies that their health care premiums in some cases would triple or quadruple. And that is going on all over the country. At a time when we already pay by far the highest prices in the world for health care, millions of Americans are going to see outrageous increases in their health care premiums, which they cannot afford. Why is that happening? Why are the Republicans making a broken healthcare system, a dysfunctional healthcare system, even worse? Why are they bringing our healthcare system to the verge of collapse? We all know the answer. We all know the answer. It was to give a trillion dollars in tax breaks to Mr. Musk, Mr. Bezos, Mr. Ellison, and the rest of the 1%. One trillion dollars in cuts to Medicaid and the ACA, a trillion dollars in tax breaks for the 1%. That, my fellow Americans, is what this shutdown is all about.

And let me be as clear as I can be. No, I will not vote for a budget that throws 15 million Americans off their health care. No, I will not vote for a budget that doubles premiums for 20 million Americans. No, I will not vote for a budget that forces nursing homes, rural hospitals, community health centers to lay off staff and close their doors throughout this country. All to give huge tax breaks to the billionaire class. So today, right now, I say to my Republican colleagues, come back from your Monday vacation. Start negotiating and do not allow the American healthcare system to be destroyed. End this shutdown.

My fellow Americans, we are the greatest country. in the history of the world. And when we stand together and don’t allow demagogues to divide, there is nothing that we cannot accomplish. Yes, we can create a vibrant democracy by ending Citizens United and not allowing billionaires to buy elections. Yes, we can join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee health care to every man, woman, and child as a human right. Yes, we can build millions of units of low-income and affordable housing and allow our younger generation to enjoy the American dream and own a home of their own. Yes, we can make public colleges and universities tuition-free. and have the best child care and public school system in the entire world. Yes, we can expand Social Security so that every senior in our country can retire with dignity. Yes, we can raise the minimum wage to a living wage. and guaranteeing every worker the right to join a union. Yes, we can lead the world in transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels and create millions of good jobs as we save the planet. Yes, we can guarantee that every woman in this country has the right to control her own body. Yes, yes, we can have a bipartisan policy that guarantees that never again will American taxpayer dollars be used to starve children in Gaza or any place else.

And now let me raise a question that I’ve been asked over and over again, you know. Bernie, great ideas, but how are you going to pay for them? Great question. Thanks for asking. And here is the answer. At a time when the wealthiest people in America have never ever had it so good, at a time when billionaires are paying an effective tax rate lower than a truck driver or a nurse. Yes, the top 1% in large profitable corporations will pay their fair share in taxes.

My fellow Americans, The establishment, including the corporate media and many of my colleagues in Congress, want you to believe that you are powerless. They want you to believe that you cannot change the status quo. But that is a lie. Throughout the history of our country, when Americans have stood up and fought for justice, they have prevailed. When the founders stood up to King George, they were told it was impossible, but they won. When abolitionists fought to end slavery, they were told it was impossible, but they won. When workers organized to form unions and stood up to their bosses, they were told it was impossible, but they won. When women demanded the right to vote, they were told it was impossible, but they won. When black Americans fought to end segregation, they were told it was impossible, but they won. When the LGBT community stood up for their rights, they were told it was impossible, but they won. Brothers and sisters, they did it then, we can and will do it now.

And how do I know How do I know that we will succeed? Take a look at this huge crowd right here in our nation’s capital. But it is not just here as I understand that today, October 18th, 2025, there are more people out on the streets in more communities all over our country. than we have ever seen in American history. Brothers and sisters, this is not the end. This is just the beginning. Together, when we stand united, When we don’t allow Trump or anybody else to divide us up by the color of our skin, or where we were born, or our sexual orientation, when we stand together, we will create the kind of nation that you and I know we can be. We can and will. create a nation devoted to freedom, justice, and democracy. Thank you all very much.