This country is well beyond wakeup calls when it comes to the threat posed by Donald Trump and his administration, but if ever there was one, it’s Pam Bondi’s DOJ arresting journalists for doing their job. What we saw last week was a violation of the First Amendment unlike any in recent memory. This humble spirit has previously resisted calling President Trump a fascist; I’ve called him an authoritarian, but not a fascist, lest it be written off as just more “radical left” hyperbole. But when we see him unrepentant at the killing of American citizens by ICE, what is clearly becoming his own paramilitary force, and arresting journalists for reporting on the actions of that force, it’s hard to pretend he hasn’t crossed the line. If before we spoke of his “authoritarian tendencies,” now we need to call them “fascist tendencies.”
As a point of reference, not even the Confederate government arrested journalists. As much as I hated the slave power’s Confederacy, its President, Jefferson Davis, took an incredible amount of abuse from the Southern press and never arrested a single journalist or shutdown a single newspaper. (Remember, newspapers were the only media we had back then.) If nothing else, Davis, an otherwise unpleasant slaveholder who committed treason against the United States, abided by the Confederate Constitution, which was pretty much a copy of the US Constitution except for the fact that it enshrined the preservation of slavery. (Okay, no document is perfect!)
The fact is, if you were a white man (not a woman, mind you) living in the Confederate States of America in the 1860s, you were among the freest people on earth. (Pardon this humble spirit’s cynicism, but maybe the slaveowners had no choice but to be generous in this regard if they expected all those poor white dudes to fight and die on the battlefield.) Anyway, it’s a pretty sad commentary that ol’ Jeff Davis had more respect for the First Amendment and a free press than Donald Trump does today. I’m sure some of you will say this former Confederate officer is finally showing his true colors, but trust me, I’m just trying to make a point about what a sorry state the country is in.
While Trump’s paramilitary force in training goes about attacking American citizens one by one, the reality of the Epstein files and Trump’s highly questionable role therein continues to drip drip drip, three million new pages, one by one (despite another 3 million still not revealed.) How long can even Trump’s most loyal MAGA supporters deny that he is what he is—call him an authoritarian or a downright fascist, he’s a terrible president and an even worse human being.
The Democrats Would Benefit from Some New House Leadership.
While millions of Americans rise to the occasion in opposition to Trump, and many individual Democrats speak out against the president’s authoritarian-like behavior, Democratic House Leader Yakeem Jeffries continues to mumble about “the American people,” as if he has nothing relevant to say and no awareness of the urgency of the moment. He acts like he’s patiently waiting for things to get back to “normal.” On the off chance that Trump and the MAGA Republicans don’t steal the 2026 congressional elections and Jeffries does become Speaker of the House, I fear we will return to the same severely flawed Congress that helped bring us the MAGA movement in the first place. Regretfully, I’m referring to those stiletto heels clicking through the Capitol building and billions of taxpayer dollars spent with not much to show for it—as in people not perceiving any tangible improvement in their lives. Yes, I’m talking about Nancy Pelosi’s philosophy of government: “You need to pass the bill to find out what’s in it.”