How I Know Trump Can't Cope With the Truly Mortal Threat to His Presidency
https://newrepublic.com/post/195324/trump-administration-crimes-jail-time
A weekly review of the rogues and scoundrels of American politics
What’s in the water in the state of Maryland? Whatever it is, it’s certainly more invigorating than the sewage that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his grandchildren have been swimming in. A few weeks ago, one of the Old Line State’s senators, Chris Van Hollen, dropped his gloves to take on President Donald Trump’s unlawful banishment and imprisonment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. This week, his House colleague Kweisi Mfume was responding to an administration flirting with suspending the habeas rights of its citizens in stark, but welcome terms. “It’s a damn shame to continue to see what is happening to our nation under the guise of this Trump administration and his Department of Government Evil,” he said. “He and Elon Musk, really in my opinion, deserve to be arrested and charged with assault on the Constitution.”
One of the more unfortunate realities of the Trump era is that to speak the plain truth about it requires you to get over the feeling that you’re being shrill or alarmist. “I know that might sound crazy and ludicrous,” Mfume said, commenting on his call to arrest the president and his pet oligarch. As someone who’s spent the past few years issuing Cassandra-like warnings only to watch so many of my ostensible industry peers take a dive, I can relate. But the thing about Cassandra is that she’s correct, and so is Mfume. Trump isn’t a president. He’s the head of a criminal syndicate, and he should be treated accordingly—now and, even more importantly, when he and his accomplices are finally out of power.
Trump 2.0 has been a remarkable speedrun into lawlessness, a testament to the fact that there might have actually been some adults in the room during his first term. (During which time he still fomented an insurrection and got impeached twice!) Now, freed from those guardrails that were once upstanding, he’s rocketed into a new level of infamy. I once held that George W. Bush’s reign was much more costly than Trump’s. No longer; his return has truly been a thing apart. As TNR’s Alex Shephard documented this week, Trump’s trip to the Gulf States has been a vertically integrated grift, in which the president has racked up more corrupt enterprises than most politicians manage in their whole careers.
This week’s skullduggery is, of course, just one brief crime spree among many. Over at The Nation, Jeb Lund lays down the lengthy rap sheet that Trump has written for himself in his first 100 days. The Trump administration has heisted the private data of millions of Americans, unlawfully terminated thousands of federal employees, extorted law firms and businesses and broadcasters; they’re gaming the markets, raking in corrupt money with crypto-tokens, kidnapping people and exiling them to foreign prisons without due process, and much much more. As Lund notes: “The question is not whether Trump and his people committed a crime while you read that last sentence but how many.”
It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the Trump administration is canceling the FBI’s investigations into white-collar criminals. But if these sorts of crimes aren’t dramatic enough for you, we could also simply stick with good old-fashioned manslaughter. As TNR’s Matt Ford reported this week, one of the hallmarks of Trump’s public health policies is that they will kill a lot of children—probably not a surprise given that the aforementioned Kennedy is well known for directing officials in Samoa to run an open-air eugenics experiment that killed 83 kids. “The net effect of these policy changes,” Ford writes, “is to make this country a more dangerous place for Americans to give birth and grow up.”
Abroad, Trump administration policies have the same eugenicist bent. As TNR contributor James North chronicled, the gutting of PEPFAR—the Bush-era HIV/AIDS intervention that has saved countless lives in Africa and one of the most highly regarded U.S. policies the world over—“has already sentenced tens of thousands of people in Africa to death, and with each week that passes with the program stuck in limbo, many thousands of needless deaths will follow.”
The administration’s approach to PEPFAR is of a piece with a range of policy decisions that will, in the best-case scenario, cede soft-power space to China and others to secure the developing world’s regard for stepping into a vacuum and providing humanitarian assistance. The worst-case scenario is, naturally, millions of needless deaths. Back in March, The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof attempted to quantify the harms done by the Trump administration’s decimation of foreign aid agencies in terms of lives lost. Here are his calculations: 1.65 million deaths from AIDS, 500,000 from lack of vaccines, 550,000 from lack of food aid, and approximately 300,000 each from lack of malaria and tuberculosis prevention, respectively.
This all raises an interesting question: How many people have to die before the word holocaust is in play? I’m not gunning for shock value here, at least not solely. I want to suggest that there is a certain necessary logic to what has to follow corrupt misrule of this kind: tribunals, trials, punishment, prison, and the running to ground and defunding of the entire Trump syndicate.
It’s an undertaking that will require no small amount of courage, and it will break with a long-standing status quo that has favored the absolution of numerous mortal sins, from the Bush administration’s unlawful torture network to Wall Street’s ruination of the economy to the many costly foreign misadventures that have feathered the nests of the military industrial complex over the years. The “look forward, not backward” ways etched into the civic firmament have served us poorly; in retrospect, what we had to look forward to was this exact moment with this perfidious administration.
Real accountability is not something I expect will be popular with the rotted mass media and its grotesque aversion to good governance or the wholly out-of-touch pundit class, whose opinions on Trumpian corruption tend to lag years behind most functional adults’. This is where the avatars of “Let the bad guys off the hook and move on” obtained their intellectual cover over the years. Suffice it to say, they’ll like a better world wrought from taking these criminals down and locking them up just fine. But those who want to pursue justice for all those wronged by this administration should expect to be branded as heretical.
We hear so much about the “rule of law” these days. So many people are concerned about it! They just don’t know what’s going to happen to it. Even among the gravely worried, there is this sense that the “rule of law” is like a machine someone turned on at some point in the past, which runs in the background of American life like some sort of ambient presence. What the rule of law really is, it turns out, is the sum total of our deeds—and our inaction. The rule of law lives or dies on our willingness to act—occasionally with grim resolve. It’s time for people who value justice to screw their courage to the sticking place.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/21/2305351/-Magic-Disappearing-DB-Story-About-Allegations-Trump-Was-Recruited-as-a-Russian-Asset
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/21/2305375/-Before-Trump-was-exposed-as-Krasnov-and-after
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/29/trump-russia-asset-claims-former-kgb-spy-new-book
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https://www.thewrap.com/43-foot-tall-naked-trump-marionette-las-vegas/
The ‘Crooked and Obscene’ project — made of foam over rebar and weighing nearly 6,000 pounds — will be toured across the U.S.
Las Vegas is home to a lot that might raise a pair of eyebrows, but a new art installation depicting Donald Trump as a naked, 43-foot-tall marionette might raise them right off your face.
Made of foam over rebar and weighing approximately 6,000 pounds, the gigantic naked Trump will travel the United States as part of the “Crooked and Obscene Tour” but first, you can see it in person and in the wild at 13460 Apex Harbor Ln in Las Vegas right now.
Per the tour’s organizers, portraying Trump in the nude “is intentional, serving as a bold statement on transparency, vulnerability, and the public personas of political figures.”
They also aim to spark conversation about “transparency—or lack thereof—in politics, challenging viewers to think critically about political influence,” according to press materials.
Those who can’t make it to Las Vegas will have opportunity to see it on tour stops at other locations across the United States. Dates and cities for the tour have not yet been announced. We’ll keep you posted.
Enjoy — or ‘enjoy’ — some photos of the project below:
This isn’t the first time a nude statute of Trump has appeared in public, though it certainly dwarfs its predecessor. In 2016 Joshua “Ginger” Monroe was hired at the art collective INDECLINE to create five life-size naked statues of the former president as part of a project called “The Emperor Has No Balls.”
The statues were put up without permits at locations in Seattle, New York City, Cleveland, Los Angeles and San Francisco; naturally they were soon removed by police.
