Is the Next Economic Crash Being Signaled to Billionaires & Putin as the Working Class Gets Blindsided?

Posted on May 1, 2026 by Arlen Grossman

While Putin, the Trump kids, and their fellow billionaires are rubbing their hands in glee, it’s going to be a hell of a year or three for the other 99% rest of us…

By Thom Hartmann/ Substack.com/ April 30, 2026

The Wall Street Journal reports in an article titled “Trump Tells Aides to Prepare for Extended Blockade of Iran” that:

“President Trump has instructed aides to prepare for an extended blockade of Iran, U.S. officials said… In recent meetings, including a Monday discussion in the Situation Room, Trump opted to continue squeezing Iran’s economy and oil exports by preventing shipping to and from its ports. … 

“For now, Trump is comfortable with an indefinite blockade, which he wrote Tuesday on Truth Social is pushing Iran toward a ‘State of Collapse.’”

So, Putin — who Trump took orders from for a full 90 minutes yesterday — and America’s billionaires who religiously read the WSJ are officially tipped off to prepare for what may well be a worldwide repeat of the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s. Or at least a revisit to the GOP’s infamous Nixon-era crises of the 1970s, Reagan’s “Black Monday” 22% market crash, Bush’s 2008 “Great Recession,” and Trump’s 2020 massive botched-pandemic-response economic melt-down.

Trump and his people didn’t bother to say one word to average Americans — no press conference or warning — but they sure made certain that their billionaire buddies are informed. 

And, of course, they’re not at all worried by this; recessions and depressions are when the morbidly rich like Trump and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet make their greatest fortunes. Businesses are failing, stock prices collapsing, and people are losing their homes, all fantastic buying opportunities for wealthy, cash-rich predators investors.

For example, when a handful of greedy Wall Street CEOs crashed the American economy in 2008, home prices (and, thus, homeowner equity) collapsed by 21%. Over 10 million Americans lost their homes to banking predators like “Foreclosure King” Steve Mnuchin, and tens of millions of others were underwater. 

The stock market plummeted by over 50% in the last year of Bush’s presidency. On October 9, 2007 the Dow was at its all-time peak of 14,164 but by March 5, 2009 it had collapsed to 6,594. No bankers were ever prosecuted.

While millions of Americans lost their jobs and were wiped out as the Bush Crash started today’s homelessness crises, the top 1 percent saw it as one of the finest buying opportunities of the new century.

Working-class people were desperately selling their homes and unloading the stocks in their 401Ks at a loss just to pay the bills, as wages plummeted in the face of a loose labor market.

But the morbidly rich were doing great.

Between 2009 — the bottom of the Bush Crash — and 2012 when the recovery finally began under Obama, the top 1 percent of Americans saw their income grow by over 31 percent. Fully 95 percent of all of the income increases in the country were seized by the top 1 percent of Americans during that period. 

As the economy recovered, rich people who’d bought stocks at the market bottom rode the S&P 500 up by 462 percent to 2020. A billion dollars invested in 2009 became $4.62 billion in just 11 years, a period during which the combined wealth of American billionaires went up by over 80 percent.

Then they did it again 10 years later!

The Trump/Covid Crash of 2020, “mismanaged” in a way to create maximum pain for working people, presented America’s morbidly rich with another brand new and huge opportunity to get even richer on top of a crisis brutalizing the rest of America.

As the market collapsed under Republicans and Trump, average Americans, now out of work, were again selling their homes and stocks at a loss just to buy food and medicine. But for the wealthy, it was a gift from God.

March 16, 2020 — just after Trump declared a pandemic and lockdown — the Dow sustained the largest single-day crash in its entire history. For the investor class, Trump and his billionaire buddies, this was an even better opportunity than the Bush crash of 2008!

Fewer than three months later, on June 4th, we learned that the seven richest people in America had seen their fortunes increase by fully 50 percent.

And with Trump’s massive tax cut for his fellow billionaires, they could keep most all of it: by that time the average American billionaire was paying less than 3 percent in income taxes (a situation that persists to this day). 

Just during that one single terrible pandemic year of 2020, the Institute for Policy Studies documents, U.S. billionaires saw their net worth surge 62 percent by $1.8 trillion. Average billionaire wealth worldwide increased 27% in that one year alone.

American billionaires’ real taxes have fallen by 79 percent since Reagan’s election in 1980, and a 2012 analysis found that as much as $32 trillion of that is safely squirreled away in tax-fraud offshore shelters, about the same amount as their tax avoidance has left us as a national debt.

Which is why working-class Americans and our media should stop pretending that downturns are random acts of God. They’re predictable outcomes of GOP policy choices that get repeated whenever a Republican is in the White House — ten of the last eleven recessions happened when a Republican was president — and this one is being engineered right now in plain sight.

Republican deregulation weakens guardrails. Trade chaos disrupts production. Inequality hollows out demand. Tax breaks for the rich force cuts to government support for poor and middle class Americans. And when the system finally buckles, the losses to average working class people mean huge profits for the morbidly rich.

And this downturn could easily be the biggest one of our lifetimes, a singular achievement the Trump Crime Family will profit from massively, along with their billionaire cronies. As CNN reports, “About half the stuff Americans buy comes from Asia” and Asia is melting down from a lack of Middle Eastern oil. It’s hitting the rest of the world, too:

“The Middle East ships about 25% of the world’s polypropylene and 20% of polyethylene, two of the most-used plastics. It also accounts for a quarter of the world’s sulphur and 15% of its fertilizer.”

Not to mention a fifth of the world’s oil, most of the world’s helium, necessary to run MRI machines and make precision chips, and other crucial commodities. As Martin Wolf wrote for yesterday’s Financial Times:

“Fifty per cent of the world’s seaborne trade in sulphur passes through the Strait of Hormuz. So does 34 per cent of trade in crude oil, 29 per cent of liquefied petroleum gas, 19 per cent of liquefied natural gas, 19 per cent of refined oil products, 13 per cent of chemicals, including fertilisers, and nearly 10 per cent of aluminium. This is a chokepoint of the world economy.“

The oil shock has become so bad in Asia that, CNN notes, “Several major petrochemical producers, including South Korea’s Yeochun and PCS in Singapore, have declared ‘force majeure,’” meaning they can no longer honor their contracts to supply their customers because of circumstances out of their control. 

And now it’s starting to show up here in the US in ways that go far beyond just the price at the pump. 

Some are wondering if Trump’s efforts to bring down the world economy — which are explicitly helping Russia — are because Putin told him to do it. 

That’s possible; our joining Netanyahu in illegally bombing Iran has also been a big boon to Putin’s regime, both in justifying his similarly illegal bombing of Ukraine and in jacking up world demand for (and the price of) Russian oil, which Trump has conveniently dropped sanctions on.

But it’s just as likely that this is simply the same type of stupid decision-making that has caused Trump to run every one of his dozens of companies except those subsidized by Russian or Middle Eastern money straight into the ground. Or it’s a two-fer, that benefits both American billionaires and Putin.

However it came about, buckle up. Hegseth’s pathetic performance before Congress yesterday tells us explicitly that the Trump regime has no plan to work out a peace deal with Iran any time soon.

While Putin, the Trump kids, and their fellow billionaires are rubbing their hands in glee, it’s going to be a hell of a year for the other 99% rest of us.

Posted in Republican Party, economy, politics, government, Economics, Iran, corporations, Middle East, Donald Trump, America, Congress, U.S. Constitution | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

The Worst Neo Robber Baron of Them All

Posted on April 27, 2026 by Arlen Grossman

Hint: He’s even worse than Musk

By Robert Reich/ April 24, 2026

{This country has a number of despicable billionaires (should billionaires even be allowed while average Americans struggle to keep their economic heads above water?). Robert Reich makes a good case for the worst of them: Jeff Bezos. Bezos treats his workers poorly (Amazon), values profits above all else, runs afoul of anti-trust laws, sucks up tp Trump, and to the pleasure of the president, made major cuts to The Washington Post.--TBPR Editor}

I’m tempted to give Elon Musk that title. But when it comes to greedy and irresponsible corporate behavior, one CEO is outdoing even Musk. 

When the history of this sordid second Gilded Age is written, the list of neo robber barons will obviously include Musk as well as Meta’s (Facebook’s) Mark Zuckerberg, Palantir’s Alex Karp, Palantir’s co-founder and board chair Peter Thiel, Oracle’s Larry Ellison (and his son, David), Google’s Sundar Pichai, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, and the Trump Organization’s monumentally corrupt Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Eric Trump. 

But one greedy, public-be-damned CEO stands out even above Musk, Trump, and the rest. His name: Jeff Bezos. His corporation: Amazon. 

It is difficult for the human mind to comprehend all the ways Bezos is shafting Americans. 

Start with prices. According to a newly unsealed filing released Monday in an antitrust lawsuit brought by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, Amazon has pressured major brands like Levi’s and Hanes to demand that competing retailers raise prices on their products. 

The New York Times’s David McCabe reports on unsealed evidence that Amazon punishes sellers on its marketplace for offering lower prices on other websites, like those of Walmart or Target. When it spots a competitor’s lower price, Amazon tells the brands to demand that rival sites raise their prices for the products. 

The filing includes an email to Hanes from Amazon, with links to Target’s and Walmart’s lower prices, along with Hanes’s apologetic response that it “reached out to Target and Walmart to have the prices increased.” And an email to Levi’s from Amazon, with links to lower-priced khakis on Walmart’s website, along with Levi’s response that Walmart had agreed to raise its price. 

According to the lawsuit, Amazon has been able to exert pressure on different brands to raise their prices because of Amazon’s power and reach. 

At a time when most Americans are having trouble making ends meet, Amazon’s push to raise prices — to enlarge its profits (and put more money into Jeff Bezos’s pockets) — is beyond unconscionable. 

This is hardly Bezos’s and Amazon’s first brush with antitrust law. In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission and 17 states accused Amazon of illegally maintaining a monopoly in online retail by squeezing merchants who sell on its site and prioritizing its own products, resulting in “artificially higher prices.”

In September, the FTC agreed to settle another lawsuit against Amazon that accused it of making it difficult for consumers to cancel its Prime subscription service. Amazon agreed to pay up to $2.5 billion — including $1 billion in penalties and additional payouts to consumers — but didn’t admit or deny wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, The American Prospect’s Harold Meyerson reports that Virginia is subsidizing Amazon’s “second headquarters” in Crystal City, Virginia — just across the Potomac from Washington, D.C. — with $750 million in taxpayer funds, yet the corporation is wildly behind its job-creation pledge. Having promised to create 25,000 new jobs by 2038, it created a mere 1,600 jobs last year and is up to just 29 percent of the number of jobs it promised by now. 

Speaking of Amazon jobs: Until earlier this month, attorneys for the National Labor Relations Board were prosecuting Amazon for firing employees that make Amazon deliveries because they’d voted to join the Teamsters, a clear violation of labor laws. 

But then, a few weeks ago, the NLRB attorneys — now firmly under control of Trump’s NLRB general counsel — announced they’d reached a “settlement” with Amazon in which Amazon agreed to pay the workers who’d been laid off for more than two years, two weeks’ worth of wages. Two weeks. 

Amazon’s workers are among the worst-treated in America. 

Ryan Haas of The Western Edge reports that on April 6, an Amazon warehouse worker collapsed and died on the floor of Amazon’s warehouse in Troutdale, Oregon. A co-worker trained in CPR tried to help but was told by a manager to turn around. For more than an hour, employees said, they were instructed to continue picking items and loading trucks as the man lay dead. One manager reportedly told workers to “just turn around and not look” and get back to work.

Jeff Bezos couldn’t care less. As of April 2026, his net worth is estimated to be between $259 billion and $269 billion, making him one of the three richest people in the world. 

Like the robber barons of the first Gilded Age, Bezos’s consumption is of the conspicuous kind. 

He celebrated his wedding last year to Lauren Sánchez with a multi-day star-studded event in Venice, Italy, estimated to cost more than $50 million, featuring guests like Oprah Winfrey and Kim Kardashian, and including a ceremony on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore and a pajama-themed afterparty at the Arsenal.

His “homes” include three adjacent properties on Indian Creek Island in Florida, costing over $230 million; the former Warner estate in Beverly Hills, California, which features a 13,600-square-foot mansion and a golf course, which he purchased for $165 million; a 14-acre compound on Maui with a 4,500-square-foot main house and 700-square-foot pool; a $23 million mansion in Washington, D.C.; and a massive multi-lot compound with waterfront frontage in Medina, Washington. 

But what puts Bezos at the head of all the other robber barons in this second Gilded Age is his slavish sycophancy toward the worst president in American history. 

Bezos bought the legendary Washington Post for $250 million in October 2013 and has turned it into a Trump cheerleader — prohibiting its editorial page from endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024 and barring it from writing anything critical about American capitalism or Trump. 

(That’s not all Bezos has done to ruin the Post. In February, he fired more than 300 Postjournalists, about a third of its staff.)

Then he shamelessly paid $40 million to license the documentary “Melania” plus $35 million to market it — and earned back a tiny percentage. It was a blatant bribe of Trump. 

And he does whatever Trump asks. After Trump complained to Bezos about a report that Amazon planned to display for consumers the costs of Trump’s tariffs, Bezos immediately canceled the plan.

Bezos has sucked up to Trump presumably to secure Pentagon contracts for his Blue Origin rocket company, which landed a $2.3 billion NASA contract early in Trump’s second term. And to avoid further antitrust lawsuits or labor law scrutiny. 

That he has zero scruples does not necessarily distinguish Bezos from the other robber barons of this despicable era. 

But his public-be-damned business practices, his especially conspicuous consumption, and his excessive sucking up to Trump make Jeff Bezos the worst CEO of them all. 

What can you do? You might share this post and boycott Amazon. 

Posted in America, civil liberties, corporations, Economics, economy, ethics, government, inequality, labor, law, politics | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Trump’s New Navy Secretary Previously Warned ‘Witchcraft’ Had ‘Taken Over’ a Californian City

Posted on April 24, 2026 by Arlen Grossman

By Charlie Nash/ Newsbreak.com/ April 23, 2026

{As a resident here in Monterey, this information is news to me. But this Trump nominee fits in well with the President’s other strange appointments.-–TBPR Editor}

Trump’s New Navy Secretary Previously Warned ‘Witchcraft’ Had ‘Taken Over’ a Californian City

President Donald Trump’s new acting Navy secretary, Hung Cao, warned in 2023 that “witchcraft” had “taken over” the Californian city of Monterey.

Cao took over as acting secretary of the Navy this week after former secretary John Phelan was ousted from his position by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

Following the news, clips from a several-year-old interview of Cao warning about witchcraft went viral on social media.

In 2023, during his unsuccessful run for the Senate in Virginia – which ended with his defeat by incumbent Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) – Cao claimed that witches had “taken over” the city of Monterey, California and removed a reference to Jesus Christ from the name of a costal area.

“We can’t let it turn like this. There’s a place in Monterey, California called Lovers Point. The original name was Lovers of Christ Point, but now it’s become– they took out the Christ, it’s Lovers Point, and it’s really– Monterey is a very dark place now,” said Cao during an interview with former Bethel Church pastor Sean Feucht. “A lot of witchcraft and the Wiccan community has really taken over. We can’t let that happen to Virginia.”

Business Insider reported at the time that while there did appear to be a Wiccan presence in Monterey, there was “little evidence that the community has ‘taken over’ the sunny seaside locale.”

During the same 2023 interview, Cao also joked that he was “African American” because he spent some of his childhood in Niger.

Posted in America, Donald Trump, extremism, politics, Republican Party | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Strategy That Built America’s Middle Class Still Works, So Why Won’t Democrats Deploy It?

Posted on April 23, 2026 by Arlen Grossman

The same bold playbook that built the middle class can restore it, and voters are ready

By Thom Hartmann/ HartmannReport.com/ April 23, 2026

{The Democratic Party is hurting, because it isn’t the political party it used to be. Thom Hartmann rightly notes that the party of working people and the middle class more and more depends on wealthy donors and big corporations. But the Republican Party does that better, and Democrats need to look at what made them so successful decades ago. Voters no longer trust the Democrats, as recent election results show. Are they capable of again being the party that helps working people, labor unions, the disadvantaged, and average voters like they used to? The party needs to earn back the trust of voters who no longer feel represented or served. Only then can this country succeed as it should.–TBPR Editor}

The “liberal” commentators are shocked. It was reported yesterday that Graham Platner, the Democrat who’ll most likely win the primary to run for the US Senate from Maine, has staked out some “truly radical” positions. The former Marine combat veteran and oyster farmer has called for:— Impeaching Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for the bribes he took from billionaires, 
— Replacing Chuck Schumer as leader of Senate Democrats with a “fighter,”
— Investigating and prosecuting Trump regime officials and underlings who’ve been involved in illegal actions like bombing unarmed boats in the Caribbean,
— Prosecuting ICE thugs who’ve assaulted, terrorized, or killed people and smashed into cars and homes without warrants,
— Going after corruption in the Trump White House, including among the Trump family, the Cabinet, and Trump himself,
— Promoting aggressive new social safety net programs to restore America’s middle class and take on the Epstein class, including a wealth tax on those with more than $1 billion, and 
— A national healthcare system modeled on Medicare-for-All. 

The “liberal” commentators are shocked. It was reported yesterday that Graham Platner, the Democrat who’ll most likely win the primary to run for the US Senate from Maine, has staked out some “truly radical” positions. The former Marine combat veteran and oyster farmer has called for:

One cable host mused out loud yesterday that these positions may help the 41-year-old progressive win the primary against septuagenarian moderate Governor Janet Mills, “but can that really win a general election?” This “don’t be Bernie or like AOC” is the great fear and marching anthem of the mainstream media and the Democratic consultant class. 

When Trump broke both US and international law joining Israel in bombing Iran without any provocation (and while they were making very real concessions during their negotiations) and in violation of the War Powers Act of 1973, Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries didn’t call for the president to be prosecuted, turned over to the Hague, or even impeached. 

Instead, he said, “Congress must be fully and immediately briefed.” Yeah, that’ll teach them!

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called Trump a liar and the bombing a “major failure” and “Operation Epic Blunder,” but beyond strongly worded press releases also hasn’t called for actual consequences for Trump, Hegseth, or anybody else in the chain of command committing these war crimes.

The conventional wisdom across the chattering class and within leadership of the institutional Democratic Party seems to be, “Don’t make big promises or real threats, don’t be Bernie or AOC.”

The problem with this strategy is that most Americans now want a modern-day Bernie or AOC, and multiple elections (and Platner’s polling) prove it, but the DNC and “mainstream” Democrats aren’t listening and don’t want to go after rich people.

It wasn’t always this way: there was a time when Democrats boldly promoted programs that literally built the world’s first over-50%-of-the-population middle class, and weren’t afraid to take names and kick ass.

Franklin D. Roosevelt transformed America with his New Deal programs, including legalizing unions, Social Security, the minimum wage, the 40-hour work week, ending child labor, Federal emergency relief (FERA), the FDIC, SEC, FCC, TVA, NLRB, FHA and Fannie Mae, and the National Archives (among others).

He also took on the Epstein Class of his day, establishing a top 90% income tax rate and proclaiming that they and their captive Republicans had declared class war against average working class Americans:

“For out of this modern civilization,” Roosevelt told America, “economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. … It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself.”

He used the language of class warfare; as with all wars, the first step is to identify the enemy. For FDR it was the fatcats of his era who weren’t content to just run their businesses and make money but also lusted for the political power they’d been given during the 1920s by Republican presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.

“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America,” Roosevelt proclaimed. “What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”

He paused for a moment, then thundered, “Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!”

The crowd roared when he said that. They knew that Republican politicians had worked hand-in-glove with wealthy industrialists to suppress unions, evade taxes, and accumulate fortunes beyond anything ever seen in America. That the GOP had been running an often-violent class war against them for years.

And they were over it. Over the greed, over the theft, and over the self-righteous proclamations that the Constitution protected their avarice. Average working people knew these “economic royalists” weren’t patriots; they were looters, vandals, and political arsonists. FDR gave voice to their anger, disillusionment, and disgust:

“In vain,” Roosevelt said, “they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.”

Republicans had declared class warfare; FDR, like he would later do with the Japanese and Germans, led the charge to fight back and defeat them.

President Lyndon Johnson similarly added to the middle class, while keeping the top income tax rate at a fierce 74% on individuals and 50% on corporations. His Great Society programs included Medicare, Medicaid, Meals on Wheels, Title I aid to low-income-district schools, Pell Grants, Head Start, Job Corps, Community Action Agencies/Community Services Block Grants, VISTA, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, ending racial quotas on immigration, Food Stamps, HUD, NEA, NEH, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (NPR/PBS).

And he and President Kennedy weren’t afraid to go after malefactors in the government itself. As Lamar Waldron and I document in our book Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination, Kennedy was the first president in a half-century to take on the Mafia, including its control over FBI Director Hoover; it ultimately cost him his life. LBJ similarly frequently went after big business and corrupt deals between what he called corporate or wealthy “special interests” and Republican politicians.

Had LBJ not blundered (and lied) on the Vietnam War, he may well be remembered as one of our greatest presidents; when it comes to the middle class, he and FDR were singular in their advocacy of programs that lifted working class people from poverty into relative comfort.

And Americans loved those programs, both FDR’s and LBJ’s; to this day, they’re among the most popular in the country’s history.

Progressive politics and policies are once again popular in America, as the foggy bubble of Reagan’s trickle-down economics has burst, leaving us with a $38 trillion hangover and a middle class that’s been wiped out, shrinking from 65% of us when Reagan was elected to 43% of us today (and now requiring two incomes instead of just one).

Polling of Democratic voters who simply failed to show up for Kamala Harris in 2024, handing the election to Trump, found that they failed to vote because they believed Democrats were ignoring “poverty and inequality” and they wanted an explicit “economic message of taxing the wealthy to invest in infrastructure and jobs” that the Harris campaign failed to deliver.

These no-show voters, the pollsters heard, wanted to “hear a story about systemic change; instead, they heard a series of misaligned policy points that failed to connect. Put bluntly, voters felt that Democrats weren’t fighting for people like them or taking on big corporations who profit from price gouging and rich people who don’t pay what they owe in taxes.”

They also discovered that:

“The politicians these voters like most are Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez … as leaders who aren’t afraid to challenge the system.”

Polling consistently shows a huge majority of Americans favor a national healthcare system, free college, widespread unionization, doubling the federal minimum wage, and want politicians who advocate “cracking down on tax cheats,” “putting a stop to price gouging” and “getting people the health care they need.”

Graham Platner’s “shocking” call to actually investigate and prosecute the many corrupt people and open criminals in the Trump administration — including Trump himself and his rapacious kids — is widely popular across a purple state; combine it with bold progressive policies and it’s a winning nationwide formula for 2026 and 2028.

Democrats need to fire their neoliberal advisors left over from the Clinton and Obama years, take a law-and-order posture against the corruption of Trump and his GOP lickspittles, and put forward FDR- and LBJ-like transformational programs to restore America’s middle class and our status as an example for the world.

Anything less merely guarantees — like the lukewarm messages of 2024 did — more Republican victories, more tax breaks for billionaires, and more people living in tents while what’s left of our liberties vanish behind the barbed wire of Trump’s and Miller’s “detention facilities.”

Posted in America, democracy, Democratic Party, Economics, elections, government, labor, labor, politics, Republican Party, voting | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

This is the scariest question about Putin — and Trump

Posted on April 20, 2026 by Arlen Grossman

The Russian president’s back is to the wall. That makes him more dangerous.

By David Ignatius/ Washington Post/ April 16, 2026

{Let’s not forget another war, now in its fifth year with no end in sight, between Ukraine and Russia. With high casualty numbers, economic concerns, and improved Ukrainian military capability, Putin knows Russia’s situation is not what he hoped it would be. Nobody can be sure what his next actions will be. Adding to the mystery, President Trump’s reaction is impossible to predict.-–TBPR Editor}

Russian President Vladimir Putin, always paranoid about enemies, may be feeling cornered this spring. His army is at a standstill in Ukraine, despite suffering enormous casualties. He appears powerless to help Iran, one of his few allies. And his best friend in Europe, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, just got dumped.

Worse problems are probably ahead. The Russian economy, despite a momentary windfall from the spike in oil prices, is a mess. European nations are getting stronger and angrier, with NATO forces arrayed from the White Sea in the Arctic to the Black Sea in the south. And the Ukraine war is grinding on with little chance of the decisive victory that Putin craves.

If you’re Putin, feeling so embattled, you might be starting to think about the next war — against Europe — even as you slog ahead in Ukraine. You could even be wondering if the time to strike might be soon — before European nations fully rearm, before Ukraine develops new weapons that can reach even deeper into Russia, and while your chum President Donald Trump is in the White House treating NATO like a punching bag.

The chilling prospect of future conflict between Russia and Europe is the theme of an important but little-noticed study released in March by Eugene Rumer, a former U.S. national intelligence officer for Russia and now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The report’s title summarized its message: “Belligerent and Beleaguered: Russia After the War with Ukraine.”

Here’s Rumer’s stark warning: “Having invaded Ukraine under the false pretext of needing to secure its western flank, Russia is poised to emerge from the war less secure, more resentful, and more threatening to Europe than before the war. Its threat perceptions will cast a long shadow over Europe.”

Rumer and his Carnegie colleagues explained in interviews this week why the abiding security challenge for the West remains the Ukraine war, despite the mayhem of the Iran conflict. “I proceed from a deep belief that Europe is the most important theater for Russia. That’s where Putin’s energies will be focused,” Rumer told me. As long as Putin is alive, he said, Ukraine will be “unfinished business.”

Michael Kofman, another Carnegie senior fellow and perhaps the most knowledgeable military analyst of the Ukraine conflict, noted that Russia failed to achieve the breakthroughs it sought last year and is off to a bad start in 2026. It suffered 30,000 to 35,000 dead and seriously wounded in March, probably losing more troops than its monthly replacement rate. This year, Kofman said, “Putin will struggle to maintain the same pace as last year.”

Ukraine threatens Putin precisely because it wants to be part of Europe. That makes it the tip of what he sees as the European spear. “From the Kremlin’s perspective, as stated repeatedly by senior Russian officials, Europe is at war with Russia,” writes Rumer. As Putin wages a “hybrid” campaign of covert sabotage against Ukraine’s allies, Europe is getting the message. Russia “could be ready to use military force against NATO within five years,” NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte warned in a speech at Chatham House in London last year.

“Let’s not kid ourselves, we are all on the Eastern flank now,” Rutte said.

Russia upped its pressure on Europe this week, as its defense ministry warned it could strike European countries that supply drones to Ukraine, a group that includes Germany, Britain, Sweden, Italy and the Netherlands. Europeans should check “addresses and locations” of companies supplying these drones, Russia growled.

Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president who now seems to specialize in saber rattling, posted menacingly on X that the defense ministry’s statement amounted to a list of targets: “When strikes become a ​reality depends on what comes next. Sleep well, ​European ⁠partners!”

Putin is a risk taker, as his invasion of Ukraine showed. What if he decides that his window of opportunity to challenge NATO and impose a new order is closing? In the most ominous passage of his report, Rumer writes: “If Putin is truly intent on imposing his vision of European security on the continent, he may decide that time is not on his side, as Europe is racing to rearm, and launch an attack against a Baltic neighbor to demonstrate that NATO’s Article 5 is essentially a dead letter.”

What would Trump do if Putin struck a European country? For me, that’s the scariest question. Trump spends so much time bad-mouthing NATO that Europeans already doubt the credibility of American security guarantees. His latest anti-NATO tirades have focused on its refusal to aid the United States and Israel in the Iran war. Before Rutte visited Washington this month, Trump called NATO a “paper tiger” that “Putin’s not afraid of.”

The Trump administration has even put its waffling in writing. The National Security Strategy issued in November argued for American evenhandedness in balancing the growing antagonism between Russia and Europe. “Managing European relations with Russia will require significant U.S. diplomatic engagement, both to reestablish conditions of strategic stability across the Eurasian landmass, and to mitigate the risk of conflict between Russia and European states,” the document argued. No wonder Europeans are worried.

One of the most unforgivable things that Trump could do in foreign policy would be to abandon America’s NATO allies in Europe at a moment when they face a growing, explicit threat from Moscow. As Rumer writes, “A transatlantic divorce before Europe has built up its conventional defenses and solved the problem of deterring nuclear threats from Russia without the U.S. nuclear umbrella over it would create a window of opportunity for Vladimir Putin to pursue his ambitions.”

Europe is hearing a siren in the night. Trump is so preoccupied with his list of anti-NATO grievances that he seems deaf to what could be the greatest crisis of his presidency. If one day historians ask, “Who lost Europe?” what will Trump’s supine national security advisers say in response? 

Posted in Europe, foreign policy, military, Russia, Ukraine, Uncategorized, Valdimir Putin, war | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Is Trump the Antichrist?

Posted on April 17, 2026 by Arlen Grossman

By Thom Hartmann/ HartmannReort.com/ April 14, 2026

{I am not a religious person, but I can imagine any clear-minded person of faith being horrified by the constant anti-Christian language and behavior exhibited by President Trump. When he first ran for president, many evangelical Christians were confident this man was close to God and would follow Christian practices and enact those into law. That’s how persuasive this religious charlatan was. He knew nothing of God, the Bible and Christianity, but pretended he did. If evangelicals haven’t figured him out yet, they are outrageously stubborn or just blind to reality. Is President Trump the Antichrist? If any human being deserves that title, all the evidence points to the man in the White House. Nobody else alive today even comes close.--TBPR Editor}

Sunday night, on Orthodox Easter, Donald Trump posted to his failing, Nazi-infested social media site an AI image of himself as Jesus, healing a man who looked suspiciously like Jeffrey Epstein as a woman who looked a lot like a young Ghislaine Maxwell looked on, with a horned demon overhead. Here’s the image annotated by the fine folks at Democratic Underground:

As Trump’s original image got reposted (along with a cleaned up version where the demon at the top no longer has horns) and spread across social media — followed by his trash-talking the Pope — the comments lit up with a steady stream of people offering their “proofs” that Trump was, in fact, the Evil One come to ravage the Earth. That he’s a literal and iniquitous thaumaturge. The proverbial Real McCoy devil.

Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted the image with the horns, saying: “It’s more than blasphemy. It’s an Antichrist spirit.”

Mandy Arthur, a Christian influencer with a huge online following, similarly tweeted: “God, we might have made a mistake and [accidentally] elected the Antichrist. Send help.”

But is it even possible? It’s a fascinating question, whether put literally or metaphorically.

Asking the question literally requires a belief in the actual reality of a Son-of-God Christ figure and of an Antichrist opponent of nearly equal but opposite power. This sort of thing fills the Bible, and I’ll get to that in a moment.

But first consider the question from the secular perspective, which argues these two terms represent, at their core, metaphors for the embodiment of good and evil.

In this context, then, a more accurate question is: “Is Donald Trump evil, and thus an antichrist?”

The Hartmann ReportA Daily Newsletter of Renaissance Thinking about Progressive Politics, Economics, Science, and the Political News Issues of Our DayBy Thom Hartmann

In The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus spoke in the plural when he predicted “false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves.” After warning that grifters and con artists (in secular terms) would try to exploit His followers, He said, “by their fruits ye shall know them.”

Trump’s “fruits” are pretty obvious:

  • More than twenty women have accused him of rape and sexual assault, including some who were 13 and 14 at the time of the attack. Two separate juries both ruled that he raped E. Jean Carroll.
  • Hundreds of contractors, customers, and employees have accused him of stealing from them or refusing to pay them (or both), as have members of his own family.
  • Throughout his first term, he lied over 30,000 times and continues to lie daily.
  • He pits Americans against each other by race, religion, and region in an effort to tear our country apart and thus weaken opposition to his authoritarian rule.
  • He openly encouraged violence against unarmed people at multiple rallies and encouraged state violence at a speech to chiefs of police; he encouraged an assault on members of the press and routinely denigrates female reporters.
  • He tried to overthrow and end our democracy, which some believe was divinely inspired (Jefferson referred to “Nature’s God” in the Declaration).
  • He embraces depraved, ungodly murderers, kleptocrats, and “strongman” rulers while ridiculing western democracies and their elected leaders.
  • He tried to damage or dismantle political and military systems designed to keep peace in the world, including the UN, NATO, and the Iran JCPOA.
  • He reaches out to Jesus’s followers and then directs them toward bigotry, violence, and hatred.
  • As an object of admiration and a role model, he’s replaced Jesus in many white evangelical congregations.
  • He delights in the killing of anti-ICE protestors like Renee Good and Alex Pretti and tearing children from their parents and putting them in cages.
  • He tried to end Americans’ access to lifesaving medical care by killing Obamacare subsidies, privatizing Medicare, and gutting Medicaid.
  • He watched on TV, like a delighted child, as his followers killed four police officers, sent 140 others to the hospital, and tried to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House.
  • He lied about Covid (after disclosing the truth to Bob Woodward), causing more disease and deaths in America than any other nation in the world except Peru.
  • There is literally not a single one of the Ten Commandments that he hasn’t broken (love God, don’t make graven images, honor God’s name, keep the Sabbath, don’t kill people, honor marriage, don’t covet or steal other’s property, and tell the truth; he even failed to “honor your parents” when he allegedly ripped off his father’s estate).
  • He threatened to commit genocide on a scale never seen in human history.
  • He and “Whiskey Pete” have celebrated the murder of over 100 people in small boats in the Caribbean without any due process or legal basis.
  • He has his entire administration work to cover up crimes committed by multiple wealthy and powerful men against underage girls.Enjoying this column? Become a paying subscriber of Raw America. You’ll get members-only newsletters and live interviews, plus membership in a thriving liberal community. Join our people-powered movement! Subscribed

The main reason many Christians freak out about an antichrist is that following him will get you banned from heaven or even cast into hell. But what did Jesus — the guy Trump’s white evangelical followers claim as their savior — say was necessary to get into heaven?

Back in 1998 I had a private audience with Pope John Paul II at his invitation; one of his personal secretaries had read one of my books. He gave Louise and me a private tour of many non-public parts of the Vatican and, the next day, we sat through an open-air concert with Pope John Paul II and about 30 VIPs, including the leader of Germany’s Bundestag, for more than an hour, surrounded by the splendor of Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s summer palace on the rim of an extinct volcano overlooking lake Albano.

When we spoke privately after the concert, His Holiness’s forceful comments about the work we all must do invoked Jesus’ words in Matthew 25. It’s an amazing 2,000 year-old story that tells us everything we need to know about today’s “Christian” politics:

Jesus’ disciples had gathered around him in a private and intimate setting.

Finally, they thought, they could ask him, straight up, the question that had been haunting them, particularly now that the Roman authorities were starting to talk about punishing or even executing them: How they could be sure to hang out with Him in the afterlife?

Jesus told them that on judgment day He’d be sitting on His throne separating the sheep from the goats “as a shepherd divideth.”

The nations of “sheep” would go with Him to heaven, the “goats” to hell.

“For I was an hungred, and ye gave me food,” he told his disciples he would say to the sheep. “I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.”

At this point, His disciples — who had never, ever seen Jesus hungry, thirsty, homeless, sick, or naked — freaked out. Whoa! they shouted. We’re screwed!

“When saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee?” they asked, panicked. “Or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? Or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?”

“Verily I say unto you,” Jesus replied, reassuring them, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

This is the only place in the Bible where Jesus explicitly tells His disciples what acts they must perform, in their entirety, to get into heaven.

Feed the hungry, care for refugees, house and clothe the homeless, heal the sick, have compassion on those in prison.

That’s it.

And it’s a list that is quite literally the opposite of everything that Donald Trump advocates, stands for, and has done in his careers, both business and political.

While biblical scholars are split about who the actual “Beast” was that John referenced in his Revelation, many consider it to have been a then-politically-necessary cloaking of the identity of Roman Emperor Nero, who was actively murdering Christians.

It was clearly a political figure, who represented the antithesis of the values and works Jesus laid out in the Sermon on the Mount and in Matthew 25, a leader whose actions unleashed:

“…a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.”

After Trump put up the picture of himself as Jesus, people from dozens of nations offered their own proofs of Trump being the Beast or the Antichrist, posting across multiple social media platforms:

  • “MAGA” means “magic” or “sorcerer” in Latin and multiple other languages
  • His grandfather’s name when he emigrated to America to start a whorehouse in the Pacific Northwest was “Drumpf,” which he changed to Trump. John in German is “Johann.” Therefore, his “actual” name is Donald Johann Drumpf — each name having six letters (666). (Weirdly, the same is true of Ronald Wilson Reagan, the guy who laid the foundation for MAGA.)
  • He illegally armed the Saudis for their merciless bombing war against Yemen which had five million people facing famine as the Saudi military blocked food arrivals.
  • His family owned 666 Fifth Avenue.
  • He fooled millions of evangelical followers of Jesus into following him instead, just as the Beast is supposed to do.
  • He put his own red-hat MAGA mark on their foreheads.
  • He consorts with “whores” and “criminals.”
  • Isaac Newton calculated that Jesus was crucified on a blood moon, and some argue he predicted the antichrist would be born on one; Trump was born on a blood moon.

It was a fascinating moment picked up by media across the world, and I was surprised by how many people — like Marjorie Taylor Greene — were actually religiously freaked out about Trump.

But for me, all the proof I need that Trump, if not the biblical Antichrist, is at least a political one, is what he says and does. In my humble opinion, he’s already revealed himself as an Antichrist, both as a disciple of the “Father of Lies,” and through his anti-Christ-type policies.

As Pope Leo XIV today tells us, a man’s “fruits” show us all we need to know about who he really is.

Posted in Donald Trump, extremism, government, religion | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Trump’s Plan? No Plan

Posted on April 14, 2026 by Arlen Grossman

Distracting the American People Is the Goal

By Arlen Grossman

Does it seem as if our invasion of Iran was poorly planned? It doesn’t matter. Most likely it wasn’t planned at all.

Just a few weeks ago, the Epstein files dominated headline news. Every day, new evidence related to Epstein’s crimes—often lost, suppressed, or heavily redacted—was being uncovered. The most damaging information, potentially implicating Trump in the rape of underage girls, seemed on the verge of being made public.

Even a president with diminished capacity would realize that such evidence would threaten his hold on the presidency, a role that brings Donald Trump what he thrives on: prestige, power, and wealth. To avoid losing it all, he figured the most effective strategy would be to shift America’s focus elsewhere.

Trump appeared to understand, at least on some level, that initiating a war would reliably distract the American public. Historically, U.S. military action has captured national attention and pushed other scandals and problems to the background. With this nation’s short attention span and appetite for war news, the Epstein files were quickly overshadowed by the sudden invasion of Iran.

It is unclear who Trump consulted before acting, perhaps Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (and maybe no one else), but he made a decisive executive decision—similiar to his action in Venezuela—to initiate war against Iran, a nation already unpopular with Americans and the rest of the world.

Known for acting impulsively, Trump made a quick decision. Empowered by the authority of his office, he realized that nobody could prevent him from taking action, so he ordered the assault with minimal, if any, consultation or advice from his Republican friends in Congress or anywhere else.

That scenario couldn’t be more obvious, because you would expect that anyone who worked with or was consulted by Trump would at least get their stories straight, but they couldn’t and didn’t. Reasons for the invasion were all over the map. Confusion reigned.

Trump invoked several justifications, referencing the 1979 hostage crisis, militant groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, Iranian-backed militias, and “47 years of Iranian aggression.” He encouraged the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow their government.

He also framed the campaign as an effort to “eliminate the imminent nuclear threat.”  (Never mind that when Trump ordered strikes on Iran last summer, he and his administration repeatedly declared that the attacks had obliterated the Middle Eastern country’s nuclear program and set back its ability to make a nuclear weapon for years.)

Secretary of “War” Hegseth said the conflict in Iran was not about regime change. “The goal, is to unleash death and destruction from the sky all day long.” He explained that the justification for the offensive was Iran’s “swelling arsenal of ballistic missiles and killer drones, which he said they were using to “create a conventional shield for their nuclear blackmail ambitions.” 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said. “The imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked, and we believed they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us, and we were not going to sit, sit there and absorb a blow before we respond.” He said the Trump administration chose to attack preemptively because Israel was planning to strike Iran, and “we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces.” 

House Speaker Mike Johnson backed Rubio’s new rationale, saying the consequences would have been staggering if the U.S. didn’t attack at the same time as Israel, saying the consequences of inaction on our part could have been devastating…. this operation needed to happen.”

Trump and his advisors were unable to articulate a convincing case for an immediate war with Iran, because they had no chance to think of one. Trump had left them, and virtually everyone else, out of the loop. They weren’t expecting Trump’s premature invasion. His spontaneous decision was to protect his reputation and delay any surfacing of evidence of involvement with any sex crimes by going to war immediately even without a real plan.

The war in Iran has been a colossal mistake because every aspect of it was ill-prepared, unplanned and uncoordinated. Forget about placing blame on any other individual or country. The blame goes to President Trump. His fear of being caught in the Epstein crimes led him to panic and act in haste. 

And in the end, what is most likely to happen is that he has just wasted time for the inevitable, the evidence of his abusing underage girls, and because of that, being forced to give up his presidency.

Posted in America, crime, Donald Trump, ethics, government, Iran, Justice, Middle East, politics | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Tomorrow’s election merits your attention

Posted on April 11, 2026 by Arlen Grossman

Hopefully, Hungarians will renounce, reject, and repudiate Victor Orbán 


By Robert Reich/ RobertReich.substack.com/ April 11, 2026

{Democracy is clearly in danger. We know Trump loves authoritarian leaders. His early success emboldened authorititarian leaders throughout the world. Hungary, Venezuela and Argentina come to mind. Stopping Orban in Hungary would be a big step in crushing the momentum of these autocratic regimes.—TBPR Editor}

The biggest authoritarian monsters of our time — Trump, Putin, and Xi Jinping — have bred smaller monsters who seem less dangerous than the big ones but are causing almost as much chaos and cruelty.

I’m talking especially about Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Hungary’s Victor Orbán. Both have held their offices by clinging to bigoted, authoritarian, homophobic, anti-Muslim views and actions that are poisoning much of the Middle East and Europe. Netanyahu continues to wage war, which is keeping him out of jail and his right-wing coalition in power; Orbán continues to consolidate control over state institutions, rewrite electoral laws, and crack down on independent media. 

Both Netanyahu and Orbán also have the support of the Trump regime and its white, Christian, nationalist cultural warriors. 

But Trump’s war in Iran has made it harder for white Christian nationalists to maintain their “America First” isolationism, given the obvious contradiction between crusading for white Christianity abroad while also promoting xenophobic nativism at home. This contradiction has eroded American support for Netanyahu and Orbán at a critical time for both. 

Icon Sportswire via Getty Images Marjorie Taylor Greene, smiling in a red dress, Tucker Carlson in a suit coat and khaki pants, and Donald Trump in a white gold shirt and a red MAGA baseball cap stand side by side leaning on a railing
MTG, Carlson, and Trump, in happier days

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson had been among Netanyahu’s and Orbán’s strongest cheerleaders in the U.S. But Carlson opposes Trump’s war in Iran and recently stepped up his criticism, calling Trump’s obscenity-laced Easter Sunday message on Iran “vile on every level” and labelling Trump’s threats to bomb civilian energy and transportation infrastructure a war crime. 

Carlson also echoed growing sentiment in the MAGA right that Trump’s decision to go to war was a result of undue influence by Netanyahu. “The Israelis have him in a hammerlock,” Carlson said.

Former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene charges that “Trump has gone mad as he wages war against Iran, a broken campaign promise. I fought alongside Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens and Alex Jones to help get Trump elected. We never changed. Trump did.”

Trump calls all these cultural warriors who have criticized his war “stupid people” whom “nobody cares about …. They’re not MAGA, they’re losers. As president, I could get them on my side anytime I want to, but when they call, I don’t return their calls because I’m too busy on world and country affairs.”

Behind this petty war of words are serious shifts in power and influence.

Trump’s war in Iran has contributed to Netanyahu’s Israel becoming a pariah state in the world. And because the war has exposed confusion and ambiguity among the MAGA faithful when it comes to foreign regimes, it has also indirectly undermined support for Orbán’s Hungary.

With the Hungarian presidential election looming, JD Vance last weekend stumped for Orbán in Budapest, lamely explaining he’d come there “because of the moral cooperation between our two countries” — each engaged in a “defense of Western civilization” based on their common adherence to “Christian civilization and Christian values.” 

Trump has endorsed Orbán. Putin is also doing what he can to help Orbán. Netanyahu sent a message last month to the the annual U.S. CPAC conference in Budapest, hailing Orbán as a leader who can “protect against this rising tide” of Islamic terrorism. “Orbán means safety, security, stability.”

Rubbish.

Tomorrow, the good people of Hungary will have an opportunity to push Orbán out of office. It’s possible. Hungary still has enough remnants of democracy to do the job — although it may not for very much longer if Orbán remains in power. 

Hungarians seem most upset with Hungary’s struggling economy, high prices, poor hospitals, and underfunded railway. Orbán’s opponent has focused on these bread-and-butter issues while noting that Orbán’s cronies have grown richer as ordinary Hungarians have become poorer.

Orbán’s removal would send a timely signal to the rest of the world about to deal with the monsters, large and small, who are now threatening global peace, prosperity, and stability while also destroying whatever moral authority the West still possesses. 

J.D Vance was right: Illiberal kleptocratic Christian nationalism is on the ballot in Hungary this Sunday, just as it will be on the ballots that Americans will cast in November. Here and there, may it be massively repudiated.

Posted in America, civil liberties, democracy, Donald Trump, Economics, elections, extremism, foreign policy, government, politics, voting | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

ANOTHER BRILLIANT TRUMP OFFICIAL

Posted on April 5, 2026 by Arlen Grossman

Waffle House Employees Didn’t See FEMA Official Who Says He Teleported to Georgia Location

One longtime server said that she’s “seen it all,” but she’s “never seen that,” referring to Gregg Phillips’ teleportation claim

By Bailey Richards/ People/ April 4, 2026

{And he’s far from the only mentally ill official in this administration. President Trump (he’s one too) has collected the worst people imaginable, many of whom are incompetent and unqualified. The people in his cabinet are particularly awful and even dangerous, Pete Hegseth and Robert F.K Kennedy Jr., for example.–TBPR Editor}

FEMA Official Says He Teleported to Waffle House
Gregg Phillips; a Waffle House exterior.Credit : Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg;getty

NEED TO KNOW

  • FEMA official Gregg Phillips claims he teleported 50 miles to a Waffle House in Rome, Ga., but nobody saw it
  • The New York Times interviewed Waffle House employees and regulars at Rome’s three locations, but none said they ever saw Phillips
  • Phillips doubled down on his claim on social media after widespread backlash, citing Biblical miracles

A senior official with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) claimed he teleported 50 miles to a Waffle House in Georgia, but nobody can back it up.

Gregg Phillips made the bizarre claim in a since-deleted podcast episode and, after it was met with backlash and doubt, he doubled down on it, citing Biblical miracles. However, nobody can seem to back up his story, according to a New York Times report published on Friday, April 3.

The Times interviewed about two dozen Waffle House employees and regulars across the three locations in Rome, Ga. — where Phillips, who leads FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, said the teleportation took place — and the response was unanimous: Nobody saw anyone teleporting into the breakfast chain.

Or as the outlet phrased it, none of the interviewees “said they were aware of anyone traveling to the 24-hour restaurants by paranormal means.”

“I’ve seen it all,” longtime Waffle House server Shastoni Burge told the outlet. “But I’ve never seen that.”

Several of Phillips’ bizarre claims began circulating after a March CNN report on his history of outlandish, far-right and violent rhetoric — including the Waffle House claim, which the FEMA official shared in a now-deleted podcast episode from January 2025.

In the episode, Phillips said that he was involved in multiple incidents of teleportation, including oncewhere his car was flown through the air to a church and once where he “ended up at a Waffle House, like 50 miles away from where I was.” (Elsewhere in the episode, he shared a desire to punch Joe Biden and stated that the former president “deserves to die.”)

After the initial CNN report spawned widespread criticism of Phillips, the FEMA official stood his ground, writing in a since-deleted March 28 Truth Social post: “The Bible calls it transported or translated.”

He also responded to a question about whether he had experienced teleportation with a “yes,” and in another post shared on March 23 he wrote, “God will not be mocked. People can debate me. Question me. Even ridicule what they don’t understand.”

“I know what I’ve experienced,” said the FEMA official. “I know Who I serve.

In a March 22 post, Phillips also cited a portion of the New Testament’s Acts of the Apostles where “the Spirit of the Lord snatched” away an early Christian holy man — known as Philip the Evangelist in some denominations — from a roadside baptism and is then described as appearing in a city miles away.

All of the FEMA official’s Truth Social posts have been taken down as of April 4.

Posted in America, Donald Trump, extremism, government, politics, scandals, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

More Evidence That Our Climate Is Changing

Posted on April 1, 2026 by Arlen Grossman

This is a photo of our reliable apricot tree, sprouting fruit earlier than usual–March! We’ve had a lot of sun and warm weather the last couple of months here in Monterey, CA and we can see the effect on our fruit trees this season!

Posted in Climate, climate change, global warming | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment