{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.
{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.”
“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.”
{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?
{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?”
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:
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 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.
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.
{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.
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.
{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}
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
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.
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!
{It is written clearly right there in our first amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” Our founding fathers knew that democracy couldn’t exist without freedom of speech and press. The people needed to know whether their government was benefitting or harming their democracy. Thomas Jefferson understood “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” —TBPR Editor}
Yesterday morning, standing in the Oval Office, Donald Trump declared that the war with Iran — a war he started without a declaration of Congress, apparently at the urging of MBS and his son-in-law who takes $25 million a year from Saudi Arabia — is “won,” and then added that “the only one that likes to keep it going is the fake news.”
Iran, for its part, flatly denied that any negotiations are even taking place. And the network news covered it just like that: Trump says the war is won, Iran says it isn’t, here’s the weather.
Nobody on camera yesterday morning even bothered to ask why Jared Kushner, who was simultaneously soliciting a fresh $5 billion from the Saudis who lobbied hardest for this war, was one of the people at the table in Geneva when the last chance for a deal collapsed.
That omission isn’t an accident. It’s the result of a thirty-year Republican strategy to bully the press into docility, and it’s long past time for Democrats to fight back using the exact same playbook.
An old friend dropped me a note this week with a complaint that, once you hear it, you can’t stop noticing everywhere you look in our nation’s media. He’d been watching one of the three major network TV evening newscasts and noticed that Trump and other Republicans are on every single night, almost always without serious pushback or fact-checking, while Democrats are rarely featured at all.
When a Democrat does show up, it’s usually to react to something Trump just did or said, a process that reinforces the Republican frame of the news even when it pushes back against it (see: George Lakoff).
I’ve been in the media much of my life; was a radio news reporter for a top station in the 1970s and have been writing books and articles about democracy and politics regularly for the past three decades: what my friend is describing is neither an accident nor a coincidence.
It’s the fully ripened fruit of a successful strategy Republicans have been running to get the media to spin stories for them since the early 1980s. And it’s long past time for Democrats to stand up and fight back hard with exactly the same playbook.
Back during the 1992 Clinton/Bush Sr. presidential race, Rich Bond, then chairman of the GOP, explained his party’s media strategy with unusual candor:
“There is some strategy to it,” he said of their habit of bashing the so-called liberal media. “If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is ‘work the refs.’ Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one.”
Lee Atwater had been running a version of this strategy for years before Bond said the quiet part out loud. The genius of it was that they never needed to prove that the media was actually infected with “liberal bias.”
Which was good for them, because the mainstream media’s never really had any sort of political bias other than status quo; it’s just that the GOP has relied on so many lies over the years like “trickle down,” “murderous immigrant invasion,” “evil union bosses,” “non-citizens voting,” “queer predators,” etc., etc., that when they get confronted with reality it seems to them like bias.
All they needed was for the accusation to be repeated often enough that journalists and producers would end up sufficiently intimidated to lean over backward to prove they weren’t pushing a liberal line. And it worked.
Media scholar Eric Alterman documented the phenomenon in detail at the Center for American Progress: conservative columnists like George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and Bob Novak had prominent perches all over the allegedly “liberal” media showing up on major TV programs weekly, while genuinely progressive voices like Paul Krugman and E.J. Dionne almost never got television slots.
A study comparing Sunday morning talk shows during Obama’s first two years versus Trump’s first two years (first time around) found that by the Trump era, every single major Sunday show, including NBC’s Meet the Press and CBS’s Face the Nation, was featuring more Republicans than Democrats. And a FAIR analysis found Republicans outnumbering Democrats 56% to 40% in Sunday show appearances during Trump’s first post-election transition period.
Here’s how effectively this strategy worked: When Bush was president, the networks said they “needed more Republicans” on television because “Republicans are in power.” When Obama was president, they said they “needed more Republicans” on TV “because Democrats were in charge,” and “it’s important to hear from the opposition.”
Heads Republicans win, tails Democrats lose, every single time, under almost every conceivable circumstance and on pretty much every topic. That’s not journalism. That’s genuine media bias. In favor of the GOP.
And while that particular scheme was playing out, the billionaires on the hard right were simultaneously building media empires of their own that now include roughly 1,500 rightwing radio stations, Fox “News,” Newsmax, One America News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, more than half of America’s local newspapers, and now, CBS itself.
Meanwhile, CNN may soon land in the hands of the same billionaire nepo-baby buyer, reportedly eager to move it in a similar direction. Just ask Pete Hegseth, who recently said, “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”
Even the White House and Pentagon press pools, once home to credentialed reporters from established outlets, are now packed with “reporters” from fringe rightwing websites and sketchy podcasts, while serious journalists and representatives of progressive outlets often find themselves locked out.
The hypocrisy here, particularly since the media now either ignores or treats Trump family and cabinet corruption as something normal, is breathtaking.
For example, Jared Kushner has been simultaneously acting as Trump’s Middle East “peace envoy” while raising a new $5 billion round of investment from the same foreign governments he’s supposedly negotiating with.
Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which is controlled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), already pumped $2 billion into Kushner’s private equity firm right after he left the first Trump White House, and pays him $25 million a year in management fees.
According to reporting in The Washington Post, MBS was making private phone calls to Trump for weeks before the bombing of Iran started, urging him to strike, since Iran is Saudi Arabia’s chief regional rival.
Kushner himself met with Iran’s foreign minister in Geneva just before the bombs fell. Iran’s foreign minister later said a deal “was within reach,” suggesting Kusnher may have been playing them for suckers on behalf of MBS and/or Netanyahu (an old Kushner family friend).
Senators Ron Wyden and Jamie Raskin have called for investigations into whether Kushner violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act and the Constitution’s emoluments clause. Not to mention policies against nepotism. And that’s Trump’s peace envoy. That’s the person steering American foreign policy toward a war that explicitly benefits and may even be being fought — at the cost of American lives and treasure — on behalf of his biggest client.
At the same time, Qatar handed Trump a $400 million luxury Boeing 747 jumbo jet to ultimately keep for himself and you and I are now paying a billion dollars to outfit it. Multiple constitutional law scholars have called it a textbook violation of the Foreign Emoluments Clause, which prohibits presidents from accepting gifts from foreign governments without congressional approval.
The New York Times has reported that Trump has already personally pocketed at least $1.4 billion from the presidency through his family’s various business deals; other investigations suggest the number could be well over $4 billion.
The administration has also been killing people on boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean — at least 151 people killed in 45 strikes since last September — including at least one Colombian fisherman, all without a declaration of war or congressional authorization. And then they bombed and invaded Venezuela, killing more than 80 people including civilians, seizing its president without any legal authority whatsoever under international law.
Now, consider what would have happened if Barack Obama or Bill Clinton had done any of this? What if Clinton’s son-in-law had taken $2 billion from a foreign government and then whispered in Clinton’s ear to start a war that benefited that same foreign government? What if Obama had accepted a $400 million jet from Qatar? What if a Democratic administration had been killing people on boats in international waters without congressional authorization?
Republicans would have been incandescent, holding news conferences and hearing after hearing after hearing. Fox “News” would have run wall-to-wall of outraged coverage for months. The Sunday shows would have featured nothing but Republicans demanding impeachment or worse.
And the mainstream media would have covered those hearings seriously and continuously, because they’d have been terrified of being called “liberal” if they didn’t.
That’s the mechanism. That’s how it works. Republicans institutionalized the accusation of “liberal media bias” so thoroughly that the media now polices itself on their behalf, even when the corruption on the other side is jaw-dropping.
The solution to this media crisis that’s so damaging to our democracy is straightforward, and Democrats need to do it now.
Every senator, every congressperson, every governor, every mayor, every Democratic surrogate who goes on television needs to be trained to say the words “rightwing media bias” early and often, not occasionally, but constantly, institutionally, the same way Republicans “worked the refs” for thirty years.
It means pressuring the networks directly. It means holding hearings — even if they have to be unofficial “shadow” hearings — right now about media consolidation and the capture of the press corps by rightwing interests. It means pointing out, loudly and specifically, every single time a network gives a Republican five minutes of uncontested airtime and then gives a Democrat thirty seconds to “respond.”
Republicans didn’t spend forty years bleating about the “liberal media” because the liberal media actually existed. They knew it didn’t but were relentless about the accusation nonetheless, and they had the infrastructure to amplify it everywhere, all the time.
Democrats can do the same thing today, and unlike the GOP, they have the truth on their side.
This starts with you. Call your Democratic senators and representatives today and demand they raise this issue publicly and loudly, in press conferences, in hearings, in every television interview. Share this article. Talk with your neighbors about it.
The refs change their calls when the voices get loud enough. It’s time to start speaking out loudly.
Lying is standard behavior for Mr. Trump, of course. His political career began with a lie about Barack Obama’s birthplace, and he has lied about his business, his wealth, his inauguration crowd size, his defeat in the 2020 election and so much more. A CNN tally of Mr. Trump’s falsehoods during one part of his first term found that he averaged eight false claims per day. Many people are so accustomed to his lies that they hardly notice them anymore.
From his first announcement of the attack on Iran on Feb. 28, President Trump has issued a stream of falsehoods about the war. He has said Iran wants to engage in negotiations, though its government shows no sign of it. He has claimed that the United States “destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military capability” when Tehran continues to inflict damage throughout the region. He has said the war is almost complete even as he calls in reinforcements from around the globe.
Yet lying about war is uniquely corrosive. When a president signals that the truth does not matter in wartime, he encourages his cabinet and his generals to mislead the country and one another about how the war is going. He creates a culture in which deadly mistakes and even war crimes can become more common. He makes it harder to win by hiding the realities of conflict and by making allies wary of joining the fight. Ultimately, he undermines American values and interests.
There is a reasonable debate to have about the wisdom of this war. Iran’s murderous government does indeed present a threat — to its own people, to its region and to global stability. Mr. Trump could make a fact-based argument for confronting the regime now, especially to prevent it from menacing its neighbors and, above all, from developing a nuclear weapon. We are skeptical, but we acknowledge that there is a case to be made.
Mr. Trump is not making it. Instead, he has lied about the reasons for the war and about its progress, in an apparent attempt to disguise his poor planning and the war’s questionable basis.
The president was only a few minutes into his Feb. 28 announcement of the start of the conflict when he offered an obviously contradictory rationale for it. He repeated his claim that American attacks last June “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program while also citing that program as a reason to go to war. The claim of obliteration is false: Iran retains about 970 pounds of highly enriched uranium, potentially enough for 10 warheads.
The lies have continued since then. Days later, Mr. Trump said the U.S. military had a “virtually unlimited supply” of high-end munitions. The Pentagon nevertheless has had to withdraw weapons from South Korea to sustain its efforts in the Middle East. He has also asserted that “nobody” believed Iran would retaliate by attacking Arab countries. On Monday, he said that “no, the greatest experts, nobody thought they were going to hit” neighboring countries. In truth, some experts had warned of precisely this scenario.
In another instance, Mr. Trump has used false information to continue his alarming penchant to portray people who contradict him as un-American. Last weekend, he posted an allegation that “Iran, working in close coordination with the Fake News Media” had spread fake videos of an American aircraft burning in the ocean. The White House has offered no examples of American media outlets having done so. Instead, several debunked fake online videos, CNN reported. Nonetheless, Mr. Trump wrote that “you can say that those Media Outlets that generated it should be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information!”
A shocking falsehood came on March 7, when Mr. Trump claimed in his typically offhand way that a strike on an elementary school in the town of Minab during the first hours of the war “was done by Iran.” The attack killed at least 175 people, most of them children. The U.S. military has conducted an investigation and preliminarily concluded that an American missile mistakenly hit the school. The military deserves credit for its honesty. The commander in chief, however, still has not retracted his statement.
This pattern is an echo of the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, when small lies grew into bigger ones, such as the covered-up massacres in My Lai and Haditha. The consequences of those untruths were long-lasting. Americans’ faith in government never recovered from the deceptions of Vietnam. And the second Iraq war, which George W. Bush’s administration sold on the grounds of fictitious weapons of mass destruction, represents the start of our cynical modern political era. Since that war began in 2003, every Gallup poll asking about the country’s direction has shown that most Americans are dissatisfied with it.
Lies about war also make it harder to achieve victory: The more one spreads falsehoods, the less one feels obliged to face reality. In retrospect, Americans understand that their leaders’ refusal to confront the truth in Iraq and Vietnam led to strategic errors. The pattern is repeating. Before Mr. Trump began this war, he brushed aside warnings from his top military adviser that Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz to traffic it does not approve. The global economy is now dealing with the consequences of his overconfidence.
He may yet learn a more personal lesson about lying in war. Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush will forever be remembered as having misled Americans about U.S. military action. They learned that falsehoods can boomerang on the leaders who tell them.
Starting a war is the most serious action that a political leader can take. It ends lives and can change history. The decisions that guide war must be based in reality, and presidents owe American service members and their families the truth about why they are being asked to fight. Whatever short-term gain Mr. Trump thinks he is getting by lying about the war in Iran is far exceeded by the cost, for him, the country and the world.
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