Wednesday, September 17, 2025

Something to Know - 17 September



This Charlie Kirk thing has taken on a life of its own.   MAGA has found a nail that has been pounded into the wall that facilitates all of their perverted messaging into one clump that is designed to appeal to a certain element and also create an overall distraction from the Epstein mess.   The authoritarian Nazi shtick is being used to suck the life out of rational reasoning:


Guest Essay

'We Will Do It in Charlie's Name'

Sept. 16, 2025
President Trump speaks to unseen reporters in the White House press pool.
Credit...Eric Lee for The New York Times

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.


President Trump and his allies are capitalizing on the assassination of Charlie Kirk to open up fresh attacks on liberal institutions, donors and foundations. They seek to portray many on the left as traitors.
Appearing on Kirk's podcast on Monday, less than a week after Kirk's death, Stephen Miller, Trump's deputy chief of staff, denounced
The organized doxxing campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people's addresses, combining that with messaging that's designed to trigger, incite violence in the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence. It is a vast domestic terror movement.
"With God as my witness," Miller then declared,
We are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie's name.
Trump and his allies have long exploited "emergencies" to push divisive measures. Now he claims that left-wing terrorism is a greater threat than terror perpetrated by the right, a demonstrably false assertion.
Over the last three years, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Cato Institute and the International Center for Counter-Terrorism have amassed evidence showing that right-wing violence is more prevalent than violence from the left.
"The current administration is perpetuating a narrative that erases right-wing violence, including Jan. 6, and blames the increased political violence on only one side," Jay Childers, a professor of political communication at the University of Kansas, wrote by email in response to my queries.

Within hours of the assassination of Kirk on Sept. 10, Trump placed the blame for political violence squarely on "the radical left" in televised remarks:
A tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree, day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals.
This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials and everyone else who brings order to our country.
On Sept. 12, Trump went beyond dismissing the threat posed by right-wing political violence to arguing that right-wing extremists are in fact justified. Asked about violence perpetrated by those on the right, Trump didn't hold back during an appearance on "Fox and Friends":
I'll tell you something that's going to get me in trouble, but I couldn't care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don't want to see crime. They're saying, "We don't want these people coming in. We don't want you burning our shopping centers. We don't want you shooting our people in the middle of the street."
The radicals on the left are the problem, and they're vicious and they're horrible and they're politically savvy, although they want men in women's sports, they want transgender for everyone. They want open borders.
Trump and his MAGA followers have not just turned Kirk's murder into a political weapon; they are trying, with some success, to use it to build a national movement to publicly out everyone who criticized Kirk on social media after his death. They are also trying to persuade employers to fire Kirk's critics.
"A campaign by public officials and others on the right has led just days after the conservative activist's death to the firing or punishment of teachers, government workers, a TV pundit and the expectation of more dismissals coming," The Associated Press reported on Sept. 14.

Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation, the wire service noted, "posted that American Airlines had grounded pilots who he said were celebrating Kirk's assassination. 'This behavior is disgusting and they should be fired,'" Duffy wrote on X.
In their article "Trump Escalates Attacks on Political Opponents After Charlie Kirk's Killing," my Times colleagues Tyler Pager and Nick Corasaniti reported that Trump and his supporters have initiated "a broad crackdown on critics and left-leaning institutions."
Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, Pager and Corasaniti wrote, warned "that his agency was closely tracking any military personnel who celebrated or mocked Mr. Kirk's death, and Christopher Landau, the deputy secretary of state, suggested the administration would strip visas from individuals who celebrated Mr. Kirk's death."

On Capitol Hill, Pager and Corasaniti continued,
Representative Clay Higgins, Republican of Louisiana, said he would use his congressional authority to seek immediate bans for life from social media platforms for anyone who "belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk," adding in a posting on X: "I'm also going after their business licenses and permitting, their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively, they should be kicked out from every school, and their drivers licenses should be revoked. I'm basically going to cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals who celebrated Charlie Kirk's assassination. I'm starting that today."
Trump and Miller have claimed that the Ford Foundation and George Soros's Open Society Foundations are financing violence on the left.
"We're going to look into Soros because I think it's a RICO case against him and other people because this is more than protests," Trump told Fox News. "This is real agitation; this is riots on the street — and we're going to look into that."
On Sept. 13, Laura Loomer, a Trump confidant, posted on X: "I have to say, I do want President Trump to be the 'dictator' the Left thinks he is, and I want the right to be as devoted to locking up and silencing our violent political enemies as they pretend we are."
Not to be outdone, Miller posted on X on Sept. 14: "In recent days we have learned just how many Americans in positions of authority — child services, law clerks, hospital nurses, teachers, gov't workers, even DOD employees — have been deeply and violently radicalized."
Sam Jackson, a professor of emergency management and homeland security at SUNY-Albany, emailed a response to my questions:
Trump, Loomer and many others are using this event to justify crackdowns on political opponents, broadly described as "the left." The political right in the United States has long tried to argue that the political left is responsible for more violence than the political right. That simply hasn't been true for decades. Lots of folks have surfaced a lot of evidence to illustrate that the far right has been responsible for more violence in the U.S. than the far left, including violent deaths.
Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago whose research focuses on political violence, described by email the importance of Kirk's murder:
The Kirk assassination is the most consequential assassination of an American political leader since the 1960s. It reflects the groundswell of support for political violence in our center's (the Chicago Project on Security and Threats) most recent national survey conducted in May, which found the highest levels in the four years we have conducted quarterly surveys on the topic.
Our survey shows that 39 percent of Democrats agree that the "use of force was justified to remove Donald Trump from the presidency," while 24 percent of Republicans agree that Trump "was justified in using the U.S. military against protesters against the Trump agenda." This represents support for political violence by tens of millions of Americans — the second defining aspect of the era of violent populism in America."
Pape contended that
There are powerful reasons to worry how Republicans will react to the assassination of Kirk, but the main one is simply the most obvious: Kirk was beloved by millions of Republicans and now many millions more. As America saw after 9/11 in our politics leading to 70 percent of the public supporting the invasion of Iraq on flimsy evidence: mass sorrow can evolve into mass anger and then mass willingness to pursue aggressive policies that can lead to spirals of violence beyond anything imagined before the event.
In February 2024, the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies issued a study I alluded to earlier, its "Global Terrorist Threat Assessment 2024." The center found that in the United States, "Violent far-right perpetrators, such as white supremacists, anti-government extremists and violent misogynists, have committed the most U.S. terrorist attacks in recent years, but violent far-left perpetrators such as antifascist extremists, anarchists and violent environmentalists have also orchestrated a growing percentage of terrorist attacks."

The center analyzed 831 terrorist attacks in this country from January 1994 to December 2022. In recent years, the study found:
Violent far-right extremists have been responsible for 94 of the 108 terrorism fatalities (87 percent) in the United States in the past five years. This included 2022, when 18 of the 19 fatalities occurred during far-right terrorist attacks.
Of the 71 terrorist attacks in 2022, 69 percent were perpetrated by those on the violent far right, 20 percent by the violent far left, 3 percent by Salafi-jihadists and 8 percent by ethnonationalists.
The most recent study of political violence is the Sept. 11, 2025, report, "Politically Motivated Violence Is Rare in the United States, by Alex Nowrasteh, the vice president for economic and social policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.
"Terrorists inspired by Islamist ideology are responsible for 87 percent of those murdered in attacks on U.S. soil since 1975," he writes. "Right-wingers are the second most common motivating ideology, accounting for 391 murders and 11 percent of the total. Left-wing terrorists murdered 65 people, or about 2 percent of the total."
Because the 9/11 attacks "obscure other trends and are plausibly distinct," Nowrasteh recalculated the data excluding the attacks. Doing so "reduces the number of murders to 620 from 3,599."
The exclusion raises the right-wing share of murders in terrorist attacks "from 11 percent to 63 percent (391), the left-wing share from about 2 percent to 10 percent (65), and the unknown/other share to 1 percent."
Terrorism since 2020, Nowrasteh wrote,
paints a slightly different picture. Since Jan. 1, 2020 (total 81), terrorists have murdered 81 people in attacks on U.S. soil. Right-wing terrorists account for over half of those murders (44), Islamists for 21 percent (17), left-wingers for 22 percent (18), and 1 had unknown or other motivations. (One more was committed in support of foreign nationalism.)
Nowrasteh did not include the deaths associated with the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol for the following reasons:
Ashli Babbitt was an attacker/terrorist. I didn't include her because I only count those who murder victims. One attacker/terrorist from a drug overdose. He wasn't a victim. One police officer died of a stroke the day after. The official report was that his death wasn't a homicide. Four police officers died by suicide afterward. I didn't count them.
Katarzyna Jasko, a professor of psychology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and lead author of a 2022 study, "A Comparison of Political Violence by Left-wing, Right-wing, and Islamist Extremists in the United States and the World," emailed her reply to my questions.

She contended that the claims about left-wing violence by Trump and his allies "are not justifiable." In recent years, she added, "far-right extremists have been responsible for more cases of political violence than far-left extremists. As our research shows, their attacks are more violent than those by left-wing extremists."
The study found that
Among radicalized individuals in the United States, those adhering to a left-wing ideology were markedly less likely to engage in violent ideologically motivated acts when compared to right-wing individuals. By contrast, we found no such difference between Islamist and right-wing individuals.
In terms of violent behavior, those supporting an Islamist ideology were significantly more violent than the left-wing perpetrators both in the United States and in the worldwide analysis. For the U.S. sample, we found no significant difference in the propensity to use violence for those professing Islamist or right-wing ideologies.
Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the Carnegie Endowment's program on democracy, conflict and governance, pointed out in an email that over the past six decades there has been a reversal in the ideological character of political violence:
In the 1950s and early 1960s, civil rights activists and leaders were murdered by far-right racists. The murders discredited those in the center who worked within the system to get civil rights legislation and who preached nonviolence, and it helped activists who said that self-defense was the only way communities could protect themselves. So in the late 1960s, violence moved to the extreme left and spread to a variety of causes.
Since the early 1990s, Kleinfeld continued, "actual violence has risen, largely from the right. While it has grown somewhat from the left — especially with regards to violence against property such as business harm from protests and attacks on Tesla dealerships — the numbers are just not comparable."
The response to the killing of Charlie Kirk, Kleinfeld argued, poses significant risks: "What is most dangerous is when violence starts to get framed as defensive — because that is when more normal people start engaging. The concern with Charlie Kirk's murder is that it may push the United States over that edge."
Gary LaFree, director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland and an author of the Jasko paper cited above, wrote in an email:
Kirk's death was obviously a very sad and worrying development. On the other hand, the administration seemed far less concerned about the recent deaths of the two Democratic legislators and their spouses from Minnesota. I cannot imagine how lionizing Kirk is going to reduce the growing polarization in the United States.
In fact, Trump and his allies are determined to intensify partisan hostility.
At 7 p.m. on Sept. 10, the day Kirk was killed, Laura Loomer posted on X:
Charlie Kirk's death will not be in vain. I will be spending my night making everyone I find online who celebrates his death Famous, so prepare to have your whole future professional aspirations ruined if you are sick enough to celebrate his death. I'm going to make you wish you never opened your mouth.
If Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Miller and Loomer have their way, America will take another step toward becoming a McCarthyite state with the ever-present danger that your colleagues and friends will report your offhand quick-reaction social media posts to government authorities.
As terrible as the killing of Charlie Kirk was, this way of honoring it is repellent.


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Juan Matute
The Harold Wilke House 
Claremont, California

Humpty Trumpty Shat on His Wall



Tuesday, September 16, 2025

Something Better to Know - 16 September

After I sent my previous email, I had a feeling that I kind of left it all behind like a dog being 
hit by hit-and-run car; turning my back on something that needed help.   So, I eventually opened 
up HCR, who has basically run to the end of the string of her tolerance for misery, but still chugs on.   
We seem to be waiting for something to happen, but it ain't happening, at least today.   



Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American heathercoxrichardson@substack.com 
Unsubscribe

Sep 15, 2025, 8:56 PM (11 hours ago)
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Six years ago, on September 15, 2019, after about a six-week hiatus during the summer, I wrote a Facebook post that started:

"Many thanks to all of you who have reached out to see if I'm okay. I am, indeed (aside from having been on the losing end of an encounter with a yellow jacket this afternoon!). I've been moving, setting up house, and finishing the new book. Am back and ready to write, but now everything seems like such a dumpster fire it's very hard to know where to start. So how about a general overview of how things at the White House look to me, today...."

I wrote a review of Trump's apparent mental decline amidst his faltering presidency, stonewalling of investigations of potential criminal activity by him or his associates, stacking of the courts, and attempting to use the power of the government to help his 2020 reelection.

Then I noted that the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), had written a letter to the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, on Friday, September 13, telling Maguire he knew that a whistleblower had filed a complaint with the inspector general of the intelligence community, who had deemed the complaint "credible" and "urgent." This meant that the complaint was supposed to be sent on to the House Intelligence Committee. But, rather than sending it to the House as the law required, Maguire had withheld it. Schiff's letter told Maguire that he'd better hand it over. Schiff speculated that Maguire was covering up evidence of crimes by the president or his closest advisors.

And I added: "None of this would fly in America if the Senate, controlled by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, were not aiding and abetting him."

"This is the story of a dictator on the rise," I wrote, "taking control of formerly independent branches of government, and using the power of his office to amass power."

Readers swamped me with questions. So I wrote another post answering them and trying to explain the news, which began breaking at a breathtaking pace.

And so these Letters from an American were born.

Six years later, we are in the midst of Trump's second term, and the patterns I saw six years ago are slicing to the heart of both the mechanics and the soul of the United States.

In that first letter where I warned of rising authoritarianism, I wrote: "So what do those of us who love American democracy do? Make noise. Take up oxygen…. Defend what is great about this nation: its people, and their willingness to innovate, work, and protect each other. Making America great has never been about hatred or destruction or the aggregation of wealth at the very top; it has always been about building good lives for everyone on the principle of self-determination. While we have never been perfect, our democracy is a far better option than the autocratic oligarchy Trump is imposing on us."

And we have made noise, and we have taken up oxygen. All across the country, people have stepped up to defend our democracy from those who are open about their plans to destroy it and install a dictator. Democrats and Republicans as well as people previously unaligned, we have reiterated why democracy matters.

If you are tired from the last six years, you have earned the right to be.

And yet you are still here, reading, commenting, protesting, articulating a new future for the nation. And I am proud to be among you.

I write these letters because I love America. I am staunchly committed to the principle of human self-determination for people of all races, genders, abilities, and ethnicities: the idea that we all have the right to work to become whatever we wish. I believe that American democracy has the potential to be the form of government that comes closest to bringing that principle to reality. And I know that achieving that equality depends on a government shaped by fact-based debate rather than by extremist ideology and false narratives.

And so I write.

I have come to understand that I am simply the translator for the sentiments shared by millions of people who are finding each other and giving voice to the principles of democracy. Your steadfast interest, curiosity, critical thinking, and especially your kindness—to me and to one another—illustrate that we have not only the power, but also the passion, to reinvent our nation.

To those who read these letters, send tips, proofread, criticize, comment, argue, worry, cheer, award medals, and support me and one another: I thank you for bringing me along on this wild, unexpected, exhausting, and exhilarating journey.



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Juan Matute
The Harold Wilke House 
Claremont, California

Humpty Trumpty Shat on His Wall



Something to Know - 16 September



This is something you already know.   Just a reminder as to why your day is spoiled already now that you know it.



Mary Geddry from Geddry's Newsletter marygeddry@substack.com 

6:37 AM (31 minutes ago)
to me

Geddry's Newsletter is a publication of nGenium, LLC


Trump's $15 Billion Tantrum and the Authoritarian Roadshow

From suing the press into silence to JD Vance's purge threats, UnitedHealthcare's retaliation, Venezuela boat strikes, Epstein banners in the UK, and jobs up in smoke, America 2025 is a circus

Sep 16
 
READ IN APP
 

Good morning! Donald Trump has decided that if the courts won't bend to his will, he'll simply bludgeon them with paper. Late Monday, he filed a $15 billion defamation suit against the New York Times, its reporters, and Penguin Random House for the crime of accurately describing his bankruptcies, scandals, and general existence. The complaint reads less like a legal brief than a therapy session gone wrong: Trump cites his Apprentice ratings, his guest spot on Days of Our Lives, even Miss Universe 2001, as proof he's a titan wronged by the "degenerate" Times. Somewhere in the middle of this deranged filing he also manages to wave away his presidential immunity, because, by suing in his personal capacity, he's invited discovery into the very dark corners he's spent decades barricading off. Congratulations, Mr. President: you've just gift-wrapped your deposition to the very reporters you despise. Bring popcorn; if the NYTimes has the stones, Epstein questions are now fair game.

While Trump is busy suing newspapers into silence, his understudy JD Vance is busy sketching a blueprint for ideological purges. Broadcasting to 250,000 Charlie Kirk mourners, Vance pledged to "go after" NGOs like the Ford Foundation and Soros's Open Society, while Stephen Miller purred about unleashing DOJ and DHS on "radical networks." At one point Vance even promised, "We're going to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence." Translation: anyone the White House dislikes will be branded violent and treated as an enemy of the state. It was a dress rehearsal for authoritarian show trials. The enemy, they made clear, is not violence but dissent.

Corporate America, naturally, is already fluent in retribution. Just ask Dr. Elisabeth Potter, a breast cancer surgeon who committed the cardinal sin of pointing out that UnitedHealthcare denies care to patients, including one who, awkwardly, was unconscious on an operating table. For her trouble, Potter now faces an avalanche of retaliation. UnitedHealthcare has hired Clare Locke, the legal pit bulls best known for defending Russian oligarchs and the Sackler family, yes, the Purdue Pharma dynasty that made billions addicting America to OxyContin, to try to bankrupt her into silence. In Trump's America, health insurance is less about coverage than crushing whistleblowers.

On the foreign policy front, "law and order" has devolved into maritime roulette. Earlier this month, the U.S. Navy blew up a Venezuelan fishing boat, killing eleven. Yesterday, they did it again, this time claiming three "narcoterrorists." Trump boasted on Truth Social, posted an ISIS-style explosion video, and then explained that there are "literally no boats" left in the Caribbean because fishermen are too afraid to be vaporized. Translation: we're stopping drugs by scaring off tuna boats. By Trump's math, 300 million Americans died of fentanyl last year, which is remarkable given that's almost the entire U.S. population.

Across the Atlantic, the welcome mat is embroidered with Epstein's face. Protesters unfurled a massive banner of Trump and his late friend outside Windsor Castle, while Channel 4 devoted an entire day of programming to fact-checking his lies in real time. Imagine a Trump visit where the photo op isn't a handshake with the King but a giant reminder of your ties to a convicted sex trafficker. It's especially rich given that Britain only recently sacked its U.S. envoy over his own Epstein ties, yet here they are rolling out the red carpet for Epstein's best friend. That's what the "special relationship" looks like now: a toxic alliance dressed up in pageantry, shadowed by scandal. Bless you Britain!

Back in Georgia, MAGA populism has eaten its own tail. A congressional hopeful bragged about calling ICE on Hyundai's $7 billion EV plant, and ICE dutifully detained over 300 South Korean engineers. Those workers are now home, recounting horror stories of duress forms, rancid food, and guards mocking their accents while they wore prisoner uniforms. The fallout? Hyundai has frozen construction, Seoul is fuming, and industry insiders warn the entire U.S. auto supply chain could be disrupted since Korean technicians set up and program the machinery for virtually every major car plant. Tens of thousands of American jobs didn't just vanish with a bang, they're evaporating in indefinite delays. The real winners? GEO Group, the private prison operator that profited from the detentions and once counted Pam Bondi as a lobbyist. This is a literal racket: arrest foreign technicians, enrich private prisons, and leave American workers holding pink slips.

Meanwhile, the economic weather report is bleak. Farmers are reeling from tariffs and China's soybean boycott. Capital expenditures are sliding to nine-year lows, labor market expectations have tanked, and the CBO says Trump's tariffs are fueling inflation. Call it Trumpflation: high prices, low growth, rising unemployment. In Pennsylvania, a three-time Trump voter dairy farmer admitted, "The whole thing is screwed up." He's right, but he voted for the arsonist now fanning the flames.

Taken together, today's headlines show a government more interested in suing reporters, punishing NGOs, retaliating against doctors, blowing up fishing boats, chasing away auto jobs, and groveling for TikTok than actually governing. Abroad, he's greeted with Epstein banners; at home, farmers and workers are left to wonder how many more self-inflicted wounds they can withstand. Trump wanted to rule like a dictator, John Kelly warned. Turns out he's ruling like a dictator and a clown: thin-skinned enough to sue the Times, reckless enough to terrorize allies, and vain enough to think the Apprentice ratings count as evidence in court.

This is America, September 2025: a nation where the president files a $15 billion tantrum, the vice president plots purges, insurers crush surgeons, fishermen flee the sea, and the UK greets us with billboards of Jeffrey Epstein. If it feels like the walls are closing in, that's because they are, and Trump is the one holding the wrecking ball.


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Juan Matute
The Harold Wilke House 
Claremont, California

Humpty Trumpty Shat on His Wall



Monday, September 15, 2025

Something to Know - 15 September

Robert Reich found this note kicking around by his parked car, and thought you might want to check it out.   In fact, take a magnet and pin it to the refrigerator.   Much of it is about our favorite Nazi  Wannabe; stephen miller.   I'm sick of reading stuff about him and things he is doing.   Any way that we can carve him up Jeffrey Dahmer style, and stuff him piece-by-piece down the garbage disposer?

Robert Reich 

1:05 AM (7 hours ago)
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Trump's Phase 2 now begins

It's a last-ditch effort to discredit all Trump's political opponents. It will fail.

Sep 15
 
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Friends,

We are now witnessing the start of what might be seen as Phase 2 of Trump's efforts to eradicate political opposition.

Phase 1 has centered on silencing criticism. It has featured retribution toward people Trump deemed personal "enemies" — not just Democrats who had led the criticisms and prosecutions of him in his first term but also Republicans and his own first-term appointees who subsequently criticized him, such as John Bolton.

Phase 1 also entailed an assault on universities that utilize so-called "diversity, equity, and inclusion," harbor faculty members and students who speak out critically against Benjamin Netanyahu's genocide in Palestine, or offer classes critical of the United States's history toward Black people and Native Americans.

Finally, Phase 1 has gone after media that criticized Trump by withdrawing funding for public radio and television and relying on the billionaire owners of The Washington Post, ABC, CBS, and X to suppress criticism of Trump on their media platforms.

Phase 2, it appears, will entail a more direct attack on all Trump's political opponents, including the entire Democratic Party.

Trump has vowed to order troops into cities run by Democrats — Washington, D.C., Chicago, Memphis, and New Orleans.

He posted a video last week assailing Democratic mayors on crime, although crime rates have fallen sharply in recent years. "For far too long, Americans have been forced to put up with Democrat-run cities that set loose savage, bloodthirsty criminals to prey on innocent people," he says in the video.

Meanwhile, he's sending disaster relief to states run by Republicans and that he won in 2024, most recently announcing $32 million in aid for North Carolina, "which I WON BIG all six times, including Primaries," suggesting that states run by Democrats will not receive such relief.

He has taken off the gloves with Democratic states and their representatives in Congress, virtually ordering the governors of Texas, Missouri, Indiana, and Ohio to redistrict in order to come up with more Republican seats.

Another aspect of Phase 2 is his willingness to describe Democrats as "evil." In a Fox News interview last week in which he complained about so-called "excesses" by the left, he referred to Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist and front-runner for mayor of New York, as a "communist."

In calling the entire Democratic Party the "radical left," Trump seems eager to use the murder of Charlie Kirk to go after Democrats and liberals. Within hours of the murder, he declared that "we just have to beat the hell" out of "radical left lunatics," and he has hammered Democrats and liberals as "vicious and … horrible."

Trump's Phase 2 thinking can be seen most vividly in the remarks of his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, who is turning Kirk's murder into a political cause. As Miller wrote on Saturday:

"In recent days we have learned just how many Americans in positions of authority — child services, law clerks, hospital nurses, teachers, gov't workers, even DOD employees — have been deeply and violently radicalized," calling them "the consequence of a vast, organized ecosystem of indoctrination."

Miller continued:

"There is an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved. It is an ideology at war with family and nature. It is envious, malicious, and soulless. It is an ideology that looks upon the perfect family with bitter rage while embracing the serial criminal with tender warmth.

Its adherents organize constantly to tear down and destroy every mark of grace and beauty while lifting up everything monstrous and foul. It is an ideology that leads, always, inevitably and willfully, to violence—violence against those [who] uphold order, who uphold faith, who uphold family, who uphold all that is noble and virtuous in this world. It is an ideology whose one unifying thread is the insatiable thirst for destruction."

Miller has vowed to use the power of the government against MAGA's political enemies, calling his political opponents "domestic terrorists" and warning:

"[T]he power of law enforcement under President Trump's leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and, if you've broken the law, to take away your freedom."

Phase 2 must be understood against the backdrop of Trump's rapidly declining popularity. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, from September 9, shows that only 32 percent of Americans support Trump's deploying armed troops to large cities.

His economic policies are similarly unpopular. Only 36 percent approve of Trump's handling of the economy, 30 percent approve of his handling of cost of living, and 16 percent support Trump's having the power to set interest rates or tell companies where to manufacture products.

Other polls show similar declines in support for Trump.

Trump's Phase 2 aims to overcome these declining poll numbers by demonizing the Democratic Party, liberals, and all other political opponents in an effort to divide the nation into those who are with Trump and those who are against him.

The overall goal is to make loyalty to Trump a litmus test of American patriotism.

I believe he will fail. Americans won't fall for it. To the contrary: Trump's Phase 2 will reveal the depths of his anti-democratic authoritarianism, from which even more Americans will recoil.

***

By the way, please plan on demonstrating October 18 in the second and largest No Kings Day protests across the nation. Information can be found here.



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Juan Matute
The Harold Wilke House 
Claremont, California

Humpty Trumpty Shat on His Wall