Have you ever heard of Marinus van der Lubbe? Probably not, but were it not for this young, itinerant  Dutch construction worker with poor eyesight, the Second World War might never have happened. His is a story of a lone-wolf agitator. It is also a metaphor and a cautionary tale for our time. Let me tell you about it.

1933

Marinus van der Lubbe was born in 1909 and grew up in Leiden in utter poverty. His drunken father deserted the family, and, by the time he was 12, his mother had died. He trained as a mason, where he discovered the labour movement and joined the Communist Youth Party. By 1931, he was working his way across Europe towards the Soviet Union to be as close as possible to his communist idols.

But along the way, he became disillusioned with the communists’ strict code of discipline and authoritarian structure. He joined an anarchic-syndicalist group that advocated “propaganda of the deed, not the word.” Reaching Poland, he turned around and headed into Germany, reaching Berlin in mid-February 1933.

Two weeks before van der Lubbe arrived in Berlin, Adolf Hitler had been appointed Chancellor of the German Reich by President von Hindenburg.

The Nazi Party had grown enormously since its drubbing in the federal elections of 1928, in which it had won only 12 seats in a Reichstag of 491. Four years later, in the July 1932 elections, it won 230 seats, accounting for 37.3% of the total vote, the most of any of the numerous parties. However, without a positive plan for the country’s future,  and with a German unemployment rate of more than 30%, the Nazis could not capitalize on their new-found popularity.

The country descended into severe turmoil. In September, the Reichstag voted “no confidence” in the government of Franz von Papen and called for new elections in November, elections in which the Nazis lost 34 seats.

Nevertheless, with Joseph Goebbels’ brilliant propaganda and shrewd political maneuvering, Hitler managed to convince von Hindenburg to name him Chancellor on 30 January.

The only plan the Nazis had at that point was Brownshirt terrorism. Having achieved power, they had no idea what to do next. They needed something to energize their movement, and Marinus van der Lubbe, the dedicated and committed anarchist newly arrived in Berlin, was about to provide it.

He believed it would take a spectacular event to rouse the unemployed to break free from their chains and take spontaneous mass action themselves.

He decided to burn down the Reichstag.

On the 26th and 27th of February, he spent every Reichsmark he had on matches and firestarters. On the evening of the 28th, he hid in the Reichstag until everyone had left for the day, and at about 9:00 pm, set fire to the building. After lighting a number of fires throughout the building, he was apprehended by police.

He had done a superb job. The fire brigade did what it could, but the place was a tinderbox and burned brilliantly all night.

His interrogation made it perfectly clear he had acted alone. One of his questioners later said, “His eyes gleamed with fanaticism.”

Immediately after learning of the blaze, Hitler, Goebbels, and Hermann Göring met in the Party’s offices with a clear view of the conflagration. Hitler was excited, even ecstatic. Rudolf Diels, the non-Nazi head of the Prussian political police who had witnessed van der Lubbe’s interrogation, tried to tell Hitler that this was a one-person crime, and a crazy person at that, but Hitler wouldn’t listen. He blamed the Communists, an influential political party he hated, and the winner of 89 Reichstag seats in the recent elections.

Looking straight at Diels and the two others, Hitler set in motion the full power that was to become the Third Reich, saying, “There will be no more mercy now; anyone who stands in our way will be butchered. The German people won’t have any understanding for leniency. Every Communist functionary will be shot where he is found. The Communist deputies must be hanged this very night. Everybody in league with the Communists is to be arrested.”

A few hours later, police squads dug out lists of Communists prepared months, even years previously, for the coming ban on the party, and set off in cars and vans to haul them out of bed. There were thousands of them. The German police, however, were ever so efficient at finding them.

Meanwhile, Wilhelm Frick, Minister of the interior, saw an opportunity. He proposed suspending several sections of the Weimar constitution, particularly those governing freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly and association. He also proposed to Hitler allowing the police to detain people indefinitely without a court order.

At a meeting the following morning, the cabinet unanimously approved the proposal. Hitler made plain his intention of destroying the Communists and anyone else who dared defy his plans. He included the Jews, specifically. “Our struggle must not be made dependent on judicial considerations,” he said. Is that sounding familiar?

Marinus van der Lubbe was tried, found guilty, and executed the following January.

2025

The incompetence and gleeful brutality of the Trump Administration have been on full display for nearly 100 days. The American people are noticing and registering disapproval.

Trump’s job approval rating is 11 points underwater (44% approve, 55% disapprove) in a new Fox News survey. While 55% of registered voters approve of his handling of border security, that is “the only issue where his ratings are in positive territory.” He’s at -15 on taxes (38% approve, 53% disapprove), -18 on the economy (38% to 56%), -25 on tariffs (33% to 58%), and -26 on inflation (33% to 59%).

The Administration is flailing. Every day seems like the Ted Mack Amateur Hour, except those amateurs knew what they were doing.

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before Watergate, Richard Nixon always seemed able to pull a surprise out of his presidential magic bag when he needed the country to look away from some current horrendoma. He would show us the bluebird of happiness had gone to some new and better place.

Donald Trump doesn’t seem to have a magic bag, much less a magical bluebird.

Right now, 96 days in, not much of Trumpism is resonating around the country. It doesn’t help that Trump changes his positions more often than weather changes in New England. What’s a punch-drunk president to do?

And that is the question.

He needs his own Reichstag Fire — a calamitous event that would galvanize the country around a strong leader who could demonstrate solid control. He’s looking, but hasn’t found it yet.

It could have been Ukraine. Ukraine is burning, but Trump is nowhere to be found. Vladimir Putin leads him around a circus ring by the nose. Trump’s “negotiators,” completely unprepared for the job, seem like kindly Mr. Chase, who would give us third-graders free candy on the way home from school, hoping our parents would come into his store later, which they never did. “Have another Babe Ruth, Tommie.”

He could have marshalled the skills on display at his rallies to mobilize the country for a noble cause — sending Russian troops back to Russia. His MAGA base would not have understood or appreciated that, but the non-MAGA two-thirds of the rest of the country would have. It would have ennobled him, elevated him in history. He didn’t do that, he couldn’t. Instead, he does his best to sell a brave country to a tyrant for a song. In return, he’ll steal some vague mineral rights and crow that he ended a war. Nobel Peace Prize stuff.

Meanwhile, he looks elsewhere for his Reichstag Fire.

Perhaps migrants? But migrants aren’t cooperating. Their numbers are down and, much to the Administration’s disappointment, they seem lawful.

We should all hope Trump is not handed his very own Reichstag Fire here in the U.S. We should all hope he doesn’t find a plausible excuse, as Hitler did, to suspend the freedoms we hold dear, the ones our ancestors fought and died for.

We should all hope.

Across America, we see groups and organizations, most of them small and local, that do what they can to demonstrate the respect we owe veterans. For example, here in Massachusetts, in Braintree, the home of John Adams, the Atlantic Symphony Orchestra is dedicating the final performance of its season this coming Saturday night to the 15.8 million veterans still with us. Although their numbers have been declining in recent years, falling 25% since 2010, the devotion to country of these men and women has never wavered.

I intend to be in that audience. Here’s why.

Very shortly after 1967 had become 1968, and after I had done everything I could to avoid anything to do with Vietnam, two friends arrived back in America. They had been killed in action. Now, like more than 50,000 others, they would forever be remembered as shrouded in military olive green.

I felt a sense of shame and, with the impetuosity of youth, visited an Army recruitment office in Haverhill, Massachusetts, and enlisted in the Army’s Officer Candidate School.

When I told my father what I had done that evening at dinner, he was horrified. The first thing he said was, “Tom, have you lost your mind?”

Maybe.

But I understood why he asked that question with such disgust. In mid-1943, he had been drafted for World War II. In January 1944, as a member of the 3rd Division, he had been in the first wave of the Battle of Anzio, the Allies’ Operation Shingle, launched amphibiously on the western edge of central Italy.

As my father and about thirty other soldiers dropped into the LST that would carry them to shore for the invasion, his Lieutenant handed him a box and told him to carry it — carefully — to shore. Asked what was in it that was so valuable, the Lieutenant replied, “Nitroglycerin bombs.”

When they exited the LST and hit the water, the first thing my father got rid of, pushing it as far as he could back out to sea, but ever so gently, were those bombs. Sometimes, war has its humorous, surreal moments.

He was among those who scaled the cliffs of Anzio. Then, after being held down by fierce German resistance for three months, the Americans broke through and, in May, captured and liberated Rome.

Anzio cost the lives of 5,538 Americans, with another 18,000 wounded. The dead are buried in the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery, just east of the town of Anzio. Like Normandy and Arlington National Cemetery, it consists of neatly lined-up white crosses with the names of the dead.

The 3rd Division then headed up and into France on their way to Germany.

My father never made it to Germany. After every one of his squadmates had been killed or seriously wounded, he had his own meeting with a German bullet. He was shot through the shoulder by a round that ended up an eighth of an inch from his spine. He was left to die in a corridor of an Army MASH hospital in France.

He fooled everyone. He did not die, but he did spend eight months rehabbing in an Army hospital back in the U.S. The bullet that got him remained next to his spine the rest of his life. He never would raise his right arm above his shoulder again. However, this high school All-American football player did learn to throw a football, sidearm, to his sons with real snap to it.

He, like so many others, had become a living veteran.

I spent nearly two years in Vietnam, but I do not think a single moment of that experience could rival the horror of what my father and all the other members of the Greatest Generation went through on their way to saving humanity from the depravity and outright evil of the Third Reich.

To give “the last full measure” so that others may live in peace is often not appreciated by those who have never experienced the horror of war. I suppose that’s understandable. However, as that is the highest gift one person can give another, we need frequent reminding. We need to realize that warfare is to be avoided at all costs and never venerated, let alone glorified.

My father and the other 16.4 million Americans who fought to send Hitler to the fifth circle of Hell, as well as those who followed them through peace and battle, deserve the utmost respect from every American, regardless of ideology or political views.

Saturday night’s concert in Braintree will have the utmost meaning for me.

Donald Trump insanely pulls the country even deeper into the rabbit hole.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump’s two most significant and repeated promises to the American people were that he would cure the country’s economic problems and end the war in Ukraine immediately upon taking office. Actually, he said he would end the war “on day one.”

Earlier this week, 87 days into Trump 2.0, a Russian missile attack on the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih killed at least 18 people and left dozens wounded, Ukrainian officials said. Nine of the dead were children, said President Volodymyr Zelensky, who grew up in Kryvyi Rih. And that, friends, probably explains the location of the attack.

Regarding President Trump’s promise to end the war “on day one,” no one can deny that after nearly three months, his stunningly persuasive diplomatic skills, as well as his close personal bromance with ex-KGB killer Vladimir Putin, have moved Russia to meaningful negotiations toward a just peace with only nine more kids murdered.

With respect to his pledge to end the country’s economic woes — the ones it didn’t have — on Wednesday of this week, the Dow, S&P, and Nasdaq all continued their slide down negative alley after Fed Chairman Jerome Powell delivered a speech to the Economic Club of Chicago in which he noted a potentially grim situation developing from Trump’s helter-skelter tariffs in which prices are pushed higher. At the same time, growth and a likely weakening in the labor market leave both inflation and employment further away from the Fed’s desired levels.

Powell called Trump’s tariff plans “fundamental changes” that don’t provide businesses and economists with any clear parallels to study. What they do provide is uncertainty, the one thing business leaders hate most.

And in a profoundly ironic note, Powell intimated that the U.S. began the year with the Biden administration handing off to Donald Trump nearly full employment with inflation expected to continue falling to the Fed’s target of 2%.

What was Donald Trump’s reaction to Powell’s speech? Three things. First, America’s self-appointed world’s greatest economist said the Chairman of the Fed didn’t know what he was talking about; second, he said Powell’s “termination couldn’t come soon enough.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has spoken with Kevin Warsh, a former Fed governor, about potentially ousting Powell before his term ends next year and possibly selecting Warsh as his replacement, according to people familiar with the matter. Warsh’s advice? Let Powell be.

The third thing our president did was what he always does when faced with potential catastrophe. He changed the subject by launching a few hand grenades at enemies he’s worked hard to create: federal judges and elite universities. And one university in particular, one that has called his bluff — Harvard.

Trump is not the first wannabe dictator to try to emasculate Universities and their academic freedom. He could take lessons from Adolf Hitler. Within four months of assuming power, Hitler had successfully gone after every professor and university leader with whom he differed ideologically in his Aryan cultural revolution. In 1933 alone, the first year of Nazi power, Jews like Albert Einstein, Gustav Hertz, and Max Born, as well as 20 past or future Nobel Prize winners left the country. They became migrants to America.

With the propaganda of Joseph Goebbels and the Brownshirts led by Hermann Göring and Ernst Röhm, Hitler got his revolution, and America was gifted some astonishing brainpower that contributed significantly to creating the American Century.

Today, Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt provides the propaganda, migrants take the place of Jews, El Salvador delivers the concentration camps, and ICE stands in for the Brownshirts. It’s much more subtle this time; it’s been modernized. There’s less overt, blood-in-the-street violence, but it’s still the same old song.

Right on cue, in a letter sent to Harvard a week ago, the Trump administration outlined demands that Harvard would have to satisfy to maintain its funding relationship with the federal government. These demands include audits of academic programs and departments, as well as of students, faculty, and staff, and require changes to the University’s governance structure and hiring practices — all familiar from 90 years ago.

Unlike Columbia, Harvard said “No” to Trump’s demands that threaten $9 billion in research funding, arguing that the changes pushed by the government exceed its lawful authority and infringe on both the University’s freedom of thought and its educational mission.

“The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Harvard President Alan Garber wrote in a message to the community.

He added: “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.” In other words, if the University went along with the regime’s demands, it would still be Harvard, but in name only.

And then Trump brought out the big guns. He gleefully assigned his wolfpack of ruthless public policy vampires the task of bringing Harvard to its knees, which is his one-and-only modus operandi for dealing with anyone or anything that pushes back against him. Retribution has been the fingerprint of his life.

Last Monday night, the Trump administration’s Antisemitism Task Force said it was stripping more than $2 billion in research funding from Harvard and cutting more than $60 million in contracts. These funds had already been awarded, but not yet conveyed. This is precisely what Trump’s DOGE has done with every agency it has done its best to eviscerate on the way to our own cultural revolution.

Next, through Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Trump ordered the IRS to investigate whether Harvard has abused its non-profit tax status. Federal law prohibits the president from “directly or indirectly” telling the Internal Revenue Service to conduct specific tax investigations. Nonetheless, the I.R.S. is still weighing whether to revoke the exemption, according to people familiar with the matter.  It would not strain credulity to assume that the IRS, like every government agency, has been brought to heel by Trump and his MAGA sycophants.

This morning, the Boston Globe reported the Trump Administration is now reviewing foreign gifts and donations to the university. It demanded that Harvard’s leaders turn over records.

As if all this weren’t enough, the Department of Homeland Security announced yesterday it may shut down Harvard’s ability to enroll international students. Harvard has a higher percentage of international students than the average American college. About a quarter of its roughly 25,000 students, both graduate and undergraduate, are foreign.

If the IRS strips Harvard of its tax-exempt status, and an appeal by the University fails, it would cost the largest endowment in the nation dearly. It would also cost the world, as Harvard would be less able to conduct its medical and scientific research with the same vigor it has since the end of World War II, when the highly successful partnership between university research and the federal government began.

If the Trump Administration succeeds in prohibiting international students from enrolling, the University, the countries from which students matriculate, and America, itself, will suffer a crippling body blow, and all because of spite.

This week, George Q. Daley, dean of Harvard Medical School, said that biomedicine has long depended on the over 75-year partnership between the federal government and America’s universities, a partnership that has paid off for Americans in life-saving advances. “Freedom of thought and inquiry, along with the government’s longstanding commitment to respect and protect it, has enabled universities to contribute in vital ways to a free society and to healthier, more prosperous lives for people everywhere,” he said. “All of us share a stake in safeguarding that freedom.”

True, but apparently not all of us care.

Let’s give a cheer for Harvard.

Lest we not grasp the enormity of the stakes in Trump’s infantile battle with Harvard, perhaps a quick review is in order, just like in a college classroom.

It was 28 October 1636, nearly 389 years ago. On that day, a vote by the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony approved the founding of America’s first college, Harvard.

John Adams was a distinguished Harvard graduate, prominent American founder, second U.S. President, and principal author of the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution  — the first state constitution in the nation and ultimately the model for the Constitution Donald Trump is now doing all he can to blow up. Adams included in his State Constitution a recognition of Harvard’s role in educating its citizens for public service.

Harvard has produced eight U.S. presidents, the most of any college or university in the United States. It has more Nobel laureates among its alumni, faculty, and affiliated researchers than any other school — 161. The next closest is MIT with 97. The University is responsible for more medical and scientific breakthroughs than any other institution, beginning with Benjamin Waterhouse’s introduction of the smallpox vaccine to the United States in 1799. Harvard researchers invented anesthesia, the electrocardiograph, heart valve surgery, the iron lung, the Pap smear, and many other groundbreaking medical advancements.

Its critics decry Harvard as an “elite” institution. It is. It is the most elite educational institution in America for all the right reasons.

Yes, it is wealthy with an endowment of $53 billion. But with that endowment, it has done much good in the world, saving millions of lives.

And yes, its faculty can be smarmy and often act like the smartest people in the room, which, in most cases, they are. I admit that Harvard could do with a little more humility and a lot less pride.

Still, since 1636, Harvard has set the standard for education in America. What a cataclysmic tragedy if Trump succeeds in hollowing out the soul of this great University.

I would note here that Donald Trump is not among its graduates.

 “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.” —  John F. Kennedy

Two years ago, the International Criminal Court (ICC) indicted Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes and issued a warrant for his arrest.

The court cited “Mr. Putin’s responsibility for the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children.” It also issued a warrant for Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, the public face of the Kremlin-sponsored program that transfers children out of Ukraine and into Russian homes.

At the time, the Court said, “There are reasonable grounds to believe that each suspect bears responsibility for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population and that of unlawful transfer of population from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.”

Experts estimate the stolen children who have been taken from their parents, sent to Russia, and given to Russian families now number nearly 20 thousand¹. Mykola Kuleba, founder of the charity Save Ukraine, said, “Russia is stealing our future.”

When the ICC issued the warrants, Russia’s Foreign Ministry quickly dismissed them, noting Russia is not a party to the court — neither is the U.S.

When the children began disappearing, the Ukrainian government created the non-profit Bring Kids Back to find abducted children, rescue them, and bring them home to unite with their parents.

Thus far, these are the results of that effort.

Ten days ago, the group announced it had found four more kidnapped children in Russian-occupied territories and had rescued and reunited them with their parents.

A research team at the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab has been tracking the children’s whereabouts and sharing its data with Ukraine’s government and the Hague-based ICC, which is still collecting evidence of war crimes against Putin.

But now the stolen children seem to have become victims in Donald Trump’s so-called peace process.  Why? Because the Trump administration has effectively shut down the Yale research team’s work and its invaluable database — including satellite imagery and biometric data tracking the identities of the children. The database is no longer publicly available; its whereabouts unknown².

A bipartisan group of 17 congressmen, led by Democratic Representative Greg Landsman of Ohio, has appealed to Secretary of State Marco Rubio to immediately remedy this.

In a letter to Rubio and Secretary of Treasury Bessent, the group reminded the two leaders the abductions are continuing and that the Yale Team  “had been preserving evidence of abducted children from Ukraine it had identified, to be shared with Europol [the European Union’s law enforcement agency] and the government of Ukraine to secure their return. Yale HRL’s funding has been terminated, and the status of the secure evidence repository is unknown. This vital resource cannot be lost.”

The Yale team had also been sharing its information with Bring Kids Back, and that information had been instrumental in finding and rescuing the more than 1,200 children who have, thus far, been reunited with their parents. However, the team was working through a State Department grant that, with the DOGE team’s help, suddenly went *poof* in the night.

The Yale lab was among several recipients sharing in a $26 million congressionally approved three-year expenditure aimed at tracking Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

Nobody in the Trump Administration seems even a little bit interested in continuing to track Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

The Yale team had carefully documented the routes used to transport the children, including “midpoint locations,” called “temporary accommodation centers” in Russian media, which were, in fact, re-education camps.

The Yale lab’s work had already made international news. Last December, the lab released an explosive report identifying 314 abducted Ukrainian children who had been placed in a “systematic program of coerced adoption and fostering.”

Rather than ask anyone in the Yale team what they were doing or why it mattered, Trump buddy and former Pentagon functionary Peter Marocco, who suddenly became a State Department official when no one was looking, summarily ended the contract funding the Lab’s work. Marocco’s first assignment upon hitting Trump 2.0 was shutting down USAID, the United States Agency for International Development. He’s been a busy little wrecking ball. We’ll give him that.

The Yale team’s work began in 2022 under a program called the Conflict Observatory. Pages on the Conflict Observatory have now been removed from the State Department website at the direction of Secretary Rubio, although it is believed data from them have been saved elsewhere online. I was not able to find them.

You may want to ask yourself, as I did, why no one in the Trump orbit seems interested in the fate of nearly 20,000 children abducted by Putin’s troops to be repatriated to Russia. Even more than that, you might question why, in addition to being uninterested, Trump’s minions are also doing their best to prevent anyone else from discovering where those children are now.

In the first 64 days of Donald Trump’s second administration, he, Elon Musk, and their legion of hatchet men and women have been gleefully cruel and sadistic. In my mind, shutting down USAID, which Atul Gawande, former Director of the agency’s Global Health Department, estimates will cause millions of deaths, was the most reprehensible action of a number of reprehensible actions.

However, the Ukrainian “living messages” John Kennedy described have been ripped from their parents’ arms and cast somewhere into the Russian darkness. And America just wantonly deep-sixed the means to find them. In the pantheon of brutal and heartless conduct, this is a monumental achievement.

What do you think?

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¹ However, in a stunning admission, in July 2023, a Russian official said Russia had brought 700,000 children from conflict zones in Ukraine to Russia.

² Details of the State Department’s termination of its contracts for researching potential Russian war crimes in Ukraine were reported earlier by The i Paper, a British news site, and The New Republic.

On the 20th of January 2025, Donald Trump came down on Washington, DC, like a hungry wolf on a shepherd’s sleeping flock. Expectation sat in the air.

Shortly after a threat and lie-filled inauguration speech that will one day rival Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens’ 1861 Cornerstone Speech for its infamy, he let loose Elon Musk’s dogs of destruction, and the nation as we knew it began disintegrating before our unbelieving eyes.

Since then, we’ve needed a truck full of Mensa members to keep track of what has happened, what is happening, and what might happen.

This has manifested in a litany of cascading executive orders, lawsuits, court rulings, appeals, upset judges, defiant administration officials, shuttered government agencies, tens of thousands of fired federal employees cruelly tossed into the cold, cuts in mental health services for veterans, the end of life-saving HIV medical services in Africa, and outraged long-time NATO allies.

Like Victor Orban in Hungary and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Trump is quickly building an American version of what professors Stephen Levitsky (Harvard) and Lucan Way (University of Toronto) call “Competitive Authoritarianism” from their 2012 book of the same name. It’s not an out-and-out move to dictatorship. Instead, Trump and other would-be autocrats give the illusion of a free society, a free press, and free and fair elections while whittling away the edges of all three, thereby stacking the deck against all who oppose them. It’s how they stay in power as citizens in opposition continue to believe they have an even chance of triumphing in the next election.

Donald Trump is well on his way to being the next fully paid-up competitive autocrat.

His will not be a static or monolithic autocracy. Trump’s all-consuming and visceral hatred for those he considers his enemies, which is everyone who disagrees with him, coupled with the power of the United States at his disposal, will make for a dynamic and fast-moving rush to kingship without the title.

Dominating everything is his intensely narcissistic need for adulation. Already, five bills have been filed in the House of Representatives to satisfy that need and venerate our 47th president, all geared to curry favor:

• South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson, the man who yelled, “You lie!” during a Barack Obama State of the Union speech, wants to put Trump’s face on a new $250 bill in part to “bring attention to the 250th anniversary of the United States;”
• Not to be outdone, Texas Representative Brandon Gill’s bill would put Trump’s face on a $100 bill, replacing that of some 18th-century non-entity named Benjamin Franklin;
• New York Representative Claudia Tenney’s bill would make Trump’s birthday a federal holiday. Currently, only two people have federal holidays named for them: George Washington¹ and Martin Luther King, Jr.;
• John Foster Dulles was a Republican who served as secretary of state during the Eisenhower Administration of the 1950s. Dulles Airport is named for him. But North Carolina Representative Addison McDowell’s bill would rename the airport after Trump and kick the name of Dulles to history’s dustbin. In co-sponsoring McDowell’s bill, his colleague, Pennsylvania Representative Guy Reschenthale, said, “President Donald J. Trump, the greatest president of my lifetime, was just sworn into office for a second term after a historic landslide victory². This legislation will cement his status in our nation’s capital as our fearless commander-in-chief, extraordinary leader, and relentless champion for the American people.” Reschenthale said that with a straight face. It’s the kind of language the Catholic Church uses when nominating martyrs for sainthood.
• Florida Representative Anna Paulina Luna, in equally enraptured and giddy prose, proposed legislation last week that would see Trump enshrined on Mount Rushmore. If that happens, and if they could, the four Presidents already there would break apart and dive into the abyss below.

Notwithstanding the euphoria of his congressional subjects, two common imperatives running through the early days of Trump’s second term appear to be ridding the country of people who don’t look like him and advancing the wealth of the already wealthy among us. However, those two imperatives are neither rational in themselves nor applied coherently by anyone in the Administration’s orbit, especially our modern-day, softened-up version of the Brownshirts — DOGE, with Elon Musk enthusiastically playing the role of Ernst Röhm. In one area after another, the contradictions and inner irrationalities of the Trump regime are emerging as planned chaos, all seeming to bounce around each other like beebees in a boxcar and all following the script of Project 2025. You remember the American Heritage Foundation’s 923-page magnum opus, don’t you? The coffee table paperweight Trump said he knew nothing about during the presidential campaign?

In a competitive autocracy, the possibilities of opposition, resistance, dissent, and non-conformity exist for all to see. In fact, they are trumpeted. However, in what threatens America right now, the roots of all four are being poisoned, and Trump’s  MAGAverse has claimed the total allegiance of more than a third of the country.

That may be enough. The Nazis’s highest percentage of votes in any election was 43.9% in March 1933, two months after Hitler was named Chancellor. After that, elections were things of the past, and it only took Hitler 53 days to destroy the threadbare democracy of the Weimar Republic.

As of this writing, we are 63 days into Donald Trump’s second term. There are 1,324 days left in it. Think of the colossal harm he can still do.

Of course, those who support him are thinking of all the good he can do for them. They are in for some rude surprises.

Regardless, how successful will our judiciary be in ordering Trump to obey the Constitution? Will the Democrats ever unite around a meaningful and persuasive message of opposition that actually resonates with the American people? Will MAGA’s reach exceed its grasp and cause the movement to implode upon itself? Will our military refuse to obey illegal orders from the Commander in Chief? Will the knee-bending, ring-kissing Republicans in the House ever metamorphose into a co-equal branch of government? Will democracy, as we have known it for 237 years, survive?

It will take a monumental, cohesive, and coordinated effort of the collective American will to reverse our present course.

It may already be too late.

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¹ Known in most of the country as Presidents’ Day, this holiday is officially George Washington’s Birthday at the federal governmental level and is celebrated on the third Monday of February.

² This is false. With a margin of victory in the popular vote of 1.48%, the 2024 presidential election was the 5th closest since 1916. Of the 21 presidential elections since the end of World War II, Trump’s percentage vote total of 57.99% in the Electoral College ranks 12th highest. The highest percentage victory since then in the Electoral College, an actual landslide, belongs to Ronald Reagan’s 97.58% in 1984.

Constitution of the United States, Aeticle 2, Section 3:

“The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

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Donald Trump Truth Social Post – 18 March 2025

“HE DIDN’T WIN ANYTHING! I WON FOR MANY REASONS, IN AN OVERWHELMING MANDATE, BUT FIGHTING ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION MAY HAVE BEEN THE NUMBER ONE REASON FOR THIS HISTORIC VICTORY. I’m just doing what the VOTERS wanted me to do. This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!”

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In the 237-year history of the United States, seven judges have been impeached, convicted by the Senate, and removed from the Bench, beginning in 1803 with John Pickering, convicted of intoxication on the Bench and the unlawful handling of property claims.

The most recent conviction is that of G. Thomas Porteous, Jr., who was removed for taking bribes and making false statements in 2010.

The House of Representatives has impeached three other judges who resigned before trial by the Senate.

Another four judges have been impeached, but the Senate acquitted them.

No judge has ever been impeached for carrying out the jurisdictional duties that come with being a judge. At least, not yet.

Trump’s post on Truth Social was so egregious it forced Chief Justice John Roberts to take the highly unusual step of issuing an official statement rebuking the president for his executive overreach.

“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts wrote. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

Trump is not the only one calling for impeaching judges who stifle his efforts. Elon Musk has been far more voluble. On 6 March, Reuters noted that since the end of January, Musk had lashed out at judges in more than 30 posts on X, calling them “corrupt,” “radical,” and “evil” after they dealt DOGE legal blows. Last week, he posted on X, “Without judicial reform, which means at least the absolute worst judges get impeached, we don’t have real democracy in America.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also jumped in to condemn the judiciary, issuing a statement saying, “A single judge is attempting to unconstitutionally seize the power of hiring and firing from the executive branch. The president has the authority to exercise the power of the entire executive branch — singular district court judges cannot abuse the power of the entire judiciary to thwart the president’s agenda. If a federal district court judge would like executive powers, they can try and run for president themselves,” she said. “The Trump administration will immediately fight back against this absurd and unconstitutional order.”

Actually, it was two judges, U.S. District Judge James Bredar in Maryland and U.S. District Judge William Alsup in California, who last week ordered the reinstatement of about 25,000 probationary employees in 18 Agencies. The courts ordered the reinstatements to be completed by Monday of this week, 17 March. Both judges found that the firings of the probationary employees egregiously violated the law.

Then, an interesting thing happened. Despite the bluster of Trump, Musk, and Leavitt, the government complied with the orders. As CBS reported yesterday, each Agency gave a detailed accounting of the reinstatements.

Each Agency reported individually to the courts that most of the fired workers had been rehired and placed on paid Administrative Leave. The California judge, William Alsup, asked government lawyers if this was just a ploy, because “[t]his is not allowed by the preliminary injunction, for it would not restore the services the preliminary injunction intends to restore.” In other words, putting probationary workers on paid Administrative Leave does nothing to make the Agencies do the work Congress intended when it appropriated the funding meant to allow each Agency to carry out its mission.

In a filing yesterday, the Justice Department responded to Judge Alsup’s question by asserting that placing reinstated employees on paid Administrative Leave “is merely a first part of a series of steps to reinstate probationary employees” and that this will continue “until their badging and IT access are restored, at which time they will be converted to an Active Duty status…”

In the dripping-with-irony response of the Department of Human Services, Head of Human Capital John Gardner advised the court that “reinstatement of removed employees to full duty status would impose substantial burdens on HHS, cause significant confusion, and cause turmoil for the terminated employees.” Furthermore, “an appellate ruling could reverse the district court’s order shortly after terminated employees have been reinstated or have returned to full duty status. In short, employees could be subjected to multiple changes in their employment status in a matter of weeks.”

That was rich. It’s kind of like complaining about having to put Humpty Dumpty back together again after kicking him off a wall — twice.

This is reminiscent of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 when Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev ordered his ships to stop and turn around rather than go past the 500-mile quarantine line President Kennedy had set around Cuba. “We’re eyeball to eyeball,” Secretary of State Dean Rusk whispered to National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, “and I think the other fellow just blinked.”

On Monday, the Trump administration blinked — but for how long?

At this moment, the courts seem to be the only thing holding Trump and Musk back. And Democrats, powerless to do anything about it, seem to be throwing all their chips into the pot, hoping the Judiciary will place a stranglehold on the venal denizens of DOGE.

Court orders are working for the moment, but what happens if the Trump team decides to ignore the rulings? What recourse does the Judiciary have then?

The Constitution gives the Judiciary the power to rule on disputes, but not enforce the rulings. That task falls to the U.S. Marshall Service, which is a bureau within the Department of Justice and operates under the authority and direction of the Attorney General, who reports to President Donald Trump, head of the Executive Branch. Could and would Donald Trump order Attorney General Pam Bondi to direct the  Marshall Service to ignore court rulings that would stifle his MAGA remake of America’s government?

If we’re not in a constitutional crisis now, we sure would be then.

In February 2022, Will Selber, a current contributor to Bulwark, was a Squadron Commander leading 240 Airmen and civilians conducting intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations in support of five separate combatant commands, one of which was in Ukraine.

In an essay published today in Bulwark’s Morning Shots, Selber outlines how his unit had front-row seats to Russia’s unprovoked invasion and provided crucial intelligence to Ukraine that enabled it to “parry blows from Putin’s forces.” Selber writes:

While I cannot comment on the nature of this support, I can say it was incredibly helpful to our Ukrainian allies. America’s intelligence community has played a pivotal role in finding and fixing Russian forces and helping our Ukrainian allies launch devastating attacks. Without America’s intelligence community, which correctly predicted the invasion, Kyiv may have fallen.

I think it can be argued forcefully that there are three primary reasons why Russia failed to take Kyiv in those early days: Russian military incompetence, Ukraine’s military effectiveness and resourcefulness, and American intelligence.

Yesterday, in the administration’s continuing shakedown of Ukraine, President Trump ordered a stop to all intelligence sharing. This halt, resembling a classic Mafia protection scheme,  deprives Kyiv of a key tool in fighting Russian forces and was announced by Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe on, where else, the Fox Network. This latest move follows the administration stopping all “military aid” last week, as the Wall Street Journal reported.

Losing military and intelligence aid will cripple Ukraine and lead to many deaths, both civilian and military.

For example, last night, a Russian missile slammed into a hotel in Kryvyi Rih, in central Ukraine, the hometown of President Zelensky, killing at least four people and injuring more than 30 others, Ukrainian authorities said. One of the dead was an infant.

“Just before the attack, volunteers from a humanitarian organization — citizens of Ukraine, the United States, and the United Kingdom — had checked into the hotel,” President Zelensky said in a statement. “They survived because they managed to get down from their rooms in time.”

Officials in Kyiv have warned that Ukraine’s air defense capabilities would be among the first elements of its security to be compromised without American assistance.

And that is precisely what happened here.

Jon Gundersen is a retired senior foreign service officer who, following Ukraine’s independence in December 1991, had the distinction of opening the American Embassy there on 22 January 1992. He has taught national security affairs at the National Defense University, the Joint Special Operations Command, and the Foreign Service Institute. I asked him his thoughts about the Trump Administration cutting off all military and intelligence aid to Ukraine. He wrote back to me:

“On February 24, 2022,  Putin’s Russia attacked Ukraine; the attack was illegal, unprovoked, and brutal. For over three years, Ukrainian forces have fought valiantly against a numerically superior foe. Yet, Ukrainian President Zelensky did not ask for  American or NATO boots on the ground, merely the means to fight the aggressor. For the past three years, Washington and its NATO allies have provided military equipment, humanitarian aid, and intelligence to Ukraine. It is the least we can do. Ukraine is fighting our fight on their soil to defend democracy. Now, the Trump Administration is cutting off military aid and needed intelligence. This will cost Ukraine dearly; lives will be lost. Cui Bono? Only Putin will benefit. This is a dark day for Ukraine and our democracy.”

“Observe how he has made a breast out of his back.
In life he wished to see too far ahead of him,
And now he must crab backwards round this track.”
Dante Alighieri, The Inferno (Canto XX, Circle Eight – The Fortune Tellers and Diviners)

Watching and, God help me, listening to Donald Trump’s address to the nation last night, I was reminded of Dante’s special place in hell for those eternally condemned to eat their words.

If you sat down to watch the event and were ready for an address documenting the State of the Union, you were out of luck. Not one word was said about that.

The speech, lasting one hour and forty minutes, was fact-free, lie-filled, and offered nothing but a cruel, transactional future for America.

I think it’s the gleeful cruelty that bothers me the most. For example, as Russell Vought, director of the Trump White House’s Office of Management and Budget and an architect of Project 2025, said in a speech in 2023: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want them to feel trauma.”

Score one for them. There’s trauma aplenty.

Even now, Vought refuses to label his targets as anything but bureaucrats and the bureaucracy; he never mentions “workers,” which would humanize them.

Watching USAID employees sobbing outside the building where many of them worked for decades, seeing them frantically collect their office belongings because they’d been given a grand total of 15 minutes to do so, realizing the vanishing national security benefits of USAID’s soft-power initiatives in health care and education around the world, and viewing the complete dismantling of the nation’s foreign policy built up since the Marshall Plan of the late 1940s — all of this is heartbreaking.

However, it was indisputably apparent last night that neither Donald Trump nor his co-conspirators on the right side of the Chamber, as well as in the gallery, could care any less about any “trauma” in the disappearing workforce. The joy they all took in Trump lauding Elon Musk’s wood-chipper approach to remaking government was palpable — and disgusting.

An interesting point came when Trump acknowledged and celebrated Elon Musk as the head of DOGE. Last week, the administration’s lawyers argued in Court that Musk was simply an advisor and that someone named Amy Gleason, who happened to be vacationing in Mexico at the time, was, in fact, running DOGE.

My mother always advised me to avoid lies, because, “Lies will come back to haunt you, Tommy.” However, does anyone believe there will be any haunting here? Mom was always right — but in this case…?

Last night, Trump bragged, “We have done more in 43 days than any other administration in four years, even eight years.”

Mr. Trump, for once, I agree with you.

Meanwhile, over at the IRS

This morning, ProPublica is out with a deeply-researched story on the huge staffing cuts about to fall on the IRS.

According to ProPublica’s story, the IRS is drafting plans to cut its 90,000-person workforce by as much as half through a mix of layoffs, attrition, and incentivized buyouts, according to two people familiar with the situation. Six thousand have already been fired.

A reduction in force of that magnitude would render the IRS “dysfunctional,” said John Koskinen, a former IRS commissioner.

As part of the Inflation Reduction Act, congress approved $80 billion in new IRS funding, intended to support the troubled IRS crackdown on tax cheats and provide better service to taxpayers. A 2021 Treasury report estimated the IRS could hire 86,852 full-time employees over the course of a decade with that $80 billion investment.

For some reason I’ve never fully understood, Republicans were apoplectic about all this. They insinuated the IRS would use this funding to go after “hard-working Americans.”

In reality, the Treasury Report showed the IRS had been severely understaffed for at least a decade, and tax cheats were scoring big. In 2022, then-IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig told lawmakers that staffing had shrunk to 1970s levels and that the IRS would need to hire 52,000 people over the next six years just to maintain current staffing levels to replace those who retire or otherwise leave.

So, following enactment of the Inflation Reduction Act, the IRS began hiring.

However, since Donald Trump’s inauguration, Musk’s DOGE has had the tax agency in its crosshairs.

Perhaps a pertinent question is: What does this mean for tax revenue?

According to the ProPublica story:

Unlike with other federal agencies, cutting the IRS means the government collects less money and finds fewer tax abuses. Economic studies have shown that for every dollar spent by the IRS, the agency returns between $5 and $12, depending on how much income the taxpayer declared. A 2024 report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that the IRS found savings of $13,000 for every additional hour spent auditing the tax returns of very wealthy taxpayers — a return on investment that “would leave Wall Street hedge fund managers drooling,” in the words of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

Now, the stated purpose of DOGE is to find “fraud, waste, and abuse.” If that is so, something is crazy here. If that is not so….?

The tariffs have landed

At 12:01 a.m. this morning, Donald Trump launched a gratuitous and unwarranted trade war as his tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and China took effect.

The move imposes 25% tariffs on Mexican and Canadian imports, though Trump limited the levy to 10% on Canadian energy. He also doubled the tariff he imposed last month on Chinese products to 20%.

The three countries are our biggest trade partners, and all three immediately retaliated, which is what happens in a trade war.

China retaliated with tariffs of up to 15% on a wide array of U.S. agricultural exports. It also expanded the number of U.S. companies subject to export controls and other restrictions by about two dozen.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his country would impose tariffs on more than $100 billion of American goods over the course of the next 21 days.

In announcing Canada’s retaliation, Trudeau said, “Today the United States launched a trade war against Canada, their closest partner and ally, their closest friend. At the same time, they are talking about working positively with Russia, appeasing Vladimir Putin, a lying, murderous dictator. Make that make sense,”

Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum said Mexico will respond to the new tariffs with its own retaliatory tariffs, which she will delay announcing until Sunday at a public event in Mexico City’s central plaza. She told the press Mexico has “a plan B, C,and D” to counter Trump’s war.

Here at home in the nation that started this stupidity, Americans are either mildly in favor or decidedly against the measures depending on how pollsters ask the question.

If the question contains the assertion that tariffs will cause prices to rise, only 30% express favor; if the question references bringing back jobs to America, 49% are all for them. Of course, that means 51% are not.

Although there are some who question the imposition of tariffs, the vast majority of Republicans in Congress are supportive and believe their constituents would be willing to suffer the pain of higher prices to enable the President to carry out his agenda, whatever that is.

Please forgive me for suggesting these going-along-with-the-program Republicans are going along with the program out of fear of another kind of retaliation — the kind Donald Trump dishes out to anyone who has the temerity to disagree with him.

These tariffs will hurt the American economy and cause prices to rise. Also, because of deeply rooted globalization, the rest of the world will feel the pinch, too.

Michael Klein was Chief Economist in the Office of International Affairs during the Obama Administration.  He is an expert in tariffs and a Professor of Economics at Tufts University. Professor Klein is also Founder and Executive Editor of Econofact,  a web-based publication of the Fletcher School at Tufts that publishes economic analyses by leading economists across the country. I asked him for his thoughts on Trump’s tariffs. He wrote:

“Tariffs are like sales taxes that raise prices for all affected goods but, unlike sales taxes, only earn revenue from some of the goods whose prices have risen (those that are imported).  Tariffs also invite retaliation, as happened in the first Trump administration and as is happening now.  The net effect of these broad-based tariffs is clearly negative and will not bring back jobs – in fact, they imperil jobs in companies that import inputs.”

Is there ever a justification for tariffs?

Maurice Obstfeld is another tariff expert and the former Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund. He is also a professor of economics at UC Berkeley and a member of the Council of Economic Advisors. In an Econofact Chat with Professor Klein, Professor Obstfeld answered that question by saying:

There are remedies in which tariffs can be available when there’s a disruptive import surge that swamps certain industries, causing high levels of unemployment and leaving little time for the firms and the workers to adjust. So, in the realm of trade policy, there’s a recognized but limited role for tariffs, but tariffs as an industrial policy to bring back manufacturing, tariffs as a tool to increase our trade surplus, these are all unlikely to work, and likely to be destructive, especially when they’re met with retaliation from our trade partners.

Which is precisely what is happening today.

In tonight’s address to a joint session of Congress, it will be interesting to hear Donald Trump boast about what a wonderful thing he did for America today by creating a trade war with our closest allies, our geographic brother and sister. Among the other things he’ll lie about, he’ll give himself a big pat on the back for showing those loser countries just who’s boss. He might mention there could be a smidgen of sacrifice Americans will have to make to bring our friends to heel. But not to worry. It won’t be long, and it won’t be much. Everything will be just hunky-doree when they bend the knee.

And in just a few minutes, a team of weighty pigs will fly past my second-floor windows on their way to the land of Oz.

A word about Econofact

Although I have absolutely nothing to do with it, I have come to appreciate Econofact. In the new world order, where “alternative facts”¹ are alive and well, it can be hard to find intelligent, non-partisan, factual analysis of major issues facing us all. Econofact does that at a high level. The authors may not tell you things you want to hear, but their facts are true and backed up by solid research.

In addition to publishing noted economist authors, founder Michael Klein conducts what he calls Econofact Chats with leading economic luminaries. They peel the onion of economic issues, as he and Maurice Obstfeld did in their chat about tariffs I cited above.

However, Econofact is a non-profit and depends on donations. In a world of worthy causes, Econofact deserves your consideration, especially now, as the Trump administration obfuscates facts. For example, yesterday, the Atlanta Fed revised its estimate for Q1 2025 GDP growth from an expected +2.9% to –2.8%, after which Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick talked about revising the analytical method of determining growth. He seems to think if the administration doesn’t like the numbers, it should change the way it calculates them.

Right now, Econofact, which is free, is asking for help by creating a Premium subscription for $50 annually.

In addition to other exclusive benefits, Premium Subscribers will have access to monthly “Ask Me Anything” Webinars featuring prominent economists and economic analysts. If you’re an economics nerd, this should appeal.

I strongly urge you to subscribe to Econofact, and, if possible, as a Premium subscriber.

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¹ The term “alternative facts” made its way into the culture when KellyAnne Conway, Senior Policy Advisor in Donald Trump’s first term, coined it while standing on the White House lawn, answering a question with a completely untrue statement, but calling it true as an alternative fact.

September, 1970

Let me tell you a story.

We call it, “going back to the world.” Home in the USA. And I’ve arrived in one piece. My new orders direct me to report to the Army’s Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia. I know the place well. It’s where I was trained and Commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant. Then, it was on to Airborne and Ranger schools, followed by a fun-filled couple of years in the highlands of Vietnam. Now, back in the world, I’m a Captain with a family and a new job, which is to help train the next bunch of happy warriors. So, Marilyn and I make the long drive from Massachusetts to Georgia and settle into the house at 3660 Plantation Road in the sun-baked city of Columbus. It’s a nice neighborhood.

A few months after moving in, a new civilian worker shows up at my office in the Infantry School. His name’s Bob. He’s a GS12 research analyst, and I have no idea why he’s here, but he has a disability that makes it hard for him to walk or move even moderately weighted stuff. He’s rented a house in Columbus and is trying to figure out how to move his junk in. Marilyn and I offer to help.

So, on a sunny Saturday morning in the deep south, we get into Marilyn’s red Corvair Corsa convertible with the turbocharged engine and dual carburetors, show up at Bob’s new place, and find a UHaul truck in his driveway packed with everything he owns. We get to work toting box after box into the house and putting it all where Bob wants it to go. It’s taken us all morning, but around noon, we’re done, and we sit down on Bob’s new furniture to celebrate the end of Bob’s beginning. Marilyn’s never met Bob, whom I’ve charitably described as being “a little strange.”  So, being a curious person, she nicely asks about his life. This goes on for a while until the big moment.

The big moment is when Bob says to Marilyn, “Wanna see my hair-trigger Colt 45s?”

It’s like an E. F. Hutton commercial. Everything stops. I freeze for a second and then say, “Bob, do you really have hair-trigger Colt 45s?” He says, “Sure do. Two of ’em. They’re pearl-handled, too. Want to see?”

He’s asking a guy who’s just finished two years dodging bullets and other bad things in a spot where serious people really wanted to kill him and his men. To say I have developed a healthy respect for any kind of gun is not giving that phrase the value it needs. Having seen up close what they can do, the accidents that can happen, actually did happen, makes me scared to death of them. I’m not scared when they’re in my hands, but in somebody else’s who might not know what he’s doing?

I’m not scared yet, though, because Bob has yet to produce the firepower, but my tension level rises like a Goddard Rocket.

I look Bob dead in the eye and say, “Bob, please don’t get the 45s. Leave em’ right where they are. Marilyn and I have to be going now. Hope you like your new place.” And with that, we leave.

We get back into the red Corvair Corsa convertible with the turbocharged engine and dual carburetors and drive home. When we get to the house on Plantation Road, I pay the babysitter and look at Tammy, the two-year-old daughter I’m just getting to know. And I think about the pearl-handled, hair-trigger Colt 45s in Bob’s house.

February, 2025 

In 1970, slightly more than 50% of Americans, mostly men, owned a firearm. Bob was one of them, and he owned two (that I knew of). Since then, although the population has grown, the percentage of ownership has declined to about 40%. Still, Small Arms Survey researchers conclude there are now more than 400 million handguns and rifles in the country. Three percent of gun owners, super owners, own more than 50% of all firearms in the U.S. For the other 97%, the average ownership is three firearms, mostly handguns.

Femicide, abusive men killing their intimate partners, is five times more likely if the abuser has a handgun and lives with the victim. Research shows the number one contributing factor to femicide is unemployment. Potential femicide victims who do not live with their abuser and own a handgun are significantly less likely to be killed by their abuser.

In 70% of workplace shooting deaths, the perpetrator used a handgun. Despite the nation’s number of handguns doubling since the mid-1990s, workplace shootings have declined significantly since then, but the 70% figure still holds. In the last 50 years, there have been 50 workplace mass shootings with an average death count of six per event. According to Jillian Peterson and James Densley, who study mass shootings for a project funded by the National Institute of Justice: 

The perpetrators were almost exclusively men (94 percent) with an average age of 38 (the youngest was 19, the oldest was 66). More than three-quarters (77 percent) were blue-collar workers, and 53 percent had experienced a recent or traumatic change in work status before the shooting.

A University of Washington 2022 study discovered six million Americans carry a loaded handgun daily; nine million do so at least once a month.

In mass public shootings, the weapon du jour is the assault rifle. The National Shooting Sports Foundation has estimated approximately 5 million to 10 million AR-15-style rifles exist in the U.S.

Regarding assault rifles, I know a thing or two. And I can say with complete certainty and a good deal of experiential credibility that there is not a single reason on God’s lovely earth why anyone other than police and my military brothers and sisters should have one, especially one with automatic fire capability. Anybody who tells you differently is chock full up to their eyeballs with what makes the grass grow green and tall.

The National Center for Health Statistics, a unit of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, annually publishes National Vital Statistics Reports. One of those reports is about how we die. In Deaths: Final Data for 2019, (most recently analyzed data collection year), we note 38,355 deaths caused by firearms. Of those deaths, 23,941 were by suicide, 14,414 by homicide. Despite comprising 13.7% of the US population, non-Hispanic Black people were homicide victims in 57% of the cases.

Unfortunately, all the CDC can do is report the numbers. Why? Because a 1996 appropriations act contained something that has come to be known as the Dickey Amendment. That amendment prohibits the CDC from doing any research into gun violence. The amendment says federal funding cannot be used to “advocate or promote gun control.”

Until Donald Trump’s re-election, I believed that since more than 38,000 people die by gun violence per year, it wouldn’t be too much to ask the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to spend a few million of its $5 billion budget on research to analyze gun violence. Seemed a modest proposal to me. However, since Trump’s inauguration, that has become fairy-tale thinking. I now believe it likely Trump will prevent his unqualified Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., from reporting on deaths by firearms even if he wants to. Perhaps, if we ever again have an honest, thoughtful, Democracy-loving, compassionate person occupying the White House, this will change. At this point, a big “if.”

Now, I would not be an unhappy guy to wake up one morning to discover all firearms in the hands of civilians have gone *poof* in the night. We all know that will never happen. But as Peterson and Densley argue:

One step needs to be depriving potential shooters of the means to carry out their plans. Potential shooting sites can be made less accessible with visible security measures such as metal detectors and police officers. And weapons need to be better controlled, through age restrictions, permit-to-purchase licensing, universal background checks, safe storage campaigns, and red-flag laws — measures that help control firearm access for vulnerable individuals or people in crisis.

Regarding Bob and his pearl-handled, hair-trigger Colt 45s? One evening in 1975, a bullet from one of them went straight through his head. Police labeled it an accident.

Knowing Bob, I did not believe that for one second.