Juneteenth

Today is Juneteenth, which became a federal holiday on 17 June 2021 when President Joe Biden signed Juneteenth National Independence Day into law, making it the 12th federal holiday. Juneteenth commemorates 19 June 1865, the date Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and delivered General Order No. 3 announcing the end of legalized slavery in Texas.

Although the war was over with General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House two months earlier, Lee’s surrender was ignored in Texas, where many plantation owners refused to acknowledge it and vowed never to “release” their enslaved workers from bondage.

A week before Granger’s arrival, a brigade of the 25th Army Corps, comprised of more than 1,000 African-descendant soldiers, arrived in Galveston and captured the city. They chased the rebel government and the remaining Confederate soldiers into Mexico. The Black soldiers of the 25th Army Corps also spread the word about freedom to the enslaved Texas population.

When General Granger arrived with General Order No. 3, he forced plantation owners to read it to their enslaved men, women, and children. Thus was born Juneteenth, which was first celebrated exactly one year after the final freeing of the last enslaved people in America. Fittingly, in 1980, Texas became the first state to promulgate Juneteenth as a state holiday. Eventually, another forty-six followed, ultimately leading to Biden’s 2021 federal holiday promulgation.

I was reminded of this history this morning when I remembered that Donald Trump had, in an instance of impeccable timing, scheduled one of his wild and crazy rallies back in 2020 on Juneteenth. According to the Associated Press, Trump was unaware of Juneteenth, let alone the significance of it to the Black community, when he announced the date of his rally. Consequently, he did not anticipate the blowback he would get. But get it he did. Even from his own supporters. In a rare instance of backing down, he moved the rally to the next day, the 20th, at the BOK Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Having insulted the Black community with the date, Trump added further insult with the place — Tulsa.

The Tulsa Race Massacre

In African American history, Tulsa has revered significance. For it was on another day in June, the 1st June day of 1921, that Tulsa was the site of the worst race massacre in American history. And, unless you were a college U.S. history major, it is likely no one taught you a thing about it as you went through school.

The day before, police had arrested a young black man by the name of Dick Rowland for allegedly attacking a white woman in a Tulsa elevator (Weeks later, she said it never happened). Soon after Rowland’s arrest, rumors began to spread about a group of whites planning a lynching party. To protect Rowland, African American World War 1 veterans surrounded the jail holding him. There was a standoff with a mob of whites. Somebody fired a shot, no one knows who, and a firefight ensued. The much larger white mob pushed the black vets all the way to Greenwood, Tulsa’s Black section.

Greenwood was the wealthiest Black community in the country. Known as the Black Wall Street, Oil had made it rich. Racism was about to destroy it. Over the course of the day, white Tulsans turned 6,000 homes and businesses and 36 square city blocks to ash. Pilots of two airplanes dropped turpentine bombs on buildings, instantly igniting them. They slaughtered three hundred African Americans and threw most into mass graves. Authorities never prosecuted anyone for anything. The federal government ignored it. Tulsa, population 100,000, swept it all under the rug. Two generations later, nobody knew a thing about it. It was never taught in schools, no books were written, no oral history passed down. It was as if it never happened.

Tulsa’s mayor from 2016 through 2024, G. T. Bynum, decided to pull the rug up to see what was hiding under it. He was committed to investigating what happened and determining accountability. He found a couple of the mass graves and began having them excavated. The goal was to at least identify as many victims as possible through DNA analysis.

Bynum formed the City of Tulsa 1921 Graves Investigation Office, convened experts to help locate, identify, and connect people today with those lost more than 100 years ago, and established the 1921 Graves Press Room to report on the effort.

Bynum’s successor, Monroe Nichols IV, the first Black to be elected Mayor of Tulsa, vowed to continue the effort, and has.

In 2021, on the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, President Biden, in an emotional speech in that city, said he had “come to fill the silence” about one of the nation’s darkest — and long-suppressed — moments of racial violence.

“Some injustices are so heinous, so horrific, so grievous, they cannot be buried, no matter how hard people try,” Biden said. “Only with truth can come healing.”

As far as I have been able to document, Donald Trump has yet to say one word in public about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.

And what has he said about Juneteenth? Four years ago, he denigrated it, saying, ‘nobody had ever heard of it’ before he brought it up, and that he “had made it famous,” despite African Americans celebrating it for 158 years. He told the Wall Street Journal he “polled many people around him, none of whom had heard of Juneteenth.” I have no trouble believing that. Might be the only time he’s told the truth since the day he rode down the gold-plated escalator ten years ago this week.

Although throughout the recent campaign for his second term, Trump said nothing about either Juneteenth or the Tulsa Race Massacre, Janiyah Thomas, the campaign’s director of Black media, did issue a statement commemorating Juneteenth, saying, “Today, we reflect on how far we [have] come as a nation and remember that light will always triumph over darkness. With President Trump’s leadership, our party will continue to advance the American dream for all people.”

If you believe that, I have some prime, Grade A land in Florida I would like to sell you — just as soon as the tide goes out.

First DOJ investigation

Since 1921, the federal government never investigated the massacre. Neither had the state of Oklahoma. But in September 2024, the Department of Justice opened a cold case investigation into the massacre under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act; the department closed the investigation in January, barely three months after starting, and shortly before it would have had to hand it off to the new Trump administration. The investigation’s report said:

“The Government has reviewed the events of May 31 and June 1, 1921, and issues this Report to officially acknowledge, illuminate, and preserve for history the horrible ordeals of the massacre’s victims. This Report is the first full accounting of the massacre undertaken by the Department of Justice.”

The report’s Executive Summary concludes:

“On the night of May 31, 1921, a violent attack by as many as 10,000 white Tulsans
destroyed the thriving Black community of Greenwood, Oklahoma—a prosperous area often referred to as “Black Wall Street.” The attack, which lasted into the afternoon of June 1, was so systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence. White men murdered hundreds of Black residents, burned businesses and homes to the ground, and left survivors without resources or recourse. In the aftermath, authorities failed to offer meaningful help, and efforts to seek justice through the courts foundered.”

Although the Biden Department of Justice did not say so, most observers thought it closed the investigation and published its report ten days before Trump’s second term because Justice officials believed if left open, Trump’s DOJ would put it where it would never see the light of day.

As Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nichols continues the investigation into the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. He has reaffirmed the city’s commitment to the 1921 Graves Investigation and the Community Engagement Genealogy Project, according to the City of Tulsa. This ongoing work aims to bring closure to families of victims and to identify more victims.

Now, educators must teach this stain on our history in all our nation’s schools.

Fat chance.

Trump’s Reichstag fire

In April, I wrote about Marinus van der Lubbe, the insane communist fanatic, who, 28 days into Adoph Hitler’s Chancellorship in 1933, decided to make a spectacular spectacle to prop up Germany’s communists. So, he burned down the 40-year-old Reichstag, the building where Germany’s legislative representatives met to debate and enact laws.

At the time, Hitler needed something to allow him to take complete control of the country. Although van der Lubbe’s spectacle was a one-man show, Hitler saw it as a perfect excuse by which to attack and eradicate Germany’s communists, who, in the 1932 elections, had taken 16.9% of the vote, or 100 seats in the Reichstag.

Hitler hated the communists nearly as much as he hated Jews. The Reichstag fire gave him the means to immediately pound them into oblivion. The next morning, he suspended several sections of the Weimar constitution, particularly those governing freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly and association. He allowed police to detain people indefinitely without a court order. On that day, 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.

This week, after a stern talking to by Stephen Miller, the man charged by Trump with carrying out his promise of deporting millions of immigrants, ICE thugs spread out across the country and went to work. Nowhere did they hit harder than in the nation’s second-largest city, Los Angeles. This prompted protests, which the Los Angeles police were perfectly capable of handling — and they did.

However, never one to miss an opportunity, Donald Trump decided the LA protests could be his Reichstag fire. On 7 June, he ordered 2,000 California National Guard troops and 700 Marines to deploy to Los Angeles to put down what he described as an “invasion and third-world lawlessness,” led by “insurrectionist mobs,” and that Los Angeles had been “invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals.”

Even before the National Guard troops arrived, the protests had quieted down. Mayor Karen Bass declared a curfew, Governor Gavin Newsom gave a televised speech on Tuesday night watched by more than 10 million Angelinos, the police arrested a few people violating the curfew, and the air seemed to go out of Donald Trump’s balloon. Nevertheless, on Wednesday, he ordered another 2,000 National Guard troops mobilized. It seems he is doing his level best to intimidate and provoke the people of Los Angeles into violent protests, which would then give him the chance to declare martial law and take over the city, then the state.

More and more, it appears the Trump Administration is flailing, despite the enormous harm it is doing to America and its allies. Every day seems like the Ted Mack Amateur Hour, except Ted Mack’s amateurs knew what they were doing.

Will Los Angeles stand peaceful in the face of the gleeful and cruel thuggery of the ICE bullies as they rip people from the streets? That is the question of the hour.

The Fort Bragg political rally

On Tuesday, the same day he was ordering more National Guard troops into Los Angeles to combat an imaginary “insurrectionist mob,” Donald Trump and his lap dog Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth took a quick trip to Fort Gragg, North Carolina, for a Presidential Address to the base’s soldiers. Except it wasn’t a presidential address — it was a Donald Trump political rally curated by the White House — and it wasn’t to the base’s soldiers — it was to a select group of the base’s soldiers who were handpicked for their political leanings and physical appearance. A communication with potential attendees asked for “no fat soldiers,” according to Military.com.

This was a staged event, a fake event just like the kind dictators around the world put together to make themselves seem powerful. As Dan Rather wrote in Steady, 

So the mostly white, mostly male, exceptionally fit, pro-Trump troops booed when the president mentioned California Governor Gavin Newsom, President Joe Biden, and the press. They whooped and roared as Trump and Hegseth talked about ridding the military of “woke garbage” and “political correctness,” and reverting more military bases to pro-Confederate names, as Hegseth did with Fort Bragg.

A Trump merchandise table, set up at the rally, was busy selling MAGA necklaces and fake credit cards emblazoned with the slogan “White Privilege Card: Trumps Everything.”

A disgusting and shameful display.

Everyone loves a parade

Today is Donald Trump’s 79th birthday. Whoop-dee-doo, and Happy Birthday, Donny!

To celebrate, the president has decided to throw himself a ~$45 million parade in Washington, DC. It will be just like the ones you’ve seen in Moscow’s Red Square and North Korea’s Pyongyang’s Kim Il Sung Square — except ours will be better! Unfortunately for Trump, most of Congress will be skipping it. They say it’s a great idea, but they don’t want to be seen there as the tanks roll by, tearing up Constitution Avenue, and Air Force jets make flyovers.

Today’s day-long extravaganza on the National Mall will include the parade with 6,600 soldiers (who will, in Trump’s words, “bravely march down the streets.”), 150 vehicles, including 28 M1 Abrams tanks, 50 helicopters, and seven marching bands. There will be a post-parade concert, parachutists, and fireworks, as well as a festival with demonstrations, equipment displays, and food trucks. And let us not forget the merchants selling Trump bling and that “White Privilege Card.”

The highlight of the day may be the planned jump of the Army’s Golden Knights Parachute team. The team will perform a High Altitude Low Opening (HALO) jump, and, after landing, will present Trump with a flag they carried down. Something Trump can brag about every time he opens his mouth for a while. Swell.

The National Guard, of whom Trump has lately become so fond, will be there to keep the peace if protesters decide to make their presence felt.

The president told reporters at the White House on Wednesday that the parade would be a big celebration and protestors would not be welcome, according to NBC News.

Although nearby counterprotests are planned, including a mass march to the White House (might not be a good idea), I am fervently hoping protesters in DC can remain peaceful. If not, there could be blood in the streets as Trump will order Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to do his dirty work — and Hegseth will.

A land of 2,000 protests

The “No Kings” Nationwide Day of Defiance movement is holding protests across the country to coincide with the big birthday bash parade — up to 2,000 of them. A coalition of progressive political action groups is organizing Saturday’s demonstrations. The primary organizing group is the 50501 Movement, which stands for “50 states, 50 protests, one movement.” 

Here in Massachusetts, demonstrations are planned in the Commonwealth’s largest cities — Boston, Worcester, and Springfield — as well as communities from Provincetown, in the east, to Pittsfield, in the west (near me), according to the No Kings website.

I think we can all agree — Saturday, Donald Trump’s 79th birthday, with its howitzers, tanks, parachute umps, and flyovers, and all manner of peaceful demonstrations across the country where citizens tell him what they think of him, will be one of the more interesting days in a presidential term chock-full of interesting days.

Let’s hope no one gets hurt.

Recovering from Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) gives you time to think; the fatigue that comes with it doesn’t allow for much else. I’ve had the chance to ponder at a deeper level what Donald Trump and his oligarch administration have unleashed upon America and the world.

What the administration and DOGE have done has been coming at us with Gatling gun speed. They do something crazy one day, like taking over the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and when we start to think about that, they toss a grenade over the transom into our laps, this one taking over the Library of Congress. And then another after that, taking over the National Archives. The result is the country becomes desensitized to its own destruction. The Constitution doesn’t matter, except to the extent it gets in the way.

As I was recovering, I decided to stop focusing on all the incoming Cruise Missile Executive Orders as they were arriving, only for each one to be blown away into the background by another one in short order. Instead, I focused on the overarching arc of it all in a search for the why of it all.

This chaotic, helter-skelter destruction must have a Why to it, right? There must be a reason, coherent or not, for why this constitutional carnage is happening. So, what is it?

The big Why I’m looking to answer is: Except for the hubris of a monstrous man, why would an entire army of administration officials, from cabinet level on down, set out with gleeful cruelty to destroy the 236-year-old American democracy? And why would the entire Republican legislative body, House and Senate, not only go along with it, but cheer it on?

In late January and early February, at the beginning of our march into darkness, most people pooh-poohed any comparison to 1930’s Germany, but, I’m sorry, this mad rush to oligarchic autocracy has become more and more similar to Nazi Germany in 1933 and 1934 with every passing day. The only thing different is, except for the occasional bloody street violence, immigrants have replaced Jews as those whose presence must be eliminated. Until implementation of the systematic mass murder of Jews — the “Final Solution” — in the summer of 1941, Germany’s Jews were persecuted and suffered widespread discrimination in the early and mid-1930s, but not extermination. Hitler’s early goal was simply to get them out of Germany.

When they discovered it was quite profitable for them, Germany’s business leaders also jumped aboard the Nazi train to ruin. Initially, they thought they could control or manage Hitler. It turned out the other way around, precisely as has happened here. According to historian Richard Evans, “By the end of 1935, organized opposition had been completely crushed.” That was three years into Nazi rule. Thus far, we are 135 days into Donald Trump’s second term; there are 1,323 remaining.

Germany’s Jews lived in constant fear. Today, early into Trump’s current term, America’s immigrants live in constant fear. This profound fear is orchestrated by anti-immigrant and Deputy Chief of Staff to Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, the scion of an immigrant Jewish family, who made it to America at the start of the 20th century from a dirt-floor shack in Antopol, Belarus, a shtetl of subsistence farmers. They left because of violent anti-Jewish pogroms, and they were lucky they made it out, just as most of today’s immigrants to the U.S. left their home countries to escape persecution and death.

Miller is the reincarnation of Adolph Eichmann, the transportation and administrative wizard, who set up elaborate systems to move Jews out of the Third Reich in the 30s, and later, in the early 1940s, to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. According to statistics published by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Administration (ICE), Miller has thus far organized the removal of 527,459 immigrants snatched up by ICE. Many have been sent to a terrible prison in Guatemala and detention centers in Venezuela, totalitarian countries happy to house them.  In an article published in Politico Magazine, Miller’s uncle, the neuropsychologist David Glosser, wrote about his shame and dismay at his nephew’s hypocrisy and betrayal of their family’s lifelong values.

Nazis did monstrously evil things. They were persuaded to sell their souls by a charismatic leader, whose oratory, according to William Shirer, who was there through it all, could get most people to do just about anything. Shirer wrote the first definitive history of the period (there would be scores of others), The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Today, we have a charismatic leader who seems able to get a significant minority to do whatever he tells them. Witness the insurrection of January 6th. A leader who now has most, nearly all, of America’s larger businesses securely in his pocket. Witness the rush to make all references to DEI disappear and the fealty payments for his inauguration, which put $239 million in his other pocket.

Nazis passed laws that enriched the Barons of industry and further impoverished the marginalized.

We are doing the same. The Congressional Budget Office, the CBO, has analyzed what the MAGA crowd insisted on naming the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” and concluded it will increase annual costs for families in the lower 50% of income.  On the other hand, those in the upper 10% will get a massive bump in income. The bill includes roughly $3.75 trillion in tax cuts — extending the expiring 2017 individual income tax breaks that benefited the rich enormously and temporarily adding new ones that Trump campaigned on. The revenue loss would be partially offset by nearly $1.3 trillion in reduced federal spending elsewhere, namely through Medicaid and food assistance for lower-income families.

As a result of the changes to Medicaid, some 7.8 million people would no longer have health insurance, and about 1.4 million people who are in the United States without legal status in state-funded health programs would no longer have coverage.

Can one deduce a collective “Why” for all the chaos of today, which is so similar to that of the 1930s? Or, is it all nothing more than repeated bursts of fiery synapses in the mass of stunted protoplasm that passes for the brain of Donald Trump?

The only thing my limited brain can come up with is this: It is Greed. Out in the open Greed. And that’s all it is. Nothing sophisticated. Just Greed.

Greed comes in many forms. One can be greedy for money. With all the oligarchs in the Cabinet, there’s a lot of that here. One can also be greedy for power, the ability to do whatever one wants without fear of accountability. There’s a lot of that here, too. Just think about Pete Hegseth, who restored Confederate names to DOD military Forts, and just this week removed Harvey Milk’s name from the USNS Harvey Milk, a Navy supply ship. Navy veteran, San Francisco Supervisor, and assassinated gay rights activist Harvey Milk, along with other iconic Americans for whom ships have been named, like Thurgood Marshall (the first Black Supreme Court Justice) and Harriet Tubman (escaped slave and leader of the Underground Railroad at great risk to her life), are being erased from any mention within the Defense Department. The rest of the government is next. It’s as if they never existed. They’d need to be straight white men for any acknowledgement.

One can also be greedy for praise from the leader, which leads to doing anything to get and stay in the leader’s good graces. That’s here, too, but it’s ephemeral: One step out of line, and you’re history.

For all the chaos, Donald Trump does not appear to have a plan beyond enriching himself, his family, and his subservient, sycophantic allies. Trump’s non-plan plan seems to be working just fine for the moment. Will that continue? Will we let it? It doesn’t look like we’ll be getting any help from all the Republican millionaires in Congress and the kajillionaires in the Administration.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump seems to have multi-faceted Greed. He is the very model of a transactional human being. It is all he knows. And right now, his transaction du jour is Crypto. As Judd Legum wrote in Popular Information yesterday:

President Trump is shamelessly exploiting the presidency for personal profit. At the center of this effort is a variety of crypto ventures. For example, Trump recently gifted a VIP tour of the White House to the largest purchasers of his crypto meme coin, $TRUMP. The average winner bought about $4.3 million worth of Trump meme coins.

But could this be at the root of it all? Nothing but old-fashioned, old-as-dirt Greed? In this case, murderous Greed, for, contrary to the lying hypocrisy of Marco Rubio (a real-life Doctor Faustus), many have died already, and many more will. Millions.

I’m reminded of the late, great Peggy Lee’s hit song Is That All There Is?

Whatever. Nobody in government cares.

Racism comes in countless forms. It is an older-than-dirt, can’t-be-killed, sick-to-its-core tree with many branches. It is one person, or a group, or an entire nation believing themselves superior to one person, or a group, or an entire nation, because the latter is different from the former.

As an example of racism, what I would like to explore today concerns the renaming of American military bases, specifically, Georgia’s Fort Benning and North Carolina’s Fort Bragg, although there are others I could also name.

Fort Benning was established in 1918 as a training base for World War I soldiers. It was named for Confederate General Henry Benning, who, before the Civil War, was an Associate Justice of Georgia’s Supreme Court. He was also an ardent secessionist and the owner of 89 slaves on his 3,265-acre Georgia plantation. He was an able tactician and became a Brigadier General during the War.

At the 1861 Georgia secession convention, which he briefly chaired, Benning said,

“What was the reason that induced Georgia to take the step of secession? This reason may be summed up in one single proposition. It was a conviction, a deep conviction on the part of Georgia, that a separation from the North was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery… If things are allowed to go on as they are, it is certain that slavery is to be abolished. By the time the North shall have attained the power, the black race will be in a large majority, and then we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything. Is it to be supposed that the white race will stand for that?”

In 1918, at the request of the Columbus, Georgia, Rotary Club, the U.S. Department of War named the newly established World War I training camp for Henry Benning.

In 2023, the Biden Administration wanted to purge military installations of any connection to slavery and Confederate assets.

Which brings us to Lieutenant General Hal Moore and his wife Julie, who, all by herself, changed a significant part of the culture of the U.S. Army.

General Moore served with distinction in World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam. He won the Army’s Distinguished Service Cross, the second-highest battle award after the Medal of Honor, for his actions at the 1965, four-day battle of Ia Drang Valley, one of the fiercest battles of the entire war.

Moore was also one of the creators of the air-mobile concept and the all-volunteer army. Toward the end of his 32-year military career, the Army appointed him to the post of Deputy Chief of Staff at the Joint Chiefs level.

Perhaps eclipsing the accomplishments of her husband, it was Moore’s wife, Julie, who did more for Army wives and families than anyone else.

From the Civil War all the way to Vietnam, the Army informed families of a soldier’s death by telegrams and taxi-cabs.

As CBS News chronicled on Sunday Morning last Sunday, Julie Moore changed that heartless, dispassionate formula for one of compassion and service. As Elaine Quiano reported, Julie knew her husband Hal, a Lieutenant Colonel at the time, was part of the ongoing Ia Drang battle, and, as she described in a letter, a taxi driver pulled up to her house: “When he rang the bell I decided not to answer; that way, everything would be all right,” she wrote. “I finally said to myself, ‘Come on, Julie, you have to face up to what’s to come, so go answer the door.”

It turned out the driver only wanted directions.

Her son, Greg, said, “At that moment, she knew what it felt like to get that telegram, and she never wanted to have anybody else get that telegram and not have somebody physically with them.”

So, Julie Moore made a deal with the local Western Union office: they would call her whenever a telegram came.

The 2002 movie “We Were Soldiers” portrayed how Julie Moore would rush to comfort the widows.

Thus began her passionate quest to have combat death notices delivered by caring service members who would also deliver needed assistance in the days following.

Because of Julie Moore, since the late 1960s, trained personnel, including chaplains, have notified thousands of families about the death of a loved one in the service of the nation. They are followed within 24 hours by a visit from a survivor assistance officer who will help with anything the family needs in the immediate aftermath of the worst news they could possibly get.

Julie Moore never stopped fighting for compassion.

And that is why in 2023, the Biden Administration renamed the Fort named for slaveholder Henry Benning to Fort Moore in honor of the patriotic contributions of Hal and Julie Moore.

But that is not the end of the story.

In 2025, just a few months ago, one of the first things the new Secretary of Defense, the incompetent and unqualified, but very loyal-to-Trump Pete Hegseth, did was to restore the name of Fort Benning. Gone was Fort Moore, along with the virtue of Hal and Julie, but even Hegseth could not advertise he was bringing back Henry Benning (even though he was). No, he reached down into the nation’s war dead and found another Benning. This time, Army Cpl. Fred G. Benning, who fought in World War I. And, yes, he was a hero, having won the Distinguished Service Cross (just like Hal Moore) for exceptional bravery in 1918 just south of Exermont, France.

Hegseth gave no explanation as to why he deep-sixed Fort Moore. This is just a guess, but I think it might have had something to do with Fort Moore being a Biden Administration change. Couldn’t have that. Or, it could be that the relationship to slavery and racism was too powerful to lose among the faithful. We might never know.

He has done the same thing with all the other Army posts named after Confederate secessionists and slavers.

North Carolina’s Fort Bragg had been named for the slave-owning Confederate General Braxton Bragg. It briefly became Fort Liberty under the Biden Administration, a situation Hegseth immediately corrected. In March, he brought back the name Fort Bragg, this time saying he had renamed the Fort after Army Pfc. Roland L. Bragg, a native of Maine, who, in July 1943 at age 23, enlisted in World War II  and won a Silver Star at the Battle of the Bulge.

There may have been other Braggs he could have chosen, but he picked Roland. Perhaps he couldn’t resist the story of the doomed warrior Roland at the bridge in La Chanson de Roland, but even La Chanson de Roland might be a little too high-brow for the less-than-scholarly Secretary Hegseth.

Regardless, these insensitive re-renamings show the world the deep racism that runs through the blood of Trump and his team of sycophants. It’s so insidious, most Americans don’t even notice it anymore.

Having served their purpose, I would wager that the names of Pfc. Roland L. Bragg and Army Cpl. Fred G. Benning have seen their day and have now been confined to some dank and dark closet in the Pentagon’s basement, perhaps right beside the portraits now facing the wall of the former Secretary of the Army Mark Esper and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, who, according to Donald Trump, was “a woke train wreck.”

He ordered their portraits removed less than two hours after being sworn in for his second term.

 

Note to readers:

Due to illness, I’ve been away from these Letters for nearly a month. Nothing serious, let alone life-threatening. But it was tiring in the extreme and irritating beyond that. All is well now, though, just in time for some thoughts about one of my favorite subjects: Memorial Day and veterans. Next week, I’ll offer my perspective on the many down-the-rabbit-hole events that have happened during my keyboard absence.

Now to the topic at hand.

Memorial Day 2025

In 1867, General John Logan,  Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, wanted to establish a day to memorialize the approximately 620,000 Civil War dead, the greatest number of American dead in any of its wars. He called it Decoration Day. The concept caught on quickly and evolved to honor all soldiers who died in the service of their country. Decoration Day became Memorial Day, and the first national observance happened on 30 May 1868. Memorial Day has been celebrated annually since then, but it wasn’t until 1971 that it became a federal holiday, always celebrated on the final Monday of May.

From the Revolutionary War to 2024, well over one million American soldiers died in service to their country. World War II saw more than 405,000 perish. These are the dead Donald Trump, looking at row after row of neatly aligned white crosses in Normandy, France,  called “suckers” and “losers,” according to General John Kelly, Trump’s Chief of Staff during his first term.

Before World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt had been looking for a way to help Great Britain as it defended itself from Hitler’s assaults, but large pockets of isolationist politics throughout the country prevented him from doing anything meaningful and large-scale. Then Japan struck.

The United States declared war on Japan the day after it attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, “a day that will live in infamy,” according to Roosevelt in his address to Congress. By declaring war on Japan, we also declared war on Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, because each was allied with Japan. Consequently, overnight, the U.S. was fighting a global war on two fronts, Japan in the  Pacific and Germany/Italy in the European theatre.

At the time, our army was tiny and untrained; our munitions and equipment, dated and woebegone. Most held over from World War I. But America’s resources were enormous, and her population was large and growing. In 1940, the U.S. population was 132 million, Great Britain’s was 43 million, and Germany’s was 70 million. Because of its limitless potential, the day America entered the war marked the beginning of the end for Hitler.

In the European theatre, that end became evident in mid-1942.

First, Hitler broke his alliance with Russia’s Josef Stalin and invaded Russia. His blitzkrieg offensive had initial success, but eventually and inevitably, he sank into the same Russian quicksand that had swallowed Napoleon Bonaparte 130 years earlier.

While Stalin was beginning to eat German armies in the east, and after months of a quick ramp-up, the U.S. joined Great Britain in attacking Erwin Rommel‘s Afrika Corps in North Africa in mid-1942.

American and British forces drove the German and Italian armies completely off the continent, beginning in Casablanca in the east and ending nine months later with Tunis in the west. German and Italian prisoners numbered 250,000; most would be sent to prison camps in America.¹

Thursday, 20 May 1943, marked the official Allied victory in North Africa and a grand parade to celebrate it in Tunis.

The day before, in Washington, DC, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress after meeting for two weeks with President Franklin Roosevelt and American and British senior military staff as they argued the war’s next phase — Sicily, Italy and up into France and Germany, favored by the British, or the American plan for a dash across the English Channel directly into France. Ultimately, they settled on the Italian campaign first to be followed a year later by the Channel crossing, D-Day.

That was a good decision, because North Africa had proven the Americans were unprepared for the enormity of the Normandy invasion. In North Africa, their unproven leaders and soldiers, beginning at the top with the Supreme Commander, General Dwight Eisenhower, had made mistakes costing thousands of lives. But they learned from their mistakes; Eisenhower went from an indecisive administrator, who had never been in battle in his 30-year career, to a commanding, even ruthless, presence. Commanders who had come up short were removed. The soldiers who had slogged through the nine months of battle had learned the value of terrain and stealth. They knew now what it was to be bombed, shelled, and machine-gunned — and to fight on. Better-trained and equipped soldier replacements began arriving, their numbers growing every week. The Americans began to prove themselves to their British colleagues, who had been fighting since 1939.

When it was all over, World War II would cost 60 million lives — one every six seconds — and countless numbers of wounded and traumatized.

In his speech to the Congress, Churchill said:

By singleness of purpose, by steadfastness of conduct, by tenacity and endurance — such as we have so far displayed — by this and only by this can we discharge our duty to the future of the world and to the destiny of man.

The African campaign, Operation TORCH, had been America’s first test of the battle-readiness of itself and its citizen-soldiers. Its army had outlasted the German opposition, but had paid a fearsome price in doing so. Allied killed in action numbered more than 70,000 in the nine months it took to conquer North Africa. The combatants had fired millions of artillery shells. Sixty years later, 200-300 landmines of World War II vintage are cleared annually, and about 40 Tunisians a year are still being killed by the unexploded ordnance. The U.S. State Department reports that at least 2,000 civilians have died from landmines since the end of the war. 

On this Memorial Day weekend, as we remember and honor those who have given their all, we find our soldiers and sailors under the leadership of a man named Hegseth, a man of little competence and zero qualifications to be where he is. Memorial Day 2025 finds the sycophantic Mr. Hegseth focusing his efforts and busily getting ready for a full-scale, $45 million military parade through downtown Washington, DC, the kind of parade Russian and North Korean dictators love, complete with great big tanks to tear up the streets. Ostensibly, this parade will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States Army, but in reality, it will be a birthday homage to Donald Trump, who will turn 79 on the day of the parade, 14 June.

Could have picked any day; he picked that one. His narcissism knows no bounds. There will be countless other homespun and devotional parades across the nation on Memorial Day 2025, but none like the one Trump is demanding: The Donald Trump Fealty Parade. Maybe we’ll have a flyover by a certain big jet from Qatar.

This Memorial Day, we don’t have a Franklin Roosevelt. Neither do we have a Dwight Eisenhower, or an Omar Bradley, or a Douglas MacArthur, or a George C. Marshall, and even if we did, Donald Trump would have fired them all.

But we do have our honored dead — the greatest generation and all the other generations that sacrificed everything so this plot of land between two great oceans, this land we call home, can remain the place where dreams come true and men and women live their best lives, free of the evil from those who would do them harm to enrich themselves. That has become infinitely more challenging in 2025, but Americans have proven time and again that when their backs are to the wall, they are up to the task of moving the nation back onto the moral and lawful track, the high ground, the “virtuous” path our Founders intended 236 years ago when they gave us the Constitution that has guided us ever since.

I hope on this Memorial Day 2025, you have time to thank a veteran and to spend a moment thinking of those honored dead who gave their all for you and me and have now faded into the fog of time.

_______________________

¹ The German prisoners of war were housed all over the country. In 1943, while my mother was sunning herself with some friends at Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, a bus pulled up by the boardwalk and about 40 young men got out under guard. They were German POWs given a day of R&R. Some of them spoke English, and my mother spent half an hour in conversation with them. As she thought of my father fighting his way through Italy and France, she couldn’t help thinking the Germans were a friendly group enjoying the public beach, notwithstanding the guards with the heavy artillery. Those Germans were the lucky ones.

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?

___________________

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.