​Eighty-two years ago next month, Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, by far his country’s greatest military figure, died because the Americans received advance notice of his flight plan. Yamamoto was on his way to an island in the Solomons in order to boost troop morale after Japan’s defeat at Guadalcanal. A radio operator carelessly sent out Yamamoto’s itinerary over an open channel. It was immediately intercepted by code-breakers at Pearl Harbor, decoded and translated. When Yamamoto’s plane was airborne, it was shot down near Bougainville by waiting U.S. Army Aircraft fighters and the admiral killed. His death was a psychological blow to Japan from which it never recovered.
 
Along come National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, Secretaries of State and Defense Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Kremlin favorite, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the apex of the U.S. national security team, openly discussing detailed attack plans aimed at Yemen’s Houthis on Signal, a public commercial platform. Bad as that was, what is worse are their desperate attempts at downplaying one of the stupidest and most dangerous intelligence screw-ups in history.
 
Gabbard and Ratcliffe lied to both Senate and House committees about their mind-boggling recklessness. Hegseth denied the obvious and trashed the journalist that Waltz thoughtlessly  included in the Signal chat. I should add that Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, by leaving the call and withholding some of the most super-sensitive information discussed, acted far more responsibly than the Trump appointees. Rubio meekly opined that it was a “big mistake.”
 
BIG MISTAKE!?!?
 
Hegseth, in his latest of an unending series of blunders as SecDef, actually itemized in detail the U.S. attack plans during the chat. Had the Iranians, Russians, Chinese or North Koreans been monitoring the platform, they could have warned the Houthis in advance and jeopardized the lives of American pilots.
 
Donald Trump, he of the mantra, “The buck stops anywhere but here with me,” claims he knew nothing about this unbelievable breach of secrecy and that it was no big deal. Instead of demanding that his collection of national insecurity failures fall on their swords, he calls this band of loyal fools “great people.”
 
During my career, I twice had Top Secret security clearances. Had I done anything remotely like what these pea-brains did, I would have found myself very quickly behind bars, charged with criminal conduct. In contrast these thoughtless buffoons will just go on doing their jobs as ineptly as possible. That any of them still have jobs is appalling and a deep insult to and disdain for the American people.
 
Needless to say, having clowns in charge of protecting our nation makes us supremely vulnerable to anyone who wants to do us harm, and especially puts our military in harm’s way. But what did you expect when Trump appointed abject mediocrities to their high posts?
 
Thus far, only one Republican member of Congress has dared make a peep about how bad this is. The rest of the Reichstag bootlickers are content to hide in their mouse holes and persist in their servility to all things Trump.
 
Of all the journalists these incompetents could have included in their public chat, Goldberg should have been one of the last ones on their list. Despite Hegseth’s shabby attempts to denigrate him, Goldberg is one of the finest journalists of our era and his magazine only continues to rise to the top of the heap, especially now that so many of the Washington Post’s crackerjack reporters and opinion writers have joined The Atlantic.
 
Among the questions raised by this intelligence disaster are the following:
 
If the situation had been reversed and it was Democrats on the chat, would Republicans just sit quietly and do nothing? Unlikely.
 
Other than the fact that she is a Trump doormat personified, how can Attorney General Pam Bondi claim that nothing classified was revealed during the chat, a blatant lie, and that the Justice Department sees no reason to investigate or prosecute?
 
Given such breathtaking incompetence, how many other times has something like this gone on that we don’t know about?
 
I understand that the public probably could care less about the particulars of this insane security breach. However, what it should be concerned with is the INCOMPETENCE of this administration which pervades everything it tries to do.
 
Sidenote. In what is destined to become a spreading brain drain, three highly-esteemed Yale professors, including world-renowned historian Timothy Snyder, are leaving the university and heading north to teach in Canada. Their beef is not with the university, but rather with having to reside and teach in an America gone down into the Trump inferno.
 
Dick Hermann
March 28, 2025

Hapless Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer rolled over for the Republican Reichstag’s gutless gutting of programs and policies contained in the Continuing Resolution (CR) to fund the U.S. government for the rest of this fiscal year. It is both shocking and pathetic that Schumer and a handful of equally spineless Democrats folded and actually voted for this terrible bill at all, and did so without any attempt at exercising their party’s leverage.
 
His arguments were that (1) the heartless CR was better than allowing the government to shut down, and (2) Democrats would be blamed for a shutdown. Neither argument stands up to scrutiny. Given the public’s attention span, by the time the next election comes around, no one will remember who voted to shut the government down. This is especially true now when every day brings a new Trump dismantling of the federal establishment and upending of the international order that sucks up all the media oxygen.
 
As for Schumer’s first point, here’s what’s in the CR. You be the judge:
 
·         Unless the Republican House of Representatives approves a last-minute Senate bill, It will take away $1.1 billion from the District of Columbia’s budget, a nasty punishment with racist overtones that will cause DC to lay off essential service personnel like cops, firefighters, other first responders and teachers.

• It adds a completely superfluous $13 billion to the $852 billion Defense budget. So much for fiscal responsibility.

• Congress relinquishes even more power to Trump and Musk to do whatever they want vis-à-vis federal spending, firing thousands of civil servants and deconstructing the government. Horrors such as shutting down the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, which Trump did last week, undoubtedly much to the delight of his Kremlin puppet-master, will quickly fade into the fog generated by new outrages.

• It allows agencies to repurpose funds that were accompanied by specific spending instructions when they were originally authorized. Bye, bye environmental protections, school breakfast and lunch programs for poor children, et al. Trump and Co-President Musk will have a field day with this. 

 
This is what Schumer’s misguided calculation gives us.
 
Democratic complicity in what amounts to a fascist takeover of the U.S. government is beyond comprehension. Instead of waving the white flag of surrender, they should be taking to the ramparts and fighting 24/7 against this continuing coup d’état.
 
A rhetorical and figurative Paris Commune is what is needed. The governors and the more articulate and forceful Congress members, like Chris Murphy and Jamie Raskin, need to be out in public every day shouting to the rooftops about the Trump chaos and corruption (e.g., hawking Teslas on the White House lawn; getting in bed with a crypto-currency firm that money-laundered for ISIS and Hamas). The appeasers—Schumer, his pitiful deputy Dick Durbin, and the Kirsten Gillibrands and others from the Neville Chamberlain wing of the Democratic Party—should go.
 
Dick Hermann
March 21, 2025

Donald Trump is legitimately a genius when it comes to campaigning for office. More than 15 years ago, he alone among the political class demonstrated that he understood the anger, rage, anxiety and fear that gave rise to the Tea Party and the Birther Movement and jumped onto that wave of discontent, riding it all the way to the presidency in 2016.
 
Neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama, two-term presidents both, never did grasp what was going on in the country. They bailed out the financial institutions that perpetrated the “Great Recession” while ignoring the plight of millions of Americans who saw their lives, hopes and dreams shattered. “Too big to fail” was a myth designed by the culprits and sold to these two gullible presidents. There was and is an orderly way to close down failing institutions of any size. It’s called bankruptcy. Instead, the U.S. government shoveled hundreds of billions of dollars into the pockets of the very people they should have prosecuted and jailed for their unrestrained greed and illegality.
 
Countless Americans lost their homes and livelihoods thanks to financial shenanigans, only to be told by their government that they were on their own. Meanwhile, Wall Street fat cats whose irresponsibility and reckless behavior caused this ruination got off scot-free. Recognizing and then exploiting the intensity of the fury was Trump’s great brilliance.
 
Trump is also a brilliant campaigner because he blurts out whatever thought enters his fevered brain in the moment, no matter how outrageous. Thus, he dominates and “wins” the news cycle every day. Conventional politicians simply cannot compete with winging it à la Trump.
 
The big problem for Trump, however, is that genius in one arena does not necessarily carry over to other milieus. When it comes to governing, he is an utter fool, incapable of rational conduct. Governing does not lend itself to winging it. You need a strategic plan. This has never been Trump’s strong suit.
 
If his first term marked by mayhem, inconsistency and insurrection did not convince you, consider the assessment of more than 100 presidential historians who rank Trump as the worst president ever, even below James Buchanan who did as much as anyone to provoke the Civil War, and Warren Harding who presided over the most corrupt federal government in history…until Trump came on the scene.
 
Voters last year were willing to overlook the guaranteed chaos and craziness they were certain to get and voted for him once again. He said he would bring down prices on day one and that was enough for voters to risk the rest of his baggage. Guess what? It isn’t working. Prices are rising because Trump still does not understand how the economy works…and apparently never will.
 
And now, the chaos and corruption of Trump 2.0 has already far exceeded that of his first go-round:

• Pardoning violent criminals and traitors.
• Firing Inspectors Generals and JAGs, the very people tasked with holding government accountable.
• Giving virtually unlimited power to an unelected neo-Nazi sympathizer in return for hundreds of millions of dollars of campaign contributions and the promise of millions more with which to primary Republicans who might finally find enough spine to criticize Trump (don’t hold your breath).
• Mass firings of federal workers from essential jobs such as nuclear weapons security and veterans’ suicide hotlines.
• Terminating contracts of companies and nonprofits that feed the hungry and distribute medicines to the desperately ill, giving China the opening it has dreamed about for years.
• Shutting down agencies that saved millions of lives and returned tens of billions of dollars to taxpayers cheated out of their money.
• Sweeping up and deporting grandmothers who don’t exactly fit the definition of hardened criminals.
• Ignoring skyrocketing prices for staples such as eggs, which Trump’s pitiful Agriculture Secretary told us could be alleviated if only we raised chickens in our backyards.
• Tariff whiplash from one day to the next, sending markets into a tailspin.
• Bailing on our long-term friends in favor of siding with our sworn enemies.
• Appointing unqualified cranks to cabinet positions where they very quickly demonstrate just how much in over their heads they are.
• Threatening to ignore court orders that don’t square with their perverse views of how cases should play out.
• Bobby Kennedy advocating Vitamin A as the antidote to a burgeoning measles epidemic among the unvaccinated, and blaming the outbreak on diet.
• Going into next flu season without a proper vaccine.
• Taking down websites containing “taboo” words, such as “Enola Gay,” the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
• Trump’s latest grift: a “crypto reserve,” which no one understands, least of all the Grifter-in-Chief. You can, however, be certain that he will make money off this while America gets fleeced.

 
The good thing is that Trump is meticulously laying the foundation for his administration’s collapse. The bill is coming due. The seeds of Trump’s demise are being planted. His second term is crumbling quickly on the ruins of his first one. His approval numbers are already underwater.
 
The bad news is that we have to endure four years of this pandemonium before we can breathe again.
 
Dick Hermann
March 14, 2025

​The Oval Office ambush Trump and Vance pulled on Ukraine President Zelenskyy could be the final break with 80 years of treaties and alliances that served the core interests of the United States magnificently. That cooperation not only deterred an aggressive Soviet Union and its Russian successor state from taking over Western Europe and threatening America. It also supplied the key component of America’s unprecedented post-World War II prosperity by providing markets for American goods and services and creating tens of millions of jobs producing those goods and services.
 
It is stunning that this could all be upended in just a few weeks. But that is exactly what Donald Trump and his malevolent minions have accomplished. The capstone was the shameful White House meeting with Zelenskyy in which Trump and Vice President JD Vance parroted Kremlin lies and talking points like dutiful little puppets in service of their new ally and BFF, Vladimir Putin.
 
I don’t see how this once great nation which has been the bulwark of the free world can recover from this massive embarrassment and abject surrender to the dark forces of evil that want to neuter the U.S. The disgraceful performance Trump and Vance put on before the cameras was a new low point in the American saga. We are humiliated before the world.
 
Putin and his gangster thugs probably cannot believe their good fortune. Three years after an illegal invasion of Ukraine that that heroic nation has fought to a standstill, and during which Russia has lost hundreds of thousands of troops and seen its economy go down the toilet, along come Trump and Vance to save Putin from his folly. Moreover, these two American traitors have already acceded to Russia’s territorial and other demands without bothering to ask for any concessions from Putin. Not that anything Putin promises would be worth the paper it is printed on. Security guarantees are a joke, as evidenced by the previous three such guarantees (one Budapest and two Minsk Agreements) Putin signed in the recent past and then promptly violated.
 
Trump, Vance and the feckless Republican Party that serves these two Putin poodles are the very definition of “useful idiots.” Putin has these servile saps pegged perfectly. All they care about is clinging to power, our national security and national interests be damned. They have abandoned any pretense of serving the public good and don’t give a fig for our country and its future. Vladimir Putin has the entire bunch of submissive quislings on an ever-shortening leash.  He must be elated at how easy it was to turn these weak-kneed grovelers into a rubber-stamp Reichstag. Lackeys and lickspittles all.
 
Compounding this tragic turn towards an existential enemy that wants to destroy us is the sickening fact that half of our country does not appear to care if we do a 180 and hurtle down this authoritarian road into Putin’s putrid pocket. It is impossible to accept that America, once  the beacon of freedom and liberty, is willing to abandon these hard-fought gains with just a shrug.
 
P.S. I made the bad mistake Tuesday evening of watching Trump’s entire childish, nasty and lie-infested speech to the Republican Reichstag and Democratic members. Worse, I did it on a full stomach. Bad enough to have to listen to him hoist himself above George Washington, lie about 300-year olds getting Social Security checks, saber-rattle against Panama and Greenland, and dump all over Joe Biden, among the other vile garbage he spewed. It was also cringeworthy watching how monumentally lame was the Democrats’ behavior: ping-pong paddle signs signifying nothing; not pretty in pink (I failed to get the message); occasional heckling. Low points were in abundance on both sides. Kudos, nevertheless to Sen. Elissa Slotkin for the best-ever response to a presidential address to Congress. Too bad fewer viewers saw it than used to watch re-runs of “Make That Spare.”
 
Dick Hermann
March 7, 2025