​Mouse Cohort No. 1. The Ex-Presidents

 
Where have you gone, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama* and Joe Biden?
 
There is a longtime tradition that holds that former Presidents do not publicly criticize their successors. However, norms, as we observe daily, are being shredded all over the place. So-called rules of decorum such as this one need no longer apply when a disaster of a President flirts with fascism, daily demonstrates his and his administration’s off-the-charts governing incompetence, and enmeshes the country in one constitutional crisis after another.
 
Unless you four are meditating deep in a Tibetan cave or sitting high atop a Himalayan summit without access to any means of communication (even smoke signals would do), please wake up and smell the foul matter burying your country.
 
The time has come when you need to speak out about the chaos, corruption and ineptitude of the current White House occupant. This is one norm that needs shattering. You have big megaphones. Use them! People might actually listen to you. It’s time for the elephants to do some serious stomping and bellowing. You should be screaming bloody murder about Trump’s illegal acts, his pardons of violent criminals, his abandonment of due process (one of the defining elements of democracy), his betrayal of our allies and 80 years of free world leadership against authoritarian regimes, his territorial acquisition fantasies, his lip-lock with Vladimir Putin, and his descent into totalitarianism. Before it’s too late.
 
*As this Rant was being put to bed, the Huffington Post reported that Barack Obama had expressed “deep concern” about Trump’s attacks against law firms and universities in a speech at Hamilton College. It’s a beginning, but by no means enough.
 
Mouse Cohort No. 2. The Legal Profession
 
Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison was a storied member of the 350-400 firm “BigLaw” community, first in line to forge enlightened anti-discrimination policies that enabled Jews, African-Americans and Women to work at “white-shoe” law firms and elevate to partnership. However, after Trump issued what any court would have likely pronounced an illegal executive order aimed at the firm, Paul Weiss quickly caved rather than fight. The “agreement” Trump shoved down the firm’s throat will have it pimping for Trump to the tune of $40 million of free legal services aimed at his enemies. That is in addition to back-tracking from the firm’s historic championing of human rights.
 
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom followed Paul Weiss down the path to perdition. Skadden did not even wait for a Trump executive order to fold, offering to provide Trump with $100 million in free legal services. Two other major law firms have also caved to Trump’s unconstitutional strong-arming at this writing.
 
It is often joked that law is the “world’s second oldest profession.” Paul Weiss, Skadden, Willkie, Farr & Gallagher, and Milbank have just joined the world’s oldest one.
 
Perkins Coie, another mega-firm targeted by Trump, is acting differently, fighting against Trump’s illegal extortion attempt. BigLaw firms Jenner & Block and Wilmer Hale are also fighting Trump’s coercive bullying. Hurrah for what honor and integrity still exists in the legal profession. And kudos to the young law firm associates who have resigned their jobs rather than work for organizations that made a deal with the devil.
 
I am sad to say that one of the firms knuckling under to Trump was a client of my company; but glad to say that two other clients are going to the mats against Trump’s illegality.
 
I don’t understand why the American Bar Association, its state bar counterparts and the entire BigLaw community aren’t joining together to fight Trump’s mafia intimidation of law firms and their clients and coming to the defense of every law firm in America threatened by Trump’s clumsy attempts at a chilling effect. Because that is what is at the heart of what this out-of-control President is doing. Even if he loses in court, the intimidation is the goal.
 
According to news reports, that goal has already been achieved. Clients seeking to sue the administration for its multitudinous transgressions are being turned away by major law firms that would have eagerly taken on those cases pre-Trump 2.0.
 
If these grandees of the legal community won’t fight Trump running roughshod over the 1st, 5th and 6th Amendments, who will?
 
Mouse Cohort No. 3. The Democratic Party
 
While a few Democratic politicians have raised their voices against Trump’s ravages and pillages, they come primarily from the party’s Progressive wing, which has little credibility with the majority of the public. I give Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez credit for getting out there and touring the country fulminating against Trump and connecting with the people harmed by his cruelty. However, if the Democrats want to be an effective opposition, it will take the more mainstream, centrist members to do something similar, and to do it as a steady drumbeat.
 
I’ve mentioned their names often in these Rants, so I won’t repeat myself here. The time has come to rip off the restraints and go full bore at Trump, Elon Musk and the docile Republican Reichstag members who are giving new meaning to the term “doormat.”
 
Dems should not over-enthuse about their victory in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election or having halved the margins in two Florida congressional races this week. The former was largely a referendum on the loathsome Elon Musk who came into the state flashing his dollars and cheesehead and behaved like the horse’s ass we in the Washington, DC area have had to endure these past months. It was not necessarily a plebiscite about Trump. And in Florida, the aspiring Reichstag wannabes won easily even without Trump at the top of the ticket.
 
There are certainly additional meek and fearful mice I could cite. We all know who they are: the legacy media and the academic community come immediately to mind. Prominent members of both are also caving to the would-be tyrant. With few exceptions (kudos to the Associated Press), they too have not stepped up to the plate and contested this evil legion of doom, opting instead for servility. And then there is the Republican Party, a pale shadow of what it used to be. Until this catastrophe of an administration, one would have thought that a spinectomy was high-risk surgery.
 
Dick Hermann
March 28, 2025

​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

It only took a few days for Donald Trump to completely upend the stable international construct that has kept the United States and much of the world from immolation for 80 years. The implications of this catastrophic reversal of the global balance of sanity as we look ahead are ominous.
 
The Hard Power Retreat
 
I said in Rant 830 that the unholy trinity of Trump, Vance and Hegseth were appeasers on a level with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in Munich in 1938, when he gave up a chunk of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler without even consulting the Czechs in hopes that the Nazi dictator would be satisfied with this latest land grab and stop his aggressive behavior. A very perceptive reader disagreed with my assessment and pointed out that what Trump is doing goes far beyond mere appeasement. The proper term to describe what is happening is “alignment.” Trump is aligning the United States with Vladimir Putin and the current crop of dangerous dictators—China’s Xi, North Korea’s Kim et al.—in their pursuit of territory and global domination.
 
Allies for eight decades have suddenly become adversaries. The NATO treaty that deterred the Soviet Union and its Russian successor state from invading Western Europe is on the cusp of losing its protective U.S. nuclear umbrella. Even a united Europe, which may be a pipedream, will be much more vulnerable to Russian aggression absent the assurance of the U.S. as defender of first resort.
 
Moreover, that vision of Europe is coming apart. Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) just garnered more than 20 percent of the vote in Germany’s Bundestag elections, coming in a shocking second by a substantial margin over the governing Social Democrats. The AfD, a neo-Nazi band of extreme right-wing, anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers and disparagers that is hostile to Ukraine and favors Russia, is openly supported by Trump and Vance. Moreover, the next French presidential election could bring the reactionary Marine Le Pen, another Putin poodle, to power.
 
The implications of the U.S. withdrawal from NATO and realignment with Russia are incredibly dangerous. It is an open invitation to Putin to do what he wants vis-à-vis the very vulnerable front-line democracies: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland and Poland.
 
Ukraine, which has heroically and successfully defended itself against Russia’s invasion, now finds itself sold out by the U.S. Any so-called security guarantees it might obtain from a peace imposed on it by the U.S. and Russia will not be worth the paper they are printed on. They will be as useless as the prior such guarantees—the Budapest Agreement of 1994 and the two Minsk Agreements that Russia signed—which were trashed by Putin when he invaded Ukraine in 2022.
 
The broader implications of Trump’s reversal of U.S. policy go beyond Trump’s affinity for Russia and hostility to our long-time allies. The American surrender signals to China’s Xi that he may finally realize his ambitions to take Taiwan without worrying about a U.S. military response and to assert Chinese domination in the Western Pacific. Once Taiwan is back in the fold, what will happen to South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Malaya,  Singapore and Indonesia. They will have little choice but to knuckle under to the new Chinese hegemony. Will this also unleash Trump’s bromancer, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, to realize his territorial ambitions vis-à-vis South Korea?
 
All of which will make the U.S. much more vulnerable to military pressure, if not an actual attack, underscored by new Pentagon leadership loyal to Trump rather than the Constitution and the American people. Replacing the Joint Chiefs and Staff with subservient generals and admirals willing to do whatever Trump orders, and absent any legal guardrails represented by the service Judge Advocate Generals (whom Trump and Hegseth also fired), severely weakens U.S. national security.
 
Sidenote. During my career, I interacted with five Army TJAGs (the two-stars who led the JAG Corps). They were among the finest and most ethical attorneys I ever met. It may be difficult even for Trump to find JAG toadies.

Saber-rattling about acquiring Greenland, the Panama Canal, Gaza and Canada are also not helpful. They are head-scratchers, especially because they appear so contrary to Trump’s long-held views about pulling back from American involvements abroad.

The Greatest Shame

The current nadir (there will surely be many more) of Trump’s disgraceful and highly alarming desertion of our allies and 80 years of wise and successful U.S. foreign policy was last Monday’s U.S. vote in the UN General Assembly against a resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The resolution passed overwhelmingly. The U.S. voted “No” along with Russia and NORTH KOREA, among others. Unbelievable!!!

The Soft Power Abandonment

Post-World War II America launched four soft power initiatives that made the U.S. the global force it became and has been ever since, and garnered as much positive feedback as any of our hard power efforts:
​

1. The Marshall Plan (1948) saved Western Europe from succumbing to Communism and created markets for U.S. goods that contributed enormously to our post-war prosperity.
2. John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps (1961) sent American goodwill ambassadors all over the world and generated enormous pro-American feelings at the grassroots level. Trump and Musk have not yet come for the Peace Corps, but be assured it is in their sights.
3. Kennedy’s U.S. Agency for International Development (1961) saved tens of millions of lives throughout the developing world through programs like Food for Peace and the distribution of desperately needed medicines to combat HIV/AIDS, measles, guinea worm and other diseases. The return on this investment in terms of goodwill and admiration for America is many times its miniscule cost (less than 1 percent of the federal budget).
4. Student exchange programs that brought millions of foreign students to the U.S. who then returned home, many to powerful positions in government and industry, armed with positive impressions of America.

The withdrawal from these hugely successful soft power programs opens the door for China, especially, to jump into the vacuum and redirect recipients’ feelings of warmth, gratitude and biases toward the East. This is an immense loss for the U.S.

It Doesn’t End There

Trump’s meat-axe approach to American foreign policy does not end with hard and soft power retreats. It also extends to his wrong-headed, anti-free trade policies, threatening and imposing tariffs on foreign goods, primarily on goods from our now-former allies. The only time in our history when tariffs were appropriate were in the early decades of the nascent U.S. when Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures induced Congress to impose them in order to protect fledgling American industries. Every other such imposition has hurt this country badly. Trump’s thoughtless tariff policy will prove painful for
American consumers too, while prompting retaliatory tariffs by our trading partners.

While I strongly oppose open borders, I also dispute wholesale deportations of undocumented and legal immigrants such as DACA eligibles and people here under Temporary Protected Status without any thought to the implications of so doing. While the victims of these policies will return to their countries of origin with less than good feelings about the U.S., Americans will also be disadvantaged. Immigrants of all stripes contribute to the U.S. economy. Many perform jobs that Americans simply won’t or can’t do at the wages immigrants will accept. The price of food will inevitably rise because growers will need to pass on increased labor costs for picking and processing foodstuffs. If you don’t like the price of eggs now, just wait.

Even hazardous-to-our-health Secretary of Health & Human Services, Bobby Kennedy, Jr.’s public health policies will have an adverse impact on our national security. For America to be strong, our general health needs to be robust. Opposing vaccinations is not the way to get there. Firing hundreds of Centers for Disease Control employees, including many who worked at CDC labs and the Epidemic Intelligence Service, the first lines of defense against pandemics, Food & Drug Administration employees, and National Institutes of Health scientists, is a sure way to undermine public health. Doing this at a time when avian flu is rampant, and measles (which we thought we had eradicated) and even polio are making comebacks, is the epitome of irresponsibility.

Finally, we need to consider climate change. Trump’s denial and hoax language regarding this existential threat is irresponsible and dangerous. Like his Covid response, hiding his spray-tanned face in the ground won’t make global warming go away. It will render Americans poorer in both the short and long terms and is guaranteed to increasingly disrupt our lives and livelihoods. Denigrating the problem with jingoism, exacerbating it by encouraging more fossil fuel extraction, and stymieing attempts to counter it with renewables like wind, solar and electric vehicle production are the definition of shooting oneself in the foot.

Taken together, Trump’s foreign policies are a disaster in the making that will weaken America and harm Americans across the board. Democrats need to shout this from the rooftops and educate the public on why this means disaster for us all.
 
Dick Hermann
February 28, 2025

​Let’s get right to it:
 
It’s Much Worse than I Anticipated. I read every disturbing, poorly-written page of Project 2025 during the campaign, which Trump denied knowing about and now is implementing item-by-item. Much of it appeared so extreme and irrational that I did not believe that even Republicans were that loony. I was way off base. Some of the most “out-there” items have come to pass or can be expected as the coup d’état that began January 6, 2021 moves forward.
 
A Cabinet of Unqualified Crackpots and Charlatans. A falling-down drunk sexual predator and serial mis-manager in charge at the Pentagon? A Russian asset that Kremlin insiders call “Our Girl” directing national intelligence? Hegseth and Gabbard are the poster children for national security malpractice. A vaccine-hostile crank at Health & Human Services who claims that Covid was designed to keep the Chinese and Ashkenazy Jews from contracting it? A Trump flunky consumed with retribution heading the FBI? And these are only the tips of the licebergs.
 
A Senate of servile sissies. I don’t want to hear any more about the independence of Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. These two joined their emasculated colleagues in endorsing most of a cabinet of singularly unqualified cranks. Profiles in cowardice, indeed.
 
Mitch McConnell is no great dissenter. Now that it can make no difference, McConnell becomes the lone Republican vote against some of Trump’s worst cabinet picks. This from the man who is primarily responsible for Trump being where he is today. McConnell could have stopped all of this if he had voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment following his incitement to insurrection on January 6, 2021. Enough members of his cowardly caucus would have followed him then and we would have been rid of the Orange Threat. Now it is too little, too late. I predict that future historians will condemn Mitch for his craven cowardice when courage was needed.
 
Where is George W. Bush? The U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) was W’s crowning achievement. PEPFAR has saved more than 25 million lives, primarily in Africa, Trump’s illegal shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has put PEPFAR on the chopping block. Bush needs to get out from behind his easel and loudly object to this evil scheme.
 
People are dying because food and vital medications are rotting on African docks. Unable to be distributed to people in need because USAID contractors that do this work have been put in limbo by Trump and Co-President Musk. Not only is this in violation of Congress’s power of the purse. It is also a criminal waste of taxpayer money.
 
JD Bowman/Hamel/Vance (he changed his name twice) Should Be Disbarred. Early on in law school (if not long before), students learn that (1) there are three co-equal branches of government, and (2) the courts have the power to determine the constitutionality and validity of the acts of the other two branches of government. “Checks and balances” in Madisonian parlance. Apparently, VP JD wasn’t paying attention. Any attorney who says that the Executive Branch can and should ignore court orders with which it disagrees should not be allowed a law license. Hop to it, Kentucky Bar!
 
As if JD wasn’t incendiary enough….Following his insulting and obnoxious Munich Security Conference scold-polemic directed at our European allies, Bowman/Hamel/Vance took the opportunity while in Adolf Hitler’s German heimatstadt and the locus of the West’s shameful 1938 dismemberment of Czechoslovakia to meet with the Führer of the AfD, Germany’s neo-Nazi party.  He pointedly did not meet with Chancellor Olaf Scholz. For 85 years, appeasement has been a dirty word. Trump, Vance and their ilk are rehabilitating it. Neville Chamberlain is opening his umbrella.
 
Not to be outdone…SecDef Hegseth disgraced himself at the Munich Conference when he delivered Ukraine to Vlad the Impaler on a silver platter. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) called it a “rookie mistake.” That implies that Hegseth will improve the longer he is in the job. Good luck with that!
 
The Great Dealmaker strikes again. The President who ceded Afghanistan to the Taliban is now serving up Ukraine to the Russians. Who goes into a peace negotiation announcing what the eventual outcome should be? In this case, allowing the aggressor to keep the territory it wrested from Ukraine, declaring Ukraine a neutral nation, denying it any hope of future NATO membership, and announcing that the U.S. is bailing out of its defense obligations under Article 5 of the NATO treaty. Trump is even blaming Ukraine President Zelenzkyy for starting the war! This is revisionist history on a level with the whitewashing of January 6. No wonder the champagne corks are popping all over the Kremlin as they watch, deliriously ecstatic, while the U.S. retreats, its tail between its legs.
 
The Thursday Afternoon Massacre. Seven Justice Department attorneys, most them conservative Republicans, who were working on the Eric Adams slam-dunk corruption case resigned after the Trump administration dropped the indictment against Adams in return for his cooperation with Trump’s anti-immigration show. The very definition of a corrupt quid pro quo. It certainly did not take long for corruption’s stink to engulf the new DOJ leadership.
 
The Democrats Still Don’t Get It. The Democratic National Committee’s recent meeting was a rehash of the same tired material voters rejected in the election. Moving away from identity politics and the insipid “politics of joy” was so offensive and at odds with reality that voters elected a twice-impeached, four-times indicted insurrectionist/convicted felon. Moreover, they elected mild-mannered Ken Martin, another Minnesota Nice Guy, as their chair. They need to be out there every day with credible spokespersons (uncharismatic Chuck Schumer won’t cut it) explaining to voters what the impact of Trump’s actions will do to them and making them angry about it. Anger, as they should have learned from Republicans, is a powerful motivator to voters. Go with the tough guys and gals like Jamie Raskin, Rahm Emanuel, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer and JB Pritzker. Junk lame slogans like Schumer’s “We Will Win!” Stop wilting in the face of the Trump/Musk onslaught.
 
A tiny glimmer of light at the end of the democracy deconstruction tunnel. A handful of the “timorous cowrin’ beasties” (a tip of the tam o’shanter to Robert Burns’ To a Mouse) who comprise today’s Republican Party are beginning to mouth meek little squeaks about the impact of the Trump/Musk devastation on their complaining constituents who are losing jobs, contracts and local infrastructure projects. Can this really be the second guardrail (the courts being the one and only at this point)? They will have to conclude that their re-election prospects are threatened more by unhappy constituents than they are by the deranged intimidator in the Oval who has them shaking in their jackboots.
 
Dick Hermann
February 21, 2025

​Blame Chief Justice John Roberts for Elon Musk and his reactionary band of super-arrogant teenage and twenty-something marauders (a.k.a., DOGEbags) who are wreaking havoc and assorted mayhem throughout the federal establishment and destroying lives around the world. They are the reductio ad absurdam of Roberts’ historically terrible majority opinion in the infamous morally, ethically, politically and Constitutionally dead-wrong Supreme Court Citizens United decision in 2010. Back then, Roberts was just getting started flexing his dismal decision muscles that today put him on a par with historians’ ranking of Roger B. Taney of Dred Scott notoriety as the all-time worst Chief Justice. Fitting that he serves at the same time as the all-time worst President, in whose expansive pocket he seems to sit, and the all-time worst House Speaker, Mike Johnson, Louisiana’s contribution to abject servility. A trifecta unlike any other.
 
It is because of the Roberts Court that Elon Musk has been able to buy his way into an unelected co-presidency or, at a minimum, the new post of Prime Minister of the United States. A cool $250 million campaign contribution buys a hell of a lot of access. In Musk’s case, the purchase wins him carte blanche to do whatever the hell he wants with the U.S. government.
 
Pre-Citizens United, there were limits on the amounts that donors could contribute to political campaigns. Pre-Musk, legal scholars already viewed Roberts’ Citizens United opinion as dangerously wrong only because he equated corporations with individuals, conferring a First Amendment Free Speech right on the former that previously had only applied to sentient beings with a pulse and a heart. No one contemplated that a former South African born to Apartheid would contribute a king’s ransom to a political candidate in order to buy his way into masterminding a budding dictatorship.
 
The damage Trump and his (domestic) handler, unelected Co-President Musk, have already done is incalculable and will take years to repair if ever it can be. Shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the most important aid agency in the world, after lying that it is a “fraud and corrupt” is beyond appalling. People in Africa, Asia and Latin America are dying because they are suddenly cut off from life-giving medications and live-saving sustenance. It is not too extreme to say that what Dr. Evil and his Mini-Me are doing is illegal and, in my opinion, criminal.
 
Having wrecked USAID, Musk and his malign minions have gone on to perform the same amputation absent anesthesia on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which in its brief history has returned $20 billion to defrauded Americans. Not to mention the anguish he has unleashed on the livelihoods of the 1,700 CFPB employees, who now join their 10,000 USAID fellow civil servants in employee limbo. This is only the beginning of the destruction he and Trump intend to rain down on the heads of the American people.
 
But don’t expect that there will be any immediate consequences for these reprehensible acts.  The courts, the only guardrail left, operate with tortoise-like deliberation while Trump and Musk proceed at light speed to do their harm.
 
John Roberts has led a life of privilege and ambition and has experienced nary a bump in his yellow-brick road to power, fame and wealth (wife Jane brings in $10 million a year—see Rant No 740, “Not So Plain Jane”). Perhaps that’s why he understands so little about what ordinary, less fortunate people must endure, and why his decisions and opinions consistently favor the charmed class into which he was born and has lived his entire life. Someone who had to travel a harder road to the mountaintop might view the devastating implications of a Citizens United decision, which have now come to pass, differently.
 
Dick Hermann
February 14, 2025

​I live six miles from Reagan National Airport (DCA) and close to the Potomac River, site of the worst aviation disaster in decades. I’ve probably flown in and out of DCA a hundred times. Every day from our house we hear and see hundreds of commercial jets and a bunch of helicopters fly overhead. To say that DCA and the adjacent Potomac River are extremely busy is an understatement.
 
Watching the horror of the January 29 mid-air collision on television brought back memories of January 1982 when Air Florida Flight 90 took off from National in a blizzard and seconds later plummeted into the 14th Street Bridge, hit several vehicles, killing their drivers and passengers, before plunging into the icy Potomac River. Conditions were so bad that evening that no airplane should have been permitted to fly. I was working late and, looking out of my office window, the snowfall was so intense that I could not see the buildings across the street. Ice formed on the plane’s wings as soon as they were de-iced at the departure gate. However, Flight 90 had to bide its time in line long enough that ice was able to reform on the wings. Upon takeoff, the plane was unable to gain enough lift and crashed a minute later. Only five of its 70-plus passengers and crew survived.
 
Two important lessons learned from that crash were that (1) blizzard conditions need to be taken seriously when deciding whether to ground flights, and (2) thorough de-icing in cold conditions just before take-off is a must.
 
President Trump’s reckless, cruel, vile yet eminently predictable claims scapegoated DEI, Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Pete Buttigieg for this horrendous accident. Consoling is totally beyond him. Vice President Vance, leaping at the opportunity to toady up his fealty, eagerly endorsed Trump’s despicable display of crassness. These charlatans would rather lie than lead.
 
However, the real reason this accident rests squarely on three organizations that should know better: The Pentagon, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Congress, whose monumentally irresponsible decisions were made and never reversed over many years:
 
(1) Allowing military and other helicopters to fly up and down the Potomac River and cross the flight paths of commercial airliners taking off and landing at DCA with only a few hundred feet of clearance. Who thought that was a good idea? Heads should roll at the Pentagon and FAA. Surely there is somewhere else much safer where the military could run helicopter training missions. Now, after this terrible yet avoidable tragedy, the FAA has, for the moment at least, banned such chopper flights.
 
(2) Continuing to let DCA exist and become busier and thus more dangerous because Congress loves its convenience. The Washington Metropolitan Airports Authority had been warning Congress of the dangers of airport over-capacity; and congestion for years, but Congress would not listen. In fact, Congress has consistently voted to increase the number of flights and extend the hours during which they could take off and land (now 5:00 AM through 12:00 AM). They keep doing this solely for their own convenience. It only takes about 15 minutes to get from Capitol Hill to the airport, whereas it takes more than 30 minutes to travel to much safer Dulles Airport in the Virginia suburbs. To save themselves a quarter of an hour or so, members of Congress are perfectly willing to dismiss experts’ safety concerns and put the lives of Americans in jeopardy. Every time a knowledgeable authority recommends closing DCA, Congress says “No!” Since they only work three days a week at best (plus recesses that account for months of time off) and travel to and from their home states and districts on Fridays and Mondays, they keep one of the most dangerous airports in the world operating when it should be shut down. Moreover, they keep adding more and more flights because they all want to be able to fly non-stop to and from their homes. Everyone else be damned.
 
Ask any commercial airline pilot and they will tell you that flying into and out of DCA is a challenge and an increasingly dangerous one. There have been near misses at DCA for years, and they have spiked in recent years. No big deal, says Congress.
 
Add to this horrific mix a shortage of air traffic controllers largely due to previous government shutdowns. Some did not return after not being paid for a month during the 2019 Trump shutdown. After it ended, a number of trainees also did not return to the Aviation Academy for continued training. The coronavirus pandemic subsequently shut down the Academy for a year, contributing to the shortage. Trump wasn’t paying attention because he was consumed with bungling the Covid response. Meanwhile, Congress did nothing to address this concern. Now Trump has frozen federal hiring, including the recruitment of new controllers.
 
The next time your Senator or congressperson holds a town meeting in your burg, ask them how they voted when it came to increasing congestion at DCA. If you don’t like their answer and you value airline safety, you know how you should vote when they come up for re-election.
 
Dick Hermann
February 10, 2025