Oh, Well, Then Again, Maybe Not: Mission (Un) Accomplished

One thing about war: it tends to impose reality upon those who want to deny it.

In that famous sequence in "Downfall," the German movie about Adolph Hitler in the bunker, Hitler is ordering around phantom Wehrmacht divisions which the generals know do not exist, to defend Berlin, to turn the tide of war against the Russians, and to sweep them from Germany.

When people talk about the miracle of Hitler having escaped the assassin's bomb which killed the officers in the room, but left Hitler unscathed, with only a shredded pair of trousers, they pointed to his escape as evidence of God's will to protect and preserve, Der Fuhrer.

But later, it was realized had Hitler been killed, his generals, and his lieutenants would likely have sued for peace and nobody outside Germany, Poland and Austria would ever have learned about the concentration camps and if the allies had agreed to terms, the Second World War might have ended like the First, with Germany unreconstructed. The total collapse of the Third Reich was necessary to reinvent Germany and establish a new order in Europe and only with Hitler fighting to the bitter end could that happen.

Now we have similar things being said about the bullet which only grazed Trump's ear.

But as Lincoln noted in his sacred Second Inaugural Address: God works in mysterious ways; "The Almighty has His own purposes; the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

Now, Donald Trump asserts mission accomplished; the Iranian nuclear program has been destroyed. They can no longer enrich uranium or create an atom bomb. 

As reported in the New York Times: "There was also evidence, according to Two Israeli officials with knowledge of the intelligence, that Iran had moved equipment and uranium from the site in recent days."

Trump, of course, has claimed the radi was "a complete and total success," and Iran's nuclear capabilities have been "obliterated."

Now we are parsing what "complete success" means and what "obliterated means.

If Iran moved its enriched uranium and its centrifuges and if the mountain redoubt was only damage and not destroyed, then what the raid demonstrated was that America does not have the power to stop Iran from making nuclear bombs.

But it's still early yet.

We do know one thing: We cannot believe Trump about anything. Of that we can be sure. Even his most ardent supporters have always said, "You cannot take him literally, but you can take him seriously."

Which is to say, you cannot believe the bum at all.

P.S. (Addendum 6/24/25)

Report from the "failing" New York Times:

A preliminary classified U.S. report says the American bombing of three nuclear sites in Iran set back the country’s nuclear program by only a few months, according to officials familiar with the findings.

The strikes sealed off the entrances to two of the facilities but did not collapse their underground buildings, the officials said the early findings concluded.

Before the attack, U.S. intelligence agencies had said that if Iran tried to rush to making a bomb, it would take about three months. After the U.S. bombing run and days of attacks by the Israeli Air Force, the report by the Defense Intelligence Agency estimated that the program had been delayed, but by less than six months.

The report also said that much of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was moved before the strikes, which destroyed little of the nuclear material. Iran may have moved some of that to secret locations.

Thinking Fast and Slow

 

So King Donald drops the bunker buster bombs on Iran's mountain protected nuclear facilities.

And he announces it, not from the Resolute Desk, but as Obama did when Obama announced the death of Osama Bin Laden, standing behind a podium. And standing behind him, nodding obsequiously,  were Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance and Pathetic Hegseth--the three stooges of the apocalypse.

The fast thought is: What a stupid thing to do! Not to mention illegal, as this is clearly an act of war and Congress, not even this rubber stamp, spineless Republican Congress voted an act of war.

On the other hand, we have long recognized there are circumstances the President may have to act in a timely way and Congress never does, so we accept he acts first and begs forgiveness later, rather than asking for permission.

And, of course, President Obama killed various Muslim leaders, terrorists, bomb makers with drones, and while this is an order of magnitude different, it's still just sending in U.S. military lethality to stop fanatics from acting.

And, as Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi noted in a recent interview with Jeffrey Goldberg  of The Atlantic the regime in Tehran has been obsessed with annihilating Israel, which it has daily called the second Satan, second only to the United States, which is the Great Satan.  They erected a doomsday clock in the middle of Tehran which counts down the time to when Iran will wipe Israel from the face of the earth.

So, there can be little doubt, if and when the current Iranian regime gets its hands on an atomic bomb, it will drop it on Israel, or if it has more than one, it'll drop all of them.

Now Halevi is every bit as appalled by Netanyahu and his apocalyptic, Warsaw Ghetto like destruction of Gazza as I am, but he finds it difficult to say Netanyahu is wrong about Iran.

So, when Trump finds the airspace over Iran clear, he sends in the B-2 bombers and tries to take out the production lines for the Iranian doomsday machine they are building to deliver to Israel. 

It may not have been successful, despite Trump's claims, which we all know cannot be believed, but can we blame him for trying?

He did not drop these bombs on civilians. He did not say he wanted to convert Fordo into another French Riviera. He simply tried to eliminate a death factory.

The arguments against this rash action:

1/ It will provoke Iran into revenge attacks: We'll suffer repeat 9/11 attacks in the US.

2/ It was illegal, as it was an act of war without Congressional approval.

3/ It will do exactly what Trump promised his voters he would not do: Draw the US into another Middle Eastern war, like Iraq or Afghanistan.

Only the first really requires response. The illegal thing is debatable; whether it involves us in a wider conflict remains to be seen but is not a done deal by any means.

So, the argument about provoking an Iranian retaliation: The fact is, when Libya blew up that American plane over Lockerbie, Scotland you could point to any number of US acts to which this might have been a response, but from the vantage point of 2025, it looks as if the Muslim fanatics simply found they had in their possession the means to blow American planes out of the sky and they did it. They did not need to point to any specific act they were avenging. And once captured, they did not point to a specific act for which planting that bomb was an act of revenge--they were simply doing violence to a United States they considered their enemy, which had visited so many depredations against them they did not even need to bother to justify any specific act.

All they needed was hate.

When the Twin Towers were destroyed, and Jim Lehrer asked a Middle East pundit on the PBS News Hour, "But why do they hate us?" he was asking in genuine perplexity, and the pundit said there are Muslim fanatics who hate us for any number of reasons, general and specific. We are infidels. We live debauched and depraved lives. We arm Israel who kill Muslims. The list goes on and on and you do not need a specific incident, only the baseline hate.

And, of course, not all Muslims hate us. Specific fundamentalist fanatics hate us.

So, given that background, that Iranian leaders are obsessed with us, hate us, want to destroy Israel and to the extent they can, the US, trying to argue that dropping bombs on Fordo will provoke them, will stoke the hornet's nest--not convincing.

Iran is already a hornet's nest. And I have to admit, even though I try to allow creatures to live their lives--I do not hunt or trap squirrels on my property; I do not trap chipmunks or even rabbits (who eat my flowers), when a hornet or wasp nest appears in the corner of my garage door frame or anywhere on my house, I go full nuke on that. You cannot live with a hornet's nest on your threshold.

Now, I am very aware some will say, "But that's also the case with Gazza." 

No, Gazza is not a hornets' nest. Gazza is different from Tehran. I can say that while also agreeing my knowledge of the Middle East and Israel is superficial and based on American and British journalism, not on professional or personal experience. I can only listen to people who might know, like the former head of the Mossad, who said explicitly Gazza has been a disaster from the Israeli point of view and has long ago become a "useless and counterproductive" effort.

But Iran--like most Americans I have seen enough of the Iranian ayatollah's for long enough to believe, even if I do not know--they are fair targets.

J'Accuse: The #MeToo Movement and the Backlash

 

Reading the New Yorker in New Hampshire is a pleasantly surreal experience.  Even out here, in the Provinces, we can live through the issues and conflicts of the day. 

The June 23, 2025 is jam packed with amazing articles but the one which currently has me transfixed and thinking about it even having finished it is "Backlash" by Alexis Okeowo.

Tina Johnson

It tells the tale of Tina Johnson, who told of visiting the office of a lawyer, Judge Roy Moore about a child custody case, with her mother. During the visit Johnson thought it strange that Moore asked her about the color of her daughter's eyes, asking if they were as pretty as hers. He then asked her for a drink after the meeting, which she declined and on the way out the door, with her mother ahead of her she felt Moore's fingers find her vagina, and she just ran out of the door. When Moore ran for the U.S. Senate, women started coming forward with similar stories of his behavior and Johnson joined the chorus, as the #MeToo movement was surging.  Articles documenting that Moore had been banned from a shopping mall "for bothering young girls." Moore lost the election to Doug Jones, who had prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan men who set the 16th Street Baptist Church bomb in Montgomery, Alabama which killed four young Black girls in 1963.  Jones wrote about this in a book called, "Bending Toward Justice," but he was ultimately defeated by football coach Tommy Tuberville, and normalcy was restored to the state of Alabama.

Okeowo's article documents the price paid by Tina Johnson and a spate of other women who came forward with complaints about the sexual depredations of men during the #MeToo movement.

The portrait which emerges of the Alabama towns where these women lived is scaborous: Leigh Corfman was run off the road in a scene right out of "Easy Rider" and wound up paralyzed. Johnson's house was burned down. Moore launched libel suits and neither woman had the financial means to defend themselves from lawsuits.

Okeowo notes that eventually people grew uncomfortable with accusation without due process and when Al Franken was forced to resign his U.S. Senate seat because his Democratic colleagues did not have the moral fortitude to defend his right to an impartial hearing, the backlash. really began.

Trump Endorses Roy Moore for Senate

I read all this through my own personal lens, honed by my own experiences. I had seen the movie "The Assistant" depicting a sexual predator who used his position of power to demand sexual compliance on the casting couch of his office--women actresses who wanted parts he had the power to offer had to consent to sex with him and the assistant was left to sanitize the leather couch.

Looking at the photos of Harvey Weinstein, I thought, "Oh, yeah, he did it. He did all of that," as he looked like a sexual predator from central casting. There was no way a man as repulsive looking as Weinstein could ever claim "consensual sex." Well, maybe he could say he simply struck a bargain: You want the part; I want sex. 

So there was that.

On the other hand, I have been wrongly accused--not of sexual abuse--but I was falsely accused as a child, and that searing experience has never left me and I still get angry to this day thinking about it.

I was about 10 years old and one day my mother got off the phone looking alarmed and disturbed. A woman who lived up the street said I had shouted profanities at her and acted defiant and she was emotionally traumatized.

I had only the vaguest idea who this woman was: the mother of children younger than me who I could not have picked out of a line up.  We lived in a development with eighty homes strung out around two concentric circles and I knew the kids in families whose kids were my age and who got on the school bus with me. I knew maybe a dozen families, maybe a score, but I did not know this woman or her children and I certainly knew I had never had any sort of disputatious interaction with any adult in the neighborhood. 

I denied the accusation categorically. I think my mother believed me, in part because this whole incident as the mother described it simply did not sound like her son, but she was inclined, as most adults would be, to at least consider the possibility the adult was correct.

Fortunately, in my case, I had some rudimentary legal training by age 10. Disputes in our family had always been resolved by convening "family court" and I demanded I be allowed to face my accuser and interrogate her. I was able to say that the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution guaranteed any accused "to be confronted with the witnesses against him." That had come up before in our family court and I quoted it now. My mother was stuck. She had to demand a meeting. 

We met outside her house in the street and looking at her I knew I had not seen her before, or if I had, in so fleeting a manner I did not recognize her. She looked at me with narrowed brows, and though it was apparent at a glance, she was not at all sure who I was, she still stuck to her story. She began to waffle a little about exactly what I said. "You can stuff it. You're not my mother. Go to Hell."

Well, maybe not those exact words. 

"Have you ever seen me before now?" I asked. 

She hesitated just enough to satisfy me, but she said, "Yes. You shouted at me."

When I tried to pin her down on the time and date and circumstances she looked at my mother and said, "I'm not going to continue this."

I spoke to my mother, being careful not to be seen as being rude to an adult. "She doesn't recognize me. She doesn't know who she was talking to."

That ended the confrontation and my mother's report to my father at dinner ended with his asking, "Who is this lady? Do we know her?"

That was a case of eye witness testimony being unreliable, not of sexual abuse when the eyewitness has such a close and extended experience there is not really a question of identify.

But it was a case of bearing false witness, of false accusation. 

It wasn't the first time I'd been falsely accused: A patrol at school accused me of sassing him and I had never seen this kid before. He mistook me for someone else. Another false accusation.

So when it comes to false accusations, I have been conditioned in some ways to doubt the accuser.

During the height of the #MeToo movement at universities, boys accused of date rape were not put on trial by the state: they were tried by college tribunals, star chambers, with no rules of evidence, often without the accused boys present, without being allowed to face their accusers--that would have "re-traumatized and re-victimized--the women and some of these boys were expelled from college.  In my own college, a junior in the engineering program was expelled after a drunken episode of sex with a naked coed who had climbed into his bed. She was too drunk to say no; but he said he was too drunk to know better. To say he was denied due process is to understate the case mightily. That's like saying "The Oxbow Incident" was about cattle rustling. 

In the case of a man who has been banned from a shopping mall and whose accusers independently describe similar approaches, the evidence weighs toward beyond a reasonable doubt.

At one of our Democratic Committee meetings a candidate for Congress, running in the primary spoke at our meeting and I asked her about the problems with #MeToo, with equating an accusation with a conviction and without due process and what did she think about this? She reacted with outrage, "I cannot believe we are even talking about this!" she said, as if these objections did not even merit discussion. 

Needless to say, she did not get my vote.

I had caught her by surprise and she was unprepared because she had never considered the other side of the issue.

I'm not sure Roy Moore has had his day in court to answer the charges against him. 

I do know one thing: The women who accused him have been violently attacked by his fans in Alabama. What I really get out of "The Backlash" is that American carnage does not exist in American cities; that's not where the carnage is. 

 It's alive and thriving in the Old South, and in Trumpworld in general, wherever the MAGA flag waves.

Dime Store Patriotism

 We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

--Last words of the Declaration of Independence

We must all hang together, or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.

--Benjamin Franklin at the Signing of the Declaration

They're all saps, fighting for strangers.

--Sonny Corelone, speaking of those who rushed to enlist after Pearl Harbor

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel

--Samuel Johnson

He won't even wear a flag on his lapel!

--Remark by a neighbor in Hampton, NH about Barack Obama, after asserting he was born in Kenya and not a real American.

"Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, D-Ill., said he will no longer wear an American flag lapel pin because it has become a substitute for “true patriotism” since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. 'My attitude is that I’m less concerned about what you’re wearing on your lapel than what’s in your heart," he told the campaign crowd Thursday.' You show your patriotism by how you treat your fellow Americans, especially those who serve. You show your patriotism by being true to our values and ideals. That’s what we have to lead with is our values and our ideals.”

Donald Trump spent a day transforming the White House grounds into what looked like a suburban automobile dealership with a Memorial Day sale. Two huge flags, bigger and better than any flags in the world, on two gargantuan flag poles, the best flag poles ever in the history of the world.

But, of course, the flags and poles are equaled by many automobile dealerships and exceeded by NFL stadium displays.

And looking at the workers who erected these poles, he asked idly if any were illegal immigrants, because some of them looked, you know, a little brown, and maybe from "shithole countries."

So, like the rest of his Presidency, this is just another mindless, cheap stunt which he thinks clever.

School boys spend hours writing essays on the meaning of the word "patriotism," so Mad Dog will not bore you with his version on what patriotism is.

Actual Patriot

But he will offer that one thing patriotism cannot be, is cheap. A sine qua non of patriotism is that it cannot be purchased for $2 at a 7/11 store and pinned to your lapel. Anything that is risk free, that costs little and risks nothing (like wearing a lapel pin or running a flag up a pole) is not patriotism.

It is not empty phrases like "leftist elites" or "fake news" or "America first."  Whatever it is, it requires actual, critical thinking. 

In fact, as Barack Obama once suggested, before he relented and started wearing the pin again, wearing something like a pin is so easy it defiles the very idea of patriotism, which, whatever it is, by definition, cannot be easy.

Like paying your income taxes.

Like getting shot at by an opposing army.

Like actually thinking about what is good for your country.

When those guys who signed the Declaration of Independence pledged loyalty to one another, they knew they could hang for it. 

When has Donald Trump, or Stephen Miller or Kristi Noem or that Dr. Strangelove called RFK JR ever done anything like that?

Government Protects Public Health: When you Allow It

 Where is Tony Fauci now that the impossible has happened?

Dr. Fauci

AIDS was first reported 44 years ago, and the virus which causes it, HIV, was identified within two years later, a remarkable scientific achievement. 

The virus itself clearly spilled over from monkey to man years before AIDS was identified in  a group of men in Los Angeles, published in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Reports, (a publication Trump and his toadies have abolished) and then quickly identified in reports from New York Hospital (Henry Masur) and from San Francisco shortly thereafter published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Tony Fauci, down in Bethesda, Maryland at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), quickly organized a task force to respond to HIV, recruiting Masur down to the NIH along with Cliff Lane and others. 

Robert Gallo

Identifying the causative agent of any infectious disease is the sine qua non of any effort to control or cure it. That was done by Drs. Luc Montagnier and Robert Gallo. 

Alexandre Yersin: Discoverer of Plague bacillus

The alacrity with which the medical establishment was able to come to grips with the basics raised hopes the scourge could be halted the way polio once had been, or small pox.

Couldn't scientists do just about anything?

Right from the get go, politics entered the fray: ACT UP, a group advocating for a government effort to thwart AIDS vilified Fauci for not doing enough fast enough. Fauci did something government folks rarely do: He invited the protestors picketing outside his building on the NIH campus into a conference room and offered to show them the ICU where AIDS patients were being cared for and the labs where research was going forward. They became among his most ardent fans.

George F. Will

From the other side, George F. Will dismissed AIDS as nothing to worry about, in an piece in the Washington Post, he posited that it was a "gay disease" which would only ever be a problem in that community, owing to the peculiar practice of anal intercourse, which disrupted the anal mucosa, exposing the tissues below with their blood supply and allowing the virus to enter. But AIDS would never infect the innocent heterosexual population Will averred. (Sound familiar? Oh, measles! We get measles outbreaks all the time. Nothing to worry about!)

That elicited a quick letter to the editor from a local doctor who pretty well destroyed Will's hypothesis, along with his credibility in scientific areas, which was important because Ronald Reagan had bought into that whole trope.

So, for those who think Robert F. Kennedy is the first ignoramus to gain currency in the response to infectious disease and the first clown to try to grab the controls of the airplane when he has no pilot training: he's not.

"As for George Will's rectal mucosa theory of AIDS {op-ed, June 7}: it is appalling to see a columnist's speculations elevated to the realm of fact, especially when there is at least as much evidence against his contention that there is something so special about the actual practices of homosexuality as to ensure that the predominant reservoir of the disease will remain with homosexuals. Mr. Will's column does a disservice in two major (and I'm sure, many minor) ways:

1) The implication is that heterosexuals may heave a collective sigh of relief and pursue their sexual activities with somewhat less trepidation.

2) There is now the likelihood that the heterosexual majority will be less keen to support research for a disease that is confined to a rather unpopular minority.

Reports from Africa suggest that AIDS has already become a heterosexual disease of frightening proportions. Physicians like myself realize we function in an area of impressive ignorance. We can only advise what seems prudent, realizing our advice may change as research provides more answers.

Mr. Will risks moving from a position of renowned conservatism to one of medieval reaction by suggesting, however obliquely, that this plague has been visited upon those who in some way deserve it. There will always be ''innocent'' victims of disease. And I would argue that patients should always be considered ''innocent'' and treated with compassion

What the world needs now is a biologist who can provide the kind of relief Jonas Salk provided from polio. Perhaps his name will be Anthony Fauci, perhaps we have not yet heard his name. But I very much doubt that relief will come from the speculations of George Will.

So, even at that early stage, physicians were looking to Dr. Fauci to be the central figure to bring the HIV era to a close. 

But Dr. Fauci insisted that a successful vaccine against HIV would be so unlikely it was not likely to ever be the solution. 

Within 6 years, the first effective, if cumbersome drug protocols emerged, and ultimately, by the late 1990's HIV was no longer a death sentence which got executed within months, and HIV became a chronic disease.

And still, at every appearance, Dr. Fauci was asked about the prospects for a preventative vaccine and he would always shake his head, dolefully, and say the problem with this virus is that it attacks the very cells, the T cells, which were essential to mounting an immune response to any virus, and it mutates so effectively, catching up to it with a vaccine seemed unlikely--so he despaired of a vaccine ever being successful. 

Then we got  a report (November 2024) in the New England Journal of Medicine about Lenacapavir, which may actually work to prevent HIV, not that it's a vaccine, but, in practice, offers much the same protection a vaccine would.  Of 3265 men in the trial cohort, only 2 got HIV infected during the trial, an astounding result. It has to be injected every 6 months, but it works in men. It was known to work in women, but apparently men are different in some way. Maybe they are more sexually active, and less likely to take precautions. Or maybe Will's notion that anal intercourse is different plays a role. Who knows? But now we've got a prophylactic anti viral which might protect as well as a vaccine.

Dr. Fauci is now 84, and he's kept a low profile since retiring.  He was the object of death threats for his role in guiding the country through COVID, and then he was out in his own backyard in Washington, D.C. and got bitten by a mosquito and got West Nile Virus, of all things, which nearly killed him. Of course, infectious disease experts have died from the diseases they studied, and Fauci admitted he had nightmares of getting AIDS, but he got West Nile virus in Washington, D.C.

Go figure.

At least it wasn't COVID.

But I'd sure like to hear what he thinks about the future of AIDS prevention. Lenacapavir is not a vaccine. It's a drug, a selective poison, but it's worlds better than where we have been, and it might even, some day, help slow or halt the spread of AIDS. 

Where Oh Where Did My Nasty Immigrants Go?

 

"In order to achieve this, we must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America's largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside. 

These, and other such Cities, are the core of Democratic Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base

(1)Cheat in Elections

(2)and grow the Welfare State,

(3) Robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American citizens.

These Radical Left Democrats are 

(4) Sick of mind

(5) Hate our Country and 

(6) Actually want to destroy our Inner Cities--and they are doing a good job of it! There is something wrong with them. 

(7) That is why they believe in Open Borders,

(8) Transgender for Everybody,

(9) and Men playing in Women's Sports--

(10) and that's why I want ICE, Border Patrol and our Great and Patriotic Law Enforcement Officers, to FOCUS on our crime ridden and deadly Inner Cities, and those places where Sanctuary Cities play such a big role. 

(11) You don't hear about Sanctuary Cities in our Heartland!"

--Who Else? Oi! Donald the Trumpling

So, this Trumpish screed was just so good not even Paul Krugman could resist responding to at least part of it. As Dr. Krugman noted, you don't hear those who live in New York City--or any other--complaining about having to live with the "American carnage" Trump sees in their towns. In fact, in NYC, where 37% of the population is immigrant, murders were 83% lower in 2024 than in 1990, and the murder rate is still falling--which is more than you can say for the state of Mississippi, which has no big cities comparable, where the murder rate is 20/100,000 people, the highest in the nation.

If there is American carnage anywhere, murder rates would place it among the non urbanized, but highly Confederate Red States which elected Trump.

But let's unpack some of these Trumpist claims. Usually he just throws so much at the wall, one never pauses to pick apart the ketchup from the spaghetti but let's just go through it this one time.

(1) Illegal immigrants do not cheat in elections. Democrats do not use them to cheat. There is deminimis election fraud and none of it involves illegal immigrants who have no incentive to want to get swept up in any such thing. The only reason Trump resents inner city election results is cities vote so resoundingly against Trump and all those who sail with him. This is where the biggest No King demonstrations happen. People who live in cities, who are actually pretty good at living with their neighbors and with other people who come from different backgrounds revile Trump and all he stands for, which is hostility to anybody but white bread Leave It to Beaver types.

No Kings Houston

(2) Illegal immigrants do not grow the Welfare State, as they are not eligible for Welfare and do not want to raise their heads above the ground to be identified by applying for welfare. This is all that Ronald Reagan Slipper Gipper non sense about the Black welfare Queen who drove her Cadillac around town living high off her $5 a week welfare checks.

(3) Illegal immigrants do not rob good paying jobs from hard working American citizens--This is that whole "Simpson's" episodes, "They Took Our Jobs" thing.  Illegal immigrants tend to take jobs employers cannot find workers for--scrubbing toilets in hotels, picking crops, roofing, installing drywall, landscaping, washing dishes in the kitchens of restaurants. In fact, Trump had to back off on raids on workplaces because the fat cat owners got to him, complaining he'd shut down their businesses if they could no longer exploit and hold captive illegal immigrants to do the work.

(4) People in big cities are not sick of mind. You want to see some sick of mind people, go out into the rural parts where there isn't much in the way of health care or social services.

(5) People in cities do not hate our country. Viz the demonstrations in big cities this past weekend.

No Kings, Philadelphia

(6) People living in inner cities do not want to destroy the cities--they like their cities. That's why they live there.

No Kings, Los Angeles

(7) Who the "they" is who believe in Open Borders is unclear. One might argue it's Trump and Stephen Miller who believe in open borders, as they destroyed the most comprehensive and severe Immigration bill Congress was all set to pass because Trump wanted to run on immigration.

(8) Transgender everybody? What is he exactly saying? Does he think Illegal Aliens or Democrats who run the inner cities want to turn everyone into Transgenders? Or is he simply playing that card he knows has resonance when it comes to...

(9) Men playing in Women's sports. Oh, here you have it. He knows that even among many Democrats, among Democrats who would support transgenders being allowed to be left alone, there is hostility to allowing men who have gone through a male puberty and then transitioned to womanhood from playing on women's teams, from swimming in college on women's teams.  This is a weak point for Democrats because it requires some delicate distinctions, which never play well in politics. And if Trump is good at anything, it's finding the raw wound.

(10) Our police are patriotic. Which is to say, police, like some soldiers, are Trumplings. They know where their salaries come from and they want to protect the most reactionary forces which promise no changes, no accommodations and to keep them in power.

(11) You don't hear about Sanctuary Cities in our heartland. Except when you look at the No Kings parade in places like.

Bennington, Vermont 

Louisville, Kentucky (Heartland Enough for you?)

Jackson, Wyoming (Pretty Dang Heartland)

Cincinnati, Ohio

Anchorage, Alaska (Even Alaska! Red as it is)