A Week Reflecting on Evil and Cruelty

Trump’s Regime, Congress, and the Supreme Court Combine to Bring About a Dictatorship While Terrorizing Americans

ICE Deportations (above) Nazi Deportation of German Jews from Bielefeld in December 1941 (below)

In his classic book regarding Soviet tyranny “The Gulag Archipelago” Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote:

“Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.” When I think of limited people Donald Trump is high on my list.

I apologize for not writing lately. We spent last week out of town to celebrate our 42nd wedding anniversary in Charlotte, North Carolina and to see Bayern Munich play in the Club World Cup. We had a great time, especially as Judy read customer comments about the now infamous and discontinued sugar free Gummi Bears. Google them. However, I discovered that driving long distances and being out in ungodly heat take a lot more out of me at age 65 than it did even at 55. So both of us were exhausted, and that it takes a lot more time to recover from such a trip, but I digress.

As I watched the events of the past week in the House, Senate, and the Supreme Court, and the complete cruelty, immorality, and contemptuous evil demonstrated by the Trump Regime on an hourly basis, I contemplated the nature of evil, and cruelty. Unfortunately, for all of us the cruelty seems to be the point of every action of the Regime, the Republican Party, and the GOP majority on the Supreme Court.

But, having watched the GOP since shortly before I left it in 2008 following my return from Iraq, I knew this was coming. It started with over 30 years of propaganda broadcast by men like Rush Limbaugh, and there that I listened to since the mid-1990s, took a decidedly racist turn when Barack Obama became the Democratic nominee in 2008. It was further sharpened by the outsized influence of Christian nationalist pastors who helped bring us Sarah Palin. Then the Tea Party and the terribly misnamed “Freedom Caucus” arose and took over the GOP Congress.

Led by men like Paul Ryan they, especially the Freedom Caucus, embraced the philosophy of Ayn Rand, one of the most evil philosophies in modern history. The sad thing for me was so see how many of GOP leaders fully embraced her evil, especially those who proclaimed their allegedly “Christian” faith in order to harm others. Then came Trump and MAGA, the most malevolent force in American political history. Gore Vidal said of Rand’s philosophy:

“Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.”

A Know Nothing Newspaper. Notice how they too were blamed for taxes and corrupting the youth.

Their economic policies come right out of Rand’s dystopian philosophy of social Darwinism. Their views of racial equality and the rights of non-White immigrants, are steeped in White supremacy, eugenics, and the belief in a White European Christian master race. None of this is new. It goes back to our colonial times with slavery and to the times of the anti-immigrant Know Nothings of the 1830s to 1850s. When I think of the Regime’s anti-immigrant policies, as well as anti-DEI policies, which as one Federal Judge recently noted, were nothing more than racist, I am reminded of Abraham Lincoln’s words:

“As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

However, the Regime could not do what it is doing without the acquiescence of all too many people who cooperate with its evil, and those who know better, but look the other way. The problem isn’t just with Trump and the members of his Regime, but with his followers, especially his Christian followers. Gustave Gilbert an American Army psychologist assigned to the Nazi War Criminals at Nuremberg wrote:

“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

That absence of empathy is common to Trump and the vast majority of his White Christian supporters. The evidence is show in almost every poll, 80-90% of them see nothing wrong in what he is doing and has done. They make up his solid core of support, and even when fellow Christians from other countries, especially immigrants and new citizens, many of whom fled oppressive dictatorships are seized on the streets, imprisoned and deported, or that the elderly and people are deprived of critical health care, or other Americans denied civil, voting, and educational rights. But that isn’t anything new either, just read our unvarnished history, especially regarding African Americans, Latinos, and Asians.

I saw the rot in the GOP early on and hoped that other supposedly decent Republicans who as well. Some did, but nowhere near enough to make a difference. Likewise, too many Democrats in the Senate have complacently voted for some of the most egregious legislation and evil nominees to important positions ever put forward. Too many Democrats are too cowardly to take a stand for fear of alienating their corporate donors, while continuing to lose elections, and rejecting candidates who do win elections by capturing the imaginations of voters, as James Baldwin noted: “A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.” That my friends is much of the Democratic leadership. They too will face accountability, if we challenge them.

This week we saw Trump and Hegseth lie about the results of the single air strike in Iran, from its supposed complexity and greatness which even surpassed D-Day, to what it accomplished. Details from the Defense Intelligence Agency Bomb Damage Assessment indicated that the strike had not successfully destroyed Iran’s nuclear processing facilities nor nearly any of its 60% enriched uranium, which within months can be further enriched to the 90% level needed to produce a nuclear weapon. It is estimated that with the amount that it currently has on hand that Iran has enough for 9 such weapons. In a second and more revealing report, the Pentagon admitted that it did not use the GBU-57 “Bunker Busters” in the Isfahan plant where most of Iran’s enriched uranium is stored because it was judged as too fat underground for them to be effective.

We also saw Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill narrowly pass in the House of Representatives and make its way to the Senate where it only got out of committee after Trump and his lackeys pressured GOP holdouts. The Bill is now being debated in the Senate where its passage is not a certainty. The Bill contains the most massive cuts to our safety net for poor, sick, and elderly citizens. I honestly do believe that Trump and MAGA believe that they are to use the Nazi terms “useless eaters” or “Life Unworthy of Life”.

Nazi propaganda to justify eliminating “useless eaters” and “Life Unworthy of Life based on the cost to taxpayers. Sound familiar?

Of course this is being done to enrich the very richest among us, to fund more ICE Agents to deport people, and spend even more on the military, which pretty much means more money for Defense Contractors that routinely overcharge for what they produce. Few military programs come in on time or on budget. Call your Senators and Representatives through the Capitol Switchboard at (201) 224-3121.

Finally, the Supreme Court which last year said that the President could not be prosecuted for crimes if the were within the scope of his duties as President, effectively making him above the Law, effectively made him Dictator. In Trump v. CASA it ruled that lower courts could not issue nationwide injunctions. The case was regarding ICE arrests and deportations of American citizens born of immigrants. Injunctions stay a decision until the courts can rule on its merits, which in this case comes down to the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment. By stopping the injunctions, the Supreme effectively gave Trump power to deport native born citizens even before courts had ruled on the merits of the case, and that the lower court can only rule in the case before them, in effect limiting the chances of others to gain relief unless they sue, or there is a class action suit on their behalf.

163. A New Kind of Judicial Supremacy

When I see the Supreme Court in action I am reminded of the portrayal of the Nazi Judges Trial at Nuremberg in the film Judgement at Nuremberg when at the beginning, Richard Widmark who plays the American prosecutor opens the trial:

“The case is unusual in that the defendants are charged with crimes committed in the name of the law. These men, together with their deceased or fugitive colleagues, are the embodiment of what passed for justice during the Third Reich… They distorted, they perverted, they destroyed justice and law in Germany. Now, this in itself is undoubtedly a great crime. But the prosecution is not calling the defendants to account for violating constitutional guarantees or withholding due process of law. The prosecution is calling them to account for murder, brutalities, torture, atrocities. They share with all the leaders of the Third Reich responsibility for the most malignant, the most calculated, the most devastating crimes in the history of all mankind. And they are perhaps more guilty than some of the others. For they had attained maturity long before Hitler's rise to power. Their minds weren't warped at an early age by Nazi teachings. They embraced the ideologies of the Third Reich as educated adults, when they, most of all, should have valued justice. Here they'll receive the justice they denied others.”

One day these six, who all should know better will face judgement.

In other news regarding citizenship, the Injustice Department under Attorney General Pam Bondi, has made revoking citizenship from naturalized citizens. They are doing this to deport them without recourse to the rights of other citizens, with the exception of first generation Americans whose parents were immigrants. Of course many of these people earned their citizenship by serving in the military, often in harm’s way. So much for “thank you for your service.”

https://www.npr.org/2025/06/30/nx-s1-5445398/denaturalization-trump-immigration-enforcement

We cannot forget that removing the citizenship of Jews and dissenting Germans was a common practice of the Nazis. To remove citizenship is to render someone stateless, with no protection anywhere.

There is so much else. I began this article yesterday and kept finding more things that I wanted to mentioned and even now have to finally stop. I can only close with the words of Judge Learned Hand, perhaps the greatest judge who never served on the Supreme Court. He spoke these words to a crowd in New York’s Central Park attending the celebration of new immigrants, many from Nazi occupied Europe two weeks before D-Day.

In it he stressed that all Americans were immigrants who had come to America in search of liberty. Liberty, he said, was not located in America’s constitutions, laws, and courts, but in the hearts of the people.

In the most frequently cited section of the speech he said:

What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it… What is this liberty that must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not the freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few — as we have learned to our sorrow.

So until tomorrow. Have a good night, don’t stop resisting, and watch your six.