The Sheet Idiocy of Investing in Fossil Fuel

The Sheet Idiocy of Investing in Fossil Fuel

As China embraces the global automotive marketplace, amping up their manufacturing sector to the point where for every vehicle US automakers sell overseas, China sells four! Their BYD brand provides a wide array of affordable cars and trucks. China is going full bore on making sure that all over China, and for nations that want the underlying charging infrastructure, those charging stations are increasingly ubiquitous. Oh, did I mention: BYD is now the leading manufacturer and exporter of EV vehicles on Earth! Meanwhile, the economically impaired Trump administration, mired in an obsessive desire to return the United States to the halcyon days of the 1950s, politically, culturally and economically, is killing American jobs at an alarming rate. US carmakers are back to retooling for gasoline and diesel powered vehicles thanks to Trump.

As reported by Forbes (July 22nd), “General Motors posted a $3 billion second-quarter profit—down $1.1 billion primarily because of tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, the company said in its earnings call on Tuesday [7/22], a day after Stellantis (Jeep, Fiat, Chrysler) blamed steep losses on tariffs.” Simply put, not only are these tariffs job killers, but Trump undoing of the highly successful Biden-era infrastructure legislation – heavily focused on alternative energy and creating masses of new jobs eclipsing those lost in traditional energy many times over – coupled with a misstep in “drill baby, drill” plus efforts are reopening coal mines that can never be profitable, is a total failure.

The demand for fossil fuels is plunging the world over, and the United States is hardly the market-maker/oil price dictator of those global commodities. As the United States officially is fighting against alternative energy, forcing US consumers back to these moribund energy sectors, the price of fossil fuels is rising again. Investors everywhere, including the United States, are loath to invest in expanding or updating refinery capacity, putting an upward pression on prices at the pump. Vladimir Putin should be grateful, since these fuels are the backbone of the Russian economy, and despite sanctions, revenue from this sector is financing the war in Ukraine.

The fact remains, and is accelerating, that alternative energy is now a whole lot cheaper, and obviously vastly less polluting (in terms of hard pollution as well as in contributions to greenhouse gas emissions). It’s a factual reality that hard numbers prove. According to the July Newsletter from the International Renewable Energy Agency (which released the above charts): “Total installed costs for renewable power decreased by more than 10% for all technologies between 2023 and 2024, except for offshore wind, where they remained relatively stable, and bioenergy, where they increased by 16%. Nevertheless, the combination of capacity factors, market share, and financing costs led to a slight increase in the levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) for some technologies: solar PV by 0.6%, onshore wind by 3%, offshore wind by 4%, and bioenergy by 13%. Meanwhile, costs declined for CSP (-46%), geothermal (-16%), and hydropower (-2%).

“Renewables continue to prove themselves as the most cost-competitive source of new electricity generation. On an LCOE basis, 91% of newly commissioned utility-scale renewable capacity delivered power at a lower cost than the cheapest new fossil fuel-based alternative. In 2024, renewables helped avoid USD 467 billion in fossil fuel costs, reinforcing their role in enhancing energy security, economic resilience, and long-term affordability.

“As renewable capacity is expected to increase in the coming years to meet climate goals, enabling technologies such as battery storage, digitalisation, and hybrid systems are becoming increasingly vital for integrating variable renewable energy, enhancing asset performance, and improving grid responsiveness. Although challenges persist - including access to finance, permitting delays, supply chain bottlenecks, and geopolitical risks - greater alignment of policies, regulation, and investment is essential to accelerate the energy transition.

“In a special address on 22 July 2025, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres outlined a compelling and evidence-backed case for why a just transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy is inevitable – and the vast benefits it will bring for people and economies.” But then, Trump’s Big Oil oligarchs truly do not care if American consumers pay more at the pump. They welcome that anomaly. Big Oil and Big Coal hate that they lost $467 billion to alternative energy last year.

As AI is putting massive pressure on electrical power generation, those fossil fuel cronies of the Trump administration are smacking their lips the potential of increased demand for their toxic products. Ignore the fires in California, floods in Texas, NM, New Jersey, etc… those once in 500-year-events that now happen twice a month on average. After all, the core belief of the science-averse Trump administration remains that climate change is a “hoax.” Unfortunately for MAGA Republicans, Mother Nature clings stubbornly to her immutable laws of physics.

I’m Peter Dekom, and as of this writing much of the United States is suffering from a killer heat wave, that Big Oil, Big Coal gift that just keeps on giving.

Falling Crimes Don’t Mean Much to Folks Reminded of Crime Every Day

 

Falling Crimes Don’t Mean Much to Folks Reminded of Crime Every Day

“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people.” 

Trump announcing takeover of DC policing, August 11th.

OK, Donald Trump’s DC military-as-cops play is showy, over-the-top, unnecessary and horribly autocratic. His crime statistics contradict numbers from his own FBI, but like immigration, which resonated with voters until Trump’s overkill cruel response, crime hovers above all urban voters… even if the bad numbers are going down. Immigration was off the rails though not remotely as badly as Trump screamed; but there was a hint of truth behind Trump’s policies, even as no one really believed he would really implement his failing wholesale quotas of deportees. He used the rantings of a mentally insecure bigot as his inspiration. Stephen Miller is pure evil and the loudest leadership voice in the Trump administration.

But we know security cameras are everywhere now, and gated communities have exploded in the last two decades. We live in a gun culture where absolutely anybody anywhere with determination can get a handgun or an AR-15 if they want. Bullets are now the leading killer of American children and teens. Gun-killing mental illness is countered with the dumbest NRA expression, “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” an expression that fails to define a “good” guy or how even a “good guy’s” momentary temper can turn him into a bad guy just long enough to kill someone. Courts created the problem.

With the loss of a functioning federal judiciary, which has so far simply waived off any objections to vote rigging via gerrymandering and views free and clear gun ownership as a fundamental right… by seriously misreading the Second Amendment… people (particularly in cities) just do not feel safe anymore. A 26% reduction in DC violent crime has no meaning if you or a family member has been a victim, and even as Donald Trump’s exaggerated statement above is hardly reality, it sounds right. As David Graham, writing for The Atlantic Daily (August 11th) puts it:

“‘This is liberation day in D.C.,’ Trump said. Nothing says liberation like deploying hundreds of uniformed soldiers against the wishes of the local elected government. District residents have made clear that they would prefer greater autonomy, including congressional representation, and they have three times voted overwhelmingly against Trump. His response is not just to flex power but to treat the District of Columbia as the president’s personal fiefdom.

“Trump’s move is based on out-of-date statistics. It places two officials without municipal policing experience in positions of power over federalization and the MPD [DC police], and seems unlikely to significantly affect crime rates. What the White House hopes it might achieve, Politico reports, is ‘a quick, visually friendly PR win.’ Trump needs that after more than a month of trying and failing to change the subject from his onetime friend Jeffrey Epstein.”

But there’s the hint of truth behind this move, even if the stated “reality” is profoundly exaggerated. Look at social and traditional media, constantly carrying “breaking news” of violent crime all the time. Often, people go to their local drugstore to buy some pretty ordinary items, only to find them locked in secure cabinets under glass. You can see what you want, but you have to push a button and wait for a busy attendant to meander down to open the cabinet door and let you take the product you want. Lots of people have stopped shopping at local hardware stores, drugstores and even major big box stores because of this inconvenience. But this product lock-up makes one huge impression: you are constantly reminded of pervasive shoplifting. And if you have stopped shopping at your former go-to ordinary retailers and have shifted to online alternatives, even if you were not a direct victim of theft, you know why you did.

That Donald Trump’s budget cuts, his racist approach to public education, his lack of support for childcare, nutritional and medical basics for the lower reaches of our economy are making crime a better “job” choice than legitimate work with solid trade school training. But even our community colleges are losing federal funding, schools that provide real training for near-term jobs with solid pay and a good chance for advancement. Education is bad and still unaffordable. Today, we abandon children, elderly and other vulnerable people every day. Trump will sweep homeless people off the DC streets and ship them… elsewhere.

We live in a society that is happy to treat the inevitable end-product of societal neglect, provide Alligator Alcatraz-level “detention” and miserable and dangerous “crime schools” masquerading as jails and prisons… but try and lift young people out of dead-end generational poverty and the austerity hammer comes out to smash those programs. Trust me, DOGE did us no favors… and now everybody is angry, too many looking for shortcuts and blame, but where are we? On the verge of losing our democracy, living under cultural mandate I and many like me find abhorrent, asking what is the United States of America today?

I have never been more ashamed of my country, yet I am quite sympathetic to terrified citizens finding solace in MAGA land, even though they are betting on the wrong people to deliver the life they truly deserve, politicians who only offer false hope, fake narratives, and whose “solutions” will make their own supporters miserable. Trump has discovered how maximizing the “us vs them” blame of divisive politics keeps him and most of the GOP members in Congress in office. And Dems are hapless fools being played by a dangerous and manipulative President who has one and only one constituency: him and secondarily his family.

As floods, fires and hurricanes decimate our lands with increasing frequency, references to climate change are being deleted from federal agency websites and documents. Nature doesn’t care. The laws of physics do not care. Our global competitors don’t care. Our President, the majority in Congress and the US Supreme Court do not care. Most of all, we ourselves do not seem to care that we unraveling what was once the greatest nation on Earth. Greed has become a God, and blame our big excuse. Can Americans ever again be on the same factual page?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I do not understand how government can work when large segments of the population simply believe in a very different array of contradictory “facts’ … and vote and act accordingly.

    

A Convicted Criminal Embraces the Politics of Distraction

Witch hunt, hoax, radical left/Democrats, Woke, Emergency, Fake News, Liberation, Biden

"Its entire premise — that the Maxwell grand jury materials would bring to light meaningful new information about Epstein's and Maxwell's crimes, or the Government's investigation into them — is demonstrably false… There is no 'there' there," 

U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer for the Southern District of New York, August 11th ruling against release of Ghislane Maxwell’s grand jury transcripts, because those transcripts revealed almost nothing that was not already in public records.

"I've known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy… He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it -- Jeffrey enjoys his social life." 

Trump’s 2002 praise of Jeffrey Epstein in a New York magazine profile of the now-deceased financier and convicted sex offender.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 [Hillary Clinton] emails that are missing… I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” 

 Donald Trump on television, July 27, 2016.

The most dangerous word from the above Trump’s list of worn out trigger words, is “emergency,” since if the President invokes that term – often based on nothing more than his statement of “emergency” or manufactured and very ‘fake facts’ – he has been successful, with a very compliant Trump-reconfigured Supreme Court, to transfer powers granted to Congress under Article I of the Constitution to himself. Whether it is his purported right to determine and levy tariffs or his takeover of law enforcement for “crime-ridden” Washington, DC, a city that, according to Trump’s own FBI, was experiencing a year-to-year 26% continuing drop in violent crime (including a fall of 12% in murder rates), a drop which antedated Trump 2.0… “emergency” was the justification.

Like Trump’s declaration of April 2nd as tariff “Liberation Day,” as he announced a program to impose new, vastly higher rates (which now threaten the economy, killing jobs and increasing costs), again, at an August 11th White House press conference to announce Trump’s invocation of his “emergency powers” to “liberate” the nation’s capital of “out-of-control” rising crimes by imposing federal control of all policing activities, Trump outlined how he would deploy federal agencies with police power (adding a significant cadre of his personal ICE police force, plus federal troops if necessary) to “end crime” in DC. Claiming that he would take the restrictions off police in DC (read: ignore the Constitution), which he claimed already solidified his support from local officers, he notably skipped over his pardon of the January 6, 2021, Capitol attackers who had wounded or killed dozens of Capitol Police. Ask those officers how they feel about Trump.

It was simply a part of the entire Trump administration’s effort to help deflect the massive bipartisan interest in what was increasingly viewed as a cover-up of Trump’s lengthy relationship with deceased sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein. After years of touting his intention, in lockstep with the Q-Anon belief in a deep state cover-up of a purported network of Democratic Party pedophiles, Trump 1.0 and 2.0 pledged to crack that network wide open. But this year, as information about Trump’s longstanding relationship with Epstein – apparently fractured when Epstein recruited a hot underaged Mar-a-Lago spa attendant (who later committed suicide) for his Caribbean Island lair/spa facility – never produced evidence that Trump was actually sexually involved with an underaged girl, but as the above quote suggests, there is little doubt that Trump knew what was going on. Still, Trump and his henchmen and women were determined to divert the national narrative, after building his campaign on the deep state: the national brouhaha over releasing DOJ files was really a wasted effort. Using the words of the judge, cited above, Trump noted, “there was no ‘there’ there.” The interest in those Epstein files did not subside.

Never letting go of his assertion the 2020 election was rigged, Trump 2.0, with help from his DNI appointee, Tulsi Gabbard, and lots of loud noise from GOP members of Congress, attempted to mount claims of Barack Obama’s “treasonous” efforts to help rig elections, and that Hillary and Bill Clinton mounted a major false narrative that Trump was supported by a pro-Trump Russian campaign, even as the evidence released by the DOJ provided substantial evidence of that Russian election interference.

Gabbard also made wild claims about former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Based on purported Russian intelligence, she accused Ms Clinton of treating "psycho-emotional problems" with "tranquilizers" during the 2016 election… Trump personal lawyer, AG Pam Bondi, and her Justice Department announced the formation of a "Strike Force" to examine the allegations with "utmost seriousness." Trump tried desperately to distract the public, but even his MAGA base was increasingly concerned that the man they elected to decimate that “deep state” of pedophiles was perhaps part of the problem. The interest in the Epstein files continued.

Trump pushed hard to transfer blame to blue states, using his immigration strong point, thinking his base would refocus. His targeted of California. His nationalized National Guard and Marine troops joined a bolstered cadre of unleashed ICE police and quickly turned to “easy” arrests: hanging out in Home Depot and other parking lots, construction sites, farms and local restaurants. California was the only state that received that weaponized Trumpian immigration effort. But the numbers were easier in red states, which produced proportionately more ICE arrests than did California.

“Part of the reason Republican-dominated states have higher arrest numbers — particularly when measured against population — is they have a longer history of working directly with ICE, and a stronger interest in collaboration. In red states from Texas to Mississippi, local law enforcement officers routinely cooperate with federal agents, either by taking on ICE duties through so-called 287(g) agreements or by identifying undocumented immigrants who are incarcerated and letting ICE into their jails and prisons.” Los Angeles Times, August 10th. ICE agents, following orders from Kristi Noem, routinely ignored a court order that prevented them from deeming skin color, Spanish speech and the nature of the venue as substitutes for “probable cause” in ICE raids. Trump is appealing to his controlled Supreme Court.

But maybe, this effort would distract the American public from the Epstein scandal. Even Ghislaine Maxwell’s transfer into a “country club” federal prison in Bryan, Texas – which violated federal prison policy of never allowed such “soft” treatment to sex offenders – after an interview with Trump’s former trial lawyer and now Deputy AG, was quickly buried with an announcement of a Trump-Putin meeting, inappropriately, in the former Russian territory of Alaska. Except that burial belief was premature, as the demand for more Epstein information in federal files only increased. Even Trump lackey, House Speaker Mike Johnson’s dismissal of the House until September, failed to stem the demand for more transparency in this mounting Trump-Epstein scandal.

I’m Peter Dekom, and why Trump’s base is surprised by a convicted felon, a man adjudicated as a sexual predator, who was so willing to embrace that pedophile-driven conspiracy theory, is now pretending he had nothing to do with that Epstein scandal and had no idea it was a happening… as his operatives continue to try to release useless old information while suppressing the relevant documentation.

Science Who Needs Your Stinking, Job-Creating Science?!

 

Science? Who Needs Your Stinking, Job-Creating Science?!

When we can slash the budget and coast on free conspiracy theories that are easier to sell.

“Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female… This page does not reflect biological reality and therefore the Administration and this Department rejects it.” 

Disclaimer now on multiple government webpages, such as those dealing with HIV, civil rights and healthcare for transgender people.

You do not create significant new manufacturing, or even service, jobs without innovation… which can be a two-edged sword: the innovation may be labor-saving robotics. And except for rarified custom manufacturing (like a celebrity-outfitted motor home or a superyacht), the US is almost never competitive with hands-on labor in other countries. As any competent economist will tell you, the United States is primarily a service economy, heavy into financial structuring, tech design and implementation. But historically, whenever the federal government directly supports sophisticated innovation, the resulting jobs created often redefine the entire nation. Our space program has generated everything from a powdered orange drink (Tang) to the global interconnectivity of our satellites and the navigation/military surveillance or internet-connected commercial systems that drive modern life.

But we live in an era of retribution and resentment by a large cadre of Americans who feel “left behind” by uncaring globalists and financial manipulators. While there is truth in their perception, this MAGA “I’ve never met a conspiracy theory I didn’t like” force is replacing hard medical and other relevant scientific knowledge… and denigrating the people and the research universities that work hard to create that job-creating innovation. In earlier years, we had an expression for that attitude: throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And while “liberal America” owes those, left behind in a tsunami of globalism and technology, a perceivable path to affordable happiness, “illiberal America” should keep in mind that any hope of their prosperity lingers in innovation, wherever it may be born. We still have to deal with the bathwater. As I will explore in future blogs, America has lost its sense of balance and the aggregation of bona fide truly local “communities.”

NASA is ours. After the US 1957 educational and infrastructural explosion, America’s reaction to the first successful orbital launch of a satellite by the Soviet Union, seriously amplified our nation’s resulting obsession with being the best and most technologically advanced nation on Earth. Nuclear weapons secrets were already stolen by the Soviets, and our post-WWII rocket program was built around German rocketeers (yes, Nazis, like Werner Von Braun) in cloisters set in a part of America where a foreigner would stick out like a sore thumb. Huntsville, Alabama, today a small city with an exceptionally high concentration of PhDs.

We’ve come a long way from those early days. NASA conducted or funded innovation – now unfortunately outsourced to billionaire entrepreneurs like Elon Musk (Space X) – spread new technologies that powered everything from GPS systems in our smartphones and care, simulation technology that has been absorbed into videogames and highly focused missile and smart bomb targeting systems to the highspeed supercomputers governing everything we do. AI anybody?

But in a political system that is predicated on wealthy private ownership of what used to be government systems, as conspiracy theorists now occupy major leadership positions in government replacing highly experienced scientists, engineers, medical doctors and researchers, government has paved a clear road for concentrated power to selected oligarchs, now taking over what those government agencies used to do. Ideas, once born in government and university laboratories, think tanks and research centers… which spread the resulting knowledge freely across the land… are now patent and copyright captives to this coterie of billionaires. Yet the funding for their billionaire efforts came from and continues to come from the government, now as vendors (with a profit mark-up) to that same government. Or dumped totally.

After decimation by DOGE and Trump’s misnamed Big Beautiful Bill, Trump is slowly shutting down most university and intra-governmental scientific and medical research as “wasteful,” just as he bolsters the power and importance of his favored oligarchs. Writing for the June 9th Los Angeles Times, columnist Michael Hiltzik wrote: “[The] President insists ‘America will always be the first in space.’ But his budget plan would slash agency’s program funding by half… Like all sponsors of science programs, NASA has had its ups and downs. What makes it unique is that its achievements and failures almost always happen in public.

“Triumphs like the moon landings and the deep-space images from the Hubble and Webb space telescopes were great popular successes; the string of exploding rockets in its early days and the shuttle explosions cast lasting shadows over its work.

“But the agency may never have had to confront a challenge like the one it faces now: a Trump administration budget plan that would cut funding for NASA’s science programs by nearly 50% and its overall spending by about 24%... Superficially, the budget cuts place heightened emphasis on ‘practical, quantitative,’ even commercial applications, [Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society] told me. Programs transmitting weather data from satellites, valued by farmers, remain funded, but studies of climate change and other studies of Earth science are slashed. Astrophysics and other aspects of space exploration also are eviscerated, with 19 projects that are already operating destined for cancellation… The budget cuts will undermine the administration’s professed goals. That’s because many of the scientific projects on the chopping block provide knowledge needed to advance those goals.”

Political realities, beyond the red-blue divide, now define our future progress. What will the Musk-Trump break-up mean for our space program? But fear not, humanity will not see an end to such research. It is painfully obvious that China has stepped into this technological void, just as they stepped into the void left to starving millions in Africa and parts of Asia once served by USAID. China could not have planted a more destructive device detonated against America or a more global influence diminishing Manchurian Candidate than Donald John Trump.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I am harshly reminded that we are only 1/8 into Trump 2.0, and the passage of his Big Beautiful Bill will guarantee his unilateral power well beyond the mid-terms (which Trump is also actively trying to control by having the DOJ sue blue state election officials with legally questionable claims).

The Trump Legacy – Weaker, Dumber, Less Competitive, Less Safe and More Isolated

 

The Trump Legacy – Weaker, Dumber, Less Competitive, Less Safe and More Isolated

"For too long, this administration has presented itself as the only defender of Christianity while it engages in merely symbolic gestures like posting Bible verses or publicizing worship services in the White House. Frederick Douglass described this type of performance: 'Religion simply as a form of worship, an empty ceremony, and not a vital principle, requiring active benevolence, justice, love and good will towards man.' I fail to see how you can shout glory to God one minute and laugh about the harsh conditions of Alligator Alcatraz the next… Mr. Trump uses money and power to keep people in line… If politicians, countries, businesses or even institutions of higher education go against his wishes, they will pay a financial penalty. Mr. Trump believes in making deals rooted in self-interest. Christians have the resources to resist this tactic because we are taught to model our behavior on Christ, who looked to the interests of others, not himself." 

 Esau McCaulley — a theology professor at Wheaton College in Illinois, July 11th OpEd in the NY Times

We now have the largest immigration police force – well beyond Trump’s private ICE Police, including the IRS, DEA, FBI, DOJ those state police now dedicated to immigration enforcement and detention – currently backed by an infinitely expandable cadre of federal military forces and active-duty Marines. They have openly tracked individuals based on racial criteria, and as courts have found this reprehensibly unconstitutional, are appealing this screening technique up the federal appellate ladder. I’ve blogged about their “secret police” tactics and the judicial responses.

For those of us in California, where crime rates, including violent crime are down, we are constantly battling Republican efforts to decriminalize and decontrol an increased use of guns. California has not been invaded by criminals, and the outbreaks of violence these days can mostly be traced to rather brutal immigration enforcement, knowing that ICE appears to be the best trained provocateurs of violence in recent California memory. For those in other states, not occupied by military-backed ICE agents, they just assume we were ultra-violent in the first place.

As Trump attacks our most prestigious research universities – long the attractant of the best and the brightest from around the world (of which many foreign grads elected to remain here) – he decimates our leadership in STEM research, sending that excellence to other nations, from China to France. As Christopher Mims, writing for the July 11th Wall Street Journal, explains: “Since the end of World War II, federal funding has helped U.S. companies dominate the cutting edge of computing, space exploration and medicine, delivering an economic tailwind for the nation. It made the country a dream destination for aspiring researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs from around the world… Now that’s changing—quickly.

“A March 2025 survey by the journal Nature of more than 1,600 scientists in the U.S. found that three-quarters have considered leaving the country. Respondents specifically cited the Trump administration’s hostility to scientific research and those who practice it… At the Nobel laureate meeting in late June that Arnold was attending when we corresponded, representatives distributed pamphlets touting a program designed to attract researchers to Germany. The flier highlighted the country’s ‘international and welcoming’ climate for both science and business.

“There are similar programs in Canada, the U.K. and China. Nikos Papandreou, a European Union parliamentarian representing Greece, recently told me that while his governing body typically moves slowly, some members are now trying to figure out how to quickly set up and fund a program to attract U.S. researchers, so that Europe can benefit from a potential ‘brain gain.’”

Fabricated charges of “antisemstism” and attacks against the most accurate descriptive terms for American culture – diversity, equality and inclusion – have pushed our once top-of-the-line post-secondary educational system toward second or even third-rate status. That great force towards job creation and upward mobility is now to be stomped on and purged out of our system. Moreover, the loss of research experts gives competitor nations a path to exceed American progress.

As Donald Trump has pledged a new, invigorated military – a force that can contain China’s expansionist aspirations – he has fired most of his top qualified generals and admirals, installed the least qualified Defense Secretary in our history, a former junior officer and Fox News host, an idealogue who has been careless with national security, willing to make major policy decisions without presidential approval… and submitted a budget that focuses on the same old/same old “bigger is better” military ethos.

Our miraculous bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites, with decades-old B-2 bombers, was not an “obliteration” of Tehran’s nuclear capacity (albeit a significant weakening), but according to Israeli intelligence, we left behind a major stash of enriched fissionable material, a number of specialized processing centrifuges and the knowledge of how to use them. Drones (unmanned on the land, sea and air) represent the state of warfare today, and those able to launch swarms of inexpensive drones tend to be able to sustain successful attacks against even the greatest military powers on Earth. As we force NATO nations to hit 5% of GDP to merit our support, we are at 3.5%

TACO Trump’s tariff wars, his economically misplaced belief that trade deficits should define our economic relationship with the rest of the world, have alienated our allies (who got some of the worst tariff proposals) and pushed many of them into new trade treaties with China. He’s pushed the BRIC economies into joining together to isolate the United States further and to develop workarounds to our essential trading systems that have, to date, kept the dollar as the main reserve currency.

Trump’s hold on MAGA voters seems to be based on the worship of a cult leader, without much focus on underlying issues. His and his administration’s litany of lies and fabrications have substituted for underlying facts for some time. Yet the administration’s struggles with the missing “Epstein files” has eroded some of that support. Trump’s mainstay legacy of harsh and rapid purging of the undocumented, his perceived major strength will all voters, seems to be reversing. “Americans' views on immigration took a massive positive swing this year amid President Donald Trump's ongoing crackdown, according to new Gallup polling.

“The share of Americans who thought immigration should decrease – 55% – reached a 5-year high point in 2024. This year, it has dropped to 30%, and positive views of immigration have hit a record high of 79%, according to poll results released July 11. The poll surveyed 1,402 Americans between June 2 and 26… But this year, even among Republicans, views on immigration have grown significantly rosier – 64% of Republicans now believe immigration is a good thing, a 25-point jump from June of 2024. The fraction of Republicans who think immigration should decrease has fallen from 88% to 48% in that time span.” USA Today, July 12th.

And this is before the economic horrors that lower income voters (disproportionately Trump supporters) will face in Medicaid, SNAP cuts plus the massive deficit increase from the resulting gift of lower taxes for the rich, are calculated. Could these finally be “issues” that pull a significant cult-based support of Trump our of that MAGA mindset? Time will tell.

I’m Peter Dekom, and perhaps a cold dose of reality will pull this nation back from the cliff edge that threatens to push us into a full-fledged freefall into dark autocracy.

Donald: The Is No Nobel APeasement Prize!

Zelenskyy White House Humiliation, February 28th

      White House East Room, August 18th 

       

Donald: There Is No Nobel APeasement Prize!

Can Putin Finally Put a Solid Wedge Between Europe & the United States?

"There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great.” 

Trump, July 25, 2019, in phone call to Ukraine President Zelenskyy, requesting a full investigation of the Biden family’s dealings in Ukraine, a call that resulted in one of two votes of Trump’s impeachment.

Sometimes I think a very dead Jeffrey Epstein and a very alive Vladimir Putin are setting both our foreign and domestic priorities and policies. On August 15th at the Anchorage summit, Putin declared that vote-by-mail ensures voter fraud (echoing an unproven GOP mantra) and directly reinforced Trump’s vision that the 2020 election was rigged against him. Trump smiled at those words. After the weekend, following years of no meaningful evidence that mail-in ballots are prone to fraud, “President Donald Trump said he will issue an executive order to end the use of mail-in ballots and voting machines ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, a move that would spark legal challenges by states.” Newsweek, August 18th.

Good to know that the Russian dictator, not exactly an expert on how to make democracy work but very knowledgeable in manipulating Donald Trump, is Trump’s inspiration for American elections… the same elections our own intelligence experts have uniformly stated, based on hard evidence, that Russian operatives have “repeatedly interfered with.” And yes, as with so many of Trump’s Executive Orders, this too flies in the face of the US Constitution. Indeed, Article I, Section 4, Clause 1, referred to as the Elections Clause, contemplates that state legislatures will establish the times, places, and manner of holding elections for the House of Representatives and the Senate, subject to Congress making or altering such state regulations (except as to the place of choosing Senators), which has been permitted to prevent real election fraud.

As Congressional hearings began (8/18) interviews of highly-placed government officials with possible knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein’s “connections” to earlier administrations (from Bill Clinton to Trump’s AG, Bill Barr), Trump needed to amp up additional distractions and deflections to keep his MAGA base from refocusing on his seeming betrayal of the inquiry into the “deep state” of high-level pedophiles, an inquiry which Trump seems to have suppressed once it was clear his name was all over those Epstein files. Many believe that Trump’s meeting with Putin and his takeover of Washington, DC based a violent “crime” wave “emergency” (notwithstanding Trump’s own FBI statistics showed a 26% reduction in such DC crimes) were primarily motivated as additional distractions to shift the focus of his own MAGA followers away from that Epstein scandal. That effort seemed to be working.

To make matters so much worse, Trump seems to have ignited a new red state “invasion” of the nation’s capital by inviting hundreds of armed federalized National Guard troops (ordered through red state governors from Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, West Virginia and Ohio) to join in support of the federal officers, already oversupplied, against DC crime and homelessness. The Republican governor of Vermont did not supply his National Guard troops to DC as he failed to see the requisite “emergency.” As Trump uttered his list of potential targets for his future use of federal and federalized troops against “crime and homelessness,” nary a red state city or state was mentioned. It was just a litany of the bluest cities and states.

The addition of red state troops almost seemed like a stage one launch of a “civil war” invasion of Confederate troops into Union cities. Trump views the federal police forces, particularly ICE, and the military as his personal enforcers. After a failed effort, the Department of Justice has already accepted that under the relevant “home rule” statutes for DC, the DOJ cannot directly take over the local police. The DC mayor and the chief of police have also accepted that they can “coordinate” with the federal government to work further to reduce crime in the nation’s capital, even lower than its already-reduced rate.

Meanwhile, apparently trying to avoid the gang-bang embarrassment inflicted on Volodymyr Zelenskyy by Donald Trump and his senior advisors on February 28th (at the White House, pictured left above), European heads of state (German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Finnish President Alexander Stubb and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen) fortified Zelenskyy’s August 18th White House meeting (above right), notably inspired by Trump’s apparent reversion to his Putin-adoration as witnessed from his August 15th meeting in Anchorage. Having pledged “severe consequences” if Putin did not accept an immediate ceasefire, Trump fawned over the Russian dictator during that August 15th meeting. No ceasefire. No severe consequences. European leaders were shocked at Trump’s return to his early pro-Putin bias and immediately insisted on joining the White House meeting scheduled for August 18th.

Zelenskyy has drawn Trump’s animosity ever since Trump demanded that the Ukraine President investigate the Biden family, which recorded phone call led to one of two Trump impeachments. After understanding that Putin was not interested in a ceasefire or even an end to his Ukraine war unless Russia totally resumed control of the country he invaded… including major territorial concessions effectively ceding control of 20% of Ukraine’s land mass to Russia… Trump fell prey to Putin’s manipulation… again. On August 17th, a White House phone call to Zelensky pressured the Ukraine President to accept Russian territorial demands, in violation of the Ukraine Constitution and wildly unpopular with the Ukrainian people, to effect peace.

Given Russia’s abominable history of broken treaties, the notion of security guarantees to protect a post-war Ukraine from another wave of Russian aggression is complicated. In 1994, one of many examples, in exchange for relinquishing its Soviet era weapons to Russia and Ukraine’s agreeing not to keep or develop nuclear weapons, in what has become known as the Budapest Memorandum, Russia, the U.S. and the U.K. pledged to “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.” In 2014, Russia invaded and annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, and three and a half years ago crossed the border in an effort to take the rest of Ukraine. So much for that treaty.

On August 18th, as Zelenskyy and the European leaders gathered with Trump in the East Room of the White House, Trump faced the reality that if he continued to champion Putin’s absurd demands for peace (which Putin now stated had to precede any ceasefire), Trump well might become the cause of a failed effort to end the war… and he subtlety walked back the Putin-fawning the world has just witnessed. With the possibility of a Section 5-like security guarantee (the NATO provision that if any NATO member were attacked, it would be treated as an attack on all of NATO) lurking in the background, the leaders retired for short period of additional discussions before returning to their home countries. Meanwhile, Putin continued to pound Ukrainian civilian targets, presumably to show his manliness. What will happen? I am not optimistic.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while a sustainable peace to the Russo-Ukraine war still seemed remote, there was a micro-glimmer of hope.

The "Emergency" President & His Pliable Supreme Court

 

The “Emergency” President & His Pliable Supreme Court

Weakness Masquerading as Strength

Can you be clever but stupid at the same time? Can you pretend that you are strong and focused when you don’t have a clue what you are doing? Will your constituents follow you every time you cry “wolf,” noting a huge problem you can blame on others that only you can solve? Are you certain that you can distract your loyal flock, even on their most fundamental beliefs, every time you cannot deliver what you promised? The “clever” part of this equation is always twofold: always blame someone else for the issue (even if you are the source of the problem; demonization requires consistency) and always have at least a little truth in your exaggeration of the problem only you can solve. Or is Trump the very definition of woke weakness?

For those of you who fear a constitutional crisis looming, be advised we are well into that crisis and in the bitter process of doing away with our Constitution with the conniving conspiracy of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Along with Roberts’ unorthodox right-wing “contextual originalist” associate justices, he is able to repeal the plain meaning of that revered document and prior Supreme Court panels’ interpretative decisions… often with seriously flawed logic and miscites of relevant precedents. “Originalism” assumes an inflexible constitutional provision that must be interpreted within the context of society and technology in existence at the time of passage. Thus, in determining the application of gun control legislation applicable to AR-15 military-grade assault rifles, the Court can only apply the Second Amendment within the rules applicable to front-loading, single shot muskets and flintlocks. Not exactly what Jefferson and Madison had in mind when they drafted those early provisions in the hopes of a flexible and sustainable foundation to carry the country forward for years, if not centuries.

But the “only I can fix it” mantra, and the litany of “emergencies” sufficiently persuaded his MAGA cult that even if Trump needed dictatorial powers to effect his “cure,” that was acceptable to them. With an immigration policy that needed a fix since the last time it was amended (in 1986 during the Reagan years, with every effort to update thereafter rejected by the GOP, even on proposals advanced by a Republican president), the border became Trump’s campaign “emergency,” even as 2023/24 was finally resulting in far more deportations than Trump 1.0 could deliver. Trump won the 2020 election on a pledge to deport all those violent undocumented aliens, effectively suspending the Constitution, creating a de facto police state, at least to blue cities and states… with cruel results that devastated our farmers and small businesses. His heavy-handed methodology pushed his national disapproval levels way past his approval levels.

Trump had also produced an impossible-to-understand tariff chart that conflated tariff rates with unrelated balance of trade issues; he somehow found an “emergency” in every nation of the world’s economic relationship with the United States. Enough to usurp the congressional jurisdiction to set tariffs so he could fix them himself. The economy soon see-sawed into chaos, as Trump fired number-gathering bureaucrats for reporting what hundreds of federal workers produced… an expression of a failing job market. He only wanted numbers he liked to be reported. “Tariff liberation day” – with TACO vacillations unending – prices pushed upward quickly… but Trump’s flock “believed.” This tariff distraction was still not enough.

Trump was made aware that his name was in those “Epstein” files, so he amped up his distraction force with one more big move: even as the FBI’s statistics showed a huge decrease in violent crime (26%) in the nation’s capital, Trump declared a DC crime “emergency,” brought in federalized troops and a bevy of additional agents from various federal agencies, and attempted (but failed) to commandeer the local police force… all to eliminate criminals and the homeless from DC. Of course there was still crime in DC, and no one is “pro-criminal,” so he may have shocked at the initial support from DC’s mayor, who still insisted that the local police remain under her control but in cooperation with Trump’s forces. Trump suggested that he might replicate the use of the military in other blue cities as “crime” became his new political mantra. The crime rates in DC already were significantly less than they were in Trump 1.0.

His efforts at distraction needed a little more to turn off the demand for release of the “Epstein files” – more even after trying to fire the head of the Federal Reserve and even as the Speaker of the House (a MAGA Trump lackey) dismissed the House for summer recess so they could not even vote on releasing those files for months. Many in his MAGA flock were turning on him over “Epstein.” Yet there was another headline distraction playing into Trumps’ hands.

Trump is the master of exaggeration and blame and the most susceptible to flattery president this country has ever had. Getting an immediate ceasefire in the Russo-Ukraine war was another headline-grabbing “emergency” opportunity. Anchorage Alaska, August 15th: As we witnessed in this surprising meeting between Trump and “just call him Vladimir” Putin, the Russian leader’s false praise of his American counterpart, confirmation that the Ukraine War “would never have happened had Trump been President” when that invasion began, and that Trump lost a rigged 2020 election since the use of mail-in ballots always enables voter fraud, Putin’s flattery worked.

Most of us, and that does not include Donald Trump, know or should know that Russia is a has-been power with a now rather small economy – despite its size and population, Russia has only the 11th largest economy (even eclipsed by Italy), and like many third world nations, is based on resource extraction for its primary wealth. And while it still maintains an array of sophisticated weapons systems with nuclear capacity, so do India, Pakistan, N Korea, Israel and several European nations. Russia is not remotely the powerhouse it was in the Soviet era… but to Trump, the 1980s defined Russia in his mind… forever.

Within minutes of their initial contact, gone was the Trump bravado (“if there isn’t an immediate ceasefire, Russia will face serious consequences”), his repeated statements of disappointment at Putin’s recalcitrance faded into that old-boy bromance of yore… and as Putin was elevated by Trump to the world stage, he sat with Trump in the presidential limo, and was reverse flattered to the point of embarrassment. Putin got exactly what he wanted: a much-coveted delay (i.e., no ceasefire) with zero consequences, the royal treatment by a sitting American President and a suggestion that it would be Ukraine making the concessions to the invader. With European skeptics watching cowering and obsequious Trump, senior European leaders immediately indicated that they would now be joining Trump in his meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy on August 18th. Apparently, they feared a repetition of the Ukrainian President’s last White House humiliation.

But the “only I can fix it” mantra, and the litany of “emergencies” sufficiently persuaded his MAGA cult that even if Trump needed dictatorial powers to effect his “cure,” that was acceptable to them. With an immigration policy that needed a fix since the last time it was amended (in 1986 during the Reagan years, with every effort to update thereafter rejected by the GOP, even on proposals advanced by a Republican president), still unraveling further during the Biden years, even as the border was Trump’s campaign “emergency,” even as 2024 was finally resulting in far more deportations than Trump 1.0 could deliver. Trump won the 2020 election on a pledge to deport all those violent undocumented aliens, effectively suspending the Constitution, creating a de facto police state, at least to blue cities and states… with cruel results that devastated our farmers and small businesses. His heavy-handed methodology pushed his national disapproval levels way past his approval levels.

His earlier distraction efforts, concocting an impossible-to-understand chart that conflated tariff rates with unrelated balance of trade issues, he somehow found an “emergency” with every nation in the world; everyone’s economic relationship with the United States… enough to usurp the congressional jurisdiction to set tariffs so he could fix them himself. The economy see-sawed into chaos, a Trump fired number gathering bureaucrats for reporting what hundreds of federal workers produced… an expression of a failing job market. He only wanted numbers he liked to be reported. “Tariff liberation day” – with TACO vacillations unending – pushed prices upward quickly… but Trump’s flock “believed.” Was that “emergency” working?

Still, there was nothing he could do to could turn off the demand for release of the “Epstein files” – after accusing Barack Obama of treason, announcing mysterious and questionable tariff deals, trying to fire the head of the Federal Reserve and trying his best to distract the “Epstein” headlines, even as the Speaker of the House (a MAGA Trump lackey) dismissed the House for summer recess so they could not even vote on those files for months – Trump knew he needed an even bigger distraction.

Trump was made aware that his name was in those files, so his amped his distraction force with two moves: first, even as the FBI’s statistics showed a huge decrease in violent crime (26%) in the nation’s capital, Trump declared a DC crime “emergency,” brought in federalized troops and a bevy of additional agents from various federal agencies, attempted (but failed) to commandeer the local police force to eliminate criminals and the homeless from DC. Of course there was still crime in DC, and no one is “pro-criminal,” so he may have shocked at the initial support from DC’s mayor, who still insisted that the local police remain under her control but in cooperation with Trump’s forces. Trump suggested that he might replicate the use of the military in other blue cities as “crime” became his new mid-term election mantra. Even though the crime rates in DC were significantly less than in Trump 1.0. Emergencies were “everywhere,” a dictator’s dream.

I’m Peter Dekom, and even as Trump sandbags the vulnerable, even many of his own MAGA constituents about to lose their medical coverage to accommodate tax cuts for the rich, the one issue he needed to deflect the most was his failure to release the “Epstein files”… and it remains to be seen if Trump has finally found a distraction for that too.

How’s It Lookin’ Under Trump 2.0?

 

How’s It Lookin’ Under Trump 2.0?

Hint: In Trump vs the Rule of Law, Trump is Winning Big; We’re Losing Bigger

Trump’s appointments are a clown car of ineptitude, fawning obsequiousness and a foundation of fabrication and blame that cannot hold the country up. Nobody should be laughing. You can start with the stuff that the headlines keep missing, which just might kill you:

“The number of measles cases has climbed this year to the highest they’ve been since the disease was declared eliminated in the US a quarter-century ago. Still, a record share of kindergartners missed required vaccinations last year, and the vast majority of the 2025 measles cases were in unvaccinated children. As we head into the new school year, exemptions are also climbing — and most are for non-medical reasons.” CNN, August 5th.

RFK, Jr. who may have good notions about nutrition, has replaced qualified medical professionals with so many false medical prophets that the quacking sounds like a huge duck farm. We seem to have a adopted a “freedom to infect others” as a basic right. God help America if another COVID-level pandemic were to invade the United States. With so many cuts to Medicaid and nutritional programs combined with the savings by defunding billions and billions of dollars of productive medical research, our falling life expectancy numbers may well plunge even more. Think of the “bright side;” the rich not only get a huge tax break, but if enough middle- and lower-income people die, falling federal healthcare costs may just make them ever richer.

As bourbon producers in Kentucky (which produces 90% of this spirit) are learning the hard way; the momentary increase in international sales (offsetting Gen Z’s changing tastes) of that beverage is facing the headwinds of retaliatory tariffs and consumer anger at American economic bullying. Multiple bankruptcies among smaller independent distillers reflect the issue. “Beyond bankruptcies and financial difficulties, the American spirits and wine industry has also seen a number of companies cut jobs in an effort to stay profitable in an increasingly uncertain trading environment. In January, Jack Daniel's parent company, Brown-Forman, announced it would be eliminating about 12 percent of its workforce and closing a barrel-making plant in Louisville, Kentucky.” Newsweek, August 4th.

But if you want to watch what is happening to small businesses, farms, meat processing plants and construction sites, the loss of low-cost labor is shutting down job sites, leaving crops rotting in the field, closing small restaurants and creating meat and poultry shortages as meat processing plants are closing for lack of the relevant workers. If childcare was prohibitive before all this, it is untenable now. But for cruelty fans, they do get to watch warrantless brutality in ICE sweeps by anonymous masked “police”… which continue to pick up more than a few US citizens along the way. Despite an injunction against racial profiling, sustained by a federal appellate court, racially based ICE raids have not stopped. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, huh? Good to be an American. That there are politicians proud about our growing construction of “Alligator Alcatraz”-like prisons for a pretty benign cadres of desperately needed workers, is pure cruelty without offsetting benefits. Prioritize deporting the “worst of the worst” has not and will not happen.

On the international credibility front, where we incent treasury buyers to support our massive deficits and push for international investors to place their funds in US companies, we are destroying the foundation of 80 years of prosperity, a time when the United States became the most successful economy on earth. The Great Depression accelerant, the Smoot-Hawley tariff, had been replaced by a long-term move to foster free trade. But as Trump tells you that the foreign countries will pay the new massive tariffs he is imposing, he forgets: retaliatory tariffs, that foreign countries do not pay these tariffs and that US consumers pay in the form of a de facto regressive sales tax. Sure, the government receives this tariff income at the border, but the revenue is more than offset by higher consumer prices and increasing US business failures.

As Trump seeks to control the Federal Reserve, appoint loyal cadres to ensure that bad economic news will never be published, shuts down US data-driven federal agencies that produce contradictions to Trump make-believe “hoaxes,” fewer people everywhere believe us. Foreign governments and international investors, one drawn by the accuracy of these reports and by a predictable rule of law, are instead creating workarounds to replace these tarnished numbers and new unpredictability in cross-border investing.

“European governments are taking steps to break their dependence on critical scientific data the United States historically made freely available to the world, and are ramping up their own data collection systems to monitor climate change and weather extremes, according to Reuters interviews… The effort - which has not been previously reported - marks the most concrete response from the European Union and other European governments so far to the U.S. government's retreat from scientific research under President Donald Trump's administration.” Reuters, August 1st.

The price for all of this Trumpian manipulation? Interest rates on our deficit driven related debt are rising, new international exchanges are being created to circumvent the “standard US clearing house” for international pricing and debt, and numbers from federal agencies are no longer accepted by so many major overseas financial institutions. And if the dollar is soon no longer the major reserve currency (the global value pricing metric), standby for massive increases in all forms of bank interest (from mortgages to credit cards to business loans)… with a concomitant increase in consumer prices.

As the Epstein Whisperer is telling his congressional minions to begin to release selective files on Jeffrey Epstein, the file searching has instead centered around requesting files on settled federal investigation of Russian election interference (ignoring the Russians indicted during the Trump administration)… of Clinton, Obama and Biden. And as Trump gloated over the humbling for foreign nations over much higher tariffs (we’ll see) and what appeared to be solid economic success, the truth began to collapse as the normal release of seasonally adjusted numbers. “Phony” and “rigged” Trump declared as he fired the non-partisan head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But, as the August 1st The Atlantic pointed out, the truth was just plain ugly:

“What had been reported as a strong two-month gain of 291,000 jobs was revised down to a paltry 33,000. What had once looked like a massive jobs boom ended up being a historically weak quarter of growth.

‘Even that might be too rosy a picture. All the net gains of the past three months came from a single sector, health care, without which the labor market would have lost nearly 100,000 jobs. That’s concerning because health care is one of the few sectors that is mostly insulated from broader economic conditions: People always need it, even during bad times. (The manufacturing sector, which tariffs are supposed to be boosting, has shed jobs for three straight months.) Moreover, the new numbers followed an inflation report released by the Commerce Department yesterday that found that the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of price growth had picked up in June and remained well above the central bank’s 2 percent target. (The prior month’s inflation report was also revised upward to show a slight increase in May.) Economic growth and consumer spending also turned out to have fallen considerably compared with the first half of 2024. Taken together, these economic reports are consistent with the stagflationary environment that economists were predicting a few months ago: mediocre growth, a weakening labor market, and rising prices.” If Trump were confident in public support, would he be asking his red state minions to “eliminate Democrat voters” and gerrymander their districts? Exactly!

I’m Peter Dekom, and, without even looking at the DOD, in answer to my title question, as the malignant chickens come home to roost, “not good, actually really bad.”

Rule of Law vs Rule by Law

 

Rule of Law vs Rule by Law

When Autocracy replaces Democracy

When George Washington first led the nation, he was faced with a monumental task, one rather unfamiliar in his era: governing a nation as a democracy. He refused to serve more than two terms, rejected the possibility of being named “king,” and showed a particular distaste for political parties. As the Constitution gave him the power to appoint federal judges for lifetime appointments, he required the “advice and consent” of the Senate… and little more. There were no subcommittee screenings; it was straight up and down Senate vote. Washington believed such votes should only be focused on the nominee’s character (generally assumed to be good), eschewing pollical affiliation and a detailed analysis of the nominee’s political biases. He found the British party-driven Parliament to be deeply antidemocratic.

By the time FDR became president, there were Senate Judiciary Committee reviews, and the generally accepted notion was that Republicans nominated Republican judges, and Democrats nominated Democratic judges. FDR appoint eight Supreme Court Justices over his twelve years in office, the most of any president. While his appointments helped him make wartime restrictions that were hardly democratic, the Court often disagreed with him, frequently limiting the reach of his New Deal, for example.

Today, despite a (mis-)belief of judicial neutrality, a study (reported in the February 20, 2024 Public Law Library) conducted by Harvard Law Professor, Alma Cohen, “examined 630,000 federal appeals court cases from 1985 to 2020. Cohen found that party affiliation had a far-reaching impact on decisions, beyond just controversial issues like gun control or abortion. She concluded that judges appointed by Democratic and Republican presidents consistently differed in their tendency to side with the weaker party.

“Cohen’s research revealed that panels with more Democratic judges were more likely to make decisions favoring individuals in civil litigation against institutions like corporations or the government. The same pattern emerged in criminal appeals, immigration appeals, and prisoner litigation. In fact, an all-Democratic panel was twice as likely to rule in favor of immigrants in immigration cases as an all-Republican panel… Critics of previous studies that examined the partisan differences among judges argued that unpublished decisions were not taken into account. However, Cohen’s work showed similar partisan effects among both published and unpublished decisions, as well as unanimous and divided panels.”

Who creates the laws, and their reference points and political, legal or cultural limitations determine rule of or by the law. A theocracy, like Iran, elevates Quranic law, as interpreted by Shia’s highest theologians above any laws created by human beings. Germany’s Nazi Party also had a legal system, but its laws were applied to amplify individual power and the party of the Fuhrer himself. When the law emanates from a single leader, one who cannot be contained by a judicial system, that is clearly rule by law. The LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation determined that “rule of” requires examination of four core values, noting that “The stronger each of these components are, the greater the rule of law.

• Equality Under the Law - All people, businesses and governments are accountable, and the law applies to everyone in the same way, no matter who you are.
• Transparency of Law - Laws must be clear, precise, affordable and accessible while protecting fundamental human rights.
• Independent Judiciary - An independent judiciary ensures equality and fairness of law between people and public officials.
• Accessible Legal Remedy - There must be access to timely resolution in a court of law.”

It is little wonder, then, a move to autocracy almost always starts with the wannabe dictator’s attack on the judiciary. It can be personal attacks on individual judges… or attacks on the “integrity” judicial decisions. If a government can simply ignore a judicial decision or appoint judges who are merely rubber stamps to the determination of a unilateral authority, that system of government cannot protect its citizens from the arbitrary application of the law, an essential trait for “Rule of.” Recent decisions of Trump’s reconfigured Supreme Court reflects partisanship on steroids and an overt deference to a single, supreme authority figure: The President.

That Court has handed down decisions that allow the election process to be totally manipulated and distorted by purely partisan forces. Unless an election law names a protected class on its face, in 2019, in Rucho vs Common Cause, the Court ruled that while partisan gerrymandering may be "incompatible with democratic principles," the federal courts cannot review such allegations, as they present nonjusticiable political questions outside the jurisdiction of these courts. This case explains why Trump recently ordered red states to use gerrymandering to protect the GOP’s slim majority in the House. Texas leapt into action.

In 2021, the Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee Supreme Court all but repealed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The decision interpreted the "totality of circumstances" language of Section 2 to mean that it does not generally prohibit voting rules that have disparate impact on the groups that it sought to protect, including a rule blocked under Section 5 before the Court inactivated that section in Shelby County v. Holder (a 2013 case that released states with traditional patterns of racial voter discrimination from federal oversight).

A little over a year ago, in Trump vs United States, the Court held that presidential immunity from criminal prosecution presumptively extends to all of a president's "official acts" – with absolute immunity for official acts within an exclusive presidential authority that Congress cannot regulate such as the pardon, command of the military, execution of laws, or control of the executive branch. Numerous subsequent decisions expanded presidential authority, at the expense of congressional power, to hold back funds approved by Congress and to have a very free hand in firing individuals in congressionally funded federal agencies under the executive branch. The Court will soon have to test whether the President’s mere statement of “emergency” conditions (without substantiation) would be sufficient to usurp Article I of the Constitution’s grant of setting taxes and tariffs to Congress.

We have also witnessed Trump-appointed administrators and lawyers find ways to twist and squirm to avoid federal court orders, even from the Supreme Court itself, particularly in the realm of citizenship and immigration. To confuse matters further, on June 27, 2025, in Trump vs CASA, Inc, the Supreme Court held that federal district courts likely lack the authority to issue universal injunctions blocking presidential actions nationwide, a ruling that is likely to allow the Trump administration to continue enforcing executive orders or other policies despite legal challenges to their constitutionality.

Politicians follow trends, and judges are supposed to ignore trends and apply the law. Populists often prefer leaders to laws, believing that this path generates necessary efficiencies to effect their beliefs. Yet looking at major variables over time – studies have shown that metrics like economic growth, life expectancy and the encouragement of investment consistently show that democracies always outperform autocracies. Yet the zeal of populists and the frequent submissive inattention of most voters often decimates democracy and its obvious benefits.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is incumbent on those who understand what the rule of law means, to human rights and happiness, convey: it is not red vs blue, but democracy vs autocracy that is at issue today.