Rick Stengel

Trump Renames Institute of Peace for Himself

If only this was the worst thing he did all day.

1. We are not in an armed military conflict with drug cartels.
2. It was a criminal drug smuggling operation.
3. The military can't target civilians, even ones committing crimes.
4. Law of war manual says you can't fire on shipwreck survivors.
5. Shipwreck aside, the whole operation was illegal.

Sickening.

Sickening.

The bait-and-switch of the president and his allies citing the 100,000 tragic American deaths from drugs and then pretending that the illegal attacks on a few small Venezualan fishing boats will somehow help solve the problem is breathtakingly deceptive and cynical.

Make Money Not War: Trump’s Real Plan for Peace in Ukraine The Kremlin pitched the White House on peace through business. To Europe’s dismay, the president and his envoy are on board.

Call it the Money Trap. It was the Russians who realized that these guys saw the world only in business terms and were more interested in dollars than diplomacy. And made them think the Russian plan was the American plan. www.wsj.com/world/russia...

Trump Frees Fraudster Just Days Into Seven-Year Prison Sentence

What remains astonishing is that for the first time in our history, we have a president who sympathizes and identifies with white collar criminals rather than the law enforcement authorities who prosecute them.

The Ex-President Whom Trump Plans to Pardon Flooded America With Cocaine

The president is authorizing the extra-judicial killing of alleged small-time Venezuelan drug smugglers while pardoning the ex-president of Honduras who was responsible for more than 200 tons of cocaine coming to the US over twenty years.

While Venezuela is not a fentanyl-or-cocaine producing country according to the UN, the president of the United States has touted an illegal land invasion of that nation while pardoning the former Honduran president who an American jury convicted of protecting the flow of cocaine to the US.

National Guard shooting suspect to face murder charges, Trump to freeze 'Third World' migration The Afghan man accused of shooting two National Guard members will face first-degree murder charges for an attack that prompted President Donald Trump to declare he would freeze migration from "Third ...

The alleged shooter was granted asylum this year by the Trump administration.

Apart from the outright offensiveness of much of this post, Trump says "hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia" are "taking over" Minnesota. Census statistics show that there are fewer than 100,000 people in the entire United States of Somali ancestry, and Minnesota has 50-70,000.

Because of tariffs and uncertainty, operating margins for small retailers with total assets less than $50 million have plunged to negative 20.7%, leaving 36% of them at a high risk of bankruptcy.

The Marketplace of Ideas Isn't Working Americans' freedom of speech is predicated on the theory of a marketplace of ideas. But this model needs to be updated.

The recent revelations by the location label on X that many maga accounts are from abroad & not-American shows why the marketplace model of speech is broken. The perverse incentives of social media monetization de-incentivize truth. That's not a fair market, as I write below.

Pentagon says it's investigating Sen. Mark Kelly over video urging troops to defy 'illegal orders' The Pentagon says it's investigating Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona over possible breaches of military law after the former Navy pilot joined a handful of other lawmakers in a video that called...

Not sure what's so complicated about this. Obeying an "illegal" order is itself illegal. This is a tenet of almost every legal or moral system, including the U.S. military.

Venality plus incompetence is a powerful combination.

The "28-point" plan is not a peace plan but a subjugation of Ukraine plan, along the lines Putin has always desired. Why give Russia a victory at the negotiating table that they did not win on the battlefield?

The Marketplace of Ideas Isn't Working Americans' freedom of speech is predicated on the theory of a marketplace of ideas. But this model needs to be updated.

The marketplace of ideas is the basis for the First Amendment's protection of free speech. It's being distorted by the platform companies, algorithms, and the global firehose of falsehood. This piece is adapted from the Feingold Lecture at CCNY. time.com/7335763/auto...

U.S. Coast Guard will no longer classify swastikas, nooses as hate symbols The military service, which falls under the Department of Homeland Security, has drafted a new policy that classifies such items “potentially divisive.”

This is the saddest, most disappointing, most immoral thing imaginable. It will take decades to repair the mess these people will leave. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

Trump calls for Democratic lawmakers to face trial for ‘seditious behavior’ “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” he wrote on Truth Social.

Department of Defense Law of War Manual (2015), § 18.3.3.
“A service member has a duty to disobey a manifestly unlawful order.”

"Things happen," the president of the United States said of the cold-blooded murder and dismemberment of a Saudi-American Washington Post journalist at the hands of Saudi officials. "A lot of people didn't like that gentleman," he said. Only autocrats did not like him.

My dad fought in WWII. He didn’t talk about it. He grew up in Brooklyn, the son of an immigrant father. He served with men from all over the country. His service made him an American; made him believe in the American dream. I think his generation would say this is not the country they fought for.

Why I Am Resigning A federal judge explains his reasoning for leaving the bench.

-->"What Nixon did episodically and covertly, knowing it was illegal or improper, Trump now does routinely and overtly."

The Mafia Presidency Trump is saying, essentially, If you don’t want to get hurt, you’ll do what I say.

Nothing more like a Mafia presidency than preemptively pardoning your co-conspirators in a gigantic crime.

A Two-Headed Coin That Always Comes Up ‘Trump’

If this were a metaphor or a satire, it would be spot on. But of course, it's not. Even Caesar had his image on only one side. But his coin did have the legend, CAESAR DICT PERPETVO (“Caesar, dictator in perpetuity”)

Where Democrats Will Duel Next for the Party’s Future

As ever, it is not either/or but both/and. The Democratic party should be a big tent containing progressives and moderates—heck, that's what a party is! No internecine warfare!

The Shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. Has Already Killed Hundreds of Thousands The short documentary “Rovina’s Choice” tells the story of what goes when aid goes.

As Atul Gawande writes, "There are valid criticisms of USAID. It sometimes fostered dependency..Yet no agency of the US gov't has saved more lives per dollar." The documentary shows how many of those lives will be lost.

As a lawyer who advised and represented international financial institutions making loans and guarantees on major investment projects in Uzbekistan for 15 years, I can say with 100% certainty that Uzbekistan does not have $135 billion to invest in the US, or anywhere else outside of Uzbekistan.

Takeaways from Trump’s rocky Supreme Court arguments over global tariffs | CNN Politics The Supreme Court appeared deeply concerned Wednesday with President Donald Trump’s reliance on a vague federal law to impose global tariffs, with several members of the court’s conservative wing pick...

Seems pretty clear that:
1. Tariffs are a tax, and only Congress can impose a tax.
2. There is no emergency to justify using emergency powers.
3. The IEEPA legislation was designed to constrain the president's powers, not increase them.
www.cnn.com/2025/11/05/p...

The Full Transcript of Zohran Mamdani’s Victory Speech

"If tonight teaches us anything, it's that convention has held us back. We have bowed at the altar of caution, and we've paid a mighty price. Too many working people cannot recognize themselves in our party, and too many among us have turned to the right for answers to why they’ve been left behind."

Memories are short. (A) We forget how deeply unpopular Trump I was and (B) that every election is about the economy. Voters rejected Trump II and the bad economy and embraced sanity and competence. On to the midterms.