Tag: donald-trump

Bully Donald Trump escalates his war on the First Amendment.

SAN FRANCISCO

Lee Heidhues 7.11.2026 UPDATED

Washington Post – 7.11.2026

Donald Trump wants nothing more than to stamp out the First Amendment.

This wannabe dictator will use his final 925 days in the White House unleashing the Department of Justice and abusing the levers of presidential power to stifle, harass and prosecute his political enemies by any means necessary.

First it was former national security advisor John Bolton who published “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” Bolton plead guilty to one charge against him and is looking at a 2.5M fine and five years prison time.

Trump uses his DOJ to get his Revenge six years later

Now Trump is going after The New York Times

The media world needs to rise up and defend the right to free speech without being intimidated and bullied.

Prior Restraint by Government – Herblock in the Washington Post 1971 Pentagon Papers – Wikipedia

Excerpted from The New York Times 7.10.2026

The Trump administration issued subpoenas on Friday to several journalists for The New York Times, after the news outlet reported this week on security concerns involving President Trump’s new Qatari-donated Air Force One.

The smirking bully Trump

The Times journalists who received subpoenas included Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt, who reported on Wednesday that Mr. Trump had departed Turkey on the old Air Force One as a security precaution at the urging of the Secret Service. On Thursday, The Times reported that the new Air Force One, a Qatari-donated Boeing 747-8, lacked some of the advanced security features of the older aircraft, including antimissile capabilities. Both articles cited sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security issues.

The subpoenas — which seek to force the reporters to testify before a federal grand jury in Manhattan on Wednesday — were an extraordinary escalation in President Trump’s efforts to threaten and intimidate independent news organizations.

In some cases, the subpoenas were delivered by federal agents who showed up at reporters’ homes.

The Times denounced the administration’s actions.

“The appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects,” said David McCraw, The Times’s top newsroom lawyer, in a statement on Friday evening.

Trump DOJ wants prison time for the former adviser John Bolton

 SAN FRANCISCO

Lee Heidhues 6.4.2026

The blogger is no fan of John Bolton.

It’s a scary notion that a well respected government official can be persecuted for exercising his right to free speech.

Click to access bolton-indictment.pdf

The arch conservative when it comes to American hegemony. I have seen him appear on The News Hour, Deutsche Welle and the BBC. I have read his writings in Foreign Affairs magazine and The Wall Street Journal.

I certainly disagree with John Bolton on his Hawkish views regarding American hegemony. But nobody can question his integrity, sincerity or convictions.

Bolton is being unfairly persecuted by Donald Trump’s Department of Justice. The convicted felon President doesn’t like what he wrote in his book, ‘The Room Where It Happened’ The Room Where It Happened – Wikipedia after leaving the White House during his first term.

The entire Editorial in the Wall Street Journal can be found by accessing the following link.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/john-bolton-plea-deal-classified-documents-donald-trump-0a24f831?st=uFuQ2T&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
John gives Trump the Eye

President Trump may hate being the target of lawfare, but he sure knows how to wield it against anyone who crosses him.

That’s the story of John Bolton, his former national security adviser, who is agreeing to a plea deal essentially for the sin of writing a critical book about his time advising Mr. Trump.

The President has been determined to seek revenge against Mr. Bolton, who wrote his well-regarded memoir, “The Room Where It Happened,” based on his 17 months running the National Security Council in Mr. Trump’s first term.

Mr. Trump first tried and failed to block publication, then went to court to confiscate the royalties. He lost that fight too. But on Mr. Trump’s return to office, his Justice Department charged Mr. Bolton with a coercive 18-count indictment for keeping diary notes on a home computer that included “national defense information.”

Mr. Bolton has now decided to plead guilty to a single felony count for retaining classified information. He will pay a $2.5 million fine, which is best understood as an attempt to deny Mr. Bolton the earnings from the book.

Like most similar defendants, Mr. Bolton had little choice.

Shades of 1930’s Germany. Trump accuses critics of ‘Treason’

SAN FRANCISCO

Lee Heidhues 3.16.2026

Does this look familiar?

There’s the old saying made famous by Wes ‘Scoop’ Nisker. “If you don’t like the News. Go out and make some of your own.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wes_Nisker

Donald Trump is using all the tools of power to bend the media to pervert the news.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Nazi_Germany

Censorship in Nazi Germany was extreme and strictly enforced by the governing Nazi Party, but specifically by Joseph Goebbels and his Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Similarly to many other police states both before and since, censorship within Nazi Germany included the silencing of all past and present dissenting voices. In addition to the further propaganda weaponization of all forms of mass communication, including newspaper, music, literature, radio, and film, by the State,[1] the Ministry of Propaganda also produced and disseminated their own literature, which was solely devoted to spreading Nazi ideology and the Hitler Myth.

Book burning in 1930’s Germany – May 1933

Excerpted from The New York Times 3.16.2026

The president and his allies have sought to vilify the news media since the start of his political rise a decade ago. But this recent denigration of news organizations — including The New York Times — comes as Mr. Trump has appeared at pains to depict his Middle East military effort as a smashing success, despite some facts to the contrary and opinion polls that have revealed widespread doubts among Americans about the war.

In particular, Mr. Trump has zeroed in on accusing American news organizations of disloyalty to their country, as in an official White House news release declaring that CNN had sought “to undermine our decisive victories in Operation Epic Fury.”

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement on Monday: “The media has been undeniably biased and negative in its coverage of President Trump and Operation Epic Fury. Anybody with eyes and ears can see this.”

ICE agents. What are they really?America’s real domestic terrorists.

SAN FRANCISCO

Lee Heidhues 1.17.2026

Fascism on the rise in America. Department of Homeland Security. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Homeland_Security

State sanctioned terrorists.

Federal agents detain a protester outside of the Broadview ICE processing facility, after U.S. President Donald Trump ordered increased federal law enforcement presence to assist in crime prevention, in Broadview, Illinois, U.S. September 26, 2025. REUTERS/Jim Vondruska

Now that convicted Felon turned President has been unleashed, again, for a year he has turned loose his version of State sanctioned domestic terrorists on the immigrant population and citizens exercising their Constitutional rights.

Who are these well paid mercenary thugs? Deutsche Welle takes a deep look.

Excerpted from Deutsche Welle – 1.17.2026

Donald Trump’s second presidential term has seen a rapid rise in the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. But who are these people, and where is the US government finding them?

Once a relatively obscure branch of law enforcement, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have fast become the sharp point of Donald Trump’s mass deportation initiative.

Since Trump took office a year ago, the number of ICE agents has jumped from 10,000 to 22,000, thanks largely to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recruitment drive to sign up what they call “qualified patriotic Americans from across the country.”

The Trump administration said it deported 605,000 people between January 20 and December 10, 2025, and 1.9 million immigrants had “voluntarily self-deported.”

America’s State sanctioned – ICE mercenaries on the job assaulting protesters

Such a significant upscaling of a branch of law enforcement is unusual — and unprecedented in the history of ICE, which was formed in 2002. The effort raises questions about screening and the suitability of candidates, of which DHS said there were 220,000 in the last year.

Training time cut as numbers rise

ICE training has been cut from 16 to eight weeks in the drive. The requirement to learn some Spanish, the language of most of the country’s unauthorized immigrants, has also been axed. ICE did not respond to a series of questions from DW on its recruitment.

American Official thuggery on the job assaulting citizens exercising their Constitutional rights.

Concerns about the training of agents and the perceived politicization of ICE have grown in the wake of the death of Renee Nicole Good, which has sparked countrywide protests across and lead to the resignation of a dozen federal prosecutors in the state of Minnesota on Wednesday.

Recruitment poster
Homeland Security
@DHSgov·
A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending. American Progress – John Gast

The advertising bill for what the DHS has described as a “wartime recruitment” drive in 2026 is $100 million (€86 million), according to a 30 page document seen by The Washington Post newspaper. The pace looks set to at least continue, given that Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” handed ICE a $170 billion budget over the next four years for border and interior enforcement.

https://www.dw.com/en/how-are-ice-agents-recruited-and-who-are-they/a-75506003

America has come a long way from the 1963 film “The Great Escape” and its iconic opening theme. A time when the Nazis were the bad guys. Now these lawless thugs in the guise of ICE agents are running the American political terror circus. There’s no Great Escape for the democracy loving citizen in the United States.

5 years since 1.6.2021. America suffers from political Amnesia

SAN FRANCISCO

Lee Heidhues 1.7.2026 UPDATED

Straight out of the 1930’s Nazi Germany playbook
Wall Street Journal – 1.7.2021
Wall Street Journal 1.7.2026

It is nearly five years since Donald Trump led the insurrection and tried to violently overturn the November 2020 election.

The place Trump belongs. Prison

As rebellion flared up in the nation’s capitol America failed its biggest test. Putting this criminal insurrectionist back in the White House a year ago. He should be in prison.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack

The American sheep like people continue to suffer from Amnesia and are all too willing to let this abhorrent event fade into the historic background.

On this New Year’s Day I went into the PBS FRONTLINE archives. Resting there for all who care to view is the graphic documentary originally broadcast on January 26, 2021. Reasonable people thought this criminal would land in jail. Wrong.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/trumps-american-carnage/

As rebellion flared up in the nation’s capitol America failed its biggest test.

There is one Hero amongst the somnolent lazy American public. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Smith_(lawyer)

Excerpted from The New York Times 12.31.2025

Jack Smith, the former special counsel, defended his decision to twice indict President Trump, accusing him of “exploiting” violence on Jan. 6, 2021, to overthrow the 2020 presidential election, according to a transcribed interview released by House Republicans Wednesday.

Mr. Smith, a former prosecutor vilified by Mr. Trump as a partisan, spent much of the eight-hour, closed-door session on Dec. 17 before the House Judiciary Committee rebutting a range of Republican claims, including the accusation that he had improperly obtained metadata on phone calls involving Trump-allied lawmakers.

“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power,” Mr. Smith said, according to the transcript.

Bloviating mindless January 6th insurrectionists were pardoned by Donald Trump the first day he returned to office 1.20.2025

In the interview, Mr. Smith sought to undermine the narrative that the president was an innocent figure persecuted by partisans who weaponized federal law enforcement, a core belief among many Trump supporters.

“We will not accept this (Trump) intimidation.” Zohran Mamdani

SAN FRANCISCO VIA NEW YORK CITY

Lee Heidhues 7.1.2025

The Felon Trump is at it, again.

Spreading racist bigoted anti-immigrant slurs. The incendiary appeal to the worst in people has served the Felon Trump well for 10 years.

The latest target of his obscene vitriol is the just officially declared Democrat nominee for the Mayoralty of the Felon Trump’s hometown.

Nominee Zohran Mondami is having none of it.

Excerpted from The New York Times 7.1.2025

“The president of the United States just threatened to have me arrested,” Zohran Mamdani said in a response on social media, adding that Mr. Trump’s statements “don’t just represent an attack on our democracy but an attempt to send a message to every New Yorker who refuses to hide in the shadows: If you speak up, they will come for you.”

He continued, “We will not accept this intimidation.”

President Trump on Tuesday floated an outlandish claim that Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for New York mayor, was an illegal immigrant and threatened to arrest him if he blocked immigration arrests in New York City.

Mr. Mamdani was born in Uganda and has lived in New York City since 1998, when he was 7 years old. He was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 2018. If elected, Mr. Mamdani would also be the first Muslim to become mayor of New York City. There is no credible evidence to suggest Mr. Mamdani is not, or shouldn’t be, a U.S. citizen.

Mr. Trump’s attack on the mayoral candidate echoed language he has long used to lend credibility to falsehoods. “A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally,” he said of Mr. Mamdani. “We’re going to look at everything.”

When a journalist raised the possibility that Mr. Mamdani “will not allow” ICE to make immigration arrests, Mr. Trump replied, “Well then we’ll have to arrest him.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has so far declined to endorse Mr. Mamdani, rallied behind him after Mr. Trump’s attacks.

“I don’t care if you’re the President of the United States,” Ms. Hochul wrote on social media. “If you threaten to unlawfully go after one of our neighbors, you’re picking a fight with 20 million New Yorkers — starting with me.”

“It’s up to you. New York. New York”

Bishop Budde eyebrow-raising sermon infuriates felon Trump

SAN FRANCISCO

Lee Heidhues 1.23.2025

CORONATION OF THE AMERICAN NAZI REGIME – JANUARY 20, 2025

An ongoing series to expose The Felon Trump assault on all institutions.

Today it’s the Episcopal Church. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Episcopal_Church_(United_States)

Excerpted from La Croix International 1.23.2025

“Mean,” “so-called bishop,” “radical left hardline Trump hater.” Such vehemence is not unusual in President Donald Trump’s rhetoric, but he usually reserves his attacks for the political world. However, his attacks were for Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., whom the new U.S. president harshly criticized January 22, the day after the National Prayer Service held as part of his inauguration.

Bishop Mariann Budd – Episcopal Bishop Washington, DC

Trump’s outrage

Mariann Budde, 65, drew the president’s anger after a sermon in which she encouraged Donald Trump, “in the name of our God,” to show “mercy” toward “the millions of people who are afraid.” “There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives,” she pleaded before the president and his wife Melania, seated in the front row alongside Vice President J.D. Vance and his wife.

And just as Trump had declared a state of emergency along the Mexican border, Budde also urged the president to be compassionate toward immigrants, of whom, she said, “the vast majority (…) are not criminals.”

Bishop Budde speaks at White House protest for Peace in Gaza – December 2023

Further reading: Trump lashes out at Episcopal bishop who called for ‘mercy’

Visibly annoyed by these remarks, Trump harshly criticized her on his Truth Social platform. “The so-called Bishop who spoke at the National Prayer Service on Tuesday morning was a Radical Left hard-line Trump hater (…),” he wrote, accusing the bishop of dragging “her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way. She was nasty in tone and not compelling or smart… She and her church owe the public an apology!”

Mariann Edgar Budde, born in 1959 and ordained a priest before being elected bishop of Washington in 2011, is the ninth bishop of the Episcopal diocese of the U.S. capital and the first woman to hold the position in this church, a member of the Anglican Communion. The Anglican Church belongs to the “historical” Protestant tradition, in contrast to evangelical Protestantism.

Established after the American Revolution during the separation from the Church of England, the Episcopal Church stands out for its inclusivity. It was among the first to bless same-sex unions and strongly advocates for LGBT equality.

Previous statements

This is not the first time the Episcopal bishop of Washington has addressed Trump, directly or indirectly. In 2020, after Black Lives Matter protesters were forcefully dispersed by police on the steps of St. John’s Episcopal Church—known as the “Church of the Presidents” in the federal capital—the billionaire posed hours later in front of the building, Bible in hand, drawing the ire of most American religious leaders. Budde said she was “outraged” and “horrified” by this publicity stunt.

Felon US President Donald Trump holds up a Bible outside of St John’s Episcopal church across Lafayette Park in Washington, DC on June 1, 2020. – Felon Trump was due to make a televised address to the nation on Monday after days of anti-racism protests against police brutality that have erupted into violence.
(Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

https://international.la-croix.com/world/who-is-mariann-budde-the-episcopal-bishop-who-drew-trumps-ire

“I’ll cut the apple in two. I’ll pray it isn’t True.” Nazi Trump Justice

SAN FRANCISCO

Lee Heidhues 1.22.2025

Some people are studying their history

As a regular feature of http://www.leesperspective.com I will hi-light Felon President Trump’s dismantling of the American system as we have come to know it.

The Civil Rights Division is the first bite of the Department of Justice apple.

“I’ll cut the apple in two. I’ll pray it isn’t True.” Apple of Sodom, Marilyn Manson

What it feels like in Nazi Trump America – ‘Apple of Sodom’ Marilyn Manson

CORONATION OF THE AMERICAN NAZI REGIME – JANUARY 20, 2025

TRUMP CONVICTED – 5.31.2024

Excerpted from The Washington Post 1.22.2025

“It’s beyond unusual — it’s unprecedented. We’ve never seen this before at this scale with any transfer of power, regardless of the ideology of any incoming president or administration,” said Damon Hewitt,president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “This should make Americans both angry and deeply worried. This is more than just a changing course of philosophy — this is exactly what most people [in the civil rights community] feared: a Justice Department that was created to protect civil rights literally abdicating its duty and responsibility to protect Americans from all forms of discrimination.”

Felon President Trump dismantles the Justice Department.

The Justice Department has ordered the civil rights division to halt much of its investigative activity dating from the Biden administration and not pursue new indictments, cases or settlements, according to a memo sent to the temporary head of the division that was obtained by The Washington Post.

Trump said on the campaign trail that police at times must be “extraordinarily rough” to stamp out urban mayhem and endorsed more aggressive tactics from police, including the use of stop-and-frisk to search suspects.

The letter instructs Kathleen Wolfe — designated by the Trump administration as supervisor of the division — to ensure that civil rights attorneys do not file “any new complaints, motions to intervene, agreed-upon remands, amicus briefs, or statements of interest.”

https://wapo.st/3WtIasi

The Third Reich of Dreams. Coming to our neighborhood

The Third Reich of Dreams. How Dreams Change Under Authoritarianism

SAN FRANCISCO RICHMOND DISTRICT

Lee Heidhues 11.20.2024

After 22 percent of my neighbors (179 allegedly intelligent people) in our precinct voted for Trump I have been thinking hard about what the future will bring on January 20, 2025.

Trump was President in 2019 when I posted a story about “The Third Reich of Dreams: How Dreams Change Under Authoritarianism.” Well, terrifyingly here we are again. In America and in my very own neighborhood in a City which likes to think itself “Progressive” and “Tolerant.” I have learned it’s not true.

Street camera for surveillance. Omnipresent in San Francisco 2024

I need not look far. I am surrounded by neighbors with surveillance cameras and high intensity security lights. These insidious tools monitor the comings and goings of everyone and at night pollute the sky. What are these people fearful of in our quiet neighborhood? The families of raccoons who forage in their trash cans?

Perhaps this is why the classic book “The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation” published in 1966 and long out of print is being republished next April.

A warning shot about the dangers of rampant paranoia. Only this time it’s not Nazi Germany. It’s right here on my block.

Excerpted from The New York Review of Books 12.5.2024

Born in 1907 in Forst, Germany, a town near the Polish border, Charlotte Beradt was a young journalist who reported on women’s issues and other aspects of German social and political life for the weekly journal Die Weltbühne.In 1933 Beradt, a committed communist and a Jew, found herself suddenly unemployed. As the Nazi movement grew, she began having nightmares every night.

She wondered whether other people were having similar dreams. She started to ask people about their dreams, discreetly: “I asked the dressmaker, the neighbor, an aunt, a milkman, a friend, almost always without revealing my purpose.” She did this because “dreams like this should be preserved for posterity,” and she wrote down hundreds before fleeing to New York in 1939. There she worked as a hairdresser for fellow émigrés, sometimes spending time with her friend Hannah Arendt.

In 1966 she finally brought her collection together, arranging the dreams by theme, offering her own light commentary, and bolstering each short chapter with epigraphs from the likes of Kafka and Brecht and Arendt herself. She gave the resulting slim volume a memorable title: The Third Reich of Dreams. The book had some modest success but never penetrated the American consciousness like the work of Arendt, perhaps because Beradt offers us not a complex hermeneutics of totalitarianism but rather a quite straightforward picture of the psychological effects of propaganda and manipulation upon a populace.

The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation

by Charlotte Beradt, translated from the German by Damion Searls, with a foreword by Dunya Mikhail

Princeton University Press, 124 pp., $24.95 (to be published in April 2025)

A message to Donald Trump. Your Election Denier gets 9 years in jail

SAN FRANCISCO

Lee Heidhues 10.3.2024

Where is the Judge who will mete out a sentence to convicted criminal, liar and election denier Donald Trump???

When will the election deniers learn that doing Trump’s dirty work for him is a fools mission which will result in jail time?

Colorado Judge Matthew Barrett sentences former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters to nine years in prison

Excerpted from Colorado Public Radio 10.3.2024

Tina Peters is headed to prison.

The former Mesa County Clerk was sentenced to nine years of incarceration, most of which will be served in the Colorado Department of Corrections.

Convicted election denier Tina Peters in happier days

Peters was found guilty of three felony counts of attempting to influence a public servant and one count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation. She was also convicted of first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty, and failure to comply with an order from the Secretary of State, all misdemeanors.

Her sentencing was handed down in a packed courtroom Thursday that included supporters of Peters, several uniformed sheriff’s deputies and local elected officials. Interested parties also gathered just outside the courtroom, streaming the proceedings on their phones from feet away. 

Peters was found guilty by a jury of Mesa County residents in August on seven counts, including four felonies after she helped facilitate unauthorized access to county voting equipment that she was supposed to safeguard. 

The Election Official Who Tried to Prove “Stop the Steal”
How a group of conspiracy theorists enlisted a county clerk in Colorado to find evidence that the 2020 vote was rigged. The New Yorker – September 7, 2022 https://www.newyorker.com/news/american-chronicles/the-election-official-who-tried-to-prove-stop-the-steal

During Thursday’s hearing, the prosecution argued that Peters should face the maximum penalty for each charge and said Peters should serve time in prison, noting her lack of contrition even after she was found guilty. 

“I don’t think anybody in this room would make a straight-faced argument that Mrs. Peters has demonstrated any respect for the law,” 21st Judicial District Attorney Dan Rubinstein said.  

https://www.cpr.org/2024/10/03/tina-peters-former-mesa-county-clerk-prison/