Trump recently reconfirmed that he plans to carry out his campaign pledge to enforce mass deportations of many of the 10 million migrants with varying statuses who have entered the United States in recent years. Some overstayed their tourist visas. Some snuck across the border, the so-called “got-aways.” But the majority arrived legally and were admitted as asylum applicants—a status the new Administration plans to revoke. At the helm of this massive undertaking will be former ICE chief Tom Homan, a hardliner who promises no mercy in his plans, including the separation of children from their parents by force of arms.

ICE will probably take lead on detentions, but the military may be involved in the construction and administration of Trump’s gulag archipelago of concentration camps. Profiting, as always, will be the prison-industrial complex.

On the DMZ America podcast, Scott and Ted explore the legal and logistical challenges for Trump. History suggests that not enough Americans will care to make a difference. The co-hosts and friends also consider whether or not there will be substantial political implications: will Americans care enough about these new arrivals to protest and sabotage the program? Scott focuses on the economics. Decreased consumption, reduced tax collections and increased labor shortages could stymie the economy and add trillions to the deficit.

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Donald Trump’s election victory caused most people to think that the war between Russia and Ukraine would soon come to an end as the United States pulled back on its financial and military support for Ukraine, something the former president promised repeatedly. However, what was expected to be a quiet transition in America’s proxy war heated up dramatically after President Joe Biden reversed himself in order to allow Ukraine to fire US-made and US-operated ATACMS missiles up to 200 miles inside the Russian Federation. As Russian president Vladimir Putin had threatened to do, Russia quickly responded by updating its nuclear doctrine to authorize Russian military leaders to launch a nuclear strike against any nuclear-armed country that attacks Russia whether it uses nuclear or conventional weapons.

Now that has taken place. Ukraine used an ATACMS system to attack and ammunition storage facility in Russia. Now the US Embassy in Kyiv is closed in anticipation of a possible Russian air attack. Will Russia let it go, retaliate asymmetrically or go to DEFCON 4? Can Putin wait things out until January 20, and if he does, will it pay off? How close are we to World War III?

On today’s The TMI Show, co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan are joined by military and intelligence analyst Mark Sleboda, an expert on the war between Ukraine and Russia, to game out what comes next.

The post The TMI Show Ep 24: “Ukraine Flirts with World War III” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

One of the more puzzling decisions of the Kamala Harris presidential campaign was to make numerous appearances with Liz Cheney, the far right neoconservative who is despised universally both by Republicans and Democrats. Now that Trump has prevailed, in part due to decisions like this, it’s likely that the blossoming friendship isn’t what it used to be.

The post End of the Affair appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

A smear, the dictionary says, is a word or statement applied to a person in order to degrade, blacken, or make unjust or unfounded accusations. The lead in today’s New York Times, a story titled “How Tulsi Gabbard Became a Favorite of Russia’s State Media,” is a textbook example of a smear. Relying on guilt by association, reading into similarities between her opinions and those of U.S. adversaries, assuming the worst of her while taking her enemies’ statements at face value, and twisting reality into a pretzel to normalize insanity and marginalize the facts, the Times piece shows you how state-sponsored media propaganda works in the real world, in this case as part of a concerted effort to sabotage President-Elect Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence. Missing, by the paper’s own account no doubt in order to avoid another costly libel lawsuit, is any evidence that Gabbard is a “Russian asset” or has done anything wrong at all. Times editors obviously assume that few readers will read beyond the headline or, if they do, will read with the skeptical eye of a veteran journalist.

On today’s The TMI Show, co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan dissect the smear campaign against Gabbard in order to showcase how “mainstream” corporate media outlets undermine reputations and lives.

The post The TMI Show Ep 23: “New York Times Smears Tulsi Gabbard” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

During the campaign, President-Elect Donald Trump promised to bring a rapid conclusion to the Russo-Ukrainian conflict that began in 2022. But most Americans aren’t aware of how or why the war began in the first place. Now the waters are getting further muddied by a decision of President Biden, a lame duck with just two months left in his term, to allow Ukraine to fire long-range American missiles deep into Russia itself.

The DMZ America podcast’s Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) review the relationship between Russia, Ukraine in the United States, how the current conflict began either in 2014 or 2022 depending on your point of view, and how it is likely to end. Can Trump make good on his promise?

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The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 179: The Ukraine War: Why It Began, How It Ends appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

On today’s The TMI Show, co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan investigate what’s true and what’s not about the second Trump Administration’s plans for border policy and the millions of asylum applicant and illegal immigrants who migrated into the United States over the last few years.

Meanwhile, immigrant advocates and activists will be availing themselves of remedies in the legal system to slow down expulsions. What tools do they have? How effective are they?

Listen: here.

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Many swing voters who opted for Donald Trump told pollsters that they felt that Democratic coastal elites looked down upon them and that they were reacting against the feeling that they were viewed with contempt. After the election, as if to confirm their suspicions, Democrats repeatedly said that people who voted Republican were stupid.

The post Feel the Love appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

          After an election, we make nice. The loser congratulates the victor; everybody shakes hands and promises a smooth transition of power. Spicy campaign rhetoric notwithstanding, such courtesies in service to the god of Stability are made possible by the underlying assumption that, while competing candidates and parties offer different ideas of how to achieve a better America, that’s the goal we all want because we all supposedly have similar values.

            Conveying a sense of continuity was no doubt paramount on President Biden’s mind when he delivered his post-election invitation to President-Elect Trump to visit the White House. There, the two men exchanged an easy repartee before an Oval Office fire–a tradition Trump did not deign to offer the victorious Biden before slinking off to Mar-e-Lago in mid-January of 2021. Restoring normalcy, with the corollary that Jan. 6th was anomalous, is also why Biden as well as Vice President Kamala Harris will attend Trump’s inaugural ceremony.

            Understandable, laudable desires by establishmentarians. Following this particular election, in which Democrats amped up the existential-threat-to-democracy histrionics to volume 11, however, Trump’s erstwhile opponents look like the boy who cried biggest-biteyest-rabid wolf ever.

            What a lupine! Biden and then Harris, her surrogates and the liberal press called Trump a fascist, a wannabe dictator and an authoritarian. They warned that, if he won, there might never again be another election. They said he’d send his enemies to camps. The choice on the ballot, they said, came down to Harris or tyranny. Even if he lost, liberals worried, Trump might launch a violent coup.

            Now Hitler Junior has won. Yet Democrats are playing it like they never said any of that, as though The Donald would never harm a fly.

If Little Adolf is planning to kill Anne Frank all over again, if he’s going to tear down Old Glory and run the swastika flag up the pole and force us all to salute, why are you Vichy Democrats inviting him over for tea? Now that the ravening wolf is chomping at the door, why is the president who called Trump’s supporters “garbage” and accused Trump of speaking “Hitler’s language” pledging to do “everything we can to make sure you’re accommodated?”

When it’s 1933 all over again, does it not follow that morality and historical precedent require you to launch a fierce proto-AntiFa Resistance, to stop the son-of-a-bitch by any means necessary—even by use of force?

            If Trump is a fascist—like you said over and over—why are you attending his swearing-in? If you believe he’s plotting to suspend the Constitution and jail his enemies of which you are now one, why are you exchanging transition team liaisons rather than flooring it up I-87 to Canada?

            The uncomfortable logical conclusion is that Democrats are liars.

            What kind of liar exactly, we don’t know.

            When Harris called Trump a fascist, she didn’t believe it. Not really. That, or she did believe it and she doesn’t mind enabling and validating a fascist regime or living under one. One of these things has to be true.

            Bluster is a normal part of campaigning.  As long as a politician’s slings and arrows against a rival don’t exceed exaggeration into rank hysteria, voters can move on after the election. Republicans who voted for Mitt Romney were disappointed that he lost, but his concession went down easily because he never told his supporters that Obama was dangerous. Democrats didn’t much care for George W. Bush but they weren’t afraid of him. As Trump said at the White House this week: “Politics is tough, and it’s, in many cases, not a very nice world but it is a nice world today.” Implication: nothing personal, it’s just business. As on the WWE, no actual humans were harmed in this partisan cage match.

This year, however, the fight was personal. Leaders of both parties convinced their partisans that the other party was evil, depressed Democrats are running to their psychiatrists in droves, and LGBTQ+ crisis hotlines are jammed. There were even (false) reports of post-Trump-victory suicides.

            Pumping up the political drama this far has consequences. One underappreciated side effect of 2024 is that voters of the future will be less likely to listen the next time they’re warned that a candidate represents a grave threat to their freedoms. That’s a problem. Because, someday–that day may be today, Trump may be that menace, we don’t know yet–there will be such a dangerous figure. But there will no way to sound the alarm loudly enough to prompt and organize a defense.

            And Democrats have been caught in their own Big Lie. After years of misleading us about Biden’s mental fitness and telling us Trump would be a dictator, they turn around and normalize him. How can they just toss him the keys to the White House on their way out the door? Were they full of crap about the Great Orange Threat? Or are they stupid?

            Give it to Trump: Reprehensible as it was, his behavior and messaging after losing to Biden in 2020 were consistent with what he conveyed before the election. If Biden won, Trump said throughout the campaign, it would mean Democrats had cheated. After Biden won, Trump refused to concede or cooperate with a transition effort and provoked the January 6th riot to try to overturn the result. It was gross and destabilizing and antidemocratic—but he remained on message.

            Trump has a strong immoral center.

            Stability and continuity are important. But Democrats don’t seem to have considered that a political system is like Jenga. Move to shore up one piece and you risk dislodging another upon which everything else rests, causing the whole thing to collapse. By choosing calm and continuity, Democrats have sacrificed credibility.

“Trump Is a Dictator” is the new WMDs. Just as Bush never recovered from failing to find proscribed weapons in Iraq, this year’s Democrats will never be forgiven for crying “Nazi wolf!” unless one actually materializes. You can’t lay on the doomsday rhetoric as thickly as Democrats have done over the past year without it being followed either by one of two things: an actual shift to authoritarianism, or a decision by many people that your party ought no longer to be taken seriously.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

The post Democrats Welcome the Fascist appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

President-Elect Donald Trump has made headlines with an extraordinarily esoteric group of appointments to his cabinet and other top jobs in his incoming second administration. Controversial alleged sex criminal Matt Gaetz has been named Attorney General, the nations chief law-enforcement officer. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., widely if somewhat unfairly described as a skeptic of vaccinations, has been nominated to run the Department of Health and Human Services. The Defense Department will be run by a 44-year-old Fox weekend host, Pete Hegseth. Tulsi Gabbard will be Director of National Intelligence.

The DMZ America podcast’s Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) consider this cast of characters and handicap the odds of being able to get them through a standard Senate confirmation process. Always aware of history, Ted and Scott also ask the question: who are the worst Cabinet members in U.S. history and are Trump’s choices likely to join their ranks?

Keywords: Donald Trump, 2024 election results, 2024 election, 2024 campaign, cabinet, appointments, advisers, White House officials, drain the swamp, trump administration, Betsy DeVos, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert Kennedy Junior, Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 178: Are Trump’s Cabinet Picks the Worst Ever? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

On The TMI Show, co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan investigate Pete Hegseth, the obscure Fox News weekend host nominated to become Trump’s Secretary of Defense. Why was he chosen? Is he qualified? Will the Senate confirm him?

The Pentagon is a vast bureaucracy that controls an annual budget of nearly $1 trillion a year and employees nearly 3,000,000 people around the world stationed at over 1000 overseas military installations and hundreds in the United States. It is the second largest employer on planet earth, and if you include subsidiary contracting firms, it is by far the biggest. In addition, it controls the military academies as well as four separate intelligence agencies. Considering all that, is Hegseth, a veteran with no relevant experience, out of his depth?

Ted and Manila pose that big question to Michael Maloof, a former senior security policy analyst in the Office of the Secretary of Defense with almost 30 years of federal service in the U.S. Defense Department and as a specialized trainer for border guards and Special Forces in select countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia. His answers may surprise you!

The post The TMI Show Ep 21: “Is Pete Hegseth Up to the Job?” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Defeated Democratic Party presidential nominee Kamala Harris studiously refused to make any concessions whatsoever to her party’s large left-wing progressive base, including on the important issue of genocide in Gaza. Now that Democrats are conducting their postmortems, the one thing they fail to acknowledge is that alienating your base voters and driving away 12 million of them wasn’t such a bright idea.

The post When We Fight Progressives, We Lose appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

On the TMI Show, co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan dive into one of the most vexing problems in the Western Hemisphere: a failed state in the Caribbean less than 600 miles away from the United States. Exploited and ravaged by French and American colonialism and decades of brutal dictators, Haiti has been destroyed by earthquakes and hurricanes and is now in the hands of brutal gangs.

Recent headlines paint a gruesome picture. Haitian police attacked a Doctors Without Borders ambulance and murdered patients it was transporting. The capital of Port-au-Prince is completely controlled by violent gangs. Starvation is everywhere. The FAA has banned American flights to the country after a Spirit Airlines jet was struck by small arms fire.

At least 5000 people have been killed in the last year. As the country’s security crisis continues, 5.4 million Haitians struggle daily to find enough to eat and gang activity has displaced over 700,000 people.  
On the human development front, Haiti has tens of thousands of confirmed cases of cholera. Over one-fifth of children are at risk of cognitive and physical limitations, and only 78 percent of 15-year-olds will survive to age 60.

The effects of this misery, of course, come to America in the form of Haitian migrants and illegal immigrants. What needs to be done to restore calm, law and order and maybe even prosperity to this benighted nation? Who is up to the job? Or should Haiti be left alone for the Haitian people to work things out?

Joining Ted and Manila is independent journalist and filmmaker Dan Cohen, the founder of Uncaptured Media. His latest documentary is “Haiti: Intervention Versus Revolution.”

Keywords: Haiti, failed state, intervention, revolution, gangs, colonialism, France, French, Caribbean, violence, anarchy, disease, cholera, Spirit Airlines, FAA

The post The TMI Show Ep 20: “Haiti Spirals Out of Control” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

As President-Elect Donald Trump fills out his cabinet and key White House positions, including creating a new government-efficiency office for Elon Musk, the DMZ America podcast’s Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) are joined by their colleague, fellow political cartoonist Ben Sargent, formerly of the Austin American-Statesman and now at the Texas Observer.

Republicans are urging a peaceful easy feeling between Americans whether or not they voted for Trump, but is that possible with an ideologically far-right slate of top personnel? On the other hand, many in MAGA world seem disappointed that Trump’s appointees include long-time Washington “swamp creatures.” Whatever happened to draining the swamp?

If personnel is policy, what do these choices harken about Trump’s intended policies for his second term?

Ben Sargent is the Texas Observer‘s longtime cartoonist. He launched his career drawing editorial cartoons for the Austin American-Statesman in 1974. Sargent won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1982. He has also received awards from Women in Communications, Inc., Common Cause of Texas, and Cox Newspapers. He is the author of Texas Statehouse Blues and Big Brother Blues.

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Keywords: Donald Trump, 2024 election results, 2024 election, 2024 campaign, Democrats, cabinet, appointments, advisers, White House officials, drain the swamp, trump administration, Ben Sargent

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 177: Interview with Ben Sargent appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Seems like a perfect time to direct anyone who hasn’t bought my book from four years ago to this detailed and straightforward explanation of how the Democratic Party got itself into its current mess.

Here’s the official description:

There’s a split in the Democratic Party. Progressives are surging with ideas and candidates like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. 72 percent of Democratic voters are progressives. But centrists like Tom Perez and the Clintons still run the DNC party apparatus–and they don’t want to compromise. Intraparty warfare exploded into the open in 2016. It’s even bigger now.
The struggle goes back decades, to the New Left and the election of Richard Nixon over George McGovern. It continued with the Democratic establishment’s quashing of insurgent progressives like Jesse Jackson, Ralph Nader and Howard Dean. The vast scale of the DNC’s secret conspiracy to stop Bernie Sanders in 2016 nomination came out courtesy of WikiLeaks.
Will Democrats again become the party of the working person? Or will the corporatists win and continue their domination of electoral politics? Ted Rall gets to the bottom of the story neither the Democrats nor the Republicans want you to know: how the civil war in the Democratic Party poses an existential threat to the two-party system.

The post appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

As the Russo-Ukraine conflict prepares to enter its third year of grinding warfare that has claimed untold lives and wreaked havoc on people and infrastructure, the election of Donald Trump to the presidency has sparked speculation that a reduction of U.S. proxy support for the Zelensky government might force the Ukrainians to sit down for serious peace talks with Putin.

Russia has gained a clear military advantage in the war. On the TMI Show, co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan dare to ask: Will Trump, as he has promised, end the Ukraine War? If so, how? What role will be played by likely incoming secretary of state Marco Rubio, and European allies? Will the broad contours of a peace deal result in a rump Ukraine and an agreement not to join NATO? Are we looking at a full-fledged armistice, a ceasefire or just continued fighting?

Joining Ted and Manila is Mark Sleboda, an International Relations and Security analyst.

Listen to/Watch the Video Version:

Keywords: Donald Trump, 2024 election results, 2024 election, 2024 campaign, Second Trump administration, Marco Rubio, Ukraine, Russia, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelensky, peace talks, Russo-Ukrainian War, negotiations, diplomacy

The post The TMI Show Ep 19: Trump Won. Will He Bring Peace to Ukraine? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Democrats engaged in all sorts of histrionics during the 2024 presidential campaign, in which the centerpiece of their message was that Donald Trump represented a grave and existential threat to democracy and might even open concentration camps as a genuine fascist. Now that he has prevailed, there is no indication that they believed any of that. Why are they still here?

The post Fight or Not Flight appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

“I’m On Fire” by the Garden State’s favorite son Bruce Springsteen could be the soundtrack to a bizarre wildfire season—wild because it’s happening in New Jersey, Connecticut and New York, states that rarely if ever have suffered the extreme drought conditions and sustained unseasonable high temperatures afflicting the Eastern United States and much of the nation. Late last week, New York City was covered with smoke from a brush fire in, wait for it, Brooklyn.

On the TMI Show, co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan ask: Is a five-month drought in a part of the country where rain is normal and standard a harbinger of still worse things to come? Donald Trump has just appointed Lee Zeldin, a right-wing zealot, to head the EPA—will Republican policies accelerate humanity’s attack on the environment? Would people take notice of environmental degradation if temperatures were falling rather than rising? Ted and Manila are joined by Dr. Reese Halter, a distinguished biologist, an award-winning broadcaster, environmentalist and writer who advocates for Planet Earth.

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The Democratic Party finds itself in nearly as much disarray as the GOP did following Barry Goldwater’s 1964 defeat to LBJ. DMZ America co-hosts Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) turn to American political scientist Charles Lipson to dissect what went wrong for the Democrats in the election and to discuss their prospects for renewal. Can Democrats follow the Republican example and rebuild their grassroots organization from the ground up at the local level? Can they free themselves of their addiction to corporate money in order to increase their populist appeal? Or should the party add domestic policy to a foreign policy that has already moved to the Right of the Republicans, completing a realignment that reverses much of what transpired between 1928 and 1932?

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Keywords: Donald Trump, 2024 election results, 2024 election, 2024 campaign, Democrats, LBJ, Barry Goldwater, political realignment, grassroots organization, Democratic Party, Charles Lipson, party politics, reinvention

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 176: Can the Democrats Be Fixed? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

On today’s TMI Show, co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan consider Donald Trump’s campaign promises in the light of the reality he will have to face as he returns to the White House in January. He promised mass deportations and still claims he plans to carry them out, but will ugly optics and economic need for more workers pressure him to back down? Were his threats to impose big tariffs on Chinese imports empty, and negotiating tactic, or to be taken at face value? Trump remarked that he had “a concept of a plan” to repeal and replace Obamacare; if so, what would that look like? Should Ukraine expect to be told to negotiate with Russia?

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The post The TMI Show Ep 17: Trump 2.0: Big Promises Meet Reality appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Defeat is an orphan. But defeated Democrats, themselves responsible for losing an election to Donald Trump that should have been easy to win, are flailing about trying to pin the blame on everyone but themselves.

The post The Blame Game appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.