Nothing Is As It Seems

Everything you know is wrong

No one inside the administration will save us this time around. There are no stand-up people in the West Wing. Suck-ups rule. Stormy Daniels is the only one even remotely qualified for her job.

It’s all a con. They’ll never relinquish power. I’ll be surprised if there’s a an election in 2026, or if there is one, if it is a fair election in the great American tradition. More likely, it will just be Kabuki theatre like in Russia, Turkey, or Hungary, where each has changed the rules to ensure the people in power prevail. With their tiny majority in Congress, they can’t take a chance on free and fair elections. That’s why the president has already signed an Executive Order making it much harder for those who might oppose him to vote.

It began with flimsy excuses for why they can’t obey court orders. They rank right up there with, “The dog ate my homework.” Once they’ve proven they can get away with it, they’ll transition to just ignoring the courts without excuses.

One of the tells is Trump’s diatribe the other night where he ranted about “60 Minutes” being so unfair to him and then siccing his FCC Chairman on Paramount/CBS, threatening to pull their broadcast licenses. As long as there is a First Amendment, there are no grounds for delicensing. They intend to break down the rule of law enough to intimidate would be critics into silence.

Unless they neuter the Bill of Rights, they cannot fulfill their Project 2025 goals of a Christian-nationalist country where straight white men are in control, and the so-called “unitary executive”—an all-powerful president—has primacy over the courts, the economy, Congress, schools, and the media. This is farther along than you think. We’ve already seen habeas corpus go out the window. In defiance of court orders, there’s no due process for deportees, and Trump is saying that “homegrown criminals,” which is to say American citizens, are next to be shipped to El Salvador’s giant prison.

Think about it: on the home front, they want to de-platform, jail and/or deport anyone who criticizes them. On the educational front, the red herring is antisemitism, but the real story is that they want to kill liberal academia. These are anti-intellectuals who hate the openness of college campuses. Again, they present a seemingly plausible excuse, but their ultimate goal is to change the fabric of our storied institutes of higher learning. It took a while for everyone to realize what was happening, and Harvard has finally stood up to the bullies. Harvard, Yale, Brown, Princeton and the other targeted schools have big enough private endowments not to fold the way Columbia did before they understood the real game.

Same with the big law firms. Trump wants retribution against those that worked for his opposition the first time around, and a couple of them folded under the early attacks before they understood that giving him an inch meant he’d take a mile. What they want next is to keep any firms from representing their enemies. It’s all totally illegal under our now-fragile Constitution, and of late, firms are standing up for their rights and not capitulating to Stephen Miller and the rest of the authoritarians.

As stated, it’s an elaborate con. The how and why represent a cautionary tale. How did Trump gain so much power, and why does he command the loyalty of nearly half our citizens? The con man, or in this case the President of the United States, first must earn the trust of millions. His multi-year run as a reality TV star where he played a successful and infallible business leader cemented his trust worthiness to viewers. His name on buildings, golf courses, Bibles, and sneakers adds to his credibility and legacy.

In a NY Times-published open letter, 1,900 top researchers accused the administration of conducting a “wholesale assault on U.S. science” that could set back research by decades and that threatens the health and safety of Americans: “For over 80 years, wise investments by the U.S. government have built up the nation’s research enterprise, making it the envy of the world,” the letter said.

Here's opinion writer M. Gessen: “Almost three months into the Trump administration’s war on universities, and a year and a half into the Republican Party’s organized campaign against the presidents of top colleges, it is clear that antisemitism and D.E.I. are mere pretexts for these attacks. Like much of what this administration does, the war on higher education is driven by anti-intellectualism and greed. Trump is building a mafia state, in which the don distributes both money and power. Universities are independent centers of intellectual and, to some extent, political power. He is trying to destroy that independence.”

No checks; no balances; just all sycophants, all the time.

©2025 Jon Sinton