If it walks like a mafia-style regime….
How many times must Trump 2.0 defy court orders before GOP House members discover, “Hey, Dear Leader is violating his oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. That’s bad, right?”
Lawrence O’Donnell opened his MS Now show on Wednesday featuring an op-ed from the New York Daily News. James Speyer, an attorney with Lawyers Defending American Democracy, writes that is it time to admit what is right before our eyes. Once Americans looked with disdain upon countries like Russia or North Korea as mafia-style criminal regimes. In such nations elites loot national wealth for personal gain and violently put down dissent. Now they are us.
The Trump administration has:
Murdered Renee Good and Alex Pretti, slandered them as “domestic terrorists” and “assassins,” and allowed their killers to walk free. Unleashed thousands of minimally trained ICE agents, recruited with explicitly white supremacist messaging, to inflict terror on people of color. Repeatedly violated the constitutional rights of citizens and non-citizens by arresting them for First Amendment-protected speech, raiding their homes without judicial warrants, and imprisoning them without due process.
And killed dozens of civilians on the high seas solely on the unsubstantiated claim that they were drug runners (not that being drug runners would justify their summary executions without due process anyway). Released hundreds of imprisoned felons who brutally beat Capitol police officers on Jan. 6. Converted the once-independent Department of Justice into an instrument of personal retribution via the prosecution of cooked-up lawsuits against the president’s enemies. Threatened to seize the territory of a sovereign nation (a NATO ally no less).
And declared that legislators should be executed for reminding military personnel of their duty to disobey illegal orders. Tried to impose ruinous and unconstitutional sanctions on some of the country’s largest law firms simply because Trump doesn’t like them. Violated court orders on a massive scale. As the chief federal district judge of Minnesota recently wrote, “ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.”
And shaken down some of the country’s largest universities by illegally threatening to withhold funding; and engaged in breathtaking corruption: as the conservative writer David Frum stated, “Trump’s scale of stealing and bribe-taking has never been remotely paralleled in any democratic country ever before.”
And that’s just for starters; there are dozens more examples.
The criminality, Speyer argues, is so flagrant, so ubiquitous, and so unlike anything this country has ever imagined that for many Americans it is simply “exhausting, numbing, and overwhelming.”
That is by design. Ask Steve Bannon.
But viewing the Trump administration as a massive crime syndicate allows us to be clear-eyed about what is coming down the road, and to plan accordingly. To take the most urgent example, there ought to be no question as to whether Trump will try to steal the midterm elections. Of course he will try to steal them. Criminals gonna crime.
Trump tried to steal the 2020 elections, and the lack of any consequences for that supremely traitorous act only further emboldened him. It is every patriotic American’s duty to oppose the coming effort to nullify the will of the voters.
Stopping that will take massive resistance along the Minneapolis model. It’s coming. Possibly backed by Trump’s praetorian guard from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have no role in state election administration. But that will not prevent this criminal regime from deploying them to intimidate voters ahead of the midterm elections or to disrupt vote counting afterwards. The damage will be done while Trump keeps opponent lawyers tied up in court.
Already, North Carolina Republican election officials are laying the groundwork with a mass mailing I mentioned a week ago. NC Newsline reiterates that “more than 241,000 voters are receiving letters from the N.C. Board of Elections declaring that an identification number in their registration record could not be ‘validated.’” I am reliably told that there is no code in the public file indicating who got the letters and why. It’s a secret list.
An NC Newsline commentary observes:
In a state where voters have endured years of baseless voter suppression attacks, mass mailings like this do not land as routine paperwork. They land as warnings. They create uncertainty, and uncertainty is one of the most effective forms of voter suppression because it makes eligible voters question whether they should show up at all.
In this case, the state board’s staff sent the poorly worded letter without notifying county election officials of its contents or that it would mostly go to legacy voters – people who registered more than two decades ago and who have voted for years. Those elderly voters were especially confused, scared or angry.
The letter did point out that an “unvalidated” ID number is frequently caused by name changes, formatting mismatches, or clerical errors. But instead of quietly resolving issues – for example, at the polling place check-in desk – the board chose to spend tax dollars on an election-season mailing that predictably caused voter anxiety.
In a similarly heavy-handed way, the Republican-controlled state elections board is demanding access to otherwise private nine-digit Social Security numbers held by the Division of Motor Vehicles. For decades, the last four digits, along with a birthdate, have been enough to maintain voter rolls. But the new Board is pursuing an ambitious plan to screen and possibly purge voters by using a controversial, flawed federal database with SSNs.
That would be the one that ProPublica decries as “Not Ready for Prime Time.” A Federal Tool to Check Voter Citizenship Keeps Making Mistakes.
The GOP will be fear-mongering this fall about “unvalidated” voters risking jail for casting a ballot. They are even now setting up November vote challenges akin to GOP Judge Jefferson Griffin’s six months of court challenges after he lost the state Supreme Court race to Allison Riggs in Nov. 2024. It’s another GOP twofer. Vote suppression up front, vote challenging on the back side.
Benjamin Franklin famously cautioned upon exiting Independence Hall that the framers had crafted “A Republic, if you can keep it.” Never since the Civil War of the 19th century have Americans been so tested. What are Americans of this century prepared to do to keep it? Or will they sleep while beside them “the most powerful crime syndicate in history” smothers their beloved republic under a pillow?
