TRUMP NEWS?
I lived in Washington, D.C. in the sixties as a student at Howard University and I can tell you with certainty that Trump’s claim to have cleaned up crime in the city is pure puffery, especially when he focuses his claims on the downtown area, which has been thriving for a long time with crime being minimal in stark comparison to the areas of D.C. where no federal troops have been assigned such as the lower North West and the South East. I’ve lived in both and can tell you that if troops had been assigned to either or both, it would only have served to rile up the populations and the results would not have been pretty for either the residents or the “occupiers.” The same goes for Chicago where I also worked on the West Side and lived for a while on the South Side and I laugh at the thought that Trump would consider sending troops to either neighborhood because the people wouldn’t tolerate it, which is why my bet is that Trump would probably limit troops to the decidedly peaceful downtown around the Loop area for people-gazing and trash clean-up duties. His occupation actions are purely performative. The danger is that they become so normalized in our minds that we become numbed to them and relax while they slowly morph into the future police state that Trump seems to covet. (The same goes for Baltimore where I visited many times with a friend whose father lived in the toughest parts of the city and where I interned for one summer at a downtown law firm. I would expect to see troops lingering by the downtown’s excellent harbor area and otherwise accomplishing little or nothing.)

TRUMP NEWS?
“It has been sickening to watch Trump tell lie after lie about the city he lives in (Washington, D.C.) most of the time but clearly knows nothing about. Yes, Washington went a week without a homicide since Trump’s National Guard deployment. Good. Great even. But he talked about that as if it had never happened before. ‘That’s the first time in anybody’s memory that you haven’t had a murder in a week,’ he said. Well, that’s true—for people whose memories go back only to mid-May. If your memory goes back any further than that—like all the way back to January 1 (before the “occupation”), say–then you might recall that this is the fifth week this year without a homicide. The others include February 25 to March 4, March 5 to March 12 (yep, that was two weeks in a row), April 11 to 18 and May 4 through 11. But the right-wing media repeat Trump’s garbage, and his idiot backers believe it.”
(Michael Tomansky writing for the New Republic, August 25 as reported in the Wall Street Journal, August 27, 2025).

TRUMP NEWS?
Speaking of a “police state,” many of the nation’s Hispanic communities voted for Trump in record numbers and he repays them by deploying blind, nameless thugs in their communities who snatch people off the street, from their homes, from their places of employment, from their shopping venues and court appearances and churches and schools and “disappearing” them and eventually deporting them—often to parts unknown—without due process. And most of the “kidnapped” folks are not the criminals he promised to remove. And those caught up in the terror are far too often legal residents and citizens. I’m curious as to whether folks in these Hispanic communities who voted for Trump have any “buyer’s remorse”.

TRUMP NEWS?
And soon, he’ll come for the rest of us. It’s the cloud that should hang over the heads of everyone who might not share Trump’s views and dares to speak out against him or otherwise offend his fragile ego, people like me who dare to write the truth. I often do imagine masked White goons descending on my door and whisking me away to one of Trump’s gulags and deporting me to some unknown place in Central Africa. (Or maybe Trump might consider dropping me off on the shores of Scotland where his mother immigrated from to America since some of my ancestors passed down the Scottish blood of their rapist slave masters through my family.)

TRUMP NEWS?
Most of us watched the racist spectacle of Trump attacking the only Black member of the Federal Reserve Board by accusing her of fraud for allegedly claiming in her mortgage applications that both of her residences were her primary home and gaining benefits for each that, by law, she could only claim for one. Well, truth be told! Bank records that Trump used as evidence proved just the opposite. She disclosed both that the second residence was a second home and a vacation home and she received no primary home benefits from it. On the other hand (irony of ironies), it has been discovered that the parents of Trump’s Treasury Department Secretary, who provided the information to Trump (possibly illegally), had performed the exact same “illegal” transaction he had accused the Black member of the Federal Reserve of, whom he is still trying to fire.
(It is not insignificant that Trump minions appealed to the Supreme Court to allow them to fire the Fed member anyway. How the Court decides on this obvious injustice will be a good indicator of just how corrupt it intends to become.)

TRUMP NEWS
I’m surprised that nobody has said out loud that Trump is out to punish the entire Black race, past and present, as punishment for South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn’s endorsement of Joe Biden in the 2020 election, an endorsement that corralled the Black vote for Biden and eventually led to Trump’s defeat. Somebody needs to tell Trump that we’ll weather his storm (just as we have so many much worse storms in the past) and come back even stronger long after he’s gone. And somebody should remind him that history and God will judge us far better than he will be judged. ■