Commentary by Jerry Lanson

Given the daily horrors that pass for policy in the Trump administration, it’s little surprise some stories simply slip past below the radar. At other times, the news media take days to catch up to them.

Such was the case with a National Park Service decision last week that expunged MLK’s birthday and Juneteenth from the list of holidays on which entrance to the national parks is free. In their place, Americans were invited to enter the parks for free on Donald Trump’s birthday, June 14.

Though The New York Times was playing catch up when it posted the story on Monday, the paper did a good job of placing this particular action in context. “The changes,” it wrote, “follow previous moves by the Trump administration to take down materials mentioning slavery at national parks and come as part of a broader effort by the White House to erase or play down Black history at government sites.”

The park service’s action, in short, was one more prime example of the whitewashing of America under Donald Trump’s presidency. Whether stripping words like “race” and “racism” from government documents, trying to bully private sector companies and universities into eliminating any mention of diversity, equity and inclusion, or detaining citizens because of the color of their skin, this administration never seems to miss an opportunity to diminish the rich mix of ethnicities, cultures and races that have shaped the democratic, economic and human foundations of this country.

Nor is foreign policy exempt, as the administration turns its back on Ukraine and turns its sights – as in gun sights -- on Venezuela and the rest of Latin America. Last Friday, the Harvard historian Heather Cox Richardson posted a chilling essay noting dramatic changes in the Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy. It has turned its back, she writes, on “the global engagements that underpin the rules-based international order that the World War II allies put in place after the war to prevent another world war.”

The new strategy, she suggests, does much more, too.

“Observers,” she continued, “referred to the document as National Security Council Report (NSC) 88 and noted that it could have been written in just 14 words. White supremacists use 88 to refer to Adolf Hitler and ‘fourteen words’ to refer to a popular white supremacist slogan.”

Trump’s repeated reference in recent days to Somali people as “garbage” is one more example that he and his administration have thrown out any trace of subtlety in its escalating assault on people of all shades of color. That assault is evident, too, in the unrelentingly cruel actions of federal immigration officers. Two stories in the past week make that point.

A headline in Sunday’s Washington Post read, “The US citizens getting caught in Trump’s immigration crackdown.”

The article began with the story of a 15-year-old high school student, born in the Chicago area, who was chased three blocks by federal agents from a basketball court at which he was playing and tackled for no reason other than his skin tone.

“In Chicago and elsewhere, Latino US citizens and lawful residents describe being detained for hours, and in some cases days,” WaPo reported. “Others were not detained, but say they were assaulted because of the color of their skin.”

WGBH Public Radio reported last week that agents from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) plucked people waiting for their naturalization ceremony from a line at Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall because they originally emigrated here from one of the 19 countries the administration classified on December 2 as “high risk.” The countries include Haiti, Somalia, the Republic of the Congo and Iran, among others.

The process of being eligible for a naturalization ceremony, the final step to becoming a US citizen, takes years.

While increasingly targeting citizens and would-be citizens of color, Trump’s ICE agents continue to round up undocumented immigrants around the country who have jobs, contribute to the economy, are raising families and have no criminal record. Some, like the Babson College student arrested just before Thanksgiving as she was about to fly home to Texas to surprise her parents, are so-called Dreamers, undocumented immigrations who arrived as small children and have lived in this country most of their lives. For many years they’ve been left alone. No longer.

And despite ICE’s oft-repeated assertion that it is only arresting really bad actors, data show an entirely different reality. The New York Times reported last week that 84 percent of those arrested in ICE crackdowns in Washington, D.C. between Aug. 11 and Sept. 10 had no criminal record.

Such stories and statistics have become so commonplace that too many of us shrug in resignation, which ultimately is a form of acceptance. That, tragically, appears to include most state and federal Democratic lawmakers, who could – and should – do far more to resist this tidal wave of tyranny. It’s an embarrassment.

“The lack of a unified [Democratic] voice comes as the crackdown on minority communities, including legal residents, has grown more aggressive.” The Washington Post wrote Tuesday.

The article noted a sharp discrepancy between the actions of Democrats holding elected office during the first Trump administration and today.

“When President Donald Trump imposed a travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries in 2017, Democratic advocates and lawmakers raced to airports across the country to protest,” wrote the WaPo. “They held news conferences and visited detention centers the following year when Trump began separating migrant children from their parents.

“Trump has unleashed even more draconian immigration policies in his second term …. But Democrats have not mounted the same visible pushback even as Trump has halted immigration applications from 19 countries, deployed federal agents into minority communities and called Somali immigrants ‘garbage’”

Abdullah Hammoud, the Democratic mayor of the Arab-majority city of Dearborn, Michigan, told the WaPo he fears things will get worse in the face of this timidity. “The fact we do not have a strong counterresponse from [Democratic] elected officials at all levels of government is the most frightening,” he said.

Certainly, some Democrats have consistently and courageously spoken out, among them California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy. But more prominent voices are needed and all must sustain their efforts. Instead, 11 months into Trump 2, the strongest and most sustained pushback is coming from civil liberties groups like the ACLU, immigrant support organizations such as LUCE immigrant justice network of Massachusetts, and ordinary citizens, such as the Chicagoans who took to blowing whistles whenever they saw ICE approaching.

This week, they were joined by the parishioners of a Catholic Church in Dedham, Massachusetts. St. Susanna Parish caused a stir in the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston when it displayed an outdoor Nativity scene with an unusual twist to mark the Christmas season. Shepherds, sheep and wise men gathered around the manager, but Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus were nowhere to be seen. They are replaced by a sign in blue letters that reads “ICE WAS HERE,” The New York Times reported. A smaller sign reassures passersby that “The Holy Family is safe in the Sanctuary of our Church.”

The Archdiocese ordered the parish to remove the signage, calling it “divisive political messaging,” the NYT reported. But courage can come from the grass roots. As of this writing, St. Susanna has refused.

This commentary originally appeared in Lanson’s Substack, From the Grassroots and is republished by permission.

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THURSDAY 12/11/25

Commentary by Stephen Macaulay

One of the characteristics that made America great is the willingness of its people to stand up for the little guy, regardless of the sacrifice. Americans didn’t let bullies push the weaker parties around. What was in it for us? The knowledge that the right thing — not the easy thing, not the popular thing, not the transactional thing — was being done because that is what we believed in: the right thing.

You may note the use of the past tense here.

That’s because of this exchange between Donald Trump and Dasha Burns of Politico:

Burns: On Sunday, your son, Donald Trump Jr., responded to a reporter’s question about whether you will walk away from Ukraine, and your son said, I think he may. Is that correct?

Trump: No, it’s not correct. But it’s not exactly wrong. We have to ... you know, they have to play ball. If they, uh ... if they don’t read agreements, potential agreements, you know, it’s, uh, not easy with Russia ’cause Russia has the upper ... upper hand. And they always did. They’re much bigger. They’re much stronger in that sense. I give Ukraine a lot of ... a lot of ... I give the people of Ukraine and the military of Ukraine tremendous credit for the, you know, bravery and for the fighting and all of that. But you know, at some point, size will win, generally. And this is a massive size, uh ... you ... when you take a look at the numbers, I mean, the numbers are just crazy.

Here we go again, with Trump and the game metaphor for the war in Ukraine. When he and JD Vance, with a tremendous lack of civility and decorum, attacked Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an Oval Office meeting back in February, there was this:

Trump: "You should be thankful. You don't have the cards. With us, you have the cards, but without us, you don't have any cards."

Back when America was great, there was no demand that anyone express thankfulness for our help. Doing the right thing was reward onto itself.

Zelenskyy, whose country was being relentlessly attacked by Russia, whose people were dying, said, “I’m not playing cards.”

He was — and he is — trying to save his country from an aggressor.

(Look: Zelenskyy could be a total prick. But there are some 36 million Ukrainians under attack, not because Zelenskyy is or isn’t a prick, but because Vladimir Putin wants to take their land. So shouldn’t our leaders be the bigger people and exhibit nobility, not pettiness?)

Trump’s reference to “if they don’t read agreements, potential agreements, you know, it’s, uh, not easy with Russia ’cause Russia has the upper ... upper hand” goes to an unsubstantiated claim that Zelenskyy hasn’t read a US peace proposal. In other words, he can blame things on Zelenskyy. (One wonders whether Trump has actually read the plan given his propensity to watch TV, day and night.)

“But you know, at some point, size will win, generally. And this is a massive size, uh ... you ... when you take a look at the numbers, I mean, the numbers are just crazy.”

There it is: The admission that Russia will beat Ukraine into submission because the US won’t help as it once would have.

Trump talks about numbers. So how about these: US defense spending is on the order of $850 billion per year. Russia’s spending is about $120 billion.

The US has 13,000 military aircraft. Russia has 4,300.

Armored vehicles? 360,000 for the US, 161,000 for Russia.

This is not to suggest that the US should go to war with Russia, but that the US could, if Donald Trump believed in the ethos that helped make America great, stand up to Putin and point back over his shoulder at the massive military might that the US has, Putin would undoubtedly rethink his approach. But as things stand, Trump’s actions show that he’s more inclined to let the aggressor take the spoils.

And what do we do instead with our military prowess? The Trump administration seems to think that using high-tech munitions on small go-fast boats in the Caribbean proves our strength.

During the Q&A about Ukraine and Russia, during which he claimed to have ended eight wars (How’d he do? Armenia and Azerbaijan have no ratified treaty and are still going at it; Israel and Hamas haven’t laid down arms; Cambodia and Thailand are fighting; Egypt and Ethiopia weren’t even at war), he suddenly, but predictably, said this:

“You know, think of it, if our election wasn’t rigged ... there was a rigged election. Now everyone knows it. It’s gonna come out over the next couple of months, too, loud and clear ’cause we have all the information and everything. But if the election wasn’t rigged in Stalin*, uh, you wouldn’t even be talking about Ukraine right now.”

Yes, if he’d been president instead of Biden there would have been no war is his claim — which he repeats over and over again, but you don’t hear him repeat his earlier claim about bringing the war to an end in a day. 

It is impossible to prove that Russia wouldn’t have attacked Ukraine had Trump been president in 2022.

It is simple to prove that Trump didn’t end the war on his first day in office.

And long after his last day in office his treatment of the Ukrainian people will be remembered.

==

*This quote is from the official Politico transcript. It isn’t clear why the most vicious dictator of the 20^th century is brought up in relation to the 2020 US presidential election.

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THURSDAY 12/11/25

In our latest Substack post we take sides and support the Algorithm Accountability Act, which would “impose a duty of care on the companies that utilize recommendations-based algorithms.”

It would reform Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act of 1996, which gives social media sites like Facebook, X-Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Bluesky, etc., carte-blanche to run lies, slander, conspiracy theories and the like, and pull readers to one political extreme or the other.

This is not, however, a left-column political position. It is not a right-column political position. 

We’re happy to say the bill proposed in the Senate is bipartisan. Its co-sponsors are Sens. John Curtis (R-UT) and Mark Kelly (D-AZ). 

We are happy to replace those above social media sites with this civil media site committed to no echo-chambers, no false equivalencies and with a love for and commitment to verified facts.

Whether you agree or disagree with us in our support of the Algorithm Accountability Act, and/or you have a strong opinion on any of the news/aggregate/analysis of our center column or the commentaries in the right and left columns, we want to hear from you. If there is a big issue you feel we’ve missed, we’d also like to hear about that too.

Become a Citizen Pundit with an email to editors@thehustings.news and please indicate in the subject line whether you lean left or right so we may post your comments in the proper column. --Editors

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TUESDAY 12/9/25

Commentary by Stephen Macaulay

It is probably a good thing that Face the Nation is on Sunday mornings.

If it were on a Friday or Saturday night some people might be inclined to participate in a drinking game: “Do a shot every time Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant says something that’s nonsense, misleading, obscuration, or otherwise not what the rest of the world understands to be reality.”

Within a matter of minutes there would be an enormous intake of alcohol.

Let’s take a look at some of Sunday, December 7.

MARGARET BRENNAN: You do think there is an affordability problem?

SEC. BESSENT: Sorry?

MARGARET BRENNAN: You do believe there's an affordability problem?

SEC. BESSENT: Oh, I think the Biden administration created a terr—

MARGARET BRENNAN: No, but now we're nearly 12 months in, you said the president would own the economy at this point.

SEC. BESSENT: I said that the Biden administration created the worst inflation in 50 years, and maybe for working Americans, the worst inflation of all time. And we have pulled that number down. . . .

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 12 months ago, when Joe Biden was still president, inflation was at 3%.

Where are we at now?

3%.

Sort of brings to mind George W. Bush’s line in September 2005 to then head of FEMA, Michael Brown: “doing a heck of a job, Brownie.” 

To be fair to Mr. Bessent, let’s continue with that answer:

“. . . - that Strategas research does something called the common man index. Under Biden, the accumulated inflation number, as measured by CPI, was about 20%. Their index showed 35. This year for the first time, the common man index is below the inflation index because the basket of goods for working Americans, food, gasoline, rent is coming down.”

Now, have you ever heard of Strategas?

Probably not, unless you’re involved in institutional investing (a.k.a., big money).

One might think that Bessent would rely on numbers generated from the department he runs, not an investment firm. But you’ve got to find the numbers where you can find them, right?

Have you every heard of the “common man index”?

Probably not, unless you’re following Strategas.

Now while whatever Bessent was trying to say — or maybe that’s not trying to say — there’s this, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which calculates the Consumer Price Index:

From September 2024 to September 2025, the unadjusted price of food has gone up 3%. The price of energy is up overall 2.8%, but while gas prices are down 0.5%, that’s more than offset by the amounts paid for things like electricity, which is up 5.1% during the same period. 

And rent? Well, the “Shelter” category in the CPI, which includes rent, is up 3.6%.

By this point, were the drinking game underway, there would be moderate tipsiness.

Margaret Brennan brought up the issue of farmers having economic issues, particularly those involved in harvesting soybeans.

Bessent, perhaps channeling the braggadocio of his boss, said, “I probably know more about any Treasury Secretary than- about agriculture since the 1800s and I can tell you that what farmers need is certainty, and we have put that in place with this trade deal. Twelve-and-a-half million metric tons this year, 25 million metric tons for the next three years, for soybeans, also sorghum, the- and lumber.”

The trade deal he is referring to is that with China.

It sounds as though they’re going to be buying a lot of ag products.

Which would be good for American farmers.

But it brings up the trade deal the first Trump Administration struck with China in 2020.

According to research by the Peterson Institute for International Economics (probably more well known than Strategas) published in 2022:

“In the end, China bought only 58% of the US exports it had committed to purchase under the agreement, not even enough to reach its import levels from before the trade war. Put differently, China bought none of the additional $200 billion of exports Trump's deal had promised.”

And as for that “certainty” Bessent refers to, the PIIE report goes on to note:

“After two years of escalating tariffs and rhetoric about economic decoupling, the deal did little to reduce the uncertainty discouraging the business investment needed to restart US exports.”

While much of what they’re referring to relates to manufactured products, there’s this, from a piece published last year in farmdoc daily, produced by the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign:

“The share of US soybean exports going to China increased from below 40% in the mid-2000s to around 60% from 2011 until plummeting to just 18% during the trade war in 2018.  China’s share of US soybean exports has since increased but not fully recovered to pre-trade war levels, averaging just over 50% since 2020.”

In other words, the Trump-initiated trade war with China in 2018 greatly reduced the amount of soybeans bought by China — and there has not been full recovery. So even if they follow through, seems like the farmers would be at a deficit had it not been for the Trump administration paying them $28 billion during 2018-19. (Soybean farmers got $7.3 billion of that.)

Brennan brought up the issue of affordability, which Bessant’s boss has referred to as “a con job” by the Democrats.

Bessant’s go-to response (well, you might think its Biden, but in this case it is not):

 “I think the President’s frustrated by the media coverage of what’s going on.”

That’s right: Blame the media for the rise in food prices.

But Bessant wants you to know things are OK:

“I will tell you that affordability has two components, there is inflation, and then there is real incomes. Real incomes are up about 1%.”

Let’s do a little math. If inflation is up 3% and real incomes are up 1%, then there is a 2% delta between those two numbers: the increase in wages is less than the increase in costs.

Bessent:

“The American people don't know how good they have it.”

Bottoms up!

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TUESDAY 12/9/25

Commentary by Jerry Lanson

On the eve of Thanksgiving, the shooting of two members of West Virginia’s National Guard near the White House rattled Americans preparing for this country’s most universal, family-friendly gathering.

Sarah Beckstrom, 20, died of her wounds. Andrew Wolfe, 24, remains in critical condition.

The attack on the Guardsmen, by an Afghan refugee who once worked for our CIA in Afghanistan was tragic, its ostensible motive thus far unclear. Gun violence begets more gun violence. It cuts live short, deepens tensions, fear and division. All Americans must condemn such an incident and honor its victims.

But violence can take many forms.

On Thanksgiving, the day after the Washington, D.C., shooting, President Trump doubled down on what has become his signature cruelty – his unrelenting demonization of asylum seekers and immigrants, documented and undocumented. His drive to deport them, splintering families and sometimes sending loved ones to countries in which they’ve never lived.

Wrote The New York Times, “In a pair of lengthy social media posts just before midnight on Thursday, Mr. Trump said he would ‘permanently pause immigration from all Third World countries’ and denaturalize migrants ‘who undermine domestic tranquility.’” He did not elaborate.

On Friday it became clear that all asylum reviews would be frozen. CNN’s website ran this headline: “An emboldened Trump escalates his anti-immigration crackdown after National Guard shooting.”

In truth, however, Donald Trump’s anti-immigration agents have been escalating their crackdown for months. Here are just three headlines and stories that ran Wednesday morning, hours before the Washington attack.

• ‘I’m Losing Everything’: Babson College Freshman Speaks Out About her Deportation to Honduras Ahead of Thanksgiving – The Boston Globe

Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, a freshman studying business at Boston’s Babson College, was about to board a plane to surprise her family in Austin, Texas, for Thanksgiving. Then ICE agents grabbed her at Logan Airport and whisked her away in an unmarked car. Within 48 hours she had been deported to Honduras, a country she had left 12 years ago at Age 7.

The basis of the arrest, the Globe reported, was a “final order of removal” issued when Belloza was 11. Both she and her father told the newspaper they weren’t even aware of it. About 1.3 million such orders existed when Trump began his term, the Globe reports, but few were enforced for those, like Belloza, with no record of any kind. She was a scholarship student who had hoped to open a tailor shop with her father.

• A Mother Was Taken into Custody by ICE. Then the Public Learned of Her Family Tie to the White House – CNN

Bruna Caroline Ferreira came to the United States from Brazil at Age 6. When she was arrested in the Boston suburb of Revere earlier this month, few people beyond her family and neighbors noticed. On Wednesday, however, it was reported that Ferreira is the mother of the 11-year-old nephew of Karoline Leavitt, Donald Trump’s press secretary and biggest cheerleader. The boy, CNNreported, lives with his father, Leavitt’s brother, in New Hampshire, but his mother had maintained regular contact. Ferreira remains in custody in Louisiana awaiting a hearing that could lead to her deportation.

• Green Card Interviews End in Handcuffs for Spouses of US Citizens – The New York Times

Call it carefully planned cruelty. As the subhead of this article reads, “Agents are arresting foreign-born spouses [of citizens] when they report for the final step to obtain permanent residency, and charging them with visa violations that could result in deportation.”

That’s right, the spouses of US citizens are being set up to be separated from their husband or wife when they come to US courthouses to follow legal procedures to finalize their permanent residency. Perhaps we should ask President Trump these questions: How does this brutality make us a better country? A safer country? A richer country? In any way whatsoever?

“I had to take my baby from my crying wife’s arm,” said 33-year-old Stephen Paul of San Diego. “It’s insane to have them rip our family apart. Whoever is directing this has completely lost touch with their mission to the country.” Paul has had to take a leave from his job in the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department to care for the 4-month-old. His wife is British.

“In 25 years of practice, I have never seen anything like this,” Paul’s lawyer, Johanna Keamy, told the NYT.

Immigration lawyers told the newspaper that in San Diego alone, several dozen arrests of spouses have taken place in similar circumstances just since November 12.

These kinds of stories document what might be considered their own acts of terror, particularly in the way they are carried out. They are their own form of violence -- against families, against communities, against love.

Unlike bullets, wrenching physical separation does not kill. But such acts deeply scar, not only those forced to leave but those left behind, not only the bereaved families, but those bound to them in community.

So, it is no surprise that the Trump Administration’s response to the brutal act of a lone gunman has thrown up arbitrary and potentially insurmountable barriers for all asylum seekers and for all immigrants from “third-world countries” (read, anyone with a non-white skin tone). It is no surprise that the administration has further militarized Washington, D.C., itself, calling up an additional 500 National Guard to join the 2,000 already patrolling the streets.

As The Washington Post wrote last Sunday: “Over Thanksgiving weekend, and a day George Washington proclaimed as one to be celebrated with unity and ‘grateful hearts,’ Trump went on a multi-post tirade on social media, saying US citizenship should be stripped from naturalized Americans ‘who undermine domestic tranquility.’ More darkly, he also called for deporting those deemed ‘non-compatible with Western Civilization.’”

In his weekend tirade, Trump also targeted the Biden administration, which had allowed the family of the suspected shooter, 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, to enter the United States in 2021 because of his service to our CIA.

What Trump never mentioned, WaPo writes, is that Lakanwal was granted asylum earlier this year – under the Trump Administration. That, of course, would not fit the week’s script of demonization.

Reprinted by permission from Lanson's Substack, From the Grassroots.

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THURSDAY 12/4/25

Commentary by Stephen Macaulay

Juan Orlando Hernandez was convicted in March 2024 of facilitating the smuggling of some 400 pounds of cocaine into the United States. 

According to the US Department of Justice, 400 tons of cocaine is on the order of 4,500,000,000 individual doses.

That means every man, woman and child in the US could have had 13 snorts of the drug.

Hernandez was sentenced by a US court to spend 45 years in prison.

He is the sort of person that Donald Trump might characterize as being a “bad hombre.”

So what is Donald Trump going to do to Juan Orlando Hernandez?

Pardon him.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration is blowing up boats in the Caribbean. These boats are supposed to be owned and operated by drug runners.

According to a report in The Washington Post on November 28, when it was determined that one of the boats blown up wasn’t completely destroyed and there were two survivors, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegsteth (who fancies himself as “Secretary of War,” presumably having played plenty of video games during his formative years) allegedly ordered that those two get taken out, too.

Which violates a whole lot of law, to say nothing of basic decency. 

After the WaPo report Hegseth posted on X that the “’lethal, kinetic strikes’” are targeting people “affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization.”

It seems, however, that the Trump Administration doesn’t want to share its evidence of those affiliations with anyone in Congress.

More than 80 people have been killed. 

According to the US Congress, a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” (FTO) can be designated by the secretary of state if the entity meets three criteria: “the suspected terrorist group must (1) be a foreign organization; (2) engage in ‘terrorist activity,’ ‘terrorism,’ or retain the capability and intent to engage in terrorist activity or terrorism; and (3) threaten the security of US nationals or the national defense, foreign relations, or economic interests of the United States.”

As for what a “terrorist activity” is, the Immigration and Nationality Act defines it as including “specific types of violent actions (hijackings, assassinations, etc.).” Then there’s the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, which defines “terrorism” as a "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents."

In other words, there are specific boxes that must be checked before there is a designation. People just can’t make it up as they go along.

No one wants US citizens to be endangered, corrupted or otherwise negatively impacted from illegal drugs coming from the Caribbean or anywhere else, like Honduras. 

Juan Orlando Hernandez is the former president of Honduras (2014-2022). He was extradited to the US after he was out of office.

So let’s see: Hernandez was tried and convicted. And now pardoned.

And let’s not forget Donald Trump’s pardon of Changpeng Zhao, who pled guilty and was convicted, along with the cryptocurrency company he ran, Binance (which was hit with a $4.3-billion settlement), for money laundering. The money laundering was associated with both drug cartels and terrorists.

Seems a bit strange that there is a willingness to pardon convicted criminals and to blow up boats being manned by what can only be thought of as alleged criminals.

One of the things that makes this country truly great — not “great” in the context of a red baseball cap — is that it is based on the rule of law.

Apparently the rule of law is something that is now becoming conditional, with the conditions being set on an ad-hoc basis.

Macaulay is pundit-at-large for The Hustings.

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THURSDAY 12/4/25

Commentary by Stephen Macaulay

While “tariffs” might be his favorite word, “weak dollar” might be close in the level of affection that Donald Trump has for it.

Consider these quotes:

• “You make a hell of a lot more money with a weaker dollar. When you have a strong dollar, you can’t sell anything. It’s only good for inflation, and it’s good psychologically. It makes you feel good.”
• "So when we have a strong dollar, one thing happens: It sounds good. But you don't do any tourism. You can't sell tractors, you can't sell trucks, you can't sell anything,"
• "It is good for inflation, that's about it."

His typical exaggeration notwithstanding, the Trump administration has done its damnedest to weaken the dollar.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED) earlier this month:

“Recent exchange rates with stable currencies (e.g., the euro, yen, and Swiss franc) suggest a general weakening in the US dollar, which is consistent with the current federal administration’s stated preferences.”

FRED calculated that if compared to the dollar exchange rate against the Euro area was 100 in January 2025, it was down to 89 in October, an 11% decrease.

One of the ways the administration has weakened the dollar is by its agitated approach to the global economy. There has been Trump’s consistent “they’re ripping us off” refrain, which evinces a lack of understanding of global supply chains. 

There are the on-again-off-again tariffs and the announcement of “deals” without any specificity. 

There are the attacks by Trump on Fed chairman Jerome Powell — “I’ll be honest, I’d like to fire his ass;” “He’s an average mentally person. . .Low IQ for what he does. I think he’s a very stupid person, actually,” which makes one wonder about Trump’s IQ, given that he was the man who nominated Powell to the Fed.

There are the tariffs on imported goods, which function as a tax paid by consumers, which can increase inflation, which reduces the purchasing power of the dollar.

There is simply a whole lot of uncertainty, and corporations and central banks don’t like that.

The dollar has long been the global reserve currency. It has been that because it was considered to be stable, so not only did it facilitate global trade (something that the Trump Administration’s policies are hobbling, to put it mildly), but it provided confidence in the markets.

Uncertainty ≠ Confidence

Trump wants the dollar to remain as the global reserve currency, yet his administration’s actions are doing things that put it in jeopardy. Although some people in the US are skeptical that the Chinese renminbi could replace the dollar, some people were skeptical of the Chinese auto industry versus the US. Yet Ford CEO Jim Farley recently said: “They have enough capacity in China with the existing factories to serve the entire North American market, put us all out of business.”

Yes, the dollar can be replaced.

If we go back to Trump’s quotes about the consequences of a strong dollar, there’s the comment about tourism. He’s saying, in effect, that a weak dollar means that foreign tourist’s currency will buy them more in the US market, so conceivably they’ll be flocking to the US.

According to a recent report from the US Travel Association:

“Travel to the United States is projected to reverse course and fall to just 85% of 2019 levels in 2025.”

Canadians have generally been about 25% of all international tourists to the US. And people from Canada, which have generally represented about a quarter of all tourists to the US, are not taking as many trips: in September land crossings were down about 35% and air travel down 27%.

Canadian tourists spent $20.5 billion in the US in 2024. 

They’re simply not coming in the numbers they had been before the Trump Administration destroyed relations with our former best neighbor. If we average the September reduction in Canadian tourists (31%) and then subtract that from the $20.5 billion, this means that the Canadian spend would be $14.1 billion. How helpful is that to the US economy?

For a man who is a vaunted businessman (despite that the Trump Organization has filed for Chapter 11 six times — and while everyone knows that casinos effectively print money, most of those reorgs were based on casinos) and dealmaker, his understanding of things like the importance of the U.S. dollar is dubious at most.

Macaulay is pundit-at-large for The Hustings. Most of his columns appear on the right; This one is on the left to provide balance with Rich Corbett on the debate over the weakening US dollar.

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TUESDAY 12/2/25

Commentary by Rich Corbett

In the grand theater of economics, supply and demand are often cast as the star performers — shortages driving up prices, gluts pulling them down. But peel back the curtain, and you’ll find a quieter, more insidious culprit: the weakening US dollar.

As the world’s reserve currency, the dollar’s value doesn’t just influence trade; it permeates every price tag American consumers see. A depreciating dollar inflates the cost of imports, commodities, and even domestic goods priced against global benchmarks, creating the illusion of scarcity-driven inflation. This isn’t abstract theory; it’s playing out in real time with gold’s relentless climb and gasoline’s stubborn refusal to drop despite record US oil output. Policymakers and pundits fixate on supply chains and corporate greed, but the real story is monetary erosion — fueled by unchecked deficits, low interest rates, and geopolitical jitters — that’s eroding purchasing power faster than any cartel could dream.

Consider gold, the ultimate dollar barometer. Historically, its price in $USD moves inversely with the greenback’s strength: When the dollar weakens, it takes more dollars to buy the same ounce of bullion. Gold isn’t just jewelry or a hedge; it’s a global store of value, and its surge reflects not mining disruptions or jewelry demand, but a flight from fiat fragility. As the dollar has shed value, down over 6% year-over-year against major currencies, the price of gold has skyrocketed nearly 57% in the same period. This isn’t supply and demand run amok; it’s the market screaming that the dollar buys less.

The same dynamic plagues the pump. The US is pumping more crude than ever. It’s at a record 13.5 million barrels per day on average in 2025, up from 11.3 million in 2020, making America the world's top producer and flooding global markets with supply. Yet, average gasoline prices hover around $3.08 per gallon as of mid-November 2025, down only modestly from pandemic peaks but still 30% above pre-2020 levels. 

Why? Oil is priced in dollars on global exchanges. A weaker dollar bids up crude costs for everyone, including US refiners, who pass it on despite domestic abundance. OPEC's games and refinery hiccups get the blame, but the root? A currency that's lost its luster, inflating energy costs even as barrels overflow.

It’s Systemic

This isn't isolated, it's systemic. Broader inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI), sits at 3% year-over-year through September 2025, a cooling from 2022's double-digit frenzy but still 50% higher than the Federal Reserve's target. Economists tout "sticky" wages or housing shortages, but correlation with dollar weakness is stark: As the Dollar Index (DXY) dipped below 100, its lowest in years, CPI ticked up, gold soared, and gas refused to retreat. Import-heavy categories like electronics, apparel, and food bear the brunt, with foreign suppliers demanding more depreciated dollars to maintain their margins.

The implications are dire. If we misdiagnose the disease, treating symptoms like "greedflation" with price controls or antitrust saber-rattling, we risk deeper currency debasement. A weaker dollar erodes savings, hits exporters with retaliatory tariffs, and invites rivals like the euro or yuan to chip away at dollar dominance. The Fed can’t keep saving us and without fiscal discipline, we're on a treadmill to nowhere.

It's time to rewrite the script. Inflation isn't a supply-side boogeyman; it's the echo of a hollowed-out dollar. We need to stabilize the currency through balanced budgets, strategic tariffs on manipulators, and a pivot from endless money-printing. The buck stops with the buck itself.

Corbett is contributing pundit to The Hustings’ right column. His work also appears on his website, My Desultory Blog.

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TUESDAY 12/2/25

Commentary by Jerry Lanson

On Sunday, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd compared Donald Trump to the snapping turtle she had as child (“he’s mean when he’s cornered”). Perhaps she should also have compared him to a stray Tom cat, who barres his fangs when backed against an alley wall.

In recent days, the news has not been kind to Trump. Confronted by a nearly unanimous congressional vote to release the Epstein files, by rifts among his MAGA faithful and by a series of polls showing his percentile support descending among voters into the mid- to upper 30s, he’s lashed out viciously.

In one incident, he pointed his finger in the face of a Bloomberg reporter and called her “Piggy.” In another, when an ABC News correspondent asked him about the murder of reporter Jamal Khashoggi and also asked why he didn’t release the Epstein files on his own, he called her “a terrible person and a terrible reporter.” He then suggested that the chair of the Federal Communication Commission consider revoking the network’s broadcast license.

And when two Democratic U.S. senators and four representatives, all former veterans or intelligence officers, put out a YouTube video reminding members of the military that they should not follow illegal orders, Trump called their action treasonous -- and initially suggested that perhaps they should be hanged.

That same day, The Washington Post broke a story saying that the US Coast Guard, under Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, would no longer consider the swastika to be a form of hate speech.

This much is clear. If overtones of 1930s fascism served as a steady backdrop to the start of Trump’s second presidential term, the month of November has stripped away any pretense of subtlety.

His threat against Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and four members of the House of Representatives strikes me as the most unhinged and frightening of his words and actions this week, though, oddly, the news media largely chose to focus most of their reporting elsewhere.

The six Congress members produced their video, titled “Don’t Give Up the Ship,” to directly address members of the military and intelligence communities. Its message is straightforward, but avoids any specific examples (the military has been called in, among other things, to play a role in highly controversial immigration actions as well as the controversial sinking of vessels in the Caribbean and the Pacific).

In the video, the six Congress members take turns delivering this script:

“We know you are under enormous stress and pressure right now,” they tell their audience. “… This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens …..

“Our laws are clear – you can refuse illegal orders, you can refuse illegal orders, you must refuse illegal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate our law or our Constitution. We know this is hard [but] … now more than ever the American people need you. We need you to stand up for our laws, our Constitution and who we are as Americans. Don’t give up, don’t give up, don’t give up, don’t give up the ship.”

On Thursday night, Trump reacted harshly. He posted on Truth Social, branding the lawmakers’ message as “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” Slotkin told NBC she subsequently received “hundreds and hundreds” of threats. She now has round-the-clock protection from the Capitol Police, the Detroit News reported.

Though Trump stepped back from his initial death threat, he has kept up the heat. Late Saturday he wrote that the lawmakers “SHOULD BE IN JAIL RIGHT NOW,” Mediate reports.

Yet this crazed tirade against lawmakers exercising their freedom of speech to talk to Americans about upholding their oaths under the Constitution has elicited a highly muted response from mainstream media.

The authors of the political web site electoral-vote.com wrote that not a single major news website chose Trump’s threat as its top story the next day – from The New York Times to CNN.

“Not a one [of their lead stories] has anything to do with Trump pulling a Mussolini/Hitler/Franco and calling for leading members of the opposition party to be put to death,” electoral-vote.com noted. “The story is not found lower on the page(s), either. It has completely disappeared.”

Added the site, “When the President of the United States calls for violence against someone, all it takes is for one person to take it seriously.”

On Friday, one of the House members, Air Force veteran and Pennsylvania Democrat Chrissy Houlahan put it this way in a CNN interview:

“I never in a million years thought I’d be talking to you tonight about the fact that the president of the United States has called for my death by hanging for sedition and treason. And called for it because I and a number of other people published a video that says you have to follow the law.”

She has reported receiving bomb threats to her office.

Trump, meanwhile, got his usual rubber-stamp support from House Speaker Mike Johnson and only slightly more restrained support from the GOP Senate leadership. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt predictably defended Trump’s tweet, calling the Democratic members of Congress “seditious traitors.” Trump himself took a half-step backwards, telling Fox News radio that “I’m not threatening death, but I think they’re in serious trouble.”

In the video, Sen. Kelly, who served in the Navy and is a former astronaut, says: “Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders.”

It is a statement of fact.

On Friday, the day after The Washington Post reported that the Coast Guard would no longer classify the swastika as a hate symbol, the paper reported that the Coast Guard, “in a stunning and hasty reversal” spurred by “furious backlash,” would continue to classify both the swastika and noose as prohibited hate symbols.

But what comes next in the president’s ongoing sedition sideshow remains unclear.

Kelly, for his part, made clear he will not be cowed.

Trump, he said this weekend, is “going to try to intimidate us because he … didn’t like what we said… I think what any other president would have done is they would have retweeted that video and said two words, ‘of course.’ And maybe followed up with ‘of course members of the military should not follow illegal or unlawful orders.’ That’s what we should expect from a commander in chief. But not this guy.”

Perhaps he should have added that any other free press would have covered the story more effectively.

“For any other president,” wrote electoral-vote.com, “this [story] would dominate the news for weeks, if not months.”

Republished by permission from Lanson’s Substack From the Grassroots.

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WEDNESDAY 11/26/25

Commentary by Stephen Macaulay

We all know what an “emergency” is. Generally, it is something both urgent and unexpected.

A simple way is to think about the emergency room in a hospital as distinct from an in-patient room. While people going into both may need to have surgery, it is in the case of the first one that it needs to happen stat, while the second one is put on a schedule.

An emergency is bounded by time: it is a distinct period when something out of the ordinary occurs and requires immediate action.

Were an emergency not bounded by time it would essentially be the status quo, normality, the way things are.

For many of the tariffs that have been applied to trading partners the Trump Administration is using the International Economic Emergency Powers Act of 1977.

It, in part, allows the president, after declaring an emergency, to “deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy.”

“They’ve been ripping us off for years!” is a refrain Donald Trump has repeatedly used.

What was unusual about the network of trade that was established? What was the extraordinary threat? 

If General Motors wants to build pickup trucks in Mexico and if you want to buy one, is this odd or threatening?

What is the emergency?

If “They” have truly been “ripping us off for years,” it hardly seems to be an emergency situation. Rather, it is how things are.

One of the things that Donald Trump claimed was happening, for example, was that Canada was letting deadly fentanyl into the US. An emergency?

From October 2023 to September 2024 the US Customs and Border Protection operation seized 43 pounds of fentanyl coming in from Canada.

Meanwhile, during the same period 21,100 pounds of fentanyl were seized coming over the border from Mexico. That could be construed as something of an emergency. But 43?

One of the ways the Trump Administration calculated tariffs was based on whether a trade deficit existed with the other country. Or said more simply: the US bought more stuff from the other country than the other country bought from the US.

In 2023 the total trade deficit — that is, goods and services — with Canada was $40.6 billion.

In 2024 the total trade deficit with Canada was $35.7 billion.

Because the US likes to buy lots of Canadian oil, there was a trade deficit being run — for several years. But that trade deficit was going down.

Emergency?

The Ontario Government ran an ad during the television broadcast of a World Series Game that included Ronald Reagan’s observations as to why tariffs aren’t good.

An incensed Donald Trump immediately reacted, posting that he’d raise the tariff on Canadian goods by 10%.

Pique or emergency?

Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) participated in a video with other elected representatives* during which he and the others stated that American service personnel should not carry out “illegal orders.”

Kelly is a retired naval officer who flew military combat missions during the first Gulf War. He knows more than a little something about orders.

In the video Kelly states: "Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders.”

Yes, the Uniform Code of Military Justice makes it clear that service personnel must obey lawful orders, but not unlawful ones.

Doesn’t illegal = unlawful?

Donald Trump, incensed by the video, put on his social media posts including “This is really bad, and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP??? President DJT” and “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by death.” 

Sedition means, in part, resistance against lawful authority.

Kelly and his colleagues are recommending resistance against unlawful (a.k.a., “illegal”) orders.

Just as the Trump Administration seems to be defining “emergency” as any conditions they deem to be so, here they are taking exception to people telling other people to obey the law. Is this to suggest that service personnel should obey illegal orders?

In October 2016 during a campaign rally at the Iowa State Fairgrounds, then-candidate Trump said: "Don't believe what you see and don't believe what you hear, believe what I tell you.”

He still believes that, and he wants the American people to, as well.

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*Other participants in the video are Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), Representative Chris Deluzio (D-PA), Representative Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), Representative Maggie Goodlander (D-NH), and Representative Jason Crow (D-CO). It is worth noting that Deluzio, Goodlander, and Crow are all attorneys, so they undoubtedly know a bit more about the law — civil and military — than former TV personality Pete Hegseth.

Macaulay is pundit-at-large for The Hustings where he writes primarily for the right column.

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WED 11/26/25