As the United States braces for the loss of as many as 200,000 of its citizens, President Donald Trump continues to attack anything he dislikes as a “hoax”—and to attack anyone who dares pose legitimate questions to him.
On March 27, this exchange occurred between Trump and ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl.
Karl asked Trump what the President could do to assure “these states, these hospitals, that everybody who needs a ventilator will get a ventilator.”
TRUMP: “I think we’re in really good shape. This is a pandemic, the likes of which nobody’s seen before.”
KARL: “But everybody who needs one will be able to get a ventilator?”
TRUMP: “Look, don’t be a cutie pie, okay? Nobody’s done what we’ve been able to do.”
One week earlier, on March 20, Trump had blown up when NBC reporter Peter Alexander dared to pose a question about Coronavirus that the President didn’t want to answer.
After citing the latest pandemic statistics showing that thousands of Americans are now infected and millions are scared, Alexander asked, “What do you say to Americans who are scared?”
TRUMP: “I say that you’re a terrible reporter. That’s what I say. I think it’s a very nasty question, and I think it’s a very bad signal that you’re putting out to the American people. You’re doing sensationalism. And the same with NBC and Comcast [the parent company of NBC]. I don’t call it Comcast. I call it ‘Con-Cast. Let me just tell you something. That’s really bad reporting. And you ought to get back to reporting instead of sensationalism.”
Alexander said in a statement: “The bottom line is, this is a president whose experiences in life are very different than most Americans across this country right now. Not a person who likely worries about finances or had, not a person who in the course of his life is worried about his future.
“Not a person who is worried about where to find a paycheck for his bills or for his rent and as evidenced by the president suggesting that an opportunity to provide for American some reassurance about how they should feel right now, the president instead took it out on me.”
That’s why this is a good time to remember the closing remarks of Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) before the House of Representatives turned over its Articles of Impeachment against Trump to the United States Senate.
Schiff was addressing the unwillingness of Trump—and his defenders—to accept any evidence, no matter how damning, against him.
ADAM SCHIFF: “Anyone watching these proceedings, anyone reading the deposition transcripts would have the same impression that you evidently had from hearing my colleagues talk about the Russia hoax, that the whole idea that Russia had gotten involved in the 2016 election was a hoax put out by the Democrats.
“And of course, they’re not alone in pushing out this idea; it is trumpeted by no one other than the President of the United States who, almost on a daily basis at times, would comment and tweet and propagate the idea that Russia’s interference in our election was a hoax….
“The impression they would have you take from ‘It’s all hearsay’ is, because we in this committee were not in that Ward Room with you, Dr. Hill, we were not in that meeting earlier with Dr. Bolton, that because we’re not in the room, it’s all hearsay.
Adam Schiff
“After all, you’re relating what you heard, and you’re saying it, so it must be hearsay, and therefore, we don’t really have to think about it, do we? We don’t have to consider that you have direct evidence that this meeting in the White House was being withheld because the president wanted these meetings, these investigations. We can’t accept that.
“Well, if that were true, you could never present any evidence in court unless the jury was also in the Ward Room. That’s absurd. They don’t accept the documentary evidence, all the text messages about quid pro quos, and ‘Are we really saying,’ and ‘That’s crazy,’ and ‘My worst nightmare is the Russians will get it, and I’ll quit.’
“…But apparently, it’s all hearsay. Even when you actually hear the president, Mr. Holmes, that’s hearsay. We can’t rely on people saying what the president said. Apparently, we can only rely on what the president says, and there, we shouldn’t even rely on that either.
“We shouldn’t really rely on what the president said in the call record. We should imagine he said something else. We should imagine he said something about actually fighting corruption, instead of what he actually said, which was, “’I want you to do us a favor, though. I want you to look into this 2016 CrowdStrike conspiracy theory, and I want you to look into the Bidens.’”
For those who want to understand Trump’s behavior—and to predict how he will react the next time he’s faced with truths he doesn’t want to acknowledge—the key lies in seeing how he had reacted to bad tidings in the past.
Bureaucracybuster's Blog 
ADOLF HITLER, ALEXANDER THE GREAT, ALTERNET, AMERICABLOG, AP, ARNOLD SCHWARTZNEGGER, ASIANS, BABY BOOMER RESISTANCE, BARACK OBAMA, BBC, BC NEWS, BERNIE SANDERS, BLACKS, BLOOMBERG, BLUESKY, BUZZFEED, CBS NEWS, CHARLIE KIRK, CNN, CROOKS AND LIARS, DAILY KOS, DONALD TRUMP, FBI, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT, GAIUS CALIGULA, GAIUS SUETONIUS TRANQUILLUS, HARPER’S MAGAZINE, HILLARY CLINTON, HISPANICS, HUFFINGTON POST, JOHN OLIVER, JONATHAN KARL, JULIUS CAESAR, MEDIA MATTERS, MOTHER JONES, MOVEON, MSNBC, MUSLIMS, NAZI GERMANY, NBC NEWS, NEIL YOUNG, NEW JERSEY, NEWSDAY, NEWSWEEK, NPR, PAM BONDI, PAUL VON HINDENBURG, PBS NEWSHOUR, PLUTARCH, POLITICO, POLITICUSUSA, PRISONERS OF WAR, RAFAEL "TED" CRUZ, RAW STORY, REICHSTAG FIRE, REUTERS, ROMAN EMPIRE, SALON, SEATTLE TIMES, SLATE, TALKING POINTS MEMO, THE ATLANTIC, THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, THE DAILY BEAST, THE DAILY BLOG, THE DISABLED, THE GUARDIAN, THE HILL, THE HUFFINGTON POST, THE INTERCEPT, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NATION, THE NEW REPUBLIC, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE NEW YORKER, THE TWELVE CAESRS (BOOK), THE VILLAGE VOICE, THE WASHINGTON POST, THINKPROGRESS, TIME, TRUTHDIG, TRUTHOUT, TWO POLITICAL JUNKIES, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT, UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, UPI, USA TODAY, WOMEN, X
THE REICHSTAG FIRE COMES TO AMERICA
In History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on September 17, 2025 at 12:10 amOn September 10, 2025, Donald Trump discovered hate speech.
It had been a long time coming.
As both a Presidential candidate and President, Donald Trump repeatedly used Twitter (now X) to attack hundreds of real and imagined enemies in politics, journalism, TV and films.
From June 15, 2015, when he launched his first Presidential campaign, until October 24, 2016, Trump fired almost 4,000 angry, insulting tweets at 281 people and institutions that had somehow offended him.
Donald Trump
The New York Times needed two full pages of its print edition to showcase them. Among his targets:
Others he clearly delighted in insulting during the campaign included:
Perhaps his most slanderous insult came when he accused Rafael Cruz, the father of his campaign rival, Senator Rafael Eduardo “Ted” Cruz, of being a potential part of Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
As a Presidential candidate and President, he has shown outright hatred for President Barack Obama. Starting in 2011, he slandered Obama as a Kenyan-born alien who had no right to hold the Presidency.
Barack Obama
Only on the eve of the first Presidential debate with Hillary Clinton—in September, 2016—did he finally admit that Obama had been born in the United States. He did so to desperately court support among black voters, who saw his attacks on Obama as attacks on them.
Then, on March 4, 2017, in a series of unhinged tweets, Trump accused Obama of tapping his Trump Tower phones prior to the election:
“Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”
Both the FBI and Justice Department vigorously refuted this slander.
According to The Washington Post Fact Checker database: Trump’s false or misleading claims totaled over 30,573 during his first presidency. Many of these claims were directed at political opponents, media figures, and other individuals.
Trump reserved some of his most insulting speech for political opponents:
To blunt the influence of the news media’s influence with the public, Trump labeled them “Fake News” and “The enemy of the American people.”
Then, on September 10, 2025, Right-wing propagandist Charlie Kirk was shot by a sniper while speaking at a Turning Point USA public debate event on the Utah Valley University campus in Orem, Utah.
That was when Trump discovered the evils of hate speech. And on September 16, he offered his own definition of it.
On September 15, his Attorney General, Pam Bondi, had vowed to go after those who engaged in “hate speech” following Kirk’s assassination: “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place—especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie—in our society.
“We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech, anything, and that is across the aisle.”
Pam Bondi
On September 16, ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl asked Trump about Bondi’s threat, noting: “A lot of your allies say that hate speech is free speech.”
Trump replied:
“She’ll probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly, You have a lot of hate in your heart. Maybe they will come after ABC. ABC paid me $16 million recently for a form of hate speech. Your company paid me $16 million for a form of hate speech, so maybe they will have to go after you.”
In short: Any speech that displeases Trump automatically becomes “hate speech”—and is subject to federal prosecution
Writing about Alexander the Great more than 2,000 years ago, the Greek historian and biographer Plutarch noted:
“And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men. Sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations, than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles whatsoever.”
Another ancient writer to cast light on the mentality behind Trump’s remark was Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus. As private secretary to the Roman Emperor Hadrian, he gained access to the imperial archives. It was from these that he obtained the material for The Twelve Caesars, his chronicle of debauchery from Julius Caesar to Domitian.
His chapter on Gaius Caligula is especially pornographic. It was Caligula who summed up the underlying goal of all the Caesars—and its effects on countless Romans and non-Romans.
Speaking to a critic, Caligula said: “Bear in mind that I can treat anyone exactly as I please.”
On February 27, 1933, a lone arsonist set fire to the German parliament building, the Reichstag, gutting most of the structure.
The next day, at the request of newly-installed Chancellor Adolf Hitler, President Paul von Hindenburg signed the Reichstag Fire Decree into law. This suspended most civil liberties in Germany, including:
Donald Trump is clearly seeking to turn Charlie Kirk’s murder into the equivalent of the Reichstag fire.
Share this: