This is the summer of Alice Through the Looking Glass politics.
Immersed in a growing scandal about his relationship to disgraced sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump has attempted to divert attention and turn the tables on his enemies by getting his pliant Justice Department to investigate President Obama for potential treason. After attempting, without success, to cover up Trump’s links to Epstein, Pam Bondi, perhaps the most dishonorable Attorney General in US history (quite an accomplishment given some of the other members of this group) sought this past week to get back in the Boss’s good books by announcing the creation of a “strike force” to investigate Barack Obama.
SFR
Obama has never been charged with a crime—let along the high crime of treason. What riles Trump and Bondi is that his intelligence team let it be known in 2016 that they believed the evidence showed that Russia was trying to tip the scales of the election in favor of Trump and against Hillary Clinton. For Trump to leap from this to an assertion that treason was committed is truly extraordinary—the sort of thing that Hitler and Stalin, Pinochet and Papa Doc Douvalier, to name a few dictators of yore, routinely did when they wanted to silence, and destroy, political opponents. After all, treason is a crime that can carry the death penalty.
What makes it more chilling and hideously ironic is that Trump is the man who himself incited an armed mob to invade the Capitol and try to prevent the peaceful transfer of power on January 6, 2021—and Trump is the man who, when he returned to power in 2025, immediately set about freeing from prison nearly 1,500 violent insurrectionists who had answered his call to action that infamous day. Never in US history has a sitting president launched an assault on the state of that nature; never has a president so flagrantly abused power for his personal benefit, or dallied so dangerously with treasonous acts.
Since January, Trump has repeatedly undermined American national interests in pursuit of private gain. He has accepted “gifts,” such as the Qatari Air Force One plane, that would have felled any other president. And he has launched a full-on dismantling of basic state infrastructure and regulatory functions that is leaving America desperately vulnerable to everything from cyber-attacks to pandemics, from escalating natural disasters to financial crises.
I do believe there’s something in the Bible about not casting stones in a glass house. It would behoove Trump and Bondi to do some reading around this particular sentiment. But, of course, Trump, convicted felon and pathological liar that he is, doesn’t give two hoots for the truth or for decency. And so, their casting of stones will only grow worse.
The sense of unreality isn’t just limited to an insurrectionist accusing his predecessor of treason. At every level, things are politically grotesque.
There’s the truly monstrous deliberate starvation of two million Gazans, carried out, with a nod and a wink of approval from the Trump administration, by a far-right Israeli government that has abandoned any pretense of moral decency.
In Judaism, the concept of Tikkun Olam broadly translates as healing or repairing the world. It implies an ability to empathize, to go outside of one’s comfort zone and to work to make the earth a better place. That is the moral code I grew up with – and it’s a world away from the sneering, menacing, thuggish, and, yes, now potentially genocidal, actions of Netanyahu and his gang of hoodlum ministers, people who believe they have a divine right to starve babies to death. Yet, anyone, including a growing number of scholars of genocide, who dares to critique the policy of mass starvation is labeled an anti-Semite by the Israeli and American governments. That is utterly Orwellian.
Other examples from this Alice Through the Looking Glass summer: CBS, whose parent company, Paramount, was angling for FCC approval for Skydance to purchase the business for $8 billion, agreed to pay Trump $16 million to settle an entirely frivolous lawsuit MAGA-man brought against them for how they presented their campaign interview with Kamala Harris. Then—the icing on the cake—the broadcaster cancelled the popular Trump-critical late-night show with Stephen Colbert. Days later, with Trump crowing about Colbert’s departure, the FCC approved the Paramount-Skydance deal. I’m not a lawyer, but I am pretty good at spelling, and I do know how to spell the word “bribe.”
A few miles uptown from the CBS offices, Columbia University, one of the country’s oldest and greatest universities was busy prostrating itself before the Trump administration, agreeing to pay a stunning $220 million in what can only be read as shakedown fees, and accepting a measure of government oversight over its admissions and hiring process in exchange for the turning back on of the federal research grant spigot. Columbia’s administrators portrayed this as a win for the university, arguing they retained academic freedom. Balderdash. In reality, this is a truly shameful capitulation, one that will almost certainly lead to evermore attacks on academic freedom in coming years.
I could go on: there are the baroque horrors of Alligator Alcatraz, the kidnapping and summary deportation of a growing number of Green Card holders, the accelerating use of the military in Trump’s hunt-an-immigrant efforts. Up is down and down is up. In today’s America cruelty is being rewarded and decency is for the birds.
