The Pardon Is the Crime Scene: How America Ends Impunity for Good

On September 8, 1974, Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon "to heal the nation." He healed nothing. He wrote an instruction manual, and its lesson has been absorbed by every aspiring authoritarian since: rise high enough and the law stops at your door.

I'll say outright, NO human being, not just American citizens within the confines of our borders, should be illegally harmed or even detained. I'll ignore for the moment all those who have been and will continue to be illegally harmed and/or confined by this President, Donald Trump.

Donald Trump read that manual cover to cover. If we fail to act now, the next one will have memorized it.

The Record

This isn't a matter of opinion. It's a matter of evidence, much of it in Trump's own voice.

He called Georgia's Secretary of State and pressed him to "find" 11,780 votes. He organized slates of fake electors in seven states. His own attorney general, Bill Barr, told him the fraud claims were baseless. His own vice president refused to overturn the count. Trump summoned a crowd to Washington, sent it to the Capitol, and for 187 minutes did nothing while it attacked the building and hunted Mike Pence. 

He took classified documents to Mar-a-Lago and obstructed their return. On tape, he admitted he wanted to "play down" a virus he knew was deadly. His own coronavirus response coordinator, Dr. Deborah Birx, later said most American COVID deaths after the first 100,000 could have been mitigated or substantially reduced.

A New York jury convicted him on 34 felony counts. Federal grand juries indicted him twice. Much of the key testimony came from Republicans who served him.

The Escape

Then the system failed, one piece at a time.

The Supreme Court handed him immunity. The federal cases evaporated when he won back the White House. And on his first day back in office, he pardoned or commuted the sentences of roughly 1,500 people charged over January 6, including leaders convicted by juries of seditious conspiracy.

Read that again. Men convicted of conspiring to overthrow the United States government walked free on one man's signature. That isn't a loophole. It's a recruitment pitch. Every future would-be autocrat now knows he can raise a loyal army with a single promise: do what I ask, and I will erase your crimes.

Severity Isn't the Problem. Impunity Is.

Many Americans, furious and exhausted, want the harshest punishment imaginable. History shows what actually fails. South Korea sentenced former dictator Chun Doo-hwan to death in 1996 for his coup and the Gwangju massacre. He was pardoned in 1997. The harshest sentence on earth meant nothing because it could be undone.

Now look at the democracies that got it right. Brazil convicted Jair Bolsonaro for plotting to overturn his election and sentenced him to 27 years. Peru imprisoned Alberto Fujimori. South Korea imprisoned two more former presidents. France sent Nicolas Sarkozy to a cell. Each proved what America has never once proved: a head of state can walk into a courtroom a powerful man and walk out a prisoner.

Criminologists have said it for decades. Certainty of punishment deters. Severity adds little. The autocrat's calculation is never "twenty years or worse?" It's "will anything happen to me at all?" In America the answer has always been no. That's what has to change.

Why This Moment Is Singular

Nixon resigned in disgrace, abandoned by his own party. Trump survived two impeachments, a felony conviction, and four indictments, and came back stronger. That has never happened before in American history. MaGA isn't a policy platform. It's a loyalty structure built on the belief that its leader stands above the law, and every escape confirms that belief.

The next version will be smarter. Deadlier.

He'll be disciplined where Trump was chaotic. Consider if it had been Steve Bannon, not Trump, elected.

Whoever it is, he'll arrive with AI tools that can produce propaganda at industrial scale, target every voter individually, and flood the information space faster than any fact-checker can respond. He'll have studied which guardrails bent and which broke. If the lesson he learns is that pardons and immunity will protect him, we won't get another chance to teach a different one.

The Court That Built the Shield

In July 2024, six justices did something no Congress and no founder ever did. They invented presidential immunity from criminal law. Trump v. United States grants absolute immunity for a president's "core" constitutional powers and presumptive immunity for other official acts. It even bars prosecutors from using official acts as evidence of other crimes.

The word "immunity" appears nowhere in the Constitution. The framers debated shielding the executive and rejected it. They had just fought a war against a king who couldn't be prosecuted.

Justice Sotomayor's dissent spelled out the consequence. Under this ruling, a president who orders the military to assassinate a political rival may be immune. She closed with five words every American should know: "With fear for our democracy, I dissent."

The Court that issued this ruling isn't beyond the reach of the people. The Constitution gives us every tool we need.

Fix the Court, and the Reversal Follows

The Supreme Court is the only federal court with no binding code of ethics, and it shows. Justice Thomas accepted years of undisclosed luxury travel and gifts from billionaire Harlan Crow. He refused to recuse himself from January 6 cases even though his wife, Ginni Thomas, had pressed the White House chief of staff to fight the election results. Justice Alito's homes flew flags associated with the Stop the Steal movement.

Congress must pass a binding, enforceable ethics code for the justices. Where the documented conduct warrants it, the House must use its impeachment power. Impeachment exists precisely for judges who place themselves above the rules every other federal judge obeys.

Congress must also restructure the Court. The Constitution doesn't fix it at nine seats. Congress set that number by statute in 1869, and it has ranged from six to ten. Staggered 18-year term limits would give every president two appointments per term and end the lottery of lifetime seats. Expansion remains on the table. A Court reformed and accountable to ethics law is a Court that will revisit Trump v. United States, and a ruling this indefensible won't survive honest review.

The People Have the Final Word

We don't have to wait for the Court. When the Supreme Court gets the Constitution wrong, the people can correct it, and we've done it before. The Eleventh Amendment reversed Chisholm v. Georgia. The Fourteenth buried Dred Scott. The Sixteenth overturned a ruling that struck down the income tax. The Twenty-Sixth passed in about three months after the Court divided over the voting age.

Trump v. United States belongs on that list.

What Accountability Must Mean

1. Prosecution without exceptions. When legal barriers fall, every provable crime committed by Trump and those who conspired with him must be charged and tried in open court, with the full evidentiary record placed before the public.
2. Maximum lawful sentences, served in full. No plea deals trading prison for a quiet exit. No "healing the nation." We tried healing in 1974, and it brought us 2021.
1. Capital Punishment - While it won't stop the next Trump, it will forewarn and help to wake up the body politic about what they are doing, who they are liking, and for a change where this has previously led.
3. A constitutional amendment that closes every escape hatch:
   • No president is immune from criminal prosecution for violating federal law.
   • No president may pardon himself, his family, or anyone for offenses connected to an election, the transfer of power, or crimes committed at his direction.
   • The statute of limitations for federal crimes is suspended while the offender holds office.
   • Anyone convicted of insurrection, seditious conspiracy, or election subversion is permanently barred from federal office.
4. A reformed Court: binding ethics, term limits, impeachment where conduct demands it.
5. A permanent public record. Germany didn't reject Nazism because of a few verdicts in 1946. Most Germans at first dismissed Nuremberg as victors' justice. What changed the nation was decades of confronting the documented record in courts, classrooms, and law. America needs its own permanent record of what happened, taught and preserved, so no future generation can be told it was a hoax.

What They'll Say, and the Answer

"It's a witch hunt." The evidence came from grand juries, Republican-appointed judges, a New York jury, and Trump's own attorney general, vice president, and White House staff. A witch hunt doesn't produce sworn testimony from the accused's own people.

"Prosecuting presidents will start a cycle of revenge." The cycle has already started, and it was started from the Oval Office. In 2025 Trump's Justice Department indicted former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, officials whose offense was investigating him. Meanwhile Brazil, South Korea, Peru, and France prosecuted former leaders through courts, and their democracies are still standing. The threat to democracy isn't prosecution under law. It's a president who can't be prosecuted at all.

"Presidents need immunity to do the job." For 235 years, no president had criminal immunity, and every president but one managed to govern without trying to overturn an election. Ford's pardon of Nixon only made sense because everyone, Nixon included, understood a former president could be prosecuted.

"He won the election. The people have spoken." Nixon won 49 states in 1972. Winning an election has never erased a crime. Votes grant power. They don't grant pardons for what was done to seize it.

"A constitutional amendment is a fantasy." The Twenty-Sixth Amendment went from Congress to ratification in about three months. Amendments seem impossible right up until the public demands them. Our job is to make the demand undeniable.

"Court reform is court-packing." Congress has changed the Court's size seven times. Term limits are supported by majorities across party lines. The only thing radical here is a Court that invented a king's immunity and answers to no ethics code at all.

The Hard Choice

Extreme times demand extreme resolve, and this is a singular moment. 

The most extreme thing America could do is also the one thing it has never done: make a former president answer to the law, and make that answer permanent. 

Not a verdict someone can pardon away in a year. 

Not a sentence that evaporates with an election. 

A judgment the Constitution itself guarantees will stand.

Nixon was the warning. Trump is the proof. 

The next one will be the ending, unless we write a different one--NOW.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of  Claude AI 

---

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington. 

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

The Formula - A thought experiment, followed to the end

A note before reading:

This is a thought experiment, and it is labeled as one for a reason. It takes a formula that many people have quietly run in their heads, states it plainly, and tests it link by link to see whether it holds. It does not. Nothing here advocates violence against anyone. The piece exists to follow a dangerous idea to its end and show where it breaks, because ideas left unexamined do more damage than ideas taken apart in daylight. Read it to the last line before deciding what it says. 

I am a humanist, a Buddhist of sorts, and I wish harm on no human being. Therein lies much of our problem today against those who do not share that orientation. 

The answer is not to become them. Still, one must think it through. What follows does.

Here is the formula, stated plainly.

Remove Putin. Remove whoever reaches for the chair next, and the one after, until a Russian leader emerges who wants back into the world. Moscow, stung, answers in kind, and the American president falls to hands no one sees. Neither country's opposition carries the stain. Both are freed. Peace follows.

It has a terrible symmetry. Two countries locked in death spirals by two men. Two oppositions that cannot act without inheriting the illegitimacy of the act. One exchange that frees them both.

Plenty of people have run some version of it in their heads. Few have run it to the end. So test it. Link by link.

Link one: remove Putin

This is the strongest link, and it deserves to be taken seriously. The war is unusually personal. Putin wrote the essays denying Ukrainian nationhood. He made the decision in a small room with a smaller circle. Russian elections cannot remove him; this month's managed vote returned his party as designed. The people bleeding for the war cannot vote their way out, speak their way out, or walk out.

There is evidence that leadership removal matters. Economists Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken studied a century of assassination attempts on national leaders and found that successful killings of autocrats were followed by moves toward democracy more often than failed attempts were. Stalin's death in 1953 was followed within months by an armistice in Korea and the end of the Doctors' Plot.

So link one holds, as a proposition: Russia without Putin might be a different Russia. Keep that in mind. It matters at the end.

Link two: remove the next, and the next

Here the formula starts to strain. The constitution hands power to the prime minister. Behind him stand the security services, people who survived twenty-five years by being the most careful and most ruthless in the room.

Each removal teaches the survivors one lesson: the West kills Russian leaders. The ones who rise next are the ones built for a siege. The filter does not select for the rational. It selects for the paranoid.

And someone has to decide who counts as rational. Whoever makes that call is choosing Russia's leader. Russians have seen this before, in other countries, and so have we. Iran, 1953. The installed leader held power for a quarter century. Then came the revolution, and the grievance still shapes Iranian politics seventy years later. A leader chosen by elimination abroad is a leader illegitimate at home.

Link three: Moscow answers in kind

This is where the formula contradicts itself.

It requires the new Russian leadership to be two things at once: rational enough to want back into the international community, and willing to kill an American president. Those are not compatible. A rational leader seeking reentry does not commit the one act guaranteed to make reentry impossible. Through forty years of Cold War, with every motive and every capability, neither Washington nor Moscow killed the other's head of state. Not from squeamishness. From calculation. Both understood what came after.

If the retaliation comes instead from the security hardliners in the interval, before the rational leader arrives, then the formula has handed the decisive act to exactly the people it was designed to filter out.

Link four: no one carries the stain

This is the load-bearing beam. The whole formula exists to solve one problem: the domestic opposition cannot act without inheriting the act.

But the stain does not disappear when the hand is foreign. It moves.

If Russia is identified, Russia owns it, and the United States is at war footing with a nuclear power. If Russia is not identified, the vacuum fills with certainty in every direction. John F. Kennedy had a known shooter, and sixty years later most Americans still suspect a conspiracy. A death with no author would be assigned one within the hour, along tribal lines. Tens of millions would name the American left no matter what the evidence said.

The formula does not remove the stain. It distributes it to everyone.

Link five: both countries are freed

The American half of the premise holds that the movement lives only in the man. Remove him and it dissolves.

History says otherwise. Perón was exiled in 1955 and died in 1974; Peronism still structures Argentine politics. Chávez died of cancer in 2013; Chavismo continued through Maduro. Personalist movements survive their founders routinely. They survive best when the founder is taken from them. A sudden vacancy would not end the movement. It would hand it a martyr and hand the successor a mandate.

And it would hand the state a pretext. The Reichstag burned on February 27, 1933. The emergency decree came the next day. In Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024, a gunman produced not collapse but a raised fist and a wave of sympathy. A government already testing emergency powers would not treat a sudden vacancy as an ending. It would treat it as an opening.

Link six: peace follows

The final link asks the United States to make peace with the state that killed its president. No American public would accept it. No American government could survive proposing it. The formula ends not in peace but in the war it was built to prevent, this time between the two largest nuclear arsenals on earth.

The verdict

On the American side, the formula fails at every link after the first. It does not break the spiral. It feeds it, then hands the spiral a martyr, a pretext, and a foreign enemy.

On the Russian side, the question stays open.

Link one held. Russia without Putin might be a different Russia. What the formula got wrong was not the destination but the hands. Every case where a leader's death changed a country's course for the better shares one feature: the change came from inside. Stalin's successors ended the terror because they feared it themselves, not because anyone abroad made them.

Whether that happens in Russia depends on whether the people around Putin decide the war costs them more than it gives them. That calculation is happening now, in rooms no one outside can see. The outside world can raise the price. It cannot pick the outcome.

Hundreds of thousands dead. One man ordering it. The arithmetic is real.

The formula is not. 

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of  Claude AI 

---

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington. 

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

9/11/2026

Fifteen years old today I wrote a blog about 9/11, at that time, ten years prior.

I wrote this here back on June 7, 2010, arguing for surgical special-ops warfare over mass troop deployment. 

Bin Laden was still alive. ISIS didn't exist yet. I'm reposting it as-is today, on the 25th anniversary, because it's a time capsule of where my thinking was—not because I got everything right. The "secret war" approach I was pushing for became the dominant U.S. counterterrorism strategy through the 2010s, and it did not turn out to be as clean as I argued below. 

Worth saying that up front. Admit your mistakes, do better next time. The idea I had was sound. What was missing was never the tactic—it was an accountability structure that no administration, including the one I trusted to run it, ever built, because the legal architecture available to them was designed for the opposite. 

Now, all bets are off. We're watching an administration whose motives and mechanisms we can't verify—and what surfaces is often worse than what we feared. Or could ever have imagined, on both sides.

Don't act like this current administration whenever you make a mistake, you foolishly double down and dare people to correct you in a corrupt autocratic playbook format of being an "American" presidential administration. 

History is going to shred this period of our shared history, no matter how much this administration tries to divide us for purposes of power and corruption.

But first, today:

Today, all four living former presidents stand together at Ground Zero for the 25th anniversary.
Same soil, same names read aloud, same silence at 9:37.
The sitting president was not there.
He was at the Pentagon instead—a venue with one microphone, one audience, and zero other former presidents standing nearby for comparison.
No New Yorkers who clearly despise Donald Trump, his lies about everything, and 9/11—where he did not bring a crew with him on that day, as he incessantly repeats the lie, unneeded, undesired, un-American.
The reported reason, per the Times last week, is a dispute over a speaking slot in New York, which he denies.
Denial or not, the outcome is the same.
One ceremony seats four presidents shoulder to shoulder in front of the cameras that built their legacies.
The other seats one, with nobody around to share the frame, to highlight what he isn't and can never be:
A decent American, a decent man, a great president.
Controllable is not a character flaw. It's a production choice.
Some stages just have fewer people who can upstage you—simply by existing.

---

Monday, June 7, 2010
U.S. 'secret war' expands globally?

The Washington Post had a June 4, 2010 article titled: "U.S. 'secret war' Expands Globally as Special Operations forces take larger role." It would seem that the Obama Administration is using more and more secret teams to go in and take out dangerous radical groups.

Is this bad?

I had been proposing this since 9/11. I brought this up again and again, at least to family and friends, back when we entered Iraq under the pretenses of having information leading to Iraq having Weapons of Mass Destruction and there being a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda; a contention I never bought, nor understood. Even when the Bush White House said they had intelligence indicating this to be true I didn't believe it. I thought, well I suppose its possible, but I found it hard to believe for obvious reasons. Why did Congress?

My contention then, as it is now, is that we should not send in mass amounts of troops. What we needed were smaller, specialist hit squads. Yes, this sounds scary. Yes, these have been misused the world over by dictators, terrorists, war lords, crime bosses. But which makes more sense: sending in many American troops to lose their lives on blanket, shotgun-like approaches to taking out the bad guys? Or sending in small teams, with proper intelligence, to mark and remove only those individuals that would best serve our goals and save the most lives?

You can argue all kinds of things about this. It could go over limits. How do you control it? Are there moral or ethical implications? On and on.

But look at what we have now. How many have been killed on both sides? How many innocents? Wouldn't it have been better to send in the smaller teams, targeting specifics, than using bombs, war theater tactics, shooting missiles from afar and using drones? Even if specialist squads killed a few innocents (which I'm thoroughly against, but that's yet another topic), how many have we killed now, using our current tactics? I doubt we could even approach the current numbers.

This is not political assassination. This is targeting specific individuals or groups, to strategically and surgically take out those who are actively supporting the killing of people outside the intent of their goals. My point in that statement is: when a group wants the US out of their country, killing US citizens, or their own—and typically innocent people—is outside the intent of their goals.

Terrorists justify their murderous actions because they are too small, too poor, too powerless, and so they use larger-than-life actions to draw attention to their group, their goals, or their issues, in order to get their way or bring popular or media attention to their cause.

But this has gotten out of hand. Frequently, their original goals change over time, or they lose track of their intention, or their core beliefs, and begin to rationalize. Since they do NOT have a centralized government to guide them, it is easy for them to lose their way. Yes, it can be easy for a state-governed group to lose sight of its origins; but far easier for those run by a small rag-tag committee, or a war lord, or a rich, deluded ex-national businessman.

Mostly these people are lost, missing something in their lives, and want to subvert process to attain goals through any means possible. That might be understandable. But it is just as understandable that someone would want to stop them. Once a terrorist organization kills innocent people, they lose the right to be justified and righteous.

The same is true of a nation state. And they should be called to task by the world stage, the UN, and their allies. But terrorists have none of this. So they need to be put down as swiftly as possible, by any means possible, just as they do it. But care needs to be used in not harming innocents.

Not harming innocents is the core concern in all of this.

So, let's start bringing back the troops. Less talk, more action.

Those in charge of these teams need to be conscious of the need to do right, to execute with need and justice, and avoid at nearly all costs the loss of innocent life. Because once they start killing innocents, they are out on the same limb as those rotted and diseased souls who have lost their way themselves.

Back to today, 25 years after 9/11 and we have what? Abused America for electing an erudite decent black man, twice? Elected a career criminal and failed TV game show mob boss type, twice?

9/11 did more damage to use than even the Republican Party and what have we accomplished?

We have set ourselves up repeatedly for more and worse to happen under this administration, under the current ruling party who is under the autocratic criminal thumb of this (and no, it cannot be stated to much, or two often) corrupt president.

We have a lot of work today ahead of us.

Work that will have to now also tackle the issue of a too strong Executive (something both parties have indicated now for decades and then when back in power, did nothing to rectify it, weakening Congress one administration after another), with a corrupt ruling parry and a SCOTUS who seems to have no relationship to that Court's past or America's present.

We CAN obviously do better. We will. 

America... 

Good health to you, to us all and to a better America through the next two election cycles.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Trump Countdown Clock: Days Until Our Trump/GOP National Nightmare Ends

 

End of Trumpism, End of MaGAism

End of Toxic Conservatism in Power

End of this Toxic Republican Party

End of America's stupid experiment in Authoritarianism

Someone posted to this that we need action, not just dates.
True, this is merely something to shoot for. Sooner if possible.

But it helps to have a goal. A date. A time.

And then shoot for sooner.

Merely waiting for this to be over, does NOTHING.

Act.

Our national nightmare, on the clock...

Term's End

— — —

until noon, January 20, 2029

The Indictments

— — —

until DOJ leadership no longer answers to him, January 21, 2029

In this tine of "Corporate Thought" meaning no morals, no ethics, profit over all else, disinformation, post-truth, toxic conservatism, etc., our government no longer functions correctly due to having been set up with a consideration that people would not stoop as low as we have seen today's American conservatism and Republicans have. 

Thus, we bow need corrections.

Here's a rundown of the institutional reforms that necessary in a post Trump-era of toxic GOP governance and the current SCOTUS (and some conservative judges) have pushed, organized by branch. 

Presidency / executive power

• Codify limits on the pardon power for self-dealing or obstructing investigations into the president's own conduct
• Close the "major questions doctrine" and emergency-powers loopholes that let presidents bypass Congress via executive order
• Strengthen the Impoundment Control Act so a president can't unilaterally withhold appropriated funds
• Clarify and narrow presidential immunity after the Trump v. United States ruling, since critics argue it created near-blanket immunity for "official acts"
• Restore independence of inspectors general and agency heads (FBI, DOJ, intelligence community) with for-cause removal protections that can't be gutted by executive order
• Tighten the Hatch Act and anti-nepotism/emoluments enforcement with real penalties

Congress

• Restore the pre-clearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act gutted by Shelby County v. Holder
• Pass federal redistricting standards to curb partisan gerrymandering
• Reform the filibuster for voting rights and basic governance bills (budget, debt ceiling)
• Tighten conflict-of-interest and stock-trading rules for members of Congress
• Restore and strengthen congressional oversight tools (subpoena enforcement mechanisms with teeth, since agencies currently can just ignore them)
• Campaign finance reform addressing Citizens United, likely via a constitutional amendment given the Court's current posture

Supreme Court / judiciary

• 18-year staggered term limits for justices, ending lifetime tenure
• A binding, enforceable ethics code (the current one has no enforcement mechanism)
• Some form of court expansion or jurisdiction-stripping on specific issues, though this is the most contested item even among reform advocates
• Stricter recusal rules tied to financial disclosures
• Reversing or legislating around specific rulings (Dobbs, Trump v. United States, Chevron's overturn in Loper Bright) through statute where possible

Broader democratic guardrails

• Insulate election administration and certification from partisan interference (building on the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022)
• Statehood or representation reform for DC and territories
• Independent redistricting commissions as a national standard

I wish us all well going forward once sanity returns and corporate thinking is back under control.

Power to the people, not power to only the powerful few.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Remember Trump's famous favorite Bible quote? No? Come on! Really?

Remember Trump's famous favorite Bible quote?

He's got one, right?

So if he does have one, based upon his actions as president, or his decades as a miserable example of a "businessman" over his lifetime, WHAT IS IT?

What might, say...three of his favorite quotes be?

The famous moment: Trump was asked his favorite Bible verse in 2015 and couldn't name one. He later cited "an eye for an eye" as his philosophy -- which is real (Leviticus/Exodus), but notably Jesus specifically repudiates it in Matthew 5:38-39. So his "favorite" is the verse Christ overruled.

Three that actually fit his record:

1. Proverbs 21:6 "A fortune made by a lying tongue is a fleeting vapor and a deadly snare." -- Six bankruptcies, Trump University fraud settlement, inflated asset valuations. The vapor part aged well.

2. Matthew 6:5 "When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others." -- The Lafayette Square Bible photo op, holding it upside down. Scripture as prop.

3. 1 Timothy 6:10 "The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil." -- Covers pretty much the entire career arc and the current presidency-as-profit-center Raskin was describing above.

The brutal irony is that "eye for an eye" being his self-chosen verse is actually the most honest thing he's ever said about himself.

Trump's politics are pure Old Testament retribution politics with zero New Testament grace anywhere in sight.

Trump really seems to be an Old Testament guy, though.

Old Testament Trump?

The OT God is frequently wrathful, vengeful, tribal, transactional, and rewards loyalty above almost everything else.

So? Trump IS like the Old Testament, immature, vindictive, jealous "God"?

Punishment is swift and disproportionate. Enemies are smited.

The chosen people are exceptional by definition. 

Outsiders are threats. Sounds kind of like a five-year-old.

But it maps almost perfectly onto Trump's operating psychology.

The transactional covenant thing is key.

OT theology is largely "obey and prosper, disobey and suffer."

Trump runs the same deal -- loyalty is rewarded, disloyalty is destroyed.

It's less a moral framework than a power framework with religious language draped over it.

What Trump actively rejects from the New Testament:

• Forgiveness of enemies (he never forgives, or apologizes, doubling down, always)
• Humility ("blessed are the meek" -- not a Trump value)
• Turning the other cheek (see: "eye for an eye")
• Care for the poor and stranger (see: every immigration and social policy)
• The rich man and the needle's eye passage -- genuinely inconvenient for him

The dark irony is that evangelical Christians, who are supposed to be defined by the New Testament and Christ's teachings, have attached themselves to perhaps the most purely Old Testament political figure in American history.

See, white Christian Nationalism. Or the American Taliban.

Allow me... And there it is. The through line.

Why the OT fits WCN perfectly:

White Christian Nationalism isn't really Christianity in any theological sense. It's a tribal identity system that uses Christian iconography as its flag. The Old Testament gives them what they actually want:

A chosen people narrative
A promised land (America as covenant nation)
Divine sanction for conquest and dominance
Clear in-group/out-group boundaries
A wrathful God who punishes enemies
Tribal law over universal grace

The New Testament is genuinely problematic for them because Christ was a Middle Eastern Jew who preached radical inclusion, care for immigrants and outcasts, rejection of wealth and power, and forgiveness of enemies. That's essentially the opposite of the WCN political program.

So they quietly sideline Jesus as a theological figure while keeping the cross as a political symbol. The cross at January 6th wasn't about the Sermon on the Mount.

Trump as OT figure works for them because he's Cyrus -- the flawed pagan king God uses as an instrument anyway. That's literally the theological framework many WCN pastors use. It's clever because it immunizes him against any moral critique.

The deepest irony: They've built a political religion around the parts of the Bible their own Christ specifically came to supersede.

That's not Christianity. That's nationalism wearing Christianity's coat.

While we're on the topic of Trump's nonsense...

The Trump "Weave" Nonsense Unravels: A Decade of Cognitive Decline in Donald Trump's Public Speech

1980s — Coherent, even articulate in interviews; sentences complete, vocabulary precise, stays on topic. Fundamental life view pretty messed up, however. Still capable of hiding that.
1990s — Still functional but shallower; the braggadocio is increasing, substance thinning.
2011 — Filler words measurably increasing in recorded interviews; vague placeholder language creeping in.
2015 — Campaign launch; rambling style rewarded by crowds, masking deterioration with performative energy.
2016 — Tangentiality accelerating but mistaken for authenticity; wins the presidency.
2017 — First STAT linguistic analysis finds his speaking style has already worsened significantly since the 1980s.
2018 — Still capable of structured prepared remarks but unscripted responses increasingly fragmented.
2019 — Repetition of key phrases intensifying; same anecdotes recycled regardless of context.
2020 — Post-election loss triggers emotional constriction; all-or-nothing vocabulary spikes.
2021 — Negative emotional language dominates; "never," "always," "completely" becoming verbal tics.
2022 — Word retrieval errors becoming regular; confabulation harder to distinguish from deliberate lying.
2023 — Haley/Pelosi confusion; uncorrected errors normalizing; digressions no longer return to a point.
2024 — Abrupt unframed topic shifts more than double; changes exceed what stylistic continuity can explain.
2025 — Retrieval failures, disorganized sequencing, errors go uncorrected in real time; the compensating mechanisms are visibly breaking down.
2026 — Currently in office, 79 years old, mentally older, and the public record of any given week supplies fresh examples without having to look hard.

The baseline has shifted to where the episodes are no longer remarkable enough to dominate any news cycle.

By the way?

That normalization may be the most telling data point of all.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of  Claude AI 

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington. 

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

The Autocrat's Playbook: Trump - From Immigrants to Iran

A documented record of who Donald Trump has attacked, in what order, and what it means

Verblendung (German): the state of willful blindness in which a person or a people becomes so captivated by a figure or ideology that they lose the capacity to see what is plainly in front of them. Not mere ignorance. Not deception imposed from outside. The kind of blindness you choose, and then forget you chose.

There is a question worth asking plainly: when you line up everyone Donald Trump has attacked since his first term in office, what do you see? Not what his supporters say you see, and not what his critics fear you see. Just the list, in order, with the facts.

What you see is a pattern. And patterns, unlike individual events, tell you something true about intent.

First Term (POTUS 45, 2017 to 2021): Establishing the Template

The first term was about identifying who could be attacked without serious political cost. Trump started with groups that lacked political power, were easy to demonize, and whose suffering would be invisible to his base.

Muslims came first, via travel bans targeting majority-Muslim nations. Then asylum seekers and migrants, through the family separation policy, zero tolerance prosecutions, and children held in detention facilities that a federal court later described as barbaric. Then Mexico, threatened with tariffs and accused of sending rapists and criminals. Then NATO allies, threatened with abandonment unless they paid more. Then Iran, from which Trump unilaterally withdrew the nuclear deal in 2018 before ordering the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani in 2020. Then China, via a trade war. Then the press itself, declared the enemy of the people.

The template was simple: pick a target, remove their legal protections, and see what happens. Nothing serious happened. So he came back.

Year One of POTUS 47: The Targets Expand Inward

Undocumented Immigrants

On his first day back in office, January 20, 2025, Trump signed executive orders expanding expedited removal nationwide, suspending refugee resettlement, and instructing agencies to detain people to the fullest extent possible. ICE was given permission to raid schools, hospitals, and places of worship. Agents in unmarked vehicles, wearing plainclothes and face coverings, began conducting door-to-door enforcement in immigrant neighborhoods based on what internal documents described as apparent race.

Legal Immigrants and Asylum Seekers

The administration then retroactively made over a million people illegal, including those who had used official government programs like CBP One appointments and Temporary Protected Status. People who had done everything the right way were reclassified as undocumented overnight. In May 2025, with Supreme Court permission, the administration revoked the protected status of 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants in what advocates described as the largest single action stripping any group of non-citizens of immigration status in modern U.S. history.

International Students and Foreign Nationals with Political Views

The administration revoked the visas of hundreds, possibly thousands, of international students across dozens of states. Many were arrested, detained, and deported or threatened with deportation not for any crime but because of their political speech, particularly support for Palestinian rights. The First Amendment was treated as a privilege that expired at the border.

U.S. Citizens

This is where the pattern became impossible to dismiss as immigration enforcement. By October 2025, ProPublica had confirmed at least 170 American citizens detained by ICE. The detainees included elected officials, disabled adults, children receiving cancer treatment, Puerto Ricans, and Indigenous people. The deportation of U.S. citizens from the United States is illegal. It happened anyway.

The administration announced plans to strip citizenship from 100 to 200 naturalized Americans per month. The DOJ directed prosecutors to pursue denaturalization cases. An executive order attempted to revoke birthright citizenship from U.S.-born children of immigrants, a right enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment.

Elected Officials and Protesters

Protesting near an ICE operation became grounds for arrest. Accompanying an immigrant to a scheduled court hearing and asking officers to produce a warrant became grounds for arrest. Asking the Secretary of Homeland Security a question became grounds for arrest. These things happened to members of Congress. The message to everyone less powerful was obvious.

The Foreign Wars: Seven Countries and Counting

While the domestic crackdown accelerated, the military campaign abroad expanded at a pace that broke all modern records. Data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project documented 622 air and drone strikes across seven countries in 2025 alone.

Somalia (February 2025 onward)

The U.S. conducted more strikes in Somalia in 2025 than under the Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations combined. Both al-Shabaab and ISIS-Somalia remained intact and active by year's end, with al-Shabaab gaining ground and advancing toward the capital.

Yemen and the Houthis (March to May 2025)

Under Operation Rough Rider, Trump ordered more than 1,100 strikes on Houthi positions, spending over a billion dollars in a matter of weeks. Human Rights Watch documented a strike on the Ras Isa port in April that killed more than 80 civilians and called for a war crimes investigation. A ceasefire brokered by Oman ended the campaign in May. By July, the Houthis had resumed attacks on shipping.

Iraq (March 2025)

A U.S. strike in al-Anbar province killed Abdallah Malli Muslih al-Rifai, identified as a senior ISIS commander, in coordination with Iraqi and Kurdish authorities.

Syria (December 2025)

Following an ISIS attack in Palmyra that killed two U.S. soldiers and a translator, the U.S. struck 70 ISIS positions across Syria on December 19. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called it a declaration of vengeance.

Nigeria (December 25, 2025)

On Christmas Day, Trump ordered what he called powerful and deadly strikes on alleged ISIS affiliates in northwestern Nigeria's Sokoto State, framed explicitly as protecting Christians. Nigerian officials disputed the characterization. Terrorism experts questioned whether ISIS even operated in the targeted region. Hegseth marked the occasion with: Merry Christmas. More to come.

Latin America and the Caribbean: The Boat Strikes (September 2025 onward)

Beginning in September 2025, the U.S. carried out at least 45 strikes on vessels alleged to be drug trafficking boats in Latin American and Caribbean waters. Monitoring group Airwars documented 151 people killed. The United Nations rejected the legal basis for the strikes, calling them unlawful extrajudicial killings. The Trump administration described drug trafficking as a form of armed attack on the United States.

Venezuela (January 3, 2026)

U.S. Special Forces raided Caracas overnight and abducted President Nicolas Maduro in an operation called Operation Absolute Resolve. At least one U.S. missile struck an apartment building in the port city of Catia La Mar, killing an 80-year-old woman as she slept. Trump described the attack as successful and perfectly executed. Legal experts and lawmakers from both parties called the operation illegal under U.S. and international law. Trump invoked what he called the Donroe Doctrine, a rebranding of the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, and declared that American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.

Iran (June 2025 and February 2026)

In June 2025, the U.S. struck Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan during active diplomatic negotiations. In late February 2026, joint U.S.-Israeli strikes were launched in what Trump described as major combat operations aimed at regime change in Tehran. The Iranian Red Crescent documented at least 201 killed in the initial wave. Iran launched a counterattack on the U.S. Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. Trump has already threatened to strike again.

The Countries Threatened But Not Yet Struck

Greenland and Denmark were threatened with military annexation. Denmark's prime minister warned that a U.S. attack on a NATO ally would collapse the entire alliance. Mexico has been threatened repeatedly over cartel activity, with reports that drone strikes inside Mexican territory were seriously considered. Cuba and Colombia were targeted with threats after the Venezuela raid. The list is not shrinking.

The Conclusion the Record Demands

He is not fighting enemies. He is manufacturing them.

Every escalation follows the same logic: identify a target that a portion of the public will not defend, attack them, normalize that attack, then expand the definition of who qualifies as the enemy. Undocumented immigrants became legal immigrants became visa holders became naturalized citizens became U.S.-born citizens became elected officials became protesters became anyone who asked a question. Abroad, terrorist groups became sovereign nations became a NATO ally in Greenland.

The violence is the point, not the means. A leader genuinely focused on security, drug trafficking, or nuclear threats would use diplomacy, law enforcement, and coalition building. Instead, each solution maximizes spectacle, cruelty, and personal political benefit. Deporting children receiving cancer treatment. Bombing a sleeping 80-year-old woman. Striking Iran during active diplomatic negotiations. These are not policy failures. They are features.

He has successfully inverted the law. Following the law now gets you arrested. Breaking it is called strength.

The domestic and foreign violence are the same project: a unified assertion that the executive branch may use lethal force against anyone it designates an enemy, with no court, no Congress, and no international body having the authority to stop it.

The word autocrat is accurate. But what the documented record describes is what historians call the consolidation phase. The dismantling of courts, oversight, civil rights protections, press freedom, and citizenship itself. The use of military force against civilians at home and abroad. The imprisonment of political opponents. The targeting of allies. This is not where authoritarianism peaks. This is where it accelerates.

The fact that large portions of the American public oppose these actions is, in this framework, not a constraint. It is the next problem to be solved.

Consolidation does not stop on its own. It stops when institutions, allies, or the public make the cost of continuing higher than the benefit. That is where history currently sits.

Sources: Al Jazeera, Council on Foreign Relations, Vera Institute of Justice, American Immigration Council, ACLU, ProPublica, Airwars, Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, Wikipedia 

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of  Claude AI 

---

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington. 

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.