Haake sabrina
mebbe belated 5 25
MERRI OK
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AN 9 26
In the last weeks of August, a valley in the Himalayas and a post-industrial city in the U.S. Midwest found tragic commonality. In Gary, Indiana, a powerful “derecho,” a fast-moving band of damaging thunderstorms, tore across Lake Michigan producing straight-line winds as high as 110 mph. The widespread destruction left tens of thousands of peoplewithout electricity for over two weeks, bringing global relief organizations like World Central Kitchen to the area for the first time. In Nepal, an enormous 2,000 foot wide chunk of glacier ice sheared off a mountain and plunged to the river 7,000 feet below, tearing everyone off the mountainside with it, killing over 1,000 people.
Scientists agree that both catastrophes were caused by the rise in global temperatures.
Eight thousand miles apart, as historically and culturally distinct as two areas can be, both Nepal and Gary emerged as pawns in the same oligarchs’ game of chicken: Can big oil squeeze another decade of ROI on their sunk equipment costsbefore the earth’s post-industrial temperature increases by 3.6°F (2°C)? Scientists have warned since the 1970s that an increase of 2°C will be the tipping point beyond which life on earth will change irreversibly, yet the same game of chicken persists. Fossil fuel profits have continued to soar despite the warnings— now tipping $3,000 a second— with the costs of climate change projected to hit $38 ***T***rillion annually.
The inhabitants of Gary and Nepal, like millions of people living in Miami, New Orleans, Houston, Asheville, Jakarta, Delhi, Lagos, and thousands of cities, towns, and rural communities around the world are sitting pawns in a deadly game they didn’t sign up for. No one other than industry titans, fossil fuel investors, and the politicians whose campaigns they bankrolled signed up for what is happening.
Gary’s steel still runs on coal, but it doesn’t have to
I used to live in Gary; full disclosure I ran for U.S. Congress in 2020, primarily to address climate change, and got my ass kicked. Although Gary is known as a post-industrialist steel mill town with an outsized carbon footprint, Gary is also home to rare and unexpected natural habitats and exceptional beauty. The sand dunes, lagoons, and oak savannahs are as pristine as they were when Potawatomi and Miami tribes lived there.
I ran for Congress with climate change urgency most residents weren’t happy to hear. Although Gary’s steel manufacturing relies on coke and coal to fuel blast furnaces, churning out 10 million metric tons of carbon every year, those furnaces could be converted to run on hydrogen produced via electrolysis powered by solar or wind, replacing coke as the reducing and heating agent. The steel could then be melted in an electric arc furnace (EAF). The whole process would produce water vapor instead of CO2 as a byproduct, which would save the steelworkers’ and the planet’s lungs.
Renewable-hydrogen steel plants also benefit from price stability, since sunlight and wind aren’t subject to the kind of volatility Trump is spreading throughout the Middle East. Early movers like Sweden’s HYBRIT project and Boston Metalhave proven that as the costs of renewable electricity keep falling, green steel will become not just cleaner but genuinely cheaper to produce at scale. This is especially true in areas with abundant solar or wind resources, and Gary is rich in both vacant land for solar and onshore winds from Lake Michigan. The only downside of converting to green steelmaking, outside the initial cost that will convert to profit in 10 years, would likely be to the local utility monopoly known as NIPSCO.
India also still burns coal, but Nepal does not
In the climate karma department, Nepal is as close to innocent as any emerging nation can be. Nepal contributes less than 0.1% of global greenhouse gas emissions despite bearing a disproportionate share of climate destruction. Nepal’s power grid is 95% supplied by clean hydropower, which is also supplemented by solar. Unlike neighboring India, the world’s third worst contributor to climate change after China and the US, Nepal does not operate coal-fired power plants.
In Nepal, traditional biomass including firewood and agricultural residue provide over 60% of overall primary energy. Biomass sources are the primary energy supply used for residential purposes including heating and cooking.
Despite their best efforts to burn clean fuel, the threat of renewed flooding still threatens Nepal, as scientists warn that debris and dammed up river channels could burst any day without warning, with over a thousand people still missing from the last event, including hundreds of foreign tourists.
Will we keep tuning out the obvious?
Every hurricane, flood, fire, disappearing habitat and river, and every sinking costal region, hastens big oil’s game of chicken toward its conclusion, one way or another. In the U.S., will the fossil-fuel aligned Supreme Court majority allow corporations to continue to destroy with no legal accountability? In India, will Prime Minister Modi continue to talk about climate justice, even as his policies create the opposite?
When my climate-focused run for office ended, a Chicago Tribune Metro editor asked if I wanted to write for them. I kept writing climate policy papers, why not use them to try to do some good? But I learned from the campaign that while many Americans are somewhat concerned about climate change, most don’t want to think about it.
Six years, hundreds of columns, and a climate justice TedTalk later, an editor from a different national paper told me that climate change, as a topic, remains unpopular.
People tune out climate change because the human brain has evolved to react to immediate, visible threats rather than slow-moving, abstract problems. The lack of personal urgency converts it to a future problem, while fossil-fuel backed organizations blame “nature” for their own malfeasance. Contemplating what’s happening to the planet also causes cognitive dissonance: it requires acknowledging uncomfortable truths about modern lifestyles, which leads to more psychological numbing, and emotional shutdown instead of action.
Maybe this psychological numbing is the earth’s kindness, her way of anesthetizing us while she reduces our number. And maybe sending up a {vindictive anti-science}_ imbecile, a grotesque sadist hellbent on destroying everything— _{the planet}, world {peace}, and the {rule of law}— is just nature’s way of thinning the herd.
Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.
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AN 5 26
Whenever a new poll comes out showing Trump’s abysmal ratings, public reactions follow a pattern. Public comments don’t question Trump’s disapproval rating. Rather, millions of people question the flip side: how does 38% of the nation still support such an obvious charlatan? Are supporters delusional? Suicidal?
Specifically, does MAGA not know that 15 million Americans, mostly their own, have now lost health insurance because of him? Can they not read the Walmart price tags they hold in their own hands? Do they not know he’s weakening the NATO alliance their granddads fought for, or that he single-handedly empowered one of the most dangerous regimes in the world?
The answer is ‘No, no, and no.’ Nearly 40% of the country—38%, to be exact— can’t connect the dots on who’s making their lives harder. We don’t need another study to figure out why, because it couldn’t be more obvious: As of May 12, 2026, 38% of the nation still supports Trump because 38% of the nation watches Fox News, purveyors of pure Trump propaganda. And compared to other consumers, Fox News viewers do not diversify their sources.
After the 2020 election, the Pew Research Center did a deep dive to learn what Americans heard, perceived and knew about it. Researchers found, for example, that 63% of Fox News viewers had given Trump an “excellent” rating on Covid. Trump suggested injecting bleach into unspecified orifices while over 1 million Americans died, yet Fox viewers thought he did an excellent job??
More accurately it was a con job, perpetrated by Fox News.
Fox News propaganda
Coming into the present news cycle, the Pope-Trump conflict illustrates the con in real time. Pope Leo XIV criticized Trump’s war with Iran by condemning leaders who manipulate religion for military gain. Trump, manifestly devoid of impulse control, immediately shot back on Truth Social that the Pope was “weak on crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy” as if he were a political adversary. In follow up Fox News Digital interviews, Trump doubled down and refused to apologize as Fox hosts clapped like seals.
While most media outlets questioned Trump’s sanity for attacking the spiritual leader of 1.4 billion people, Fox dissembled with headlines like, “60 Minutes accused of using left-leaning Cardinals to bait Trump into feud with Vatican” and “{Pope Leo says remarks about world being ‘ravaged by a }_}_{}__{{handful of tyrants’ were not aimed at Trump}. When Trump dispatched Marco Rubio to patch things up with the Pope last week, most media {reported that it didn’t work}, but Fox called it a big success and applauded {what a great job Rubio did.}
Fox News even tried to accuse other media networks of intentionally ‘baiting’ a response from Trump. They invited Elise Stefanik onto the network to tell Pope Leo XIV to “stay out of politics,” while other guests labelled the Pope’s foreign policy views ‘wrong’ and ‘liberal.’ Sean Hannity questioned whether the Pope fully understood the Iran conflict, and several other Fox commentators questioned whether the Pontiff had “read the Bible” about geocomplexities in Iran. To be clear, not one Fox host questioned whether Trump had “read the map” before he delivered the Strait of Hormuz to the mullahs.
The First Amendment protects political speech but it does not protect fraud
The Pope example alone illustrates how MAGA is being lied to on a daily basis, but it’s just one example. Fox News serves up daily falsehoods about climate change, immigrants, public education, NATO, black crime, ICE, and the war in Iran to craft a pro-Trump narrative, assuming their lies are legally protected by the First Amendment as “political speech.”
Enough damage is now evident to challenge that legal assumption.
In 2010, Supreme Court republicans fast-tracked America’s slide into oligarchy when they ruled in Citizens United that corporate political donations were a form of free speech. Citizens United further clarified that, under the First Amendment, political speech warrants the “highest level of protection against government regulation” following the New York Times Co. v. Sullivan’s restatement, and an earlier ruling that any regulations on political speech must withstand the highest level of strict scrutiny.
But while First Amendment protection for political speech is old news, there’s another long-toothed maxim: The First Amendment does not protect fraud. In 2012, under United States v. Alvarez,the Court confirmed that fraud is a ‘narrowly limited class of speech’ not entitled to First Amendment protection. In Alvarez, the Court struck down the Stolen Valor Act, a law that made lying about military medals a crime, because no one gained a ‘material advantage’ from the lie. Unless someone is profiting from their false speech, the court ruled, there’s no actionable fraud—they’re simply lying. But false speech connected to economic gain on one side and economic harm on the other is fraud, legally unprotected under the First Amendment.
Under this definition, Fox News is engaged in classic consumer fraud. Fox admitted in the Dominion case that they lied to their viewers for profit, and paid out nearly $1 billion in settlement as a result. But their lies didn’t stop after that case, they continue to sell 24/7 Trump propaganda as ‘news.’ They are perpetrating the same fraud, one that hooks viewers, profiting Fox and their corporate backers, while materially harming victims by convincing them to vote against their own economic interests.
Under Supreme Court precedent, Fox News isn’t engaging in protected political speech. It’s engaging in commercial fraud. And the victims aren’t just Fox viewers, even though studies show they are harmed the most: the entire nation is enduring political violence,
because 38% of the country is being lied to.
Albert Einstein once said, “A people that were to honor falsehood…would be unable, indeed, to subsist for very long.” Is mere national survival a sufficient justification to return to requiring accuracy in the news? Is it legally sufficient to pass strict scrutiny? If it is not, after a Democrat-run Congress returns to the Fairness Doctrine, this high court will have elevated partisan interests to the point of national suicide.
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How Trump's DOJ is quietly protecting billionaires — and destroying poor neighborhoods
Sabrina Haake May 08, 2026
The barely- acknowledged silver lining in Trump’s war in Iran is that it has pushed 30% of the world’s economic power into a race toward renewable energy. Market volatility of fossil fuels, already complex, has become so intolerable due to the oil chokehold in the Strait of Hormuz that nearly 60 nations are mapping out their accelerated plan to abandon fossil fuels.
Legacy cities, built around heavily polluting industries from 1940-1970, inherited dystopian realities, including toxic brownfields, disappearing populations, poverty, declining birth rates, and diminished life expectancy from airborne particulates. Study after study has shown that people of color, many of whom live in legacy cities, face disproportionate health problems from pollution including benzenes, coal ash, airborne particulates, industrial waste, and lead. One study showed that a 10 mile difference in where someone lives can make a 33 year difference in life expectancy due largely to differences in air, soil, and water quality.
As we watch our coastlines sink while fires, droughts and floods increase in intensity, it is only a matter of time before courts begin to compensate victims of mass environmental injury. While legacy cities, comprised of poor and/or black majorities, would make ideal class-action plaintiffs, the best way to avoid a forced national restructuring of the energy map is for state lawmakers to relieve legacy cities from state-sanctioned monopolies that have harmed them for decades.
Republicans should not have a monopoly on energy
Enter the utility monopoly, comprised predominantly of white, mid-to-upper wealth, males. Thirty-four states have created regulated energy monopolies under which competition is eliminated in exchange for “heightened state control”; these controls are exercised to guarantee regulated utilities a certain rate of return on their capital investments, regardless of injuries and pollution caused along the way. The statutes guarantee that the more power plants utilities build, the more financial rewards for their investors, regardless of whether or not those projects injure public health. Even project overruns, where a projected $5 billion plant ends up costing $10 billion, results in greater profits to shareholders, while 100% of the overrun costs are paid for by the consumer.
There is no industry in the free market economy of United States — other than the energy industry — where a given, controlled, highly lucrative ROI is legally guaranteed.
Utility monopoly states have established public utility monopolies to control local electricity production and distribution. Through public utility commissions (PUCs), they govern and regulate monopolies conceived as vertically integrated businesses, meaning the monopoly provides service from front (generation) to end (the consumer meter.) The entrenched array of state-controlled monopolies throughout the U.S. resulted in increased reliance on coal and coke powered facilities that leach chemicals toxic to human life in predominantly black, brown, Asian, and poor communities.
Follow the Money
The Trump administration is fighting climate progress in unprecedented ways. This month, Trump’s Justice Department sued Minnesota to block a state-level lawsuit against oil companies, arguing that the well-pleaded lawsuit is an attempt to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. This action follows a 2025 executive order directing the DOJ to protect energy production from state-level climate lawsuits, and complements Trump’s relentless efforts to increase reliance on fossil fuels to enrich and protect his deep-pocket fossil fuel donors.
While litigation winds through the federal courts, states could take matters into their own hands by transferring green energy generation to legacy cities and away from monopolistic utilities. The policy change would bring a profound economic shift by offering sustained economic opportunity to poor people, people of color, and others who live next to industry that ravages its host. This is an economic restitution approach based on evidence that black, brown, and poor citizens are disproportionately harmed by industrial pollution, toxic brownfields, and airborne particulates linked to living in legacy cities.
Redress is not suggested — nor recoverable — for decisions made in the 40s and 50s about where to site polluting industry. Demographics have shifted, and many entities have engaged in corporate shell games designed to insulate them from misdeeds of their corporate forbears.
But today there is no shortage of alternative energy firms with green energy expertise to share with municipalities in exchange for a share of the profits, if only they were not barred by artificial market constraints of Public Utility Commissions. It’s not hard to draft a 30-year lease where the energy developer provides expertise and equipment, and the city provides land, tax and permitting incentives. Over time, shared profits would gradually shift to the city while private investment is recovered.
Environmental justice would benefit the planet
Bringing energy autonomy to legacy cities would present a viable and sustainable economic justice model. Exempting legacy cities from PUCs, or state restraint, as compensation for decades of pollution and diminished life expectancy seems like a win-win, especially compared to the potential devastation of a well-funded class action.
A simple exemption for legacy cities would free 48 cities to set up green utilities through public-private ventures of their own choosing, and would soon provide cash-strapped cities more than enough money to enhance city services and possibly pay dividends to residents. Instead of drowning in debt, legacy cities could soon pave roads, buy municipal EV fleets for police and fire, and provide the kind of early education that gives urban youth a real chance at succeeding.
The war in Iran hits home how absurd it is to extract limited fossil fuels and export them around the globe when wind and solar power exists in everyone’s back yard. Black, brown, and poor communities disproportionately poisoned by fossil fuels own the wind and sun as much as anyone else, and should not have to sue the richest defendants in the world just to get their fair share. As long as we inhabit a spinning ball that circles the sun, we will have all the wind and solar energy we will ever need.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.
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What we're really fighting for
Sabrina Haake May 03, 2026
I just opened an online image so beautiful it stopped my thoughts, cut them off midstream so efficiently I forgot where they were going.
The image, captured in this glorious video from Renee Volpe, shows a bird constructing its home from young leaves she sews together with leaf thread. She suspends her architectural marvel from an attached leaf (almond tree?), a condo perched between branches, shielded from rain and hungry eyes. After she builds the walls, she lines the floor with softness, perfect for cradling her own belly and bellies soon to peck free from speckled eggs. I googled, ‘What yellow bird sews its own nest?’ and learned that it’s most likely a tailorbird, known for weaving natural materials into habitats.
The bird’s soft beauty speaks- white collar, yellow jacket, hat and pants in matching orange. But it was her purpose, her drive to protect and cradle life, that leapt from the screen and shook me. Her wordless mission said to stop staring at the destructive craziness du jour leaching from the White House and intuit, just for a moment, the real intelligence of life.
The bird’s quiet resolve somehow reminded me that the psychopath we’ve loosed on the world is only transitory. Even the concentration camps he’s building with critics’ names on them will eventually crumble. As horrific as this moment in America is, all of it will pass.
A bird builds a nest. A predator tears it down.
I write, too often, about what is wrong in the world. From where I sit, most roads to death and cruelty are built by emotionally stunted men too short on intelligence and too long on world-destroying power. On a good day I see them as a blip, a wrinkle, a mistake along our evolutionary continuum. Their self-preserving greed and wanton cruelty are nothing new; those traits have been with man since we first stood erect. Even today, despite the clear hindsight of history, the stupidest among us somehow still believe that naked aggression reflects superiority.
One of the deadliest Cro-Magnon predators to walk the earth has attacked ten different nations in as many years. Starting wars with no purpose other than to satiate an insatiable ego, he demands a prize for spreading peace, as if willing green to become yellow will make it turn. Despite his relentless attacks on science, he has unearthed one unwelcome truth: if he repeats a lie often enough, some not-insignificant cohort of the U.S. population will believe it is true.
The bird, our bird, is blissfully oblivious to a force so ravenous it took a wrecking ball to the White House, a force hellbent on destroying history because he knows history will not spare him. Our bird’s indifference reveals the glaring dichotomy of co-existing forces on earth: those that protect life, and those that destroy.
Intelligence can be deceptive
My mom tried hard to raise Catholic children. Her best efforts, thwarted by a hard life, began and ended with sending us to Catholic schools. When I was about nine years old, waiting in line for communion, I studied—really studied—the Stations of the Cross along the wall: violent whips, nails through bloodied hands, crowns made from thorns. Staring too hard or just hard enough, I suddenly realized I was being manipulated. This wasn’t a message of god, goodness, or the sublime, this religion wanted to control people, using fear.
For about the next thirty years I considered myself an atheist; researching “religious” cruelties through the ages delivered easy confirmation. Yet I still re-learned, whenever I walked in nature, that a vast intelligence lived there. How else to explain an acorn?
I’ve learned since then that trees and plants communicate with each other. Plants’ communication systems are composed of underground fungal networks, electric signals, and chemical signals. They don’t debate, they just work quietly to absorb sunlight and nutrients from the earth around them, making good use of what the stars sent us billions of years ago.
A bird? Or divinity?
One day, walking through the trees, my dearest friend Lois Osborn convinced me that I wasn’t an atheist after all. How can you sense the rightness of the universe and not believe in god? For someone so convinced of their own intelligence, how can you be so blind to deep contradictions? We agreed, finally, that god (“life force,” if you will) exists in the propulsion of life.
Lois, I’ll add, is an old school Christian. She believes there’s an evil force in the world akin to a biblical Lucifer. She believes in judgment—in another place and time, she might wear a MAGA hat. But she harbors an immense dislike for cruelty. She sees that MAGA Christians embrace cruelty as a form of governance that hurts others with no real thought of what Jesus would do. So I channel Lois as I watch the tailorbird video on repeat like it’s a drug.
Yes, an ugly annihilatory force is afoot in America, one that may reshape our nation for generations to come. We have no choice but to fight it. But along the way, we have to take breaks and touch grass. And we have to remember that even if this ugliness culminates in the worst possible outcome, some tailorbird, somewhere, will survive, peck through the ashes, and rebuild its nest.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.
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Trump just broke his America First promise to build his illegal ballroom - Alternet.org
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Congress's cowardice exposed again as Trump ignores judge's ruling
:{:{Sabrina Haake April 09, 2026}:
From his first days back in power, Trump has set about remaking the nation’s capital in his own gilded image.
He paved over the 1903 Rose Garden, then matched the new patio to his Mar-a-Lago hotel, demolished the entire East Wing, and spray painted Oval Office fixtures in a
Let-them-eat-cake gold frenzy. The Kennedy Center, left alone until one artist after another refused to perform there following Trump’s rebrand, is now facing an unplanned two year “closure” for “comprehensive renovations.” Still in the works are Trump’s massive ‘arch de Trump’ between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial, the conversion of three historic municipal golf courses into private, luxury courses, and a 90,000 square foot ballroom styled after his Palm Beach bordello that will dwarf the White House.
The Commission of Fine Arts is an independent federal agency established by Congress to advise the President and Congress on aesthetics and design in order to preserve the quiet dignity of the nation's capital. After Trump packed its governing board with allies, the Commission voted to approve his gold-appointed ballroom, no notes. However, on March 31, 2026, in a delicious smackdown that got out-noised by Trump’s WWIII insanity, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon put a pin in it.
Addressing the planned ballroom, Judge Leon wrote that the President of the United States “is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families,” however, he is not the owner.
What gives Trump the right to redraw the nation’s capital?
Facing down Trump’s claims of foolproof authority to control what happens to the White House, Judge Leon belabored the historical context in which Congress —not the president— has always controlled construction at the White House. His opinion can be found here.
Leon started by noting that the original White House construction was directed and funded by Congress. The initial build was quickly followed by repairs necessitated by the War of 1812. From there Leon detailed how Congress appropriated funds for construction of the South Portico in 1823, the North Portico in 1829, and the East and West Wings in 1902. In the late 1940s, Leon noted, after the discovery of major structural issues, Congress appropriated funds for “the renovation, repair, and modernization” of the White House but prohibited any change of the “architectural appearance of the exterior of the mansion or the interior of its main floor.”
Despite the clarity of historical precedent, easily found on the White House’s own Historical Association website, the White House announced in August 2025 that, “President Trump, and other patriot donors, have generously committed to donating the funds to build” a 90,000 square foot ballroom, at “zero cost to the American Taxpayer!” (Cancer! Lobotomies! at zero cost!)
Less than two months later, photos circulating online confirmed that the East Wing had been entirely demolished to make way for Trump’s ballroom eyesore.
National monuments don’t belong to Trump’s oligarchs
Trump has claimed repeatedly that he, not Congress, possesses vast powers to control the nation’s purse strings. To construct his ballroom, he claimed the right to supplant Congressional funding with money donated by his wealthy donor class, as if centuries of American tradition could be restyled in Trump’s taste by simply paying for it. Trump’s ballroom donors wouldn’t have $400 million laying around to begin with if not for Trump’s $117 billion in tax cuts lining their pockets.
Issuing a preliminary injunction against the ballroom’s construction last week, Judge Leon ordered it to “stop until Congress authorizes its completion.” Under 40 USC. § 8106, in effect since 1912, “[a] building or structure shall not be erected on any reservation, park, or public grounds of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia without express authority of Congress.” The statute further instructs the Secretary of the Interior to protect the District of Colombia’s scenery, natural and historic objects “in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”
Trump’s legal team tried numerous spins around these statutory hurdles, but Judge Leon rejected them in turn, ruling that “no statute comes close to giving (Trump) the authority he claims to have” to bypass Congress for such major alterations, regardless of who’s paying for them.
Ultra vires: ‘beyond the powers of,’ ‘unauthorized’
Letting Trump and his oligarchs pay to control the landscape of our nation’s 235 year capital is blatantly unethical. Donor entities such as Amazon, Apple, Meta, Google, and Microsoft, defense contractors, and cryptocurrency firms paying for the ballroom expect paybacks in the form of regulatory breaks, merger approvals, more tax breaks, and lucrative federal contracts. That’s why the Antideficiency Act restricts government agencies from accepting private funds without explicit authorization from Congress- to prevent people and corporations from donating to the government in order to buy influence.
Trump, above that law thanks to SCOTUS, is now freely and openly selling influence and accepting bribes. Aside from the obvious corruption of pay to play, by revising national monuments with private funds, Trump is also trying to transfer the power of Congress, a co-equal branch of government, to his own corporate donors. That Congressional Republicans are letting him do it suggests severe pathologies and hints at a flaw in our founding document.
Fittingly, as to Trump’s lamentations that the work had already begun on the ballroom, with the destruction of the East Wing now leaving an unsightly mess, Judge Leon called it “a hole of the President's own making.”
If that’s not a metaphor for this disastrous presidency, nothing is.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.
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America elected a simpleton and the wreck he leaves behind could be permanent
U.S. President Donald Trump attends a ceremony marking the 24th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States at the Pentagon, in Washington D.C., U.S., September 11, 2025. REUTERS Evelyn Hockstein
Sabrina Haake, Raw StoryNovember 25, 2025
Since Donald Trump has been back in office, energy prices have increased at more than double the rate of inflation. The Consumer Price Index from the end of October reported an “all items price index” increase for food, shelter, and transportation of 3.0 percent over a 12-month period, while energy services for the same period rose by 6.4 percent.
After promising to slash energy prices, Trump has done the opposite. His energy policies reflect the same ethos driving everything else in his retribution playbook: reward donors and inflict pain on Democrats, even when the economic consequences are nationwide.
Lust for retribution
In early October, Trump announced the claw-back of billions of dollars in federal funding for utilities, money that had been appropriated to reinforce power grids and reduce electricity prices.
Targeting blue states exclusively, Budget Director Russ Vought announced the cancellation of “nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda.” In all, 321 Congressionally set awards supporting 223 wind, solar, and transmission projects were trashed.
Trump’s aversion to clean energy isn’t the only factor driving costs. His refusal to upgrade the grid, his half-baked export and tariff initiatives, and his blind support for energy-sucking AI data centers are all contributing to surging energy prices with no relief in sight.
As Canary Media framed it, “Trump slapped tariffs on certain wind turbine materials and opened a sham “national security” probe to pave the way for even more. He halted construction on a nearly completed offshore wind farm and moved to revoke permits for two more. He canceled hundreds of millions in port funding critical to offshore wind development and imposed new directives to stifle renewable projects on federal lands.”
Trump’s dedication is showing: after only ten months of Trump 2.0, US household electric bills have increased by 10 percent, and are expected to continue climbing.
UN Climate Summit
Trump is doing more than reversing US climate successes, he’s also undermining progress in other parts of the world. Last month, when the International Maritime Organization agreed on the world’s first carbon tax on global shipping to encourage the transition to cleaner fuels, Trump released a childish Truth Social rant threatening to retaliate.
This month, he ignored the UN Climate Summit in Brazil. Thankfully, California Governor Gavin Newsom attended, representing the world’s fourth-largest economy. Newsom highlighted California's efforts to step up on climate where Trump has stepped out.
Facing down the embarrassment of an antiquated, know-nothing, pro-fossil fuel regime, Newsom didn’t hold back. When asked about the US retreat from global climate action, he called Trump “an invasive species … He’s a wrecking ball president trying to roll back progress of the last century … he’s doubling down on stupid.”
Newsom did more than talk. While he was at the summit, he signed new Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) with Brazil, Colombia, and Chile to advance clean energy, wildfire prevention, and other climate-related initiatives. He also expanded California’s existing partnerships with China and Mexico on clean energy development and zero-emission freight corridors.
Newsom managed to bolster California's profile as a stable international business and climate partner despite the optics of a US president ruled by ego and impulse.
Our loss, China’s gain
In September, addressing the UN, Trump called climate change a “con job” and urged other world leaders to abandon their climate efforts despite the Earth’s rising temperatures. Trump claimed falsely that China sells wind turbines to the world without using them at home, and told assembled leaders, “If you don’t get away from the green energy scam, your country is going to fail.”
The next day, China pledged the reverse. Xi Jinping announced China’s plan to increase electric vehicle sales and dramatically increase wind and solar power, targeting a 600 percent increase over 2020 levels.
Despite Trump’s claim, China has vastly expanded wind power developments at home, adding 46 gigawatts of new wind energy this year alone, enough to power than 30 million homes. Meanwhile, our Cro-Magnon regime froze permits for wind farms and issued stop work orders, ending tens of thousands of wind energy jobs in the process.
Critics agree that Trump’s withdrawal from climate efforts ceded valuable ground to China, which is now rapidly expanding its renewable and EV industries. China’s Ming Yang Smart Energy just unveiled OceanX, a two-headed offshore wind turbine. OceanX is expected to cut offshore energy costs to one-fifth of Europe’s costs while allowing wind farms to operate with fewer, more powerful turbines.
“China gets it,” Newsom said at the UN Climate Summit, “America is toast competitively, if we don’t wake up to what the hell they’re doing in this space, on supply chains, how they’re dominating manufacturing, how they’re flooding the zone.”
Newsom is right. Americans are suffering the tragedy of an uninformed and unstable president who rejects science, a president who wants to take us back to the 19th century. We have also inflicted our tragedy on the rest of the world.
Pope Leo frames climate action as a moral and spiritual imperative, tying the “cry of the Earth” to the “cry of the poor,” because small island nations and the global south, including poor states in the US, will continue to suffer the most from extreme weather and climate destruction.
Trump will be dead before climate change becomes an obvious existential threat. As Newsom said, he is only temporary. But the global destruction he leaves behind could be permanent. We owe it to our children, ourselves, and all the earth’s inhabitants to never again elect an imbecile, and to shut this one down before he kills us all.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
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Behind Trump's sinister plan for Americans who don’t support him
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a law enforcement event in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., May 19, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Sabrina Haake, Raw StoryNovember 16, 2025 |
On Monday, the Trump administration submitted arguments to the Supreme Court claiming that no court — including the Supreme Court — can question Trump’s decision to deploy military troops against US cities.
Trump lawyers wrote that “the President’s determination to call up the National Guard is a core exercise of his power as Commander in Chief over military affairs, based on an explicit delegation from Congress. That determination is not judicially reviewable at all; at minimum, it is entitled to extremely deferential review, under which (Trump’s deployment) should be upheld.”
Claiming Trump called up the National Guard in Chicago “in light of the violent, organized resistance” ICE agents face, Trump attorneys insist his decision is not subject to judicial review, citing a case from 1827 that they apparently have not read.
Martin v. Mott arose from the War of 1812, and held that military subordinates could not second guess a president’s judgment about military threats. Although it is often mis-cited, Martin did not even discuss judicial review, much less hold that no court can ever review a president’s decision.
Americans don’t want this
Most Americans have a strong moral resistance to military intrusion into civilian affairs. An easy majority of Americans today, across party lines, oppose sending military troops into US cities in the absence of a foreign threat.
Our resistance can be traced back to the Revolutionary War. After living under the tyranny of King George III, whose hated armed troops ate their food and slept in quarters they were forced to provide, colonists held a widespread fear of a national standing army, because it threatened individual liberty and the sovereignty of the separate states. Because of that distrust, the founders carefully apportioned responsibility over the “militia” — today’s National Guard — between the federal government and the States.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 15 of the U.S. Constitution grants Congress, not the president, the power to call forth the National Guard “to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.” That foundational authority in turn supports Title 10 USC 12406, which allows a president to call forth the militia but only under specific, statutorily defined circumstances. It also supports the Posse Comitatus Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1385, which forbids the use of any part of the federal armed forces to execute laws, except where “expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress,” reflecting “the deeply rooted and ancient opposition in this country to the extension of military control over civilians.”
Exaggerated threats
Trump officials, with daily assistance from Fox News, report extreme violence among ICE protestors, significantly more violence than eyewitnesses, or state and local law enforcement officers, have observed.
Trump lawyers claim ICE agents “are facing incessant violent resistance on the streets of Illinois — including ambushes where their vehicles are rammed by trucks and dangerous projectiles are thrown at them, potentially motivated by bounties placed on their heads by violent gangs and transnational cartels. Federal agents faced with such threats and violence — in Chicago and elsewhere— operate, on a daily basis, in a climate of fear for their lives and safety, forced constantly to focus on self-defense and protection instead of executing federal law.”
It is no surprise that eyewitness accounts largely dispute these claims, often with video evidence. Examples of disputed ICE claims include:
In instances where ICE agents alleged their vehicles were rammed by activists, video footage showed the federal agents' vehicles were the aggressors, ramming the other vehicles first.
Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino admitted he was not hit by a rock until after he deployed tear gas at a Chicago protest, contradicting earlier claims that it happened in reverse.
DHS claimed a middle-aged, heavy set woman, a WGN news producer, went out of her way to assault an ICE agent; eyewitness said she was simply standing there taking video. She was eventually released without charges.
After DHS claimed a “more than 1,000 percent rise” in assaults on ICE agents, reporting from NPR and a review of federal court filings found no public evidence to support that claim.
Videos circulating online show unprovoked, excessive violence from federal agents against protestors, with several showing agents pointing guns at peaceful observers.
To date, there is no known case addressing what happens when an unhinged president deliberately escalates violence and civil unrest in order to feel powerful/beat his chest/justify siccing the military on US citizens.
'Regular forces'
The Ninth and Seventh Circuit Appellate courts have addressed Trump’s National Guard deployments into US cities. Both appellate courts rejected Trump’s argument that military deployments are not reviewable, noting that the statute’s plain text lists specific predicate conditions before a president can deploy the National Guard, and “nothing in the text … makes the President the sole judge of whether these preconditions exist.”
The Ninth Circuit decision is awaiting full en banc review, while the Seventh Circuit concluded that facts on the ground weren’t what ICE said they were. The Seventh Circuit decision is now before the US Supreme Court, which recently directed the parties to file supplemental brief letters on the meaning of 10 USC 12406(3), which allows a president to call up the National Guard when he is “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”
Trump’s belief that his deployment of military forces is immune from judicial review is ominous, given his demonstrated lust for violence against unarmed people. His sinister plans for Americans who don’t support him, now officially labeled “domestic terrorists,” will depend greatly on whether the Supreme Court checks him with this case.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
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Home | MAGA is playing a dangerous game with consequences they can't comprehend
A man wears a MAGA hat as people attend a vigil at the Montgomery Statue in Whitehall, to commemorate U.S. conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was fatally shot while speaking at an event at Utah Valley University, in London, Britain, September 12, 2025. REUTERS/Jack Taylor
Sabrina Haake, Raw StoryOctober 20, 2025 |
This week, blind to constitutional law and US history, Trump Border Czar Tom Homan said that protesting ICE “could lead to bloodshed and people dying.”
By suggesting that masked ICE agents could kill protestors for simply shouting hateful things at them, Homan was building the permission structure for federal agents to use “full force” violence against non-violent protestors.
More than that, his statement was meant to groom the public. The Trump administration is trying to get US citizens used to the idea that federal agents could use lethal force — to the point of killing people — against anyone who exercises their constitutional right to peacefully protest government actions they don’t like.
On too many videos circulating on social media to count, masked ICE agents have been recorded getting more and more aggressive with members of the public, deliberately escalating non-violent exchanges into violent ones.
Federal agents have been caught on video body slamming people to the ground, kneeling on people’s necks, and pointing armed weapons at close range. More than 20 people have died at ICE’s hands, including US citizens, but this tally is artificially low because the Trump administration tightly controls media access to ICE detention facilities.
Team Trump has no idea what the First Amendment means
Homan, like Trump, seems oblivious to what the First Amendment says.
“Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech … or the right of the people peaceably to assemble…”
This protection was extended from Congress, or the federal government, to the states in 1868 through the passage of the 14th Amendment.
It was the very first amendment to the Constitution, and was the key to getting states to go along with the Constitution at all. Many states refused to sign or support the Constitution after it was drafted in 1787 because they were fearful of a strong federal government with no constraints to protect people from overreach. It was the sticking point that refused to yield, as the objecting states would not support the Constitution without a guarantee of individual liberties, including freedom of religion and, most importantly, the freedom to speak openly, to gather, and to criticize the government.
James Madison rose to the challenge and drafted the First Amendment, the language of which remains to this day, and has never been changed.
The world is envious of our freedom of speech
Freedom of speech beyond the reach or control of the government stands as a beacon of freedom throughout the world, a marker of man’s evolution from the Dark Ages when rulers often punished and tortured people for their beliefs.
That’s why Trump’s Executive Order declaring that the federal government would now punish dissenters, whom he labelled “domestic terrorists,” sends chills down the spine of anyone who has the slightest concept of world history.
People in MAGA who support Trump’s centralized thought control have no concept of what it’s like to live under authoritarian rule. In China, Xi Jinping has installed facial recognition software into China's public security apparatus, where it records everyone at cross lights, bus stops, transport hubs and in public spaces. Xi uses it for mass surveillance, to record, identify, track and persecute anyone who criticizes the government.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin is just as bad. Aside from famously having critics poisoned, or pushed out of helicopters and windows, Putin has imposed severe prison sentences of up to 15 years for spreading "deliberately false information" about the Russian military.
Last week, Trump’s Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth tried something similar. Hegseth announced new rules threatening journalists’ access to the Pentagon if they did not agree to publish only information that he wants released, and was shocked when most of the press refused to go along with it.
The faction of MAGA clamoring to relax the division between church and state today have no idea what they are asking for either. Trump’s Christo Nationalists claim the U.S. was founded by and for Christians, and that its laws and government should therefore impose Christian values over all of society. They have no understanding of world or human history, or that freedom of religion grew out of the Inquisition, when torture was common.
James Madison would be proud of No Kings Day
Yesterday, huge crowds marched in major cities, as smaller gatherings sprung up across small town USA for “No Kings” protests against the Trump administration.
There were more than 2,500 events in all 50 states, predicted to be one of the largest demonstrations in US history.
Demonstrators spoke out against Trump’s policies, including perceived threats to democracy, ICE raids and Trump deploying military troops in US cities. The signs speak for themselves.
As I marched inside my bear inflatable, I’ve never been more proud to be an American.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
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Republicans are prepping the far right for war
Sabrina Haake, Raw Story
September 24, 2025
In the decade before the Civil War, slave-owning men known as “Fire Eaters” started ratcheting up public discourse in stark, divisive, all or nothing terms. They cast their interests not as political differences, but as an existential crisis facing the nation. They used public speeches to vilify people who disagreed with them, spreading hatred in the hearts of men until it grew hot, and war became inevitable.
It’s impossible to read the words of those men without hearing the voices of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller speaking at Charlie Kirk’s memorial.
Using that solemn occasion to deliver a message of hatred and division, two weeks after Kirk’s murder, Trump and Miller are still exploiting it. Despite the lack of clarity about both the killer’s motive and his shifting political ideologies, they continue to spread false rhetoric blaming the “radical left,” projecting their own wish for political violence just as the Fire Eaters of the 19th century did.
Words of war
Anyone who expected a respite, or dared to hope for a “presidential” message during Kirk’s memorial service, was sorely disappointed. After a MAGA speaker lineup, Trump walked onto the stage while Lee Greenwood sang “Proud to be an American,” also known as “God Bless the U.S.A.” In Trump's heavily choreographed entrance, raucous applause erupted as live fireworks exploded across a stage more reminiscent of a used car clearance event than a somber memorial.
After Kirk’s grieving widow spoke of forgiveness and grace, Trump batted her words away. Trump relayed to the audience how Kirk said he didn’t hate people who disagreed with him.
“But,” Trump said, “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents and I don’t want the best for them, I’m sorry.”
Miller, the presumed architect behind Trump’s attacks on immigrants and minorities, delivered his own ghoulish invective, eulogizing Kirk with dark images of us vs. them:
“The light will defeat the dark. We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. They cannot imagine what they have awakened. They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen in all of us. Because we stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble.
And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing. We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create. We are the ones who lift up humanity.”
Miller didn’t define who he meant by “we” and “they.” He didn’t need to.
Right v left
Trump and Miller are getting their wish: Political violence in the US is on the rise. Violent attacks against US government personnel and facilities more than doubled between 2024 and 2025. Contrary to what Trump and Miller keep claiming, however, it’s coming from the right, not the left.
Analyzing political violence according to the views of the perpetrator is complicated in part because interpreting motive can itself be subjective. It’s also complicated because different organizations use different terminology. The FBI and Department of Homeland Security define domestic violent extremism as violence “intended to influence government policy or intimidate civilians for political or ideological purposes,” while researchers, including universities, use more operational definitions.
Despite these challenges, data clearly show that right-wing political violence has been far, far deadlier than left-wing political violence.
Based on government and independent analyses, PBS reports that right-wing extremist violence has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of fatalities in the US, listing recent examples such as the 2015 Charleston church shooting, the Pittsburgh 2018 Tree of Life synagogue attack, and the anti-immigrant 2019 El Paso Walmart massacre. The report also lists deaths caused by left-wing extremist incidents, including anarchist and environmental movements like the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front, arson and vandalism campaigns that often targeted property rather than people.
When compared side by side, violence from right wing extremism amounted to approximately 75 percent to 80 percent of U.S. domestic terrorism deaths between 2001 and the present, while violence from the left comprised about 10 percent to 15 percent of such incidents and less than 5 percent of fatalities overall from political violence.
Violent words elicit violent responses
Mark Hertling writes in his excellent essay “Beware today’s fire eaters” that the 1861 onset of Civil War can be attributed to political arsonists who portrayed compromise and coexistence as dishonor, promoting national violence as the only resort.
Hertling, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, writes that the Civil War agitators “moved beyond grievance into agitation and violence. They … treated any dissent as an existential threat to their way of life. They cultivated a rhetoric that was designed not to persuade opponents but to radicalize their many followers,” ultimately celebrating political violence as necessary.
The tactics of the fire-eaters, Herling notes, reveal the same playbook we are witnessing today as Trump radicalizes his base by demonizing and dehumanizing his political opponents.
Fire Eaters of the Civil War, like Trump and Miller, painted their political adversaries as mortal enemies. As Trump has demonstrated repeatedly with Executive Orders that have no basis in law, the Fire Eaters also normalized extralegal responses. They claimed political violence was a patriotic duty, just as Trump exalted J6 rioters to fight like hell or they wouldn’t have a country left, then rewarded even the worst among them with a pardon.
As Trump, Miller, Hegseth and Bondi build the world’s largest and most lethal police state, they are equipping Trump with his own private militia. As Trump teases a third presidential run, it’s not hard to see that, for him, January 6 was but a rehearsal.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
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One Trump court case will determine whether America will still have a democracy
Sabrina Haake, Raw Story July 26, 2025
Oral arguments were heard this week in Harvard v. Trump’s cross motions for summary judgment. Summary judgment, or “judgment on the papers,” means both sides agree on the facts but disagree on how the law applies to those facts.
Neither Harvard nor the Trump administration dispute that Trump made certain unprecedented written demands to the University, accompanied by unprecedented threats if they refused to comply.
Harvard refused to comply, and sued instead.
Whichever party loses summary judgment will appeal, and the final disposition will likely, eventually, come from the Supreme Court. If the high court’s republican majority further empowers Trump’s edicts under their misguided “unitary executive theory,” our 249 year history of ideological freedoms will come to an end and the nation will yield to Trump’s revenge.
Trump’s pressure campaign against Harvard
The Trump administration, ostensibly seeking to reduce campus antisemitism following widespread protests over Gaza, threatened to withhold billions in federal funding from Harvard, place a lien on University assets, and put academic departments in receivership, unless Harvard agreed to:
Exclusively promote faculty committed to Harvard’s mission and Trump’s viewpoints;
Submit the university to a Trump administration review of “viewpoint diversity;”
Scrutinize any “programs and departments” that might, in Trump’s judgment, fuel ‘antisemitic harassment;’
Submit all faculty to outside review for alleged ‘plagiarism;’
Submit to a comprehensive hiring and review audit conducted by the federal government;
Implement a comprehensive mask ban and suspend anyone who wears a mask;
Report to the federal government on any faculty members who “discriminated against” Jewish or Israeli students;
Screen student applicants to reject those with viewpoints “hostile” to Trump/ Israel’s policies;
Establish outside review for Harvard programs that reflect “ideological capture” ie, programs where classroom messaging does not reflect Trump-supportive dogma;
Diminish the influence of its own professors and faculty over the university; or
Establish “merit based” hiring and admissions policies that pleased the Trump administration.
The oral argument
Oral argument was both testy and basic. The lone DOJ lawyer arguing the motion, Michael Velchik, asserted that the administration “has the power to decide” where it will spend taxpayer money and that, “the government does not want to fund research at institutions that fail to address antisemitism to (the government’s) satisfaction.” According to Velchik, when Harvard refused to go along with Trump’s demands, Trump was free to terminate any and all contracts with the university.
Trump essentially argues that the federal government can terminate or withhold funds under a contract for any reason at all, even if that reason violates free speech, the right of free association, or any other rights protected under First Amendment.
Steven Lehotsky, Harvard’s counsel, countered that Trump’s attempts to control the University, including telling the University what it can teach and how it can teach it, represents Trump’s blatant “and unrepentant” violation of the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has long held viewpoint discrimination to be such a serious violation of the 1st A that it is treated as ‘presumptively unconstitutional.’ Lehotsky argued plainly that, “It’s the constitutional third rail, or it should be, for the government to insist it can engage in viewpoint discrimination.”
Trump has been consistent in his belief that he can punish speech and political conduct he doesn’t like, notwithstanding clear and unequivocal legal precedent to the contrary. He has applied the same strong-arm tactics to boardrooms and corporations, national media outlets, law firms, and, most recently, comedians. If the Roberts court continues to enable him, Trump will extend the same reasoning to imprison or otherwise punish anyone who criticizes him, following the same authoritarian playbook that produced such hits as Nazi Germany, Viktor Orban’s Hungary, and Putin’s Russia.
How does Trump tie withdrawal of medical research funding to the civil rights of Jewish people?
Even if Harvard allowed the expression of antisemitic views on campus—despite a strong Jewish presence among Harvard faculty—there still has to be some nexus, or some connection, between what the government is trying to fix (antisemitism) and the methods it uses to fix it. The judge went to the heart of this concept when she asked Trump’s counsel to explain the relationship between antisemitism and cutting off unrelated cancer research funding, noting that Trump is “not taking away grants from labs that have been antisemitic.”
An amicus brief filed in the case by Jewish scholars also points out that Trump routinely uses “antisemitism” as a ruse to attack freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of association. As noted in their amici brief, many Jewish scholars reject the notion that being Jewish “requires adherence to a specific conception of Zionism or support for the Israeli government or its policies and practices.”
Judge Burroughs noted that if Trump, or any federal administration, could punish a university without due process simply because they don’t like their politics, or their message, or the substance of their curriculum, the constitutional consequences would be “staggering.”
The outcome of Harvard v. Trump will determine whether we still have a democracy
Harvard v. Trump asks the most fundamental questions one can ask about the relationship between the government and the governed. Under the First Amendment, can the federal government control what is taught in the classroom and what is said on campus at various universities? Can the federal government withhold federal funds if it doesn’t like what it hears, or doesn’t agree with the viewpoints expressed?
If the answer is no, then our Constitution stands. Trump will join a 249 year line-up of presidents who have to grin and bear it when students call them ugly names and protest their policies. Who knows, Trump might even someday learn why the framers made free speech and association the very first amendment to the Constitution.
But if the answer is yes, the First Amendment will fall under the Roberts court, and there’s no reason to believe any other Constitutional protection will stand. Trump will forcibly insert his right-wing ideology onto campuses, boardrooms, and legacy media nationwide. That ideology will serve a madman’s lust for power and revenge, and America’s democracy will cease to exist.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
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Home | Trump just got a wake up call as he tries to escalate his war on defiance
Sabrina Haake, Raw Story June 15, 2025
Ever since he was ignominiously blocked from shooting George Floyd protesters, Donald Trump has been itching to sic the military on U.S. citizens. Seizing California’s National Guard and sending U.S. Marines into Los Angeles to deliberately escalate violence brings his long-festering fever dream closer to life.
Trump’s former Defense Secretary Mark Esper has recounted how, during a White House meeting in 2020, Trump looked at Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley and asked why he couldn’t just shoot protesters, adding, “It was (both) a suggestion and a formal question. And we were just all taken aback at that moment as this issue hung very heavily in the air.”
Milley pushed back on that suggestion and other illegal Trump impulses, eventually leading Trump to call for Milley’s execution and revoke his security detail. During Trump 1.0, Trump apparently suggested shooting protesters enough times that Esper issued a public statement opposing the use of the Insurrection Act against protesters, enraging Trump.
Trump made sure that would not happen again in his second administration by appointing a dangerously unqualified defense secretary with few moral qualms. As a Fox News host, Pete Hegseth echoed Trump’s desire to deploy the military against protesters. He defended war criminals who ‘killed the right people in the wrong ways,’ advocating “total war against our enemies… All of ’em, you stack bodies, and when it’s over, then you let the dust settle and you figure out who’s ahead.”
A trillion-dollar defense budget to kill whom, exactly?
Even though the U.S. is not at war, and Trump has shamefully abandoned our NATO military alliances, Hegseth waxes hard on “lethality,” and rails against “woke” laws that punish soldiers for indiscriminate killings. Trump/Hegseth seek a trillion-dollar defense budget, not to defend America from foreign enemies who are now Trump’s mentors, but to attack “enemies within,” i.e., Americans who oppose Trump’s agenda.
None of this, including Trump’s deliberate escalation of violence in LA, was unforeseen. Who can forget how Kamala Harris was panned as histrionic when she said Trump would sic the military on U.S. citizens, following his promise to do just that? In October, 2024, Trump said he’d use the military against the biggest threat to America — Americans who don’t support him.
“I think the (main problem we face) is the enemy from within,” Trump said, adding: “We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the big — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”
Both he and Hegseth have already weeded out military officers who would honor their oaths to the Constitution over illegal orders from Trump. This week, Hegseth inadvertently confirmed that the military, under Trump, will become a domestic force when he testified before Congress, saying, “We’re entering another phase, especially under President Trump with his focus on the homeland, where the National Guard and Reserves become a critical component of how we secure that homeland.”
It’s galling that no congressman has connected the dots and asked about explosive military spending that Trump/Hegseth have signaled will be used against Americans.
Dubious legal grounds
As of this writing, Trump has not declared martial law, but recent Trump history, paired with his glaring mental illness, suggests it’s “when,” not “if.”
Trump’s plan to use troops to impose his domestic agenda is decidedly un-American. Today it includes deportations and manufacturing civil unrest; tomorrow, Trump’s goons will round up journalists who criticize him, judges, Democrats, and political opponents, as just happened Thursday when Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) was tackled to the ground for trying to ask Kristi Noem questions.
If you have any doubt, watch Trump’s illegal and partisan address at Ft. Bragg, where he led troops in uniform to wildly “boo” journalists, California’s governor, and LA’s mayor. If you have any lingering naivety, still hoping soldiers will honor their oaths and not follow America’s Hitler, that speech will erase it.
For now, Trump is acting in LA pursuant to a presidential memorandum deploying the National Guard under a rarely used federal law, 10U.S.C.§12406. Under that code, a president possesses the power to federalize the National Guard only when there is “a rebellion or danger of rebellion” against federal authority, or when the president cannot execute federal laws. As Trump sees it, this assessment depends on his own untrained and undisciplined opinion. Under that statute, however, the National Guard can only support other law enforcement officers and defend federal property.
The Posse Comitatus Act also remains in effect, prohibiting the use of the military as a domestic law enforcement agency, except in extraordinary circumstances not yet present in LA despite Trump’s best efforts. The Insurrection Act of 1807, the authority under which Hegseth sent active Marines to LA, is a broader set of statutes granting Trump the power to use military force in specific circumstances, including suppressing armed rebellion, civil disorder, or other extreme circumstances where the states are unable to maintain public order.
Gov. Gavin Newsom formally objected to Trump sending troops, because California in general, and LAPD in particular, have sufficient resources to maintain order. Newsom knows that when US Marines start shooting civilians, whether in LA, Chicago, or New York, violence will ratchet up to the necessary threshold to circumvent Posse Comitatus and allow Trump to declare martial law.
Sabrina Haake is a 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her columns are found @ Alternet, Chicago Tribune, Howey Political Report, Indiana Democrats’ Kernel of Truth, Inside Indiana Business, MSN, Out South Florida, Raw Story,Salon,Smart News, South Florida Gay News, State Affairs, and Windy City Times. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
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At least one Trump attack dog just killed their career
:{:{Sabrina Haake, Raw StoryMay 18, 2025 |}:
The Attorney General of the United States is considered the nation's top lawyer. As head of the Department of Justice, Pam Bondi leads the nation's largest law office. No federal precedent, and nothing in her oath of office, exempts her from the code of ethics, federal pleading rules, or the rule of law all attorneys swear to uphold.
Lawyers who work for the government have a duty to seek justice, whether facts lead to acquittal or conviction. For that reason, they are expected to avoid public statements displaying partiality because such statements undermine public trust in the legal system. The American Bar Association directs in Rule 3.6 that:
“A lawyer who is participating… in the investigation or litigation of a matter shall not make an extrajudicial (outside the court) statement that … will be disseminated (publicly) and have a substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing (a case.)”
In other words, try your case in court, not on TV. Only supported facts of evidence are allowed in a court room; demagoguery, and assertions of opinion unsupported by admissible evidence, are not allowed. That is why judges have frequently admonished Trump attorneys that statements to the press are not evidence.
Despite the clarity of the ABA rule, Bondi has consistently argued pending cases in the media, particularly Fox News, where she falsely asserts that it is up to Trump to decide what the law requires. Every first-year law student is taught that the judicial branch, not the executive, decides what the law is.
Intentionally misconstrued orders
In April, the U.S. Supreme Court directed the Trump administration to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was deported to El Salvador without constitutionally required process. Under Bondi’s direction, DOJ lawyers argued that they don’t understand plain English, spinning the term “facilitate” to mean “removing any domestic obstacles that would otherwise impede the alien’s ability to return here.”
The word “domestic” does not appear anywhere in SCOTUS’ order to the government “to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.”
Rather than respect the plain language of the order, Bondi’s strategy is to play games to either render the ruling null due to delay or worse, to challenge the court’s authority. As an example of the latter, the Justice Department filed an emergency motion to stay the Abrego Garcia order from U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, aggressively challenging federal courts’ authority even after the Supreme Court ruled, pleading that, “The federal courts do not have the authority to press-gang the President or his agents into taking any particular act of diplomacy.”
The appellate court was appropriately triggered. Without waiting for plaintiffs’ response, the Fourth Circuit court of appeals issued a sharp rebuke, written by a Reagan appointee, describing the US strategy as “shocking:”
“The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done.
This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”
Abuse of pleading rules
Federal pleading rules require attorneys to certify that what they assert is warranted by existing law or a reasonable argument for modifying the law, and that their factual contentions have evidentiary support. Rule 11 states that a court may impose sanctions on any attorney responsible for violating the pleading rule, including supervising attorneys.
As far as I can discern from public record, none of the facts in the El Salvador deportations have been pled with evidentiary support; Donald Trump’s opinion that someone is a violent gang member is not evidence. This means Bondi has either allowed — or directed — attorneys under her supervision to file unsupported pleadings. That a conservative judge called the latest motion “shocking” also sets it outside the rule.
Not only is Bondi authorizing her attorneys to file unsupported pleadings, she has punished staff for making accurate statements to the court. In April, she directed the dismissal of Erez Reuveni, a career lawyer, for acknowledging to the court that Abrego Garcia had been deported to El Salvador in error. Shortly thereafter, a 10-year veteran of the same unit resigned, saying he could not “with clean conscience” defend the department’s actions under Bondi, claiming they ran counter to the law, the Constitution and “basic principles of fairness and humanity.”
Trump’s personal law firm
Bondi’s latest transgression has not yet made it to court, but it likely will. Last week, Bondi declared that, under the Foreign Emoluments Clause, Trump can legally accept a “flying palace 747 jumbo jet” as a gift from Qatar, a country that has directly funded Hamas terrorism.
Qatar's financial and political ties to Hamas have long been known. In a memorandum, Bondi concluded that the gift was “legally permissible,” apparently reasoning that because the gift is not officially conditioned on any official act, it does not constitute bribery.
No such limiting language appears in the Constitution — Bondi just put it there. Her analysis also concluded that the gift complies with the law because the plane is not being given to an individual, but rather to the United States Air Force and, eventually, to the presidential library foundation, where Trump will then make personal use of it. Pity the DOJ lawyer flunky Bondi will force to sign that bad faith legal jujitsu when it gets before a judge.
The facts are that when Trump leaves office, the 747 would be transferred to the Trump Presidential Library. This is plainly a $400 million gift from a foreign government to Trump himself, perhaps meant as a “tip” following Trump’s private $5.5 billion golf course deal with Dar Global and Qatari Diar, a company created from Qatar's sovereign wealth fund in 2005. It's painfully obvious to anyone outside the Fox News bubble that Trump, who has not divested from his private ventures, is using the Oval Office to enrich himself, aided by unethical counsel.
Follow the dirty money
Former federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig observed that Bondi’s actions have radically transformed and politicized the DOJ, transmuting it “into Trump’s personal law firm,” which is “a rejection of the founding principle of the rule of law.”
Although four years feels interminable, Trump is not a permanent fixture, and he will be out of office while Bondi still needs her law license. Bondi seems not to care, suggesting she has no intention of practicing law after Trump’s departure. Perhaps she will return to lobbying, where she earned over $100,000 a month lobbying for Qatar. (Conflict of interest, anyone?)
As I see it, Bondi has already met the threshold of bad faith for disbarment. An attorney who trashes the rule of law must know that eventually she will be barred from practicing it.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
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NO LNX
A new low even for MAGA – but they're about to go lower
REUTERS/Rebecca Cook
Sabrina Haake, Raw Story May 05, 2025
Last week, Trump held a campaign-style rally on the campus of Macomb Community College in Warren, Michigan. To the delight of his MAGA fans, he trotted out the same personal grievances he’s been serving up since 2015.
Despite achieving fewer legislative accomplishments during his first 100 days than any president since the 1950s, Trump told his adoring crowd that he had “accomplished more in three months than most administrations accomplished in four years or eight years.”
If aiding the enemy, defying court orders, and taking a chainsaw to federal services are “accomplishments,” then Trump is accomplished indeed.
MAGA delights in Trump’s cruelty
After his usual braggadocio, Trump pivoted to video recordings of abject cruelty. Behind the podium, Trump displayed large screen videos of the inhumane treatment of helpless migrants he deported to El Salvador's notorious gulag, CECOT. He brayed, still without evidence, “The worst of the worst are being sent to a no-nonsense prison in El Salvador… watch this!”
“This” was a series of video clips showing hundreds of men he has imprisoned without due process, without a hearing, and without credible evidence that they committed any crime. “This” was a video showing men brutally bent over, having their heads shaved bare, and forcibly shoved into concentration camp-style cages that sleep 75 to 80. “This” was Trump priming his already violence-prone base into a bloodthirsty frenzy, as they exploded in raucous approval of his inhumanity, thundering, "USA! USA! USA!"
According to an affidavit from the Human Rights Watch, prisoners held in CECOT are denied communication with the outside, and only appear before courts in online hearings, often in groups of several hundred detainees at the same time. The Salvadoran government calls them “terrorists” who “will never leave” the prison.
El Salvador, governed by a man who controls the media and calls himself a “cool” dictator, denies human rights groups access to its prisons, and allows journalists to visit only under highly staged circumstances. In videos produced during these visits, prison authorities brag about men held in completely dark solitary confinement cells.
Trump’s stochastic violence against judges
Trump also used the rally to showcase his continued attack on judges, whom he called “communist radical left judges,” claiming they are trying to ‘seize his power.’ Nodding to the courts’ inability to enforce their own orders, Trump warned the world: “Nothing will stop me.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio concurs. At least week’s cabinet meeting, to which Trump invited the media, each cabinet member tried to out-flatter the next person by praising Trump. Seated to Trump’s right, Rubio announced that questions regarding Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man sent in error to El Salvador — specifically, what steps the White House was taking to facilitate his return — were off limits to the media. “I’ll never tell you that, and you know who else I’ll never tell?” Rubio jeered.
“A judge,” he answered himself, “because the conduct of our foreign policy belongs to the president of the United States.”
Due process is not a matter of foreign policy
Vice President J.D. Vance also describes the rule of law with sarcastic bombast. He has slammed critics, including federal judges, for “weeping over the lack of due process.”
The Fifth Amendment protects all persons, not just US citizens. It guarantees that no person shall “be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law;” it does not say, ‘no citizens.’ Trump, Rubio, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Vance act as if they’ve never heard of it, despite its storied American history. Trying to assume the role of the courts in deciding what the law is, they keep declaring, falsely, that their abuse of immigrants is about “foreign policy.” It isn’t. It’s about the US Constitution, the lynchpin of democracy, without which we don’t have one.
After the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that Trump must facilitate Garcia’s return from El Salvador, Trump took to social media to turn a legal block into a PR strategy. He wrote that he is “being stymied at every turn by even the U.S. Supreme Court…which seemingly doesn’t want me to send violent criminals and terrorists back to Venezuela… If we don’t get these criminals out of our Country, we are not going to have a Country any longer.”
Revealing his complete ignorance of how legal immigration works, he added, “We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years. We would need hundreds of thousands of trials for the hundreds of thousands of Illegals we are sending out of the Country. Such a thing is not possible to do…MAGA!”
It’s as if, despite tanking last year’s border bill just so he could campaign on it, he’s never actually considered that processing immigrants requires paperwork.
VP Vance, who knows better, says it’s up to Trump—and himself— to decide what due process is, and what it requires. “To say the administration must observe “due process” is to beg the question: what process is due is a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment, and so many other factors.” No. It isn’t. It’s not up to Vance and Trump’s discretion because the Fifth and 14th Amendments, and well established precedent, mapped out what due process requires — notice, a hearing, and an opportunity to be heard — decades ago.
Trump is a symptom, not a cause
It’s a sick disease of the mind, this urge to oppress others for power, but Trump didn’t invent it. Neither did Hitler, Mao Zedong, or Stalin. It’s been there since we stopped living in tune with the earth, and started living in our heads. It’s our collective fall from grace, a phenomenon worsened exponentially by social media.
Watching our experiment stumble brings deep personal anguish, like watching someone you love destroy themselves. You’d give your own life to help, but they have to save themselves.
A minority of Americans- 23%- approve of what Trump is doing and would loudly cheer “USA!!” at videos of human suffering. These are the same people who used to applaud public lynchings; before that, they salivated at public stonings, witch burnings and Caligula’s public displays of torture. It seems they will always be with us; the only positive is that there are far more of us than there are of them.
ALSO READ: Trump is a troll – but this 'ugly' selfie demands a damning response
Sabrina Haake is a 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her columns are or have been published in Alternet, Chicago Tribune, MSN, Out South Florida, Raw Story, Salon, Smart News, State Affairs, and Windy City Times. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
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