Trump Crime Syndicate -- Tom Sullivan

[erronis]

https://digbysblog.net/2026/02/19/trump-crime-syndicate/

If it walks like a mafia-style regime...

How many times must Trump 2.0 defy court orders before GOP House members discover, "Hey, Dear Leader is violating his oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. That's bad, right?"

Lawrence O'Donnell opened his MS Now show on Wednesday featuring an op-ed from the New York Daily News. James Speyer, an attorney with Lawyers Defending American Democracy, writes that is it time to admit what is right before our eyes. Once Americans looked with disdain upon countries like Russia or North Korea as mafia-style criminal regimes. In such nations elites loot national wealth for personal gain and violently put down dissent. Now they are us.

The Trump administration has:

Murdered Renee Good and Alex Pretti, slandered them as "domestic terrorists" and "assassins," and allowed their killers to walk free. Unleashed thousands of minimally trained ICE agents, recruited with explicitly white supremacist messaging, to inflict terror on people of color. Repeatedly violated the constitutional rights of citizens and non-citizens by arresting them for First Amendment-protected speech, raiding their homes without judicial warrants, and imprisoning them without due process.

And killed dozens of civilians on the high seas solely on the unsubstantiated claim that they were drug runners (not that being drug runners would justify their summary executions without due process anyway). Released hundreds of imprisoned felons who brutally beat Capitol police officers on Jan. 6. Converted the once-independent Department of Justice into an instrument of personal retribution via the prosecution of cooked-up lawsuits against the president's enemies. Threatened to seize the territory of a sovereign nation (a NATO ally no less).

And declared that legislators should be executed for reminding military personnel of their duty to disobey illegal orders. Tried to impose ruinous and unconstitutional sanctions on some of the country's largest law firms simply because Trump doesn't like them. Violated court orders on a massive scale. As the chief federal district judge of Minnesota recently wrote, "ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence."

And shaken down some of the country's largest universities by illegally threatening to withhold funding; and engaged in breathtaking corruption: as the conservative writer David Frum stated, "Trump's scale of stealing and bribe-taking has never been remotely paralleled in any democratic country ever before."

And that's just for starters; there are dozens more examples.

The criminality, Speyer argues, is so flagrant, so ubiquitous, and so unlike anything this country has ever imagined that for many Americans it is simply "exhausting, numbing, and overwhelming."

. . .