"This is Treason"

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Sandspur

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March 24, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson Mar 25

This morning, economist Paul Krugman came right out and said it: “People close to Trump are trading based on national secrets.” Another word for that, he said, is “treason.” The evidence for such a claim is the sudden and isolated jump in trading volume in S&P 500 and oil futures about 15 minutes before Trump suddenly announced that the U.S. and Iran were in negotiations to end the war—an announcement that turned out to be false.

The oil futures trade alone was worth about $580 million, the Financial Times estimated. As Krugman notes, exploiting confidential information for financial gain, otherwise known as “insider trading,” is illegal. But exploiting confidential information about national security for private financial gain is something else again. It puts profit-making above Americans’ safety.

“I’d very much like to know exactly who was making those trades yesterday morning,” Krugman wrote. “Were they people directly in the know, or billionaires/traders who paid people in the know for tips?”

There certainly are signs that Trump considers the government his to do with as he wishes to keep himself in wealth and power. In the Washington Post Monday, architecture critic Philip Kennicott examined how Trump is smashing the historic lines and architecture of the national capital.

Trump’s plan for a gargantuan 90,000-square-foot ballroom will dominate the original White House and cut into the lines of the driveway designed a century ago by the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. His proposed 250-foot arch near Arlington National Cemetery would be the largest triumphal arch in the world, overshadowing the nearby Lincoln Memorial. His proposed “National Garden of American Heroes” between the Lincoln Memorial and the Tidal Basin would take the park near monuments dedicated to Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and fill it with hastily made statues to “showbiz stars, folk heroes, and sports celebrities.”

By stuffing oversight panels with his own cronies, Trump has destroyed the process of design review intended to preserve Washington as a city whose layout and design reflects the simplicity, dignity, and majesty of the American people. Yesterday the White House began the process of ripping the beige Tennessee flagstone pavers out of the West Colonnade that connects the Oval Office and West Wing to the Executive Residence. Trump wants to replace them with black granite, which will contrast more effectively with the gold doodads and the gold-framed portraits in the “Presidential Walk of Fame” Trump has installed along the walk.

Trump’s vision of the U.S. is one tied to fossil fuels, leading the administration to declare war on renewable energy. On Monday it announced it will pay $928 million in taxpayer money to the large French energy company TotalEnergies to buy back leases it acquired under the Biden administration to build two wind farms, one off New York and the other off North Carolina. TotalEnergies will then invest that money in U.S. oil and gas projects, including one in Texas that will export liquefied natural gas.

“The era of taxpayers subsidizing unreliable, unaffordable and unsecure energy is officially over, and the era of affordable, reliable and secure energy is here to stay,” said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. North Carolina governor Josh Stein, a Democrat, told Maxine Joselow and Brad Plumer of the New York Times: “Our state has the offshore wind potential to power millions of homes with renewable American-made energy. It’s ludicrous and wasteful that the Trump Administration is spending $1 billion in taxpayer money to pay off a company to stop it from investing private dollars to create the clean energy we need.”

Meanwhile, as airport lines grow because of the ongoing shutdown that means Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents aren’t getting paid, Trump yesterday sent in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to fourteen airports in eleven cities, including Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, Phoenix, Cleveland, Fort Myers, New Orleans, and New York City.

While CNN’s Brian Stelter speculated that Trump got the idea for putting ICE agents in the airports from “Linda from Arizona,” who called in to “The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show” last Friday, Trump ally Steve Bannon suggested on his podcast War Room yesterday that “[w]e can use this as a test run, as a test case, to really perfect ICE’s involvement in the 2026 midterms.” Jacob Knutson of Democracy Docket noted that Trump’s deployment of ICE agents to airports showed both that he sees them as his own personal law enforcement agents and that he is willing to deploy them in situations that are not related to their actual job description.

Democratic senators have tried repeatedly to get Senate Republicans to agree to fund all of the Department of Homeland Security except ICE, the agency responsible for the violence in Minnesota that led to the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. For those, Democrats have demanded reforms.

But Trump has kept pressure on Republican senators not to pass such a measure, instead demanding that Senate majority leader John Thune kill the filibuster to pass legislation without the votes of Democrats. On Sunday, Trump posted that he would not agree to any funding proposal unless Democrats also agreed to support the so-called SAVE America Act, which would require voters to show not just ID but also proof of citizenship, would end mail-in voting, and would attack the rights of transgender Americans.

After the Senate confirmed former senator Markwayne Mullin late yesterday as secretary of homeland security, replacing former secretary Kristi Noem, Republicans offered to Democrats a measure that funded DHS without funding ICE, but made no reforms to the agency. To fund ICE—and perhaps to pass pieces of the SAVE America Act—they plan to use the process of budget reconciliation, which cannot be filibustered and thus can be used to pass measures without any Democratic support.

Democrats rejected the Republicans’ offer, noting that Republicans have blocked eight different Democratic attempts to fund everything in the Department of Homeland Security other than ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the parent agency for Border Patrol. The Democrats will make another offer.

Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), who as vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee is central to the talks, said Trump’s demands have made negotiations difficult and added: “We’ve been very clear that if we’re talking about funding any part of ICE and CBP, we absolutely must take some key steps to rein them in. The current Republican offer in front of us does not do that. Reforms must make it into law.”

The SAVE America Act Trump wants is pretty openly a voter suppression measure: voting by undocumented immigrants is already virtually nonexistent, and it is already illegal. And the Brookings Institution reported in 2025 that only about four cases of mail fraud occur per 10 million mail-in ballots, or 0.000043% of total mail ballots cast. But Republicans are using the idea of voter fraud to argue for measures that could toss more than 21 million Americans off the voter rolls.

There is an especial irony in Trump attacking mail-in voting as fraudulent: Bill Barrow of the Associated Press reported today that Trump voted by mail in Tuesday’s elections in Florida. White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales explained Trump’s position, saying that “the SAVE America Act has commonsense exceptions for Americans to use mail-in ballots for illness, disability, military, or travel—but universal mail-in voting should not be allowed because it’s highly susceptible to fraud.”

In today’s special legislative elections in Florida, Democrat Emily Gregory flipped the house district in which the Trump Organization’s Mar-a-Lago sits. The district went for Trump by 11% in 2024. Gregory, a business owner and a military spouse, defeated a Republican who received Trump’s “Complete and Total Endorsement” in January. At an election night party, Gregory told her supporters: “When we started this, nobody thought it was possible. They thought we were crazy. I knew my community. I knew we deserved better. We deserve a leader who will fight for us.” Gregory told CNN’s Erin Burnett that she did not focus on Trump, but focused on her Republican opponent and the “issues that matter most to Florida families.” “Everyone is feeling that affordability crisis, and the last thing that Florida families needed when they’re struggling is $4 gas,” she explained.

Trump’s niece, psychologist Mary Trump, posted: “The Democrats just flipped a state house seat in the district where Donald committed voter fraud by casting his ballot illegally by mail.”

Tonight, Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported that the Pentagon has ordered to the Middle East about 2,000 military personnel from the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, trained to deploy anywhere in the world within eighteen hours. About 2,500 Marines from the 31st Expeditionary Unit will arrive in the region later this week.

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Notes:

Paul Krugman

Treason in the Futures Markets

3867 likes 800 comments · Paul Krugman

https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-vote-by-mail-bd52fd205f4484237d5b77d2e7319350

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/2026/03/23/trump-washington-architecture-ballroom-arch/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/2026/01/13/west-potomac-park-national-garden-american-heroes/

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-white-house-west-colonnade-walkway-black-flooring-b2944824.html

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-next-tacky-white-house-west-wing-colonnade-walkway-renovation-project-revealed/

https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/23/media/trump-ice-airports-clay-travis-fox-news

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/23/us-airports-latest-tsa-ice

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/bannon-trump-ice-airport-deployment-test-run-2026-midterm-elections/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/23/climate/offshore-wind-gas-trump-total.html

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/new-save-act-bills-would-still-block-millions-americans-voting

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5798846-senate-democrats-reject-gop-ice-proposal/

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/24/dhs-homeland-shutdown-tsa-delays-senate-white-house-funding-deal.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/24/us/politics/82nd-airborne-division-iran-troops.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/republicans-tout-deal-end-dhs-shutdown-airport-delays-rcna264909

https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/24/politics/florida-democrats-state-district-mar-a-lago-special-election

X:

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Bluesky:

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Washington’s objectives for launching the war in Iran are far from clear.

 

 

Thought for the day: This is an excerpt from an article published in Foreign Affairs.

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BYSTANDER’S DILEMMA

By COLIN H. KAHL, Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and served as U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy from 2021 to 2023.

Washington’s objectives for launching the war in Iran are far from clear. The Trump administration started the war with the stated goal of regime change. “Take over your government,” U.S. President Donald Trump said in a video posted to Truth Social on February 28. “This will be probably your only chance for generations.” Yet in the days since, administration officials have been all over the place. Is the goal to select a more “acceptable” government, as the United States did in Venezuela? Is it “unconditional surrender”? Is it to destroy the nuclear program? Or is it simply to leave whoever survives incapable of projecting military power and declare victory? Clearly defining objectives matters because achieving regime change, behavior change, ending Iran’s nuclear program, and degrading Iran’s ability to project power are not variations on the same goal. They require fundamentally different wars, with different resources, timelines, definitions of victory, and postconflict planning.

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Trump hasn't a clue what he's doing or why, and Congress is dangerously absent, lost in a paralysis caused by fear of his backslap if they hold him accountable. We and the rest of the planet are in a tailspin, an aviation term for a dangerous predicament that will be fatal if not brought under control.

Sandspur

Is Trump purposefully doing Russia’s bidding? And how does Epstein play into this?

 

In her post of March7, 2026, Heather Cox Richardson who authors the substack, "Letters from an American," she raises the issue of Trump's overly friendly nature toward Russia and Vladimir Putin and quotes Senator Sheldon Whitehouse as saying: "If Trump were purposefully doing Russia’s bidding, it is hard to see what he would be doing differently."

And how are the Epstein Files and Epstein's personal involvement playing into this disturbing question?

Here is a partial take on what Richardson had to say. 

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On Thursday, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) called attention to another factor in play. In a speech to the Senate, Whitehouse noted that throughout his second term, Trump has advanced policies that help Russia, pausing weapons shipments to Ukraine, easing sanctions on Russia, and pushing a peace deal favorable to Russia. Last summer, he welcomed Putin to American soil, and administration officials have parroted Russian propaganda. Russian state media gloated when Trump “installed Russia apologist Tulsi Gabbard as his director of national intelligence,” and Attorney General Pam Bondi upon taking office stopped the anti-kleptocracy work that had targeted Russian oligarchs.

Trump’s new national security policy threw traditional U.S. allies overboard and favored policies that Russian government officials praised as “largely consistent” with their own.

“If Trump were purposefully doing Russia’s bidding,” Whitehouse said, “it is hard to see what he would be doing differently. The United States is the most powerful nation in the world. Russia is a weak, corrupt regime. My old friend Senator John McCain used to say that Russia is a gas station, run by gangsters, with an army. It doesn’t make sense that the President of the United States, who insists—insists—on being dominant in essentially every relationship, is so submissive to one person and that one person is Russia’s dictator, Vladimir Putin.”

Whitehouse suggested that the answer “could…have something to do with Trump’s close friendship with the deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.” He noted that the Epstein files, riddled as they are with references to Trump, are also riddled with references to Russian girls and women, Russian operatives, and Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Whitehouse spoke about how many of Epstein’s victims believed he was recording them, and how there were hidden cameras installed throughout his homes. He quoted Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, who wrote: “He explicitly talked about using me and what I’d been forced to do with certain men as a form of blackmail, so these men would owe him favors.”

Whitehouse suggested the possibility that Epstein might have been working with Russian operatives, but emphasized that we don’t know. “Epstein was an inveterate liar and a criminal who often sought to exaggerate his power and influence, and the Epstein files need to be viewed through that lens,” he said. “What we do know is that a significant number of powerful men—our current President, some of his cabinet secretaries, tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and others—were very mixed up with Epstein at different times. And Epstein seems to have been very mixed up with Russia.”

“We also know that there is a cover-up afoot at the Department of Justice,” he continued, where officials are “trying to shield Trump from something in the Epstein files.”

“One of the great forces that Washington runs on is normalcy bias,” he said, but he suggested looking past that bias to note that “we have links with Russia, girls from Russia, money from Russia, people from Russia, deals and transactions with Russia, contacts with people with Russian intelligence, news reports exploring contacts with Russia, and an official investigation from the government of Poland into an Epstein-Russia connection.”

Yesterday Noah Robertson, Ellen Nakashima, and Warren P. Strobel of the Washington Post reported that Russia is providing Iran with the information it needs to attack U.S. forces in the Middle East, including aircraft and ships.

During a roundtable on college sports, Peter Doocy of the Fox News Channel asked Trump about that report, saying: “It sounds like the Russians are helping Iran target and attack Americans now.” Trump responded: “I have a lot of respect for you. You’ve always been very nice to me. What a stupid question that is to be asking at this time. We’re talking about something else.”

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To read Heather Cox Richardson's entire post go here: <heathercoxrichardson@substack.com>

Sandspur

"America is more like a quilt: many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes..."

"America is more like a quilt: many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread. The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the Native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay, and the disabled make up the American quilt…. "

Jesse Jackson

 

"He [Jackson] was talking about everyone who was left out, everyone who was forgotten, everyone who was unseen, everyone who was unheard. And in that sense, he was expressing the very essence of what our democracy should be, the ideals at the very heart of the American experiment, the belief that regardless of what we look like or how we worship, regardless of where our ancestors come from or how much money we got, we’re all part of the American family. We’re all endowed with the same inalienable rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

"We’re all obligated to answer the call and step forward and take responsibility for making wrongs right and for caring for our neighbors, and bringing the reality of America a step closer to its glorious ideals. We are living in a time when it can be hard to hope.

"Each day we wake up to some new assault on our democratic institutions, another setback to the idea of the rule of law, an offense to common decency. Every day you wake up to things you just didn’t think were possible. Each day, we’re told by those in high office to fear each other and to turn on each other, and that some Americans count more than others, and that some don’t even count at all.

"Everywhere we see greed and bigotry being celebrated and bullying and mockery masquerading as strength, we see science and expertise denigrated while ignorance and dishonesty and cruelty and corruption are reaping untold rewards. Every single day we see that, and it’s hard to hope in those moments.

"So it may be tempting to get discouraged, to give into cynicism. It may be tempting for some to compromise with power, and grab what you can, or even for good people to maybe just put your head down and wait for the storm to pass.

"His [Jackson's} voice calls on each of us to be heralds of change, to be messengers of hope…. Wherever we have a chance to make an impact, whether it’s in our school or our workplaces or our neighborhoods or our cities, not for fame, not for glory, or because success is guaranteed, but because it gives our life purpose ... and because if we don’t step up, no one else will.”

Barack Obama

 

Resistance to Trump's incompetent and disastrous leadership is Building

 

This is an excerpt from an article by Mike Allen's Axios AM. See the link below for the full read:

The Trump resistance is picking up steam

Sandspur__________________________

Look how 2026 has started for Trump, and the new pushback he faces, as synthesized by Axios' Zachary Basu:

• ⚖️ Retribution: A federal grand jury unanimously rejected the Justice Department's attempt to indict six Democratic lawmakers over a video they made urging service members to refuse unlawful orders. It's at least the fifth time that charges against Trump's adversaries or protesters have been turned away by a grand jury. A federal judge also shut down Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's attempt to punish Navy veteran Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) over his role in the video.
• 🚨 ICE raids: Trump's border czar Tom Homan announced an end to the 10-week ICE surge in Minneapolis yesterday. The president acknowledged his mass deportation campaign could use a "softer touch."
• 🪖 National Guard: Trump withdrew federalized National Guard troops from L.A., Chicago and Portland after repeated legal defeats and opposition from local leaders, dealing a blow to his efforts to crack down on crime in Democratic-run cities.
• 📦 Tariffs: Six House Republicans joined Democrats to pass a resolution rescinding Trump's tariffs on Canada. The vote became possible only after a smaller group of Republicans staged a floor rebellion against GOP leadership.
• 🗂️ Epstein files: Trump's push to shut down MAGA's Jeffrey Epstein obsession backfired spectacularly. The Justice Department is still grappling with backlash, with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) voicing rare criticism over revelations that DOJ tracked what lawmakers searched while reviewing the unredacted files.
• 📽️ Racism: A chorus of Republicans, led by Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), condemned Trump's reposting of a video that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. The White House initially defended the decision to post the video, but removed it from Trump's account, blaming a staffer. Later, the president said he "didn't make a mistake."
• 🇩🇰 Greenland: Trump dominated Davos last month with his threats to seize Greenland by any means necessary — only to retreat amid market turmoil, European fury, warnings from congressional Republicans, and a vague "deal" promising the U.S. greater access to the Arctic territory.
• 🏦 Fed: The DOJ's criminal investigation of Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell has drawn deep skepticism from Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who has vowed to block confirmation of Powell's successor, Kevin Warsh, unless the probe is dropped.

For the entire article see here: The Trump resistance is picking up steam