We have never lived through a better era to be a criminal, provided your political fealty is directed toward the right person. If you are an executive facing fraud charges or a perpetrator of violent offenses, the standard calculations of the penal code may no longer apply as long as you support Donald Trump. If you’re Team Trump, the machinery of the state will actively dismantle itself to protect you. If not, good luck to you.
The Trump regime’s message is now unmistakable: rules do not apply to MAGA. Consider the recent saga of the U.S. Army pilots who took two AH-64 Apache attack helicopters on an unauthorized detour to perform a low-altitude flyby of washed-up rocker and MAGA ally Kid Rock’s Nashville home. As a former military helicopter pilot and aircraft commander, let me be clear: this is exactly the kind of stunt we are taught never to do. If I had pulled something like that, there would have been legitimate grounds to take my wings away. Instead, when the Army suspended the crew pending a standard safety and regulatory review, as is the proper procedure, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth intervened personally, bypassing standard military discipline to announce on X: “Thank you @KidRock. @USArmy pilots suspension LIFTED. No punishment. No investigation. Carry on, patriots.” Their rule breaking was catalogued as patriotic.
Trump has consistently used the power of his office to protect his ideological allies. By issuing pardons to those who attacked the Capitol and attempting to institute a multi-billion-dollar weaponization slush fund to pay out reparations to insurrectionists and other political loyalists, Trump’s dog whistle sounds like an invitation to commit future crimes in his name. The presidential pardon power, historically preserved as a tool for mercy and the correction of systemic judicial errors, has been converted into a personalized tool of patronage.
Trump hardly seems to care who he pardons as long as he believes them to be an ally. For instance, when asked why he pardoned Changpeng Zhao, a man convicted for money-laundering violations that helped terrorists and other criminals, Trump replied: “I don’t know. He was recommended...” In fact, Zhao helped Trump launch his own stablecoin. This cavalier approach to forgiving his favorite criminals is feckless and reckless. One pardoned January 6th rioter has already gone on to molest two children whom he then attempted to silence with promised hush money that “he [hoped] to get from [the] slush fund.” Another was given a job at the Pentagon.
While this regime systematically insulates its allies, it is concurrently manufacturing new categories of criminality to target perceived enemies. Under National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), veiled as countering domestic terrorism, Trump has weaponized federal law enforcement infrastructure with overbroad powers to go after civil society groups, nonprofits, donors, activists, and even “leftist influencers.” With Trump in charge, the wealthy and well-connected are routinely let off the hook while actual victims of the system find no such reprieve; now, those resisting Trump are all the more likely to become victims, too. As true criminal justice reform is frozen out, ordinary defendants will face the full, unyielding weight of the legal meat grinder.
Competence and adherence to the law have been replaced by compliance. President Kennedy’s famous Inaugural quote could be rewritten: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for Donald Trump personally. Cabinet meetings have famously assumed a cult-like quality, where members rotate kissing up to Trump in such excess that the New York Times found that at least one in every six sentences offered him flattering praise. As MS NOW wrote, “Somewhere, Kim Jong-un could be heard saying, ‘Jeez, I think you guys are overdoing it a bit.’” Whether in North Korea or in the United States, replacing experts with sycophants at the highest levels of leadership leads to terrible consequences.
Trump is gifting appointments to his unqualified cronies at the expense of our national security. Secretary Lutnick (who engaged in intimate business deals with Epstein years after Epstein’s first conviction, planned family vacations to his private island, and lied about it) has connections to the stablecoin Tether, the primary vehicle Russian oligarchs use to move sanctioned Iranian oil to China. Secretary Hegseth breached security protocol in his second month on the job and is committing war crimes around the globe.
Now, take William J. Pulte, a real estate heir with a history of using his position at a federal mortgage agency to make criminal fraud referrals against Trump’s political adversaries. The man has zero national security, military, or traditional intelligence experience, yet Trump named him Acting Director of National Intelligence, where he will oversee a network of 18 agencies, including the CIA and the NSA. Even Republicans revolted over the choice, forcing Trump to quickly nominate a permanent replacement, but Pulte holds the role until Trump’s new pick, Jay Clayton, is confirmed by the Senate. Clayton, naturally, has appeared on CNBC several times to argue on Trump’s behalf, even defending the slush fund. I’m a veteran Navy pilot who used to get regular intel briefings; I understand the necessity of experience in this role. The idea that either of these bootlicking hacks will serve as the principal adviser on intelligence issues—for any amount of time—is insulting and incredibly irresponsible.
This dangerous loyaltocracy may have culminated in the nomination of Todd Blanche to serve as Attorney General. Blanche, who served as Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer, has openly stated that the president has a right and duty to direct the DOJ to target specific individuals, shattering the post-Watergate norm of an independent, impartial justice department. He also recently said at a press conference, “I love working for President Trump. It's the greatest honor of a lifetime…[If he] asks me to go do something else, I will say thank you very much - I love you, sir.” Public declarations of love to the President may get you a Cabinet position these days, but if the nation’s top law enforcement official is operating under a mandate of total personal fealty, “equal justice under law” has become a dead letter.
Trump’s favor is the new golden ticket. Praise the administration and even lawbreaking may be overlooked with a “carry on, patriot,” a pardon, a promotion, or an appointment to high office. If you criticize Trump, however, your First Amendment-protected speech could be labeled domestic terrorism, and the federal government may be instructed to prosecute you. These are high stakes. When the law becomes an asymmetric weapon, it ceases to be law at all—and our democracy starts looking a lot more like an autocracy. So, call your reps, demand accountability, and don’t stop advocating for justice. But also, make sure you’re writing everything down. One day, there will be legal proceedings on these matters. Be ready to testify.
Julie Roland was a Naval Officer for ten years, deploying to both the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a helicopter pilot before separating in June 2025 as a Lieutenant Commander. She has a law degree from the University of San Diego, a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and is a member of the Truman National Security Project.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Pinnacle Bank Expo Center on the Nebraska State Fairgrounds on October 05, 2026 in Grand Island, Nebraska.
The President Invited Iran to Bomb My Home
I was driving home to San Diego from Los Angeles on Monday night when I heard that the President of the United States had offered both cities up to Iran as bomb targets. At a rally in Nebraska, defending his war, Trump told the crowd, “let [Iran] take out Los Angeles, let ‘em take out San Diego.” It was, he said, “a very small price to pay.”
I was coming from a Bernie Sanders rally for Proposition 40, the one-time tax on California billionaires that would send 90% of its revenue to healthcare. We desperately need it to pass because, in order to give tax breaks to billionaires, Trump signed a law that will strip health coverage from 10 million Americans; this tax will make sure we can still cover Californians. Call me crazy, but I think taxing billionaires one time so we can make sure kids in California get to see a doctor is a very small price to pay. I also think that even if Trump were joking, it is indefensible to make jokes about the potential destruction of so many lives. Human life is never a small price to pay. Human life is priceless.
Plus, the reality is: here in San Diego, we’re already paying the price for Trump’s actions, and it’s not small at all. He has gutted FEMA, tried to kill climate resiliency programs, and destroyed public health standards, while his signature law is set to cut off health insurance and food support for hundreds of thousands of San Diegans. Like plenty of American cities, San Diego is already busy finding local solutions to respond to the problems this president has recklessly created.
Not to mention, at least 19 American service members have been killed in this war already. Human rights monitors have documented more than 3,600 dead in Iran by April alone. Here at home, gas is sitting just pennies below its all-time record. Taxpayers have already spent more than $45 billion on the war, while Trump’s oil and gas portfolio has grown by roughly $15.5 million this year alone. Of course anything is a “small price” to someone paying free.99 for this war, and profiting from it. Meanwhile, We the People are paying twice: first for the war, and then for the consequences of that war. But now he wants San Diego to pay a third time, flippantly offering us up to Iran.
It is worth noticing which cities he thought to name. Were San Diego and Los Angeles strategically chosen to signify something to his audience, or were they simply the first cities that came to mind as expendable places? Either way, the effect is to normalize—-and to gauge a crowd’s reaction to–the idea of massive violence in major California cities, suitable targets because of their perceived liberal lean. So what if Iran needs to bomb a little bit of America before the war can be over? Who cares, says Trump, if they target Los Angeles and San Diego?
By the way, why didn’t he offer up San Francisco, the free-love hippie-town MAGA loves to hate (and also my birthplace)? Could it be because that’s where the tech titans live? The same ones who joined Trump for Xi Jinping’s state dinner, a guest list worth a combined $2.4 trillion?
San Diego may have fewer billionaires, but it is home to more than 115,000 active-duty service members and 230,000 veterans. One in six active-duty sailors–in the entire Navy–is stationed here. So is one in four Marines. You cannot throw a rock in this county without hitting a military family: brats and spouses and veterans are among us. I got out of the Navy last year after ten years, and eight of those were here in San Diego. When Trump says “let ‘em take out San Diego,” he’s talking about the backbone of the United States military. He’s also talking about the people fighting his war.
San Diego has not been watching this war from the sidelines. Today, the USS Abraham Lincoln returns to North Island after an almost yearlong deployment to the Middle East that featured food shortages, broken toilets, and mold in the showers after 286 days at sea without a single port call. Eight sailors in the Lincoln’s strike group attempted suicide, but in August, when a reporter asked whether the deployment had gone on too long, Trump said “not nearly long enough.” Now he has told a crowd in Nebraska that we should let Iran take out the city those sailors call home. These are sociopathic sentiments.
Last week at Quantico, Pete Hegseth closed his address to the force by telling them, “President Trump has your back and so do I.” To the contrary, President Trump has put one of the biggest military towns in the country forward as a target for our adversaries. With friends like these, the “domestic” in “against all enemies, foreign and domestic” starts to sound a lot less hypothetical.
San Diego is home to Naval Air Station North Island, Naval Base San Diego, Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, the Point Loma submarine base, Camp Pendleton, and Miramar (and I have been permanently stationed at or trained at all of them). If Iran bombed San Diego and Los Angeles, aside from the devastating loss of life, it would cripple an immense share of our national security readiness.
And for what, exactly? Trump says the war is “essentially almost over with.” This is the same man who claimed in June 2025 that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated,” then launched a war over it anyway on February 28. More than seven months later, he wants us to believe two things at once: that we’ve basically won, and that we might need to sacrifice an American city or two to finish winning. If the war is almost over, why does anybody need to take out San Diego?
I wonder if Trump’s endorsed candidate for California’s 48th District here in San Diego County will respond to these remarks. He recently said “no pain, no gain,” when referring to the gas prices San Diegans are paying. Jim Desmond, would you apply that same mindset if we were bombed? Or do you have the moral courage to stand up for the people you’re running to represent?
Last November, six Democratic members of Congress, all veterans, including Senator Mark Kelly, recorded a video reminding troops of their duty to disobey unlawful orders, restating the law that says so. Trump called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” and then his Justice Department went looking for an indictment, which a grand jury refused. The president treated reading the law out loud to the troops as a capital offense, but then he himself invited a foreign enemy to destroy two American cities, possibly as a punchline. Is anyone calling the latter sedition? Who is demanding accountability?
Calling our lives a small price to pay affirms a moral bankruptcy, as well as an obvious dereliction of duty to the office he holds. While we can’t impeach him or invoke the 25th Amendment ourselves, we must stop being so quiet about what we’re paying already. We can make our voices heard by calling our representatives, writing op-eds, knocking doors, phone banking, and voting in defiance of the man who threatens the safety of our city. Ballots are already arriving in mailboxes. Vote, and vote yes on 40 (and no on 41 and 42).
Trump has been harming our cities for a while, but now he is inviting our military adversaries to join him in the harm. If we have any self-respect as Americans, we must not tolerate our leaders disregarding the dignity of lives in this way. We must fight for our home.
Julie Roland was a Naval Officer for ten years, deploying to both the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a helicopter pilot before separating in June 2025 as a Lieutenant Commander. She has a law degree from the University of San Diego, a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and is a member of the Truman National Security Project.