AUGUST 8, 2026 – Now that a most felicitous “Happy Birthday” day is in the rear-view mirror, I can turn my swivel-head back to the road ahead, starting with the patch called out by a road sign shouting, “ROUGH ROAD.” The black-on-orange words are a harbinger of trouble on our nation’s political pathway. Ironically, the pavement has been rough and rocky for several miles already. With so many teeth already loosened from their roots, how many more can be shaken from our jaws before our cheeks flap when we talk?
For many of us, life in these United States proceeds as it always has. When we’re hungry, we eat. When we’re thirsty, we drink. When we’re bored, we watch a new series on one of any number of streaming services. The price of gas? Hmmm. “It is what it is.” The latest news about the on-again, off-again “skirmish” in Iran? Same. Or rather, its converse: “It is NOT what it is . . . or at least, tomorrow it won’t be what Trump says it is today.” As long as the S&P trends upward, all is good in the gated-neighborhood—actual or figurative—in which many of us enjoy a life largely detached from the wreckage of our body politic.
I worry, though, that even if we’re in “privileged quarters,” aboard a cruise ship on which all of us are passengers is imperiled by fires in the engine room, a norovirus rampant in the galley, and a madcap captain at the helm. The onboard medical staff, meanwhile, have been confined to their quarters, pending an investigation and trial for having warned the captain about the norovirus: Word of illness aboard? The staff should’ve known it wouldn’t be good for patronage of on-board shops. Worse, the professionals; the senior officers and graduates of the Merchant Marine Academy have all been furloughed. In their places are the captain’s lackeys, who don’t know an ENC (Electronic Navigational Chart) of the Strait of Hormuz from a Google Map of Minnesota, except that both depict water and both are enemy territory.
Depending on your circumstances aboard the ship, you might continue your good fortunes at the poker table or you could be pulling your PFD (personal flotation device) out of the closet of your stateroom . . . provided you’re not laid up with the norovirus, in which case, you’d be sprawled out on the bed or on the floor of the bathroom.
In any case, even if you’re projecting a (winning) poker face amidst growing stacks of chips, it behooves you to take notice that your gin and tonic is higher on one side of the glass than the other.
Among the many forces causing the ship to list is a matter deep in the bowels of the vessel. Or in real life, inside the DOJ. We’ve all known for quite some time that upon assuming command, Trump went straight to work converting what used to be considered one of the “premiere law firms” in the country, if not the world—the United States Department of Justice—into his personal law firm, with the attorney general serving as his consigliere. Veterans of the department have resigned in droves, and replacements (to the extent they can even be recruited) are qualified based on personal loyalty to Trump, not on professional credentials or character.
Some lawyers, dedicated to their work on behalf of the country, not the president, have held firm to the rules of professional responsibility (i.e. ethical standards), despite major internal pressure to bend the rules, take positions without adequate bases in law or fact, and to investigate and prosecute political enemies of the president. One of these lawyers loyal to the Constitution, not to a boss, a king or a president, was a seven-year veteran of the department, Will Rosenzweig.
According to a report in the NYT, last September, Mr. Rosenzweig was summarily fired. Worse, he was dismissed on the eve of a trial involving defendants charged with Medicare fraud costing taxpayers millions of dollars. According to lawyers familiar with the case, the untimely firing of Mr. Rosenzweig threw the case into a “tail-spin.”
Fired without explanation, Mr. Rosenzweig is now suing the government. The story behind the story is yet another case of “amateur hour” in the Trump Administration. No . . . It’s much worse than that. It’s emblematic of the current regime’s destruction of competent, rational government.
What’s particularly chilling about Will Rozenzweig’s firing is that it was precipitated by a rightwing “influencer” by the name of Natalie Winters. With “hundreds of thousands” of followers, according to the Times report, Winters posted on social media a statement to the effect that “A federal prosecutor in Miami overseeing a fraud case against ‘MAGA patriots’ [i.e. the aforementioned defendants accused of big-magnitude Medicare fraud (they have since been convicted, by the way)] had once written a blog with comments critical of Trump[1].”
The upshot of this was that Ms. Winters forwarded the message to the accounts of senior members of the DOJ, demanding that the “federal prosecutor” (i.e. Will Rosenzweig) be fired. Then came the rim shot: less than three hours later, he was, in fact, shown the door.
Every single one of us should be questioning how in the world an “influencer” with little more than a smartphone and desire to develop a “following,” can storm the bridge of an enormous cruise ship; how this woman could acquire the power to steer the United States Department of Justice into firing a top-flight lawyer working on behalf of you and me to reign in Medicare fraudsters.
Rather than serving the public interest, the Trump government—and most notably, the Department of Justice—has become the tool of personal political retribution and financial aggrandizement in defiance of all ethical norms, let alone legal strictures. This piratical takeover of government threatens the interests of all of us who’ve become dependent on government—which means every single one of us, directly or indirectly, whether we’re Democrat, Republican, independent, anarchist or libertarian. More specifically, left, right, center or wholly indifferent; citizen, permanent resident, green-card holder, asylum seeker, visitor under a visa or “undocumented immigrant”; young or old, educated or illiterate; able-bodied or physically challenged; mentally alert or mentally challenged . . . every person aboard our common vessel depends on sound, rational, competent, rules-based government for protection of our civil rights and other legal rights, our personal safety and well-being, our national defense, and so many aspects of our standard of living that turn on services provided by the federal government.[2] The firing of Will Rosenzweig and countless thousands like him across all agencies of the federal government jeopardize what we heretofore took for granted.
Consequently, irrespective of “policy politics,” we need to ensure that come November, a new Congress is elected; one that will assume its Constitutional duty and hold the current regime to account for the damage it has wreaked on the shoals of authoritarianism.
And that, my readers, is my “lemon harangue high” for the day. Tomorrow I’ll come back down from my soapbox labeled, “Mixed-up Metaphors.”
Subscribe to this blog and received notifications of new posts by email.
© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
[1]Even if true, the blog was discontinued after Rosenzweig joined the DOJ. Moreover, “punishment” by way of a subsequent political purge was a direct violation of his First Amendment rights. But in the Trump DOJ playbook, the existence or non-existence of a legal or factual basis for any action is irrelevant. Fear of losing employment, the chilling effect on free speech from the mere threat of action, and the financial pressure (legal fees) associated with defending against “nuisance prosecution” (or civil litigation) are tactics used by the Trump Administration to bear down on resistance. We are deep into an era when any one of us (or our friends, family, associates) could face such tactics in reaction to exercising our basic Constitutional rights.
[2] It’s perfectly reasonable to debate rigorously about the role and extent of government in the life of the country, but such discourse should have preceded the “chainsaw approach” deployed by DOGE. Most people have no idea how the federal government contributed to the life of our country. Sound-bytes folded into mantras about government “waste, fraud, abuse and interference” overwhelmed any chance of intelligent discussion about (a) what government services were provided; (b) how they worked (or didn’t); and (c) the cost of eliminating those services or transferring them to the private sector (if that was even a viable option) or to state and local government. In what was Trump’s life pattern of “management by chaos,” the angry growl of chainsaws took the place of fact-gathering, analysis, debate, and sound policy development and implementation.
