A Saturday Reid: the Ides of March

Chuck Schumer leads ten should-be opposition Senators in rendering America's most vulnerable unto Caeser.

On the Roman calendar, the Ides of March falls on the 15th day of the third month. It is also the date in 44 BC when history states Roman dictator Julius Caesar was betrayed and assassinated by a group of Roman Senators who feared he was becoming too powerful and they hoped by ending him to prevent Rome from descending into tyranny. Some 60 Senators were allegedly involved in the conspiracy, led by Marcus Junius Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus, and Decimus Junius Brutus Albinus. Willam Shakespeare immortalized the crime in his tragedy Julius Caesar, which gave us the classic line, spoken in the play by a soothsayer: “beware the Ides of March.”

Among the lessons inherent in the history of Julius Caesar is that violence is not only an ugly betrayal of humanity, it doesn’t beget positive change. The Senators who hoped to save the Roman republic through uncivilized means only hastened the dictatorship they feared. After Caesar’s demise, his friend Marc Antony (boyfriend of Cleopatra) and Antony’s grand-nephew Octavius (Caesar’s chosen successor), fought a civil war against Brutus and Cassius’ forces and then Octavius’ forces fought Antony’s, leaving Octavius as the new Caesar, who became the very dictator those murderous Senators had feared. He was renamed Caesar Augustus — a name that should be familiar to those versed in the Christian Bible. The first verse of the second chapter of the Book of Luke reads: “In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world…” namely, the census that accompanied the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, as his parents became undocumented immigrants in Palestine.

Beware the Ides of March…

Linguistically, "Ides” refers to a divide. And if there is a Shakespearean analogy to be had in the mess that is the current Democratic party, “a divide” is the gentlest way to describe it. For Charles “Chuck” Schumer, the minority leader in the United States Senate, came on the eve of the Ides of March — days before the start of March Madness — in the year of our Lord 2025 … not to betray the would be American Ceasar, but to enable him. Defying nearly unanimous House Democrats, led by their leader, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, Schumer led eight fellow Democratic Senators plus independent Angus King to break his own party’s filibuster of the House-passed continuing resolution to fund the government through September, clearing the way for its passage. The Senators who stood with Schumer, against not just young Democrats, progressive Democrats, Black, AAPI and Latino Democrats, were as follows:

The story of Julius Cesar is one of betrayal, not just of a leader, but of a republic. It was the beginning of the collapse of Rome into empire and autocracy. And the handmaidens of that collapse were Senators who mistook treachery for patriotism.

Related reading: Elizabeth Booker Houston on the consequences of Schumer’s sellout.

As you might imagine, Trumpus Ceasar is pleased with Mister Schumer (at least for now...)

But most Democrats are furious…

Calls for Schumer to step down as leader are beginning to percolate. Newark, New Jersey Mayor Ras Baraka, who is running for governor, has officially called for Schumer to step aside as Democratic Senate leader.

And some New York Democrats are weighing their options if Schumer chooses to run for re-election in 2028. From Politico:

A handful of House lawmakers, including some in battleground districts, are floating supporting a primary challenge against him. Activists are organizing efforts to punish him financially. Schumer is facing questions within his own caucus about whether he made strategic errors in handling the high-stakes moment and failed to outline a clear plan about how to deal with the complex politics of a shutdown, according to interviews with six lawmakers or their aides. Some Democratic senators are even privately questioning whether he should stay on as their leader.

“He’s done a great deal of damage to the party,” said Ezra Levin, co-founder of the liberal group Indivisible, which has scheduled an emergency call Saturday with its New York chapter and other local leaders to “seriously consider if the current [Democratic] leadership is equipped to handle the moment we’re in.”

In a remarkable sign of how deep the intraparty frustration with Schumer runs, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries refused to throw his fellow New Yorker a life raft. Asked by reporters on Friday if there should be new leadership in the Senate, he said, “Next question.”

Schumer’s one-time partner, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), went so far as to urge senators to vote against his position, saying that “this false choice that some are buying instead of fighting is unacceptable.” And dozens of House Democrats sent a sharply worded letter to Schumer Friday, which expressed “strong opposition” to his standpoint, arguing that the “American people sent Democrats to Congress to fight against Republican dysfunction and chaos” and that the party should not be “capitulating to their obstruction.”

Though several senators said they supported his leadership, some Senate Democrats avoided questions when asked directly Friday about Schumer’s leadership role.

“We still have more to play out on this,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) when asked if the backlash would impact Schumer’s role as leader. “So I’m not really thinking about the big-picture politics.”

Pointedly, Schumer’s fellow Brooklynite, Rep. Jeffries, refused to throw a lifeline, responding to a reporter’s shouted question of whether there should be new Senate leadership with a clipped two word answer: “next question.”

And folks are starting to Google: “how do you oust a Senate leader…”

Schumer clearly has convinced himself that he did the right thing by the federal government … or maybe just his and Kirsten Gillibrand’s Wall Street donors … but clearly all he has really done is unify various factions of the Democratic Party, inside and outside of Washington, against him.

“We’re ready to get out of this building and head back to the Capitol at any moment and prevent the government from shutting down,” said Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

“Now is the moment for Democrats to draw a line in the stand and say that we stand very firmly on the side of working class people and against the ultra-rich that are trying to corrupt our government for themselves,” he added.

Meanwhile, some of the nation’s most influential progressive groups warned of serious political consequences for Senate Democrats and predicted a fierce backlash when members of Congress return home next week.

Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, which has organized hundreds of protests across the nation, said that nearly 8 in 10 of the group’s activists support primary challenges against “Senate Dems who cave on the GOP bill.”

He wrote on social media that the vast majority of those Democratic activists plan to express their anger at town halls or other public events next week. MoveOn, another progressive group that claims nearly 10 million members nationwide, predicted that its activists would also demand answers from Democratic officials in the coming days

“Clearing the way for Donald Trump and Elon Musk to gut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is unacceptable. It’s past time for Democrats to fight and stop acting like it’s business as usual,” said Joel Payne, a spokesperson for MoveOn.

In a social media post, Anne Caprara, the chief of staff for Illinois Gov. JB Prtizker, argued that the party could unify around a fight with Trump.

“The fight going on in the Democratic Party right now is not between hard left, left and moderate. It’s between those who want to fight and those who want to cave,” Caprara said, adding, “Misread this at your own peril.”

Even in the Senate, Democrats were mostly unwilling to speak up to defend Schumer’s move. Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Georgia Democrat, even suggested that the party should be looking for new leaders in the coming years.

“I think come ‘26, ‘28, we’ll get some new leadership,” he said. His office later said Warnock was answering the question broadly.

When you’ve lost the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, who is also your fellow Senator…

The sadism of King Joffrey

King Joffrey Baratheon, Game of Thrones

One of the ongoing themes of Game of Thrones was the sadism of young King Joffrey Baratheon, the king of Westeros in the Song of Ice and Fire series. Joffrey’s sadism is borne of his deep insecurity. Ostensibly the eldest son and heir of King Robert Baratheon, and Cersei Lannister, he is really the firstborn product of an incestuous relationship between Cersei and her twin brother Jamie Lannister. And he is constantly ridiculed and scolded by both his grandfather Tywin, and his small but lascivious uncle Tyrion, who serves as the advisory “Hand of the King” — both of whom know full well Joffrey’s inadequacies as a leader, and that beyond his sadistic ways, he is inherently a fool and a coward.

Donald Trump is America’s Joffrey Baratheon.

On Friday, he went into the Justice Department and let his full fascist inner child king run wild.

President Donald Trump on Friday walked into the Department of Justice and labeled his courtroom opponents “scum,” judges “corrupt” and the prosecutors who investigated him “deranged.”

With the DOJ logo directly behind him, Trump called his political opponents lawbreakers and said others should be sent to prison.

“These are people that are bad people, really bad people,” the president said in a rambling speech that lasted more than an hour.

While condemning officials who directed the military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and repeating his false claims about the 2020 election being stolen, Trump said: “The people who did this to us should go to jail.”

In remarks that were by turns dark, exultant and pugnacious, Trump vowed to remake the Justice Department and retaliate against his enemies, some of whom he called “thugs.”

It was, even by Trump’s standards, a stunning show of disregard for decades of tradition observed by his predecessors, who worried about politicizing or appearing to exert too much control over the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency. Trump, instead, called himself the “chief law enforcement officer in our country” and accused the DOJ’s prior leadership of doing “everything within their power to prevent” him from becoming the president.

Trump charged the DOJ with spying on his campaign, raiding his home, persecuting his “family, staff and supporters,” launching “one hoax and disinformation campaign after the other” and breaking the law “on a colossal scale,” making clear the glee he has taken in undermining the department’s typical independence and wielding it to achieve the White House’s objectives.

“First, we must be honest about the lies and the abuses that have occurred within these walls,” Trump said. “Unfortunately in recent years, a corrupt group of hacks and radicals within the ranks of the American government obliterated the trust and goodwill built up over generations. They weaponized the vast powers of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies to try and thwart the will of the American people.”

Those days, Trump said, “are over, and they are never going to come back. He added that he would demand “full and complete accountability for the wrongs and abuses that have occurred.”

It was a freak show that would have been more appropriate to have taken place in the Kremlin.

While any presidential visit to the Justice Department is a rarity, Trump repeatedly breached other norms in his remarks as he slammed former officials, unleashed attacks on private attorneys, and touted his vote tallies in last year’s election.

“It’s a campaign by the same scum you’ve been dealing with for years,” Trump said of the lawyers and officials who have targeted him. “We will expel the rogue actors and corrupt forces from our government. ... We will restore the scales of justice in our country.”

The president sought to recast his fraught history with the department — most notably the two federal criminal cases he faced last year, one on charges of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and the other for refusing to return a hoard of classified documents after he left office in 2021. Trump also bragged about revoking the security clearance of “deranged Jack Smith,” the special counsel who indicted him in those cases. (Smith and the Justice Department abandoned both cases after Trump won reelection last year.).

Trump boasted about pardoning hundreds of “political prisoners who have been grossly mistreated,” referring to the people convicted in connection with the pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. And he said “there was no better day” than when he fired James Comey, the president’s first-term FBI director who investigated the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.

“What they’ve ripped down is incalculable,” Trump said of the department’s leaders under the Biden administration.

This is a madman, who believes his negative press is illegal…

Whose weak willed secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has barred the South African ambassador to the United States from entering the country, declaring him “persona non grata” for telling the truth about maga…

Rubio, in a post on X, accused Ebrahim Rasool of being a “race-baiting politician” who hates President Donald Trump. Rubio declared the South African diplomat “persona non grata.”

Neither Rubio, who posted as he was flying back to Washington from a Group of 7 foreign ministers meeting in Canada, nor the State Department gave any immediate explanation for the decision.

But Rubio linked to a Breitbart story about a talk Rasool gave earlier Friday as part of a South African think tank’s webinar in which he spoke about actions taken by the Trump administration in the context of a United States where white people soon would no longer be in the majority.

Both Trump and his ally Elon Musk, who grew up in South Africa, have criticised the country’s Black-led government over a new land law they claim discriminates against white people.

It is highly unusual for the US to expel a foreign ambassador, although lower-ranking diplomats are more frequently targeted with persona non grata status.

At the height of US-Russia diplomatic expulsions during the Cold War and then again over Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, allegations of interference in the 2016 US election and the 2018 poisoning of a former Russian intelligence officer in Britain, neither Washington nor Moscow saw fit to expel the respective ambassadors.

Phone calls to the South African Embassy seeking comment, made at the end of the work day, were not answered.

Rasool previously served as his country’s ambassador to the US from 2010 to 2015 before returning to the post in January.

As a child, he and his family were evicted from a Cape Town neighbourhood designated for white people. Rasool became an anti-apartheid campaigner, serving time in prison for his activism and identifying as a comrade of the country’s first post-apartheid president, Nelson Mandela. He later became a politician in Mandela’s African National Congress political party.

In Friday’s webinar, Rasool, speaking by videoconference, talked in academic language of the Trump administration’s crackdowns on diversity and equity programs and immigration.

“The supremacist assault on incumbency. We see it in the domestic politics of the USA, the MAGA movement, the Make America Great Again movement, as a response not simply to a supremacist instinct, but to very clear data that shows great demographic shifts in the USA in which the voting electorate in the USA is projected to become 48% white,” the South African ambassador said,

He pointed to Musk’s outreach to far-right figures in Europe, calling it a “dog whistle” in a global movement trying to rally people who see themselves as part of an “embattled white community.”

Rasool made no pointed attack on Trump and instead offered tips for dealing with his administration, saying, “This is not a moment to antagonise the United States” and “Let’s avoid things that cock a snoot at the United States.”

His ouster comes after Trump signed an executive order that cut aid and assistance to the Black-led South African government. In the order, Trump said South Africa’s Afrikaners, who are descendants of mainly Dutch colonial settlers, were being targeted by a new law that allows the government to expropriate private land.

The South African government has denied its new law is tied to race and says Trump’s claims over the country and the law have been full of misinformation and distortions.

Trump said land was being expropriated from Afrikaners, when no land has been taken under the law.

Whose Antisemitism Task Force chair casually shares antisemitic meme content written by avowed white nationalists…

And whose Department of Defense, led by a weekend TV host, is deleting all records of Black and women servicemembers from the most sacred burial ground in the U.S.., Arlington Natonal Cemetery — probably the most repulsive thing this wretched administration has done so far.

That is the person to whom Chuck Schumer rendered his power. Perhaps even his soul.

Couldn’t be me.

(This post has been updated).