Apology

First – To all readers of Workers Comp Insider, apologies for accidentally sending an unfinished post last night about Juneteenth, which, as you’d imagine, I meant to send on Juneteenth, not two days ahead.  On another note, I need to let you know we are retiring Workers Comp Insider at the end of June. We created the Insider in 2003, and it’s time to put it to bed. Thank you all for reading it.

In 2018, I created a Substack column, Tom Lynch’s Letters from the Berkshires. You’ll find it at: tomlynch.substack.com. It’s easier to get to and read, and, unless you let me know otherwise, I’ll soon be migrating everyone from the Insider to it.

Thanks again for 22 years of reading the Insider.

Now for:

Donald Trump and his new shiny object, Iran

Before the G7 conference, Donald Trump seemed uninterested in Iran. Israel was going after Iran’s military leaders and nuclear research sites, and Trump seemed happy to let them do it while suggesting negotiations. Two weeks ago, he seemed confident a nuclear deal with Iran was easily within reach.

Then, Israel became more successful, really successful, having killed both the top military and scientific Iranian leaders, as well as pulverized the country’s nuclear sites. Trump had just endured a deflating, poorly attended, lackadaisical parade where parade troops merely ambled, rather than marched. On returning to the White House, he had also had to suffer through TV coverage of 2,000 No Kings demonstrations around the country, where people seemed joyful in their protesting. A lot more joyful than anyone who’d attended his embarrassing, shrivelled-up parade.

What’s a narcissistic sociopath to do? Donald Trump’s whole life is devoted to controlling everything and placing himself at the center of it all. And now he wasn’t at the center of anything, especially Israel’s success.

I’ll say this for the man: he can pivot on the head of a pin. In about a nanosecond, he went from calling for a cease-fire and urging negotiations to demanding “unconditional surrender” from Iran and to saying “we now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran” and “we” know the whereabouts of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Then, saying something no president has ever said in public about a foreign, sovereign leader, Trump said, “We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least for now.”

He added, “Our patience is growing thin.”

Now, all eyes are once again where Donald Trump wants them — on him.

Never mind that killing foreign leaders violates executive orders signed by a series of presidents dating to Gerald Ford. The operative one says: “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.”

The trouble is that right now, unlike Trump 1.0, there isn’t a soul in the Trump 2.0 administration who has the competence to do the job they’re in or the capacity to disuade Trump from doing whatever crazy thing has popped into his squishy brain, like killing Iran’s leader.

So, here we are.

Juneteenth

Today is Juneteenth, which became a federal holiday on 17 June 2021 when President Joe Biden signed Juneteenth National Independence Day into law, making it the 12th federal holiday. Juneteenth commemorates 19 June 1865, the date Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and delivered General Order No. 3 announcing the end of legalized slavery in Texas.

Although the war was over with General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House two months earlier, Lee’s surrender was ignored in Texas, where many plantation owners refused to acknowledge it and vowed never to “release” their enslaved workers from bondage.

A week before Granger’s arrival, a brigade of the 25th Army Corps, comprised of more than 1,000 African-descendant soldiers, arrived in Galveston and captured the city. They chased the rebel government and the remaining Confederate soldiers into Mexico. The Black soldiers of the 25th Army Corps also spread the word about freedom to the enslaved Texas population.

When General Granger arrived with General Order No. 3, he forced plantation owners to read it to their enslaved men, women, and children. Thus was born Juneteenth, which was first celebrated exactly one year after the final freeing of the last enslaved people in America. Fittingly, in 1980, Texas became the first state to promulgate Juneteenth as a state holiday. Eventually, another forty-six followed, ultimately leading to Biden’s 2021 federal holiday promulgation.

I was reminded of this history this morning when I remembered that Donald Trump had, in an instance of impeccable timing, scheduled one of his wild and crazy rallies back in 2020 on Juneteenth. According to the Associated Press, Trump was unaware of Juneteenth, let alone the significance of it to the Black community, when he announced the date of his rally. Consequently, he did not anticipate the blowback he would get. But get it he did. Even from his own supporters. In a rare instance of backing down, he moved the rally to the next day, the 20th, at the BOK Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Having insulted the Black community with the date, Trump added further insult with the place — Tulsa.

The Tulsa Race Massacre

In African American history, Tulsa has revered significance. For it was on another day in June, the 1st June day of 1921, that Tulsa was the site of the worst race massacre in American history. And, unless you were a college U.S. history major, it is likely no one taught you a thing about it as you went through school.

The day before, police had arrested a young black man by the name of Dick Rowland for allegedly attacking a white woman in a Tulsa elevator (Weeks later, she said it never happened). Soon after Rowland’s arrest, rumors began to spread about a group of whites planning a lynching party. To protect Rowland, African American World War 1 veterans surrounded the jail holding him. There was a standoff with a mob of whites. Somebody fired a shot, no one knows who, and a firefight ensued. The much larger white mob pushed the black vets all the way to Greenwood, Tulsa’s Black section.

Greenwood was the wealthiest Black community in the country. Known as the Black Wall Street, Oil had made it rich. Racism was about to destroy it. Over the course of the day, white Tulsans turned 6,000 homes and businesses and 36 square city blocks to ash. Pilots of two airplanes dropped turpentine bombs on buildings, instantly igniting them. They slaughtered three hundred African Americans and threw most into mass graves. Authorities never prosecuted anyone for anything. The federal government ignored it. Tulsa, population 100,000, swept it all under the rug. Two generations later, nobody knew a thing about it. It was never taught in schools, no books were written, no oral history passed down. It was as if it never happened.

Tulsa’s mayor from 2016 through 2024, G. T. Bynum, decided to pull the rug up to see what was hiding under it. He was committed to investigating what happened and determining accountability. He found a couple of the mass graves and began having them excavated. The goal was to at least identify as many victims as possible through DNA analysis.

Bynum formed the City of Tulsa 1921 Graves Investigation Office, convened experts to help locate, identify, and connect people today with those lost more than 100 years ago, and established the 1921 Graves Press Room to report on the effort.

Bynum’s successor, Monroe Nichols IV, the first Black to be elected Mayor of Tulsa, vowed to continue the effort, and has.

In 2021, on the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, President Biden, in an emotional speech in that city, said he had “come to fill the silence” about one of the nation’s darkest — and long-suppressed — moments of racial violence.

“Some injustices are so heinous, so horrific, so grievous, they cannot be buried, no matter how hard people try,” Biden said. “Only with truth can come healing.”

As far as I have been able to document, Donald Trump has yet to say one word in public about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.

And what has he said about Juneteenth? Four years ago, he denigrated it, saying, ‘nobody had ever heard of it’ before he brought it up, and that he “had made it famous,” despite African Americans celebrating it for 158 years. He told the Wall Street Journal he “polled many people around him, none of whom had heard of Juneteenth.” I have no trouble believing that. Might be the only time he’s told the truth since the day he rode down the gold-plated escalator ten years ago this week.

Although throughout the recent campaign for his second term, Trump said nothing about either Juneteenth or the Tulsa Race Massacre, Janiyah Thomas, the campaign’s director of Black media, did issue a statement commemorating Juneteenth, saying, “Today, we reflect on how far we [have] come as a nation and remember that light will always triumph over darkness. With President Trump’s leadership, our party will continue to advance the American dream for all people.”

If you believe that, I have some prime, Grade A land in Florida I would like to sell you — just as soon as the tide goes out.

First DOJ investigation

Since 1921, the federal government never investigated the massacre. Neither had the state of Oklahoma. But in September 2024, the Department of Justice opened a cold case investigation into the massacre under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act; the department closed the investigation in January, barely three months after starting, and shortly before it would have had to hand it off to the new Trump administration. The investigation’s report said:

“The Government has reviewed the events of May 31 and June 1, 1921, and issues this Report to officially acknowledge, illuminate, and preserve for history the horrible ordeals of the massacre’s victims. This Report is the first full accounting of the massacre undertaken by the Department of Justice.”

The report’s Executive Summary concludes:

“On the night of May 31, 1921, a violent attack by as many as 10,000 white Tulsans
destroyed the thriving Black community of Greenwood, Oklahoma—a prosperous area often referred to as “Black Wall Street.” The attack, which lasted into the afternoon of June 1, was so systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence. White men murdered hundreds of Black residents, burned businesses and homes to the ground, and left survivors without resources or recourse. In the aftermath, authorities failed to offer meaningful help, and efforts to seek justice through the courts foundered.”

Although the Biden Department of Justice did not say so, most observers thought it closed the investigation and published its report ten days before Trump’s second term because Justice officials believed if left open, Trump’s DOJ would put it where it would never see the light of day.

As Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nichols continues the investigation into the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. He has reaffirmed the city’s commitment to the 1921 Graves Investigation and the Community Engagement Genealogy Project, according to the City of Tulsa. This ongoing work aims to bring closure to families of victims and to identify more victims.

Now, educators must teach this stain on our history in all our nation’s schools.

Fat chance.

Trump’s Reichstag fire

In April, I wrote about Marinus van der Lubbe, the insane communist fanatic, who, 28 days into Adoph Hitler’s Chancellorship in 1933, decided to make a spectacular spectacle to prop up Germany’s communists. So, he burned down the 40-year-old Reichstag, the building where Germany’s legislative representatives met to debate and enact laws.

At the time, Hitler needed something to allow him to take complete control of the country. Although van der Lubbe’s spectacle was a one-man show, Hitler saw it as a perfect excuse by which to attack and eradicate Germany’s communists, who, in the 1932 elections, had taken 16.9% of the vote, or 100 seats in the Reichstag.

Hitler hated the communists nearly as much as he hated Jews. The Reichstag fire gave him the means to immediately pound them into oblivion. The next morning, he suspended several sections of the Weimar constitution, particularly those governing freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly and association. He allowed police to detain people indefinitely without a court order. On that day, Hitler made plain his intention of destroying the Communists and anyone else who dared defy his plans. He included the Jews, specifically. “Our struggle must not be made dependent on judicial considerations,” he said.

This week, after a stern talking to by Stephen Miller, the man charged by Trump with carrying out his promise of deporting millions of immigrants, ICE thugs spread out across the country and went to work. Nowhere did they hit harder than in the nation’s second-largest city, Los Angeles. This prompted protests, which the Los Angeles police were perfectly capable of handling — and they did.

However, never one to miss an opportunity, Donald Trump decided the LA protests could be his Reichstag fire. On 7 June, he ordered 2,000 California National Guard troops and 700 Marines to deploy to Los Angeles to put down what he described as an “invasion and third-world lawlessness,” led by “insurrectionist mobs,” and that Los Angeles had been “invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals.”

Even before the National Guard troops arrived, the protests had quieted down. Mayor Karen Bass declared a curfew, Governor Gavin Newsom gave a televised speech on Tuesday night watched by more than 10 million Angelinos, the police arrested a few people violating the curfew, and the air seemed to go out of Donald Trump’s balloon. Nevertheless, on Wednesday, he ordered another 2,000 National Guard troops mobilized. It seems he is doing his level best to intimidate and provoke the people of Los Angeles into violent protests, which would then give him the chance to declare martial law and take over the city, then the state.

More and more, it appears the Trump Administration is flailing, despite the enormous harm it is doing to America and its allies. Every day seems like the Ted Mack Amateur Hour, except Ted Mack’s amateurs knew what they were doing.

Will Los Angeles stand peaceful in the face of the gleeful and cruel thuggery of the ICE bullies as they rip people from the streets? That is the question of the hour.

The Fort Bragg political rally

On Tuesday, the same day he was ordering more National Guard troops into Los Angeles to combat an imaginary “insurrectionist mob,” Donald Trump and his lap dog Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth took a quick trip to Fort Gragg, North Carolina, for a Presidential Address to the base’s soldiers. Except it wasn’t a presidential address — it was a Donald Trump political rally curated by the White House — and it wasn’t to the base’s soldiers — it was to a select group of the base’s soldiers who were handpicked for their political leanings and physical appearance. A communication with potential attendees asked for “no fat soldiers,” according to Military.com.

This was a staged event, a fake event just like the kind dictators around the world put together to make themselves seem powerful. As Dan Rather wrote in Steady, 

So the mostly white, mostly male, exceptionally fit, pro-Trump troops booed when the president mentioned California Governor Gavin Newsom, President Joe Biden, and the press. They whooped and roared as Trump and Hegseth talked about ridding the military of “woke garbage” and “political correctness,” and reverting more military bases to pro-Confederate names, as Hegseth did with Fort Bragg.

A Trump merchandise table, set up at the rally, was busy selling MAGA necklaces and fake credit cards emblazoned with the slogan “White Privilege Card: Trumps Everything.”

A disgusting and shameful display.

Everyone loves a parade

Today is Donald Trump’s 79th birthday. Whoop-dee-doo, and Happy Birthday, Donny!

To celebrate, the president has decided to throw himself a ~$45 million parade in Washington, DC. It will be just like the ones you’ve seen in Moscow’s Red Square and North Korea’s Pyongyang’s Kim Il Sung Square — except ours will be better! Unfortunately for Trump, most of Congress will be skipping it. They say it’s a great idea, but they don’t want to be seen there as the tanks roll by, tearing up Constitution Avenue, and Air Force jets make flyovers.

Today’s day-long extravaganza on the National Mall will include the parade with 6,600 soldiers (who will, in Trump’s words, “bravely march down the streets.”), 150 vehicles, including 28 M1 Abrams tanks, 50 helicopters, and seven marching bands. There will be a post-parade concert, parachutists, and fireworks, as well as a festival with demonstrations, equipment displays, and food trucks. And let us not forget the merchants selling Trump bling and that “White Privilege Card.”

The highlight of the day may be the planned jump of the Army’s Golden Knights Parachute team. The team will perform a High Altitude Low Opening (HALO) jump, and, after landing, will present Trump with a flag they carried down. Something Trump can brag about every time he opens his mouth for a while. Swell.

The National Guard, of whom Trump has lately become so fond, will be there to keep the peace if protesters decide to make their presence felt.

The president told reporters at the White House on Wednesday that the parade would be a big celebration and protestors would not be welcome, according to NBC News.

Although nearby counterprotests are planned, including a mass march to the White House (might not be a good idea), I am fervently hoping protesters in DC can remain peaceful. If not, there could be blood in the streets as Trump will order Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to do his dirty work — and Hegseth will.

A land of 2,000 protests

The “No Kings” Nationwide Day of Defiance movement is holding protests across the country to coincide with the big birthday bash parade — up to 2,000 of them. A coalition of progressive political action groups is organizing Saturday’s demonstrations. The primary organizing group is the 50501 Movement, which stands for “50 states, 50 protests, one movement.” 

Here in Massachusetts, demonstrations are planned in the Commonwealth’s largest cities — Boston, Worcester, and Springfield — as well as communities from Provincetown, in the east, to Pittsfield, in the west (near me), according to the No Kings website.

I think we can all agree — Saturday, Donald Trump’s 79th birthday, with its howitzers, tanks, parachute umps, and flyovers, and all manner of peaceful demonstrations across the country where citizens tell him what they think of him, will be one of the more interesting days in a presidential term chock-full of interesting days.

Let’s hope no one gets hurt.

Recovering from Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) gives you time to think; the fatigue that comes with it doesn’t allow for much else. I’ve had the chance to ponder at a deeper level what Donald Trump and his oligarch administration have unleashed upon America and the world.

What the administration and DOGE have done has been coming at us with Gatling gun speed. They do something crazy one day, like taking over the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and when we start to think about that, they toss a grenade over the transom into our laps, this one taking over the Library of Congress. And then another after that, taking over the National Archives. The result is the country becomes desensitized to its own destruction. The Constitution doesn’t matter, except to the extent it gets in the way.

As I was recovering, I decided to stop focusing on all the incoming Cruise Missile Executive Orders as they were arriving, only for each one to be blown away into the background by another one in short order. Instead, I focused on the overarching arc of it all in a search for the why of it all.

This chaotic, helter-skelter destruction must have a Why to it, right? There must be a reason, coherent or not, for why this constitutional carnage is happening. So, what is it?

The big Why I’m looking to answer is: Except for the hubris of a monstrous man, why would an entire army of administration officials, from cabinet level on down, set out with gleeful cruelty to destroy the 236-year-old American democracy? And why would the entire Republican legislative body, House and Senate, not only go along with it, but cheer it on?

In late January and early February, at the beginning of our march into darkness, most people pooh-poohed any comparison to 1930’s Germany, but, I’m sorry, this mad rush to oligarchic autocracy has become more and more similar to Nazi Germany in 1933 and 1934 with every passing day. The only thing different is, except for the occasional bloody street violence, immigrants have replaced Jews as those whose presence must be eliminated. Until implementation of the systematic mass murder of Jews — the “Final Solution” — in the summer of 1941, Germany’s Jews were persecuted and suffered widespread discrimination in the early and mid-1930s, but not extermination. Hitler’s early goal was simply to get them out of Germany.

When they discovered it was quite profitable for them, Germany’s business leaders also jumped aboard the Nazi train to ruin. Initially, they thought they could control or manage Hitler. It turned out the other way around, precisely as has happened here. According to historian Richard Evans, “By the end of 1935, organized opposition had been completely crushed.” That was three years into Nazi rule. Thus far, we are 135 days into Donald Trump’s second term; there are 1,323 remaining.

Germany’s Jews lived in constant fear. Today, early into Trump’s current term, America’s immigrants live in constant fear. This profound fear is orchestrated by anti-immigrant and Deputy Chief of Staff to Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, the scion of an immigrant Jewish family, who made it to America at the start of the 20th century from a dirt-floor shack in Antopol, Belarus, a shtetl of subsistence farmers. They left because of violent anti-Jewish pogroms, and they were lucky they made it out, just as most of today’s immigrants to the U.S. left their home countries to escape persecution and death.

Miller is the reincarnation of Adolph Eichmann, the transportation and administrative wizard, who set up elaborate systems to move Jews out of the Third Reich in the 30s, and later, in the early 1940s, to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. According to statistics published by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Administration (ICE), Miller has thus far organized the removal of 527,459 immigrants snatched up by ICE. Many have been sent to a terrible prison in Guatemala and detention centers in Venezuela, totalitarian countries happy to house them.  In an article published in Politico Magazine, Miller’s uncle, the neuropsychologist David Glosser, wrote about his shame and dismay at his nephew’s hypocrisy and betrayal of their family’s lifelong values.

Nazis did monstrously evil things. They were persuaded to sell their souls by a charismatic leader, whose oratory, according to William Shirer, who was there through it all, could get most people to do just about anything. Shirer wrote the first definitive history of the period (there would be scores of others), The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Today, we have a charismatic leader who seems able to get a significant minority to do whatever he tells them. Witness the insurrection of January 6th. A leader who now has most, nearly all, of America’s larger businesses securely in his pocket. Witness the rush to make all references to DEI disappear and the fealty payments for his inauguration, which put $239 million in his other pocket.

Nazis passed laws that enriched the Barons of industry and further impoverished the marginalized.

We are doing the same. The Congressional Budget Office, the CBO, has analyzed what the MAGA crowd insisted on naming the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” and concluded it will increase annual costs for families in the lower 50% of income.  On the other hand, those in the upper 10% will get a massive bump in income. The bill includes roughly $3.75 trillion in tax cuts — extending the expiring 2017 individual income tax breaks that benefited the rich enormously and temporarily adding new ones that Trump campaigned on. The revenue loss would be partially offset by nearly $1.3 trillion in reduced federal spending elsewhere, namely through Medicaid and food assistance for lower-income families.

As a result of the changes to Medicaid, some 7.8 million people would no longer have health insurance, and about 1.4 million people who are in the United States without legal status in state-funded health programs would no longer have coverage.

Can one deduce a collective “Why” for all the chaos of today, which is so similar to that of the 1930s? Or, is it all nothing more than repeated bursts of fiery synapses in the mass of stunted protoplasm that passes for the brain of Donald Trump?

The only thing my limited brain can come up with is this: It is Greed. Out in the open Greed. And that’s all it is. Nothing sophisticated. Just Greed.

Greed comes in many forms. One can be greedy for money. With all the oligarchs in the Cabinet, there’s a lot of that here. One can also be greedy for power, the ability to do whatever one wants without fear of accountability. There’s a lot of that here, too. Just think about Pete Hegseth, who restored Confederate names to DOD military Forts, and just this week removed Harvey Milk’s name from the USNS Harvey Milk, a Navy supply ship. Navy veteran, San Francisco Supervisor, and assassinated gay rights activist Harvey Milk, along with other iconic Americans for whom ships have been named, like Thurgood Marshall (the first Black Supreme Court Justice) and Harriet Tubman (escaped slave and leader of the Underground Railroad at great risk to her life), are being erased from any mention within the Defense Department. The rest of the government is next. It’s as if they never existed. They’d need to be straight white men for any acknowledgement.

One can also be greedy for praise from the leader, which leads to doing anything to get and stay in the leader’s good graces. That’s here, too, but it’s ephemeral: One step out of line, and you’re history.

For all the chaos, Donald Trump does not appear to have a plan beyond enriching himself, his family, and his subservient, sycophantic allies. Trump’s non-plan plan seems to be working just fine for the moment. Will that continue? Will we let it? It doesn’t look like we’ll be getting any help from all the Republican millionaires in Congress and the kajillionaires in the Administration.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump seems to have multi-faceted Greed. He is the very model of a transactional human being. It is all he knows. And right now, his transaction du jour is Crypto. As Judd Legum wrote in Popular Information yesterday:

President Trump is shamelessly exploiting the presidency for personal profit. At the center of this effort is a variety of crypto ventures. For example, Trump recently gifted a VIP tour of the White House to the largest purchasers of his crypto meme coin, $TRUMP. The average winner bought about $4.3 million worth of Trump meme coins.

But could this be at the root of it all? Nothing but old-fashioned, old-as-dirt Greed? In this case, murderous Greed, for, contrary to the lying hypocrisy of Marco Rubio (a real-life Doctor Faustus), many have died already, and many more will. Millions.

I’m reminded of the late, great Peggy Lee’s hit song Is That All There Is?

Whatever. Nobody in government cares.