I feel like Michael Jochum‘s publicist. I can resist reposting some of his Facebook posts. He says what needs to be said eloquently, forcefully, and succinctly. No wasted words. To say he is “Not Just a Drummer,” is a understatement. Here’s one of his recent posts about the Ford worker who spoke truth to power by telling Dear Leader that’s he’s a pedophile protector. DL’s predictable reaction: flicking the bird and muttering, “Fuck you.”
Good news for TJ Sabula, who exercised his 1st Amendment Rights: Ford worker involved in heated exchange with Trump will keep his job, receives no discipline (9.2.26).
Nearly seven hundred thousand dollars has now poured into GoFundMe campaigns for Ford worker TJ Sabula because the man did something so dangerous in today’s corporate–authoritarian hellscape, he told the truth. He called Donald Trump exactly what he is, a pedophile protector, inside the Dearborn F-150 plant, on camera, in real time, in work boots, with nothing but conscience and courage backing him up. Trump’s response, the sitting President of the United States, flipped off an American worker and muttered “fuck you.”
That image should be seared into every history book ever written, the most honest photograph of modern power, a corrupt president shooting a middle finger at labor for refusing to stay quiet. And Ford’s response, instead of condemning the obscenity, the tantrum, the corruption, was to suspend Sabula without pay, hiding behind corporate garbage words like “respect” while giving a free pass to presidential vulgarity and abuse.
Corporate America always sides with power over people, always. The United Auto Workers, by contrast, did what institutions are supposed to do, they backed their guy, they said workers should never be subjected to vulgar behavior by anyone, including the President of the United States, and that split could not be more revealing.
What makes Sabula a hero is not the money, although the public outpouring says everything about where the country’s heart still beats, what makes him a hero is that he did the thing most people only practice in their heads when power walks through their workplace like it owns the oxygen, he said the truth out loud, and in doing so he gave us the most perfect Trump photo ever taken, a man so morally hollow, so brittle, so diseased with entitlement that he lashes out at a worker for refusing to bow. And this is
Trump’s real problem as a so-called leader, not that he is impetuous, brash, naive, crude, inexperienced or an outsider, we already know he is all that and more, it is that he is weak and sniveling, not strong or self-controlled, not cool or tough, not low-key or determined, he is whiny, weepy, self-pitying, he throws himself sobbing onto the body politic, a full-blown drama queen weaponizing grievance and ego while the country burns.
This is what courage looks like now, one person, one sentence, one room that desperately does not want to hear it, and an empire of cowardice scrambling to punish the worker for telling the truth.
— Michael Jochum, Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition
Bonus post:
Donald Trump has been a failure at everything he’s done in his life.
An epic failure.
A failure as a husband.
A failure as a father.
A failure as a game show host.
And now the pathological lying, pussy grabbing, disabled mocking, misogynistic, racist, Neo-Fascist, narcissistic, illiterate, convicted felon-rapist is once again a failure as president.
His only “accomplishments” are to do everything he can to diminish the legacy of President Barack Obama. Trump can’t handle the undisputed fact that President Obama is one of the most, if not the most beloved presidents in American History.
I cannot express to you how much I miss having Barack Obama in the White House, with his incomparable decency, goodness, eloquence, humanity, and brilliance. It wounds me deeply to watch and listen with horror as this incompetent, mean-spirited, arrogant buffoon who was the accidental President in 2016, and is currently the President in 2025 has degraded our democracy and our standing across the world as a beacon of humanitarian principles.
May we all be liberated from the scourge of a trump as soon as possible. Meanwhile, thank you to President Obama for exemplifying the true greatness of America.
Bonus post #2:
Trump’s storm troopers are not a metaphor anymore, they are a rehearsal.
The willful ignorance of people who still cheer this regime is no longer merely bankrupt; it is morally and legally obscene. We were warned. We saw the signs. And yet here we are, watching jackbooted federal agents behave like an occupying army on American streets while their supporters pretend this is “law and order.” If you cannot see the straight line from Nazi Germany to Trump’s modern-day Gestapo, you are not just not paying attention, you are choosing blindness.
Trump’s Gestapo is animated by the same rot that has always powered authoritarianism: narcissistic psychopaths who see the world only through the prism of their own dominance. Humanity, restraint, proportionality, due process, all of it is disposable if it gets in the way of power. They do not serve the law; they serve a man. They do not protect the public; they terrorize it.
We don’t need theoretical debates about where this leads. We have the evidence in real time. These are the same people who would drag human beings to Guantánamo without blinking, who will grab a terrified woman in the street while masked like faceless enforcers. The fact that they were willing to lob a flash-bang and pump tear gas under a family car, with six children inside, including a six-month-old infant, tells you everything you need to know about how far they are willing to go.
Let’s be clear about what happened in Minneapolis.
A Black family, parents and six children, were trapped between protesters and ICE agents. They did exactly what any reasonable, terrified parents would do: they stayed put, trying not to move while armed federal agents surrounded their vehicle. The windows were down. The lights were on. The children were visible. And Trump’s ICE decided the appropriate response was to detonate a flash-bang beneath their car and flood it with tear gas.
A blast that lifted their vehicle off the ground. Airbags deployed. Doors locked. Tear gas filling the cabin. A mother clawing through smoke to free her children. And a six-month-old baby pulled from that car “lifeless,” foaming at the mouth, requiring CPR while his mother could barely breathe herself.
And what is the response from Trump’s regime?
DHS had the gall, the moral vacancy, to claim that law enforcement “never targeted this family” and that agents “reasonably deployed crowd control measures.” They had the audacity to call this family the “victims of rioters and agitators.”
That is not just a lie. It is a deliberate inversion of reality, the same propaganda playbook Hitler and Goebbels perfected. Blame the victims. Sanctify the perpetrators. Paint brutality as professionalism.
This is how fascism normalizes itself. You create your own propaganda machine to reach millions. You build your own Reichstag in Congress, filled with loyalists who will rubber-stamp anything. You twist the Department of Justice into your personal Gestapo, led by figures whose own ethics and legality are deeply suspect. You vilify and dehumanize anyone who challenges you, career civil servants, journalists, minorities, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, liberals, and label them “enemies of the state.”
And you corrupt religion in the process.
Trump and his enablers have hijacked Christianity, stripping it of its soul and turning it into a tool of domination. They have twisted the message of a poor carpenter who preached compassion into a weapon for greedy, prosperity-obsessed grifters who fleece their congregations while blessing cruelty. They are manufacturing an unofficial army of loyalists, disciples of a false prophet, who would follow him into moral darkness without hesitation, and quite possibly into crimes against humanity.
The chilling truth is this: we are not as far from ghettos, roundups, and deportation trains as we comfort ourselves into believing. The mindset is already here. The hatred is already here. The machinery of repression is being built right in front of us. The only thing missing is the infrastructure, and they are actively working to assemble it while we argue about civility.
This is no longer an abstract political fight. It is a fight for whether America remains a constitutional republic or slides fully into authoritarian nightmare. And yes, I fear we are going to have to resist in ways we never wanted to imagine.
I am not a religious man. But watching this cruelty unfold, watching babies nearly suffocated by federal agents in the name of “law and order,” I find myself saying it anyway:
Dear God — save us from this storm of demagoguery, inhumanity, and doom.
—Michael Jochum, Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition
An International Educator in Vietnam 