Monday, September 14, 2026
BREAKING: Maggie Haberman just dropped a blockbuster front-page investigation cataloging exactly how Trump has been using the full power of the federal government to silence the press, and it's a story he desperately did not want written.
The piece, co-authored with Jim Rutenberg, lays it all out in stark terms.
The Justice Department has sent FBI agents to reporters' homes to serve subpoenas, in at least one case flashing a warrant to seize devices. The Pentagon fired the editor and publisher of Stars and Stripes, the military's traditionally independent newspaper, and locked out journalists who refused to sign pledges limiting what they could report. Regulatory agencies have leaned on media companies over their content. Public television and radio funding has been stripped away.
Trump has sued major news organizations personally. The White House seized control of the press pool that follows the president, hand-picking which outlets are allowed access.
And Times reporters investigating security problems with Trump's Qatari-gifted Air Force One were hit with subpoenas of their own, later withdrawn only after it looked like the Justice Department was about to lose in court.
Here's what makes this reporting land even harder.
Trump has spent recent weeks personally attacking Haberman, calling her "unattractive," a "scammer," and a "stalker" after she reported he was skipping the 9/11 ceremony at the World Trade Center because he wouldn't be allowed to give a speech there.
She didn't flinch. She didn't mention the attacks in her story. She just did her job and published the facts.
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Sunday, September 13, 2026
On Thursday, with hatred twisting his snarling face, Trump lunged at a woman reporter. For a moment, it looked like he was going to physically assault her. “Not you. Not you,” Trump said. Then came the lunge and the monstrous face, “Hey, not you!”
The lunging incident grew from a single moment. It happened when a woman reporter tried to ask Trump a question.
The previous day Trump had promised every American citizen a $5,000 stimulus check after the midterm elections. The next day on the tarmac of DFW Airport in Dallas, the woman reporter asked Trump why the American people need a £5,000 incentive to turn out to vote if Trump’s economic policies were so successful.
Trump denied that it was an incentive to vote, even though that’s exactly how he’d framed it the previous day. Then Trump told the woman it was a "reward" for people having to put up with “a horrible situation caused by Biden.”
The lunge happened after the woman attempted a follow-up question.
“Hey, not you!”
The reporter was ABC’s Rachel Scott. Ms Scott is an intelligent, highly competent reporter.
She’s also Black.
This isn’t the first time Ms Scott has attracted the unjust ire of Trump. During the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) Conference in late July of 2024, Scott asked Trump why Black voters should trust him given his past rhetoric. Trump called the question “horrible,” “hostile,” and “disgraceful.” He later labeled her “the most obnoxious reporter in the whole place.”
Trump has a long, ugly history of abusing women reporters, especially when they’re women of colour.
For example, Yamiche Alcindor, Abby Phillip, Akayla Gardner and Weijia Jiang are highly intelligent and competent women reporters of color. They have all felt the vicious lash of Trump’s racist tongue, a tongue he uses only on women, especially women of colour.
But women of color don’t have to be reporters to attract Trump’s invective. Kamala Harris, Maxine Waters, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Michelle Obama, “The Squad” of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, are particularly favourite targets for derision by racist Trump.
Trump isn’t merely racist, either; he’s above all a misogynist. Women of any race routinely receive excoriation for their looks, their weight, their intelligence, and their right to speak their minds. Trump abuses women in ways that he rarely uses against men, particularly white men.
Trump clearly hates and fears and feels inadequate around smart women. Where does this come from?
In 2015, psychologists Tali Mendelberg and Christopher Karpowitz at Princeton University, studied how men respond to intelligent women in group settings. The study revealed that men with fragile masculinity showed measurable anxiety and hostility toward women who outperformed them.
Trump has the most fragile masculinity of anyone I can think of. He also obviously has an advanced case of SPA.
SPA, or Small Penis Anxiety, is a persistent worry or distress about penis size. When Trump brings up his obsession with the size of his hands, a psychological misdirection known as "displacement" or "deflection," he’s really talking about his tiny penis.
The revelation from Stormy Daniels that Trump’s penis is minuscule is dismissed by Trump, who says that he never had any relationship with her. But that’s an obvious lie.
Trump’s history of adjudicated rape, alleged child rape, sexual assault, unwanted touching, inappropriate comments, and physical and verbal abuse toward dozens of women would put a less powerful man in prison, if not on the national sex offender registry. Trump has always gotten away with these crimes against women, in part because the Republican Party has evolved into a safe place for rapists and woman haters.
Violence and hatred of women are deep in the MAGA DNA.
It’s the real reason Roe v. Wade was repealed. Not out of concern that a bit of microscopic protoplasm might be a fully-formed human soul, but because some men are outraged that a woman can get pregnant by any means but theirs.
It’s why women whose lives are in peril, who were raped by their fathers, who will die if they give birth are denied life-saving or sanity-saving abortions in some American States.
Neither is it any accident that the so-called online "Manosphere" is Trump-aligned either. Violence against women is becoming a cultural norm among insecure little men who take their frustrations out on all women because their egos can’t handle a little rejection.
Men like Trump are terrified of what they can’t control, and Trump is clearly terrified of smart women. Trump’s lunge at a brilliant and skilled Black reporter has given another increment of permission to the worst and ugliest and most violent impulses of weak men.
In a split second, Trump showed us exactly what he is and what he’s capable of.
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I added my own variation of this pie - There’s no rule saying we can’t give an old recipe a new little twist. Vintage recipes have good bones, darling! Don’t be afraid to experiment and add your own special touches—you’re simply adding another chapter to the story of the recipe.
There is a group of recipes known as "desperation pies" that came about out of necessity during America's Great Depression, which took place from 1929–1939
Desperation pies, also known as "make-do" pies, are made with simple ingredients that home cooks usually had on hand and were not overly expensive. Common types of desperation pies included vinegar pie, chess pie, mock apple pie, shoofly pie, sugar cream pie, water pie.
When recipes are passed down from one generation to another, it's passing down a story. It's suddenly so much more than a pie or a cake; it's a retelling of our own ancestral past. Food is a key part of social history. When we include such recipes in our own kitchens and our menus, we are living the stories of those times in which they come from. Desperation pies tell us the story of the ingenuity of the Depression era housewives that found ways to still bake for their families using what limited resources were available to them at the time.
Support for Zionism
- Early Advocate: Churchill expressed sympathy for a Jewish homeland in Palestine as early as 1905–1908. Read more about this history in the analysis by the International Churchill Society. [1, 2, 3]
- Strategic Ally: He viewed Zionism as a civilizing and modernizing force in the Middle East and saw European Jews as vital allies. [1, 2, 3]
- Policy Influence: As a government minister and later prime minister, he helped shape British policy regarding a "Jewish National Home," though his stance also involved balancing complex regional tensions with Arab populations. You can read further commentary on these dynamics from the American Enterprise Institute. [1, 2, 3, 4]
When Did Churchill Become a Zionist?
Jerusalem, 29 March 1921. Colonial Secretary Churchill (r) escorted by British High Commissioner Herbert Samuel. (National Photo Collection of Israel, Wikimedia Commons)
Remembering Richard
This post is part of a series entitled “Remembering Richard.” With this series, The Churchill Project seeks to honor its late senior fellow, Richard Langworth (1941-2025), by republishing his writings on Churchill from his personal website, where he wrote about a great deal more than the Bulldog of Britain, all of it worth reading.
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Q: Zionist and Israel supporter
“Churchill, a Zionist, was first to call for the creation of Israel in 1905.” Where and when in 1905 did he say that? —G.H., New York City
A: Date undetermined
Churchill was probably a Zionist by 1905. Reader Gene Kopelson (Comments, below) notes Michael Makovsky’s evidence of young Winston’s early respect for Jews and many Jewish friends. This didn’t make him a Zionist per se, but he certainly had become one by the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917. But I can find no public statement calling for an independent Israel until 1948. Until then he called for a “Jewish National Home.” With his characteristic optimism, he believed Arabs and Jews in Palestine could coexist. He pointed to the talent of the Arabs. And he praised the Jews for their horticulture and irrigation projects. Indeed in today’s Israel, Arabs comprise 20% of the population.
Cairo, 1921
Headed by Churchill in 1921, the Cairo Conference set the borders of the modern Middle East. There he opted for the Zionist idea, what he called a “Jewish National Home” within Britain’s Palestine Mandate, roughly coinciding with what is now Israel. The rest of the Palestine Mandate became the Arab state of Jordan. To a delegation of Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem on 28 March 1921 Churchill declared for a Jewish National Home:
Palestine (Wikipedia Commons) And where else could that be but in this land of Palestine, with which for more than 3000 years they have been intimately and profoundly associated? (Churchill by Himself, 175)
Churchill’s impressive achievement at that time was to convince two Arab potentates, King Abdullah in Jordan and King Feisal in Iraq, to tolerate a Jewish Homeland in their midst. This situation prevailed until Britain gave up the Palestine Mandate (without resolving the tensions) after World War II. In the 1948 war Israel secured independence.
A world war later…
…on 10 December 1948, Churchill spoke in the House of Commons. He regretted that Britain and the West had lost the opportunity to make a permanent settlement in the Middle East. This is the first admission that I can find that he accepted partition and an independent Zionist state:
I always had in my mind the hope that the whole question of the Middle East might have been settled on the largest scale on the morrow of victory and that an Arab Confederation, comprising three or four Arab States—Saudi-Arabia, Iraq, Transjordania, Syria and the Lebanon—however grouped, possibly united amongst themselves, and one Jewish State, might have been set up, which would have given peace and unity throughout the whole vast scene of the Middle East. As to whether so large a policy could have been carried into being I cannot be sure, but a settlement of the Palestine question on the basis of partition would certainly have been attempted, in the closest possible association with the United States and in personal contact with the President, by any Government of which I had been the head. But all this opportunity was lost. (Churchill by Himself, 176-77)
Hopes and regrets
Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann (wearing Arab headdress as a sign of friendship) with then-Emir Feisal in Syria. (Wikipedia Commons) Churchill supported the Zionist state, declaring in the House of Commons in 1949: “…the coming into being of a Jewish State in Palestine is an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand or even three thousand years.” (Churchill by Himself, 175)
But in 1951 he deplored British policies after the Second World War. These, he said, “led to the winding up of our affairs in Palestine in such a way as to earn almost in equal degree the hatred of the Arabs and the Jews.” (Churchill by Himself, 439).
Many who still have hope for Churchill’s optimism accept a “two state solution” for Palestine and Israel. But the two separate Palestinian entities, Gaza and the West Bank, subdivide the latter’s population. A solution with a chance of success might contemplate a shift of peoples to create a contiguous state. No one seems to want to grasp that nettle (which caused havoc in India in 1947). Even in 1948, Churchill recognized that it would not be easy.
Further reading
“How Winston Churchill Preserved the Dream of Israel, July 1922” (2018)
“Churchill and Lawrence of Arabia: A Conjunction of Two Bright Stars” (2020)
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