Opinions
We must resist Trump with our voices and votes
It is important for all of us to speak out each day
It’s time to stop the felon in the White House — not with guns, not with violence, but with our voices, and our votes. In every possible way Republicans, who are today a MAGA cult, are in their way waging a form of war against the people of America.
Now the felon in the White House is focused on screwing the people of the District of Columbia. He is doing it with his attacks on transgender people; by sending masked ICE agents into the District to harass communities of law-abiding, tax-paying residents; the mass firings of federal workers, many living in the District; and then not insisting his MAGA pawn, Speaker Johnson, pass the bill the Senate sent to him allowing the District to spend $1.1 billion of its own tax dollars.
Trump added insult to injury by declaring a phony emergency, federalizing the District’s police, and sending armed national guard troops onto the streets of D.C. He created fear, and caused a major drop in business for restaurants, bars, and hotels, while serving no real purpose other than again, scaring people. Judging by the videos I have seen, the vast majority of the National Guard, taken from their families, are spending their time standing around, and now, picking up trash, and spreading mulch, in federal parks. This is what the felon in the WH thinks makes him look like a strongman to the world. So much of it done to keep the people from thinking about all his failures. His kissing Putin’s ass and still getting played by him, and trying to have people forget about, and keeping the Epstein files, from becoming public.
The people of the District are fighting back, and I applaud them for it. They are speaking out, and demonstrating. They are trying to protect their neighbors from the masked ICE Gestapo. I have joined in some demonstrations, and take opportunities like this to call out the felon, who is acting like Hitler, with his own Goebbels, in the guise of Stephen Miller. It is important for all of us to speak out every day, wherever and whenever, we can. People around the country need to understand we are different here in D.C. We are 700,000 Americans who don’t control our own destiny. In normal times we still need to submit all legislation our council passes, and our annual budget, to the Congress for a thirty-day review. If they don’t approve, they can make changes, and they have. We have only had home rule since 1974 when the District was finally allowed to elect its own mayor, and council. But it’s part of that home rule legislation that allowed the felon in the WH to do what he is doing today. He always controls the national guard here, not the Mayor. While he called them out now, it’s important to remember when his cult attacked the Congress on January 6, 2021, he sat in the WH watching the carnage on TV, and refused to call them out. Many may remember in 1995 Congress voted to install a ‘control board’ in the District of Columbia. While not ending home rule, they in essence gave the president the right to take over running the city. Then President Bill Clinton, named the chair of the Control Board, Alice Rivlin, and she, and the board, dramatically cut city spending. They took over the city’s agencies across the board. They, not the mayor or the Council, were in control. Yes, the city was broke, and in the long run many believe it is what saved the city. Then Anthony Williams was elected mayor in 1998. The Control Board Chair, Alice Rivlin, trusted him enough to turn management of the city agencies back to him. But the control board stayed in effect until 2001.
Today, I am thankful we have a mayor, Muriel Bowser, who understands her role in this. She has told us her North Star is trying to ensure the District of Columbia does not lose home rule. She is faced with a felon as president who has threatened to actually end it. If he asks Congress to do that, and they bow down to him as they have done on every other issue, he would get to appoint the mayor of the District. If you think things are bad now, just imagine who Trump would appoint. So, in essence, the only person who stands between what we have today, and that happening, is our current mayor. I think it’s time people understand that, and thank her for what she is trying to do, and so far, has successfully done. She is being forced to play the same game as many of our international allies are, as they try to save Ukraine. She, and they, find they have to play to the ego of the felon. Sad, but a fact of life in the world today.
There are three major things the mayor is now trying to influence. One is keeping Congress from extending the felon’s phony emergency, and she has been successful with that. The second is trying to keep ICE off our streets, and if the felon insists on sending them in, which he can, that they are unmasked, with visible name badges. Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) joined with our representative, Eleanor Holmes Norton, to introduce a bill in Congress to do that. The third is to get the occupation troops, the National Guard, off our streets. The problem is the felon controls the D.C. National Guard, and said he will extend their mission at least through November. We need to keep fighting that, and the D.C. Attorney General, Schwalb, is trying to do it in the courts.
So, as I sit at my coffee shop in Dupont as I write this, my friend, an MPD officer, stops by for his morning coffee. He tells me what is happening around the District, and it is frightening. I recently had my first contact with National Guard troops as they strolled Q street. I chatted with three of them, two young men and a woman, all from Louisiana. I asked what they were doing and they told me basically nothing, just walking around. They were given a perimeter to walk each morning. They were staying at a hotel and didn’t know how long they would be here. One of them missed his kid’s first day in school, and another was missing classes. I told them while I respected their being in the guard, they had to know and understand why none of us welcomed them here. Total insanity. I have not personally seen any of the ICE Gestapo around here, and my life seems to go on as always. Yet I know from my MPD friend, and seeing the headlines and videos, that in other parts of the District people are suffering, and afraid. I know some of my friends, who look a little different than I do, now need to carry their papers with them at all times. They can’t walk down the block without being afraid. They live in constant fear because of the felon in the White House. Any decent person has to see that is unacceptable and fight it.
The least I can do is continue to rage on their behalf. Continue to call out the insanity we are being forced to live with, because nearly 50% of the nation voted for the sick bastard in the White House. I will work every day, without violence, to rid our country of him, and his MAGA cult. I will support every Democrat around the nation running for office, even if they aren’t someone who I would personally choose. Because today, because of the felon’s control of his party, any Democrat is better than any Republican. I have a friend running in Iowa for United States Senate who gives me hope for the future of our nation. He is the kind of person I hope David Hogg and his PAC will actually support. He is the young man who when he was in college, made a speech to the Iowa Legislature in support of his two moms. He then went on to run, and win, a seat in the Iowa State Senate, and rose to be Minority Leader. He continued the fight for his moms and all the people of Iowa. Today Zach Wahls wants to take that fight to the United States Senate, and fight for all of us. For all moms, wherever they may be. He is a sixth generation Iowan, and he and his wife have just had a son, who he is now fighting for as well. He is the type of person I want to see leading our nation. He is the future, and there are others like him out there who need our support as we wage a peaceful fight at the ballot box against what the felon and his sycophants are doing to this nation we love, and to the world.
It’s time to get all your neighbors to join in this fight. We can take back our country without guns, if we use our voices, and our votes. Never give up, never give in. We can, and we will, win; because we have justice on our side.
Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist.
Opinions
Why this Black Pride, I ranked Janeese Lewis George #1 for D.C. mayor
Compliance is not a strategy for defending D.C.
Washington, D.C. is at a crossroads. In uncertain moments, voters are encouraged to lower expectations, choose familiarity over vision, and look for leaders who seem most willing to accommodate hostile federal power. That approach misunderstands this moment and what leadership requires.
I ranked Janeese Lewis George #1 for mayor.
As a Black gay man whose career has moved through law, policy, media, and movement work and has called D.C. home for 15 years, I have seen the difference between performative allyship and meaningful action. Too often, politicians treat LGBTQ communities as symbolic talking points. They show up for Pride, issue polished statements, and expect support without taking risks that improve our lives. Our vote should be earned through policy, consistency, relationships, and accountability.
That is one of the many reasons I trust Janeese.
A recent Blade column tried to define Janeese through guilt-by-association politics, treating a passing association with someone else’s comments as proof of her values. I wholly reject that framing.
Coalition-building in a city as politically diverse and socially complex as D.C. will never be perfect. Anyone who has organized, legislated, or advocated understands that progress requires engaging people whose views or approaches may not align at every moment. The fair standard is a candidate’s values, priorities, judgment, and record.
Janeese’s record clears that standard. GLAA gave her a 10 out of 10, its highest possible rating. Capital Stonewall Democrats, the largest LGBTQ political organization in D.C., endorsed her by an overwhelming margin. Her platform shows a candidate who understands that LGBTQ safety depends on the ability to stay housed, access healthcare, protect bodily autonomy, and defend D.C.’s power to govern itself.
For a Black trans woman fighting eviction, safety starts with a lease she can keep. For a family with two dads choosing between medicine and a utility bill, freedom starts with a city willing to lower costs and stand up to greedy utility companies like Pepco and Washington Gas. For residents bounced between agencies, dignity starts with a government that can get help to people before crisis deepens.
Janeese’s campaign speaks to those conditions. She is running on tenant protections, affordable homes, lower utility costs, and a public safety plan that recognizes a problem residents already understand: D.C. has resources, yet too many people still get passed from agency to agency while their situation gets worse. She has also committed to rescinding the MPD order allowing local police to work with ICE.
The above-mentioned Blade column spends little time on those stakes. Its energy goes toward attacking Janeese’s endorsers and casting suspicion on her people-first politics. The writer has previously said he becomes wary when the Working Families Party endorses a candidate because he sees the party as anti-business. That critique reveals anxiety about a candidate challenging the corporation-friendly consensus that has made D.C. harder for working people to survive in. Yet it doesn’t speak to the many workers of those businesses who support a mayoral candidate like Janeese.
This election is also about how D.C. responds to Trump and federal overreach. Trump is not our mayor. The people of Washington, D.C. are. The argument that D.C. needs someone who can comfortably work with Trump sounds like preemptive surrender. There is little evidence that electing a more cautious Democrat would produce a respectful relationship with a president who has repeatedly treated D.C. residents as politically expendable.
D.C. needs a mayor willing to advocate for residents, defend the city’s interests, and resist attempts to bully or diminish the people who live here. Effective leadership requires negotiation. Negotiation from fear gives away power before the fight begins. Compliance is not a strategy for defending D.C.
Further, an ethics complaint against Janeese came with its own political baggage. City Paper reported that the nonprofit behind the complaint and investigation has a board member connected to a research firm her opponent’s campaign paid $20,000. Voters should weigh that connection against Janeese’s record and the LGBTQ organizations that have already vetted her.
This election will decide which communities are prioritized in D.C.’s future: working-class residents trying to stay in the city, or out-of-state elites treating D.C. like an investment portfolio. Black LGBTQ leadership carries responsibility here. Our communities know what it means to be praised in public and abandoned in budgets. We know the difference between symbolic allyship and policy that changes conditions.
I am ranking Janeese Lewis George #1 because, in this critical moment where inspiration is needed, Janeese is offering the kind of mayoral leadership D.C. needs. Black LGBTQ Washingtonians deserve a city we can afford, a government that works for people’s best interests, and leaders who will defend us.
Preston D. Mitchum is a D.C.-based policy consultant, attorney-activist, and television personality whose work focuses on the intersections of racial justice, democracy reform, health and gender equity, and LGBTQ+ rights.
Cuba
When impunity meets history
Raúl Castro indicted for alleged role in shooting down Brothers to the Rescue aircraft
The scene would have seemed impossible only a few years ago.
The name of Raúl Castro Ruz appearing formally inside a United States federal criminal indictment. Cuba’s former general of the Army, for decades one of the most powerful figures inside the Havana regime, accused in connection with the shootdown of the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft and the deaths of American citizens in 1996. And all of it unfolding in Miami, inside the Freedom Tower, on May 20.
That detail matters.
Because this indictment arrives at one of the most fragile and politically tense moments in recent relations between Washington and Havana. It comes as Cuba faces deep economic collapse, growing political exhaustion, mass migration, blackouts, and increasing public frustration both inside and outside the island. It also arrives on a date carrying enormous symbolic weight for Cuban exiles — the anniversary of the founding of the Cuban Republic in 1902.
But the true significance of this moment goes far beyond symbolism.
What happened in Miami represents something much larger: the collapse of the idea that certain men would never face accountability.
For decades, Raúl Castro embodied the permanence of revolutionary power in Cuba. Defense minister. Military strategist. The man who oversaw the armed forces for generations. One of the central architects of the Cuban political and security apparatus built alongside Fidel Castro. A figure many believed would leave this world untouched by any court, shielded forever by power, time, and history itself.
Today the image is very different.
Today his name appears inside the language of American criminal prosecution.
And that changes the historical dimension of this case completely.
Because this is no longer simply a political accusation voiced by the Cuban exile community. It is now a formal federal criminal indictment publicly announced by the United States government against one of the highest-ranking figures in the history of the Cuban regime.
The setting itself carried enormous meaning.
The Freedom Tower is not just another building in Miami. For generations of Cuban exiles it represents memory, displacement, survival, and the beginning of a new life after fleeing Cuba. Thousands of Cubans passed through those doors after escaping the revolution. Families arrived carrying fear, uncertainty, grief, and hope all at once. Announcing these charges from that location transformed the moment into something far deeper than a legal proceeding.
And the people witnessing it were not only members of the exile community.
Among those present were relatives of the young men killed nearly 30 years ago. Families who spent decades waiting to hear words they feared might never come. Families who carried the weight of loss while believing the men responsible would never be formally accused by any court.
That emotional weight still surrounds this case.
On Feb. 24, 1996, two civilian aircraft operated by Brothers to the Rescue were shot down over the Florida Straits by Cuban military jets. Armando Alejandre Jr., Carlos Costa, Mario de la Peña, and Pablo Morales were killed. The flights were connected to humanitarian rescue efforts searching for Cubans attempting to flee the island during the migration crisis of the 1990s.
Those aircraft were not military bombers.
They were not attacking Cuba.
They were civilian planes associated with rescue operations involving Cubans risking their lives at sea.
That reality has always shaped how this tragedy lives inside the memory of the Cuban exile community.
For many, this was never viewed simply as a geopolitical conflict between hostile governments. It was seen as the use of military force against civilians connected to humanitarian missions during one of the darkest chapters in modern Cuban migration history.
But for many Cubans, the indictment reaches far beyond the Brothers to the Rescue case itself.
It touches decades of unresolved pain tied to one of the central figures behind Cuba’s military and political system.
It reaches mothers who buried sons lost in compulsory military service or in distant wars they never chose to fight. Families who spent years believing promises that were never fulfilled. Political prisoners who disappeared into silence. Relatives who watched loved ones die trying to flee the island.
And for many LGBTQ Cubans, the moment carries another layer of historical weight.
Long before official campaigns promoting tolerance and inclusion emerged from within the Cuban government, there were years of persecution, fear, forced silence, and humiliation carried out under the revolutionary system itself.
The UMAP labor camps remain one of the deepest scars in modern Cuban history. Gay men, pastors, religious believers, artists, and others considered incompatible with the revolutionary ideal were sent away under the language of “re-education” and forced labor.
In recent decades, public gestures toward LGBTQ inclusion promoted by figures close to the Cuban leadership attempted to project an image of progress and openness to the international community. But for many survivors, and for many Cuban LGBTQ people, those gestures never erased the trauma or the historical responsibility tied to the same structures of power that once persecuted them.
For many, acknowledgment without accountability still feels painfully incomplete.
That is why this indictment resonates so deeply today.
Because it arrives while Cuba once again faces profound national crisis. The island is losing entire generations through migration. Public frustration continues to grow. Economic collapse shapes daily life. And the revolutionary narrative that once projected permanence and control appears increasingly eroded by reality itself.
Against that backdrop, the image emerging from Miami becomes even more striking.
A man once viewed as untouchable by history now formally accused by the United States government and legally transformed into a fugitive wanted by American justice.
History moves slowly until suddenly it does not.
And for many Cubans, both on the island and throughout the diaspora, what happened today inside the Freedom Tower felt like witnessing something they once believed they would never live long enough to see.
As a Cuban, as an immigrant, and as someone who has lived close to that pain, one thought keeps returning tonight:
Justice takes time.
But when it finally arrives, it arrives with history behind it.
David Trone’s commercials keep telling us what he has done for women. But apparently, he doesn’t trust them to fight for themselves, or he wouldn’t keep spending countless millions to defeat them.
Trone is trying to buy back his seat in Congress, this time running in a primary in Maryland’s 6th District against incumbent Democrat April McClain Delaney. Once again, Maryland voters should say a loud NO to David Trone. He is doing this after spending nearly $60 million trying to buy a United States Senate seat, which he thankfully lost to Angela Alsobrooks, now one of only two Black women in the United States Senate. Clearly, that was a blow to his ego, and now he is trying again to defeat another very competent woman. He has already spent close to $7 million on commercials attacking Delaney, telling us how much money he has spent on what he calls ‘good deeds.’ Delaney is accurately calling him out for working with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and donating through his business, nearly $800,000 to Republicans, including MAGA ones. When he was buying his first seat in Congress, the Washington Post reported, “Wine retailer David Trone… has contributed more than $150,000 to Republicans in states across the country since 2000, according to a nonpartisan site that tracks money in politics. Most went to candidates and officeholders in states where he sought legislation or regulatory changes favorable to his company, Total Wine & More. Among the Republicans who received funds were Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas and North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory.” The same Pat McCrory who signed anti-LGBTQ legislation and Abbott who wants to close all Planned Parenthood sites in Texas.
I urge voters in Maryland’s 6th, to speak out for, and vote for, April McClain Delaney. Join with me, and a host of others, who have endorsed her as of March 31. They include Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.), Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D), Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.), and every Democrat in the Maryland U.S. House delegation.
McClain Delaney says, “Now, David Trone says I should step aside, so he can have his old office back after he ran for the Senate, lost, and has been sitting on the sidelines. He’s a distraction. This race isn’t about one man’s ego. … And as a member of team Maryland, I forged strong relationships with Governor Moore and the entire federal delegation, as well as with local leaders across the district.” She adds, “On behalf of my district, I stand up to bullies. That’s why I’ll continue to take on Trump’s assault on our government workers, defend our diverse community, protect choice and women’s reproductive rights, and work against inflation-creating tariffs.”
Again, this isn’t the first time Trone spent a fortune trying to get into Congress. It cost him about $25 million, and two tries, to win the first time. Then his ego had him give up the seat he bought to run for the U.S. Senate. Apparently he has unlimited amounts of money to spend and at nearly 72 thinks he needs to get back in by defeating a strong woman nearly 10 years younger, who is doing a great job. He is clearly not needed in Congress.
Trone always made the basis of his campaigns not taking any money from PACs, lobbyists, and big donors. Seems hypocritical considering he thought it was OK to influence others to build his own business. To give Trone credit he always runs on a very liberal platform, which is pro-LGBTQ, pro-women, and pro-equal and human rights for all. But then Democrats like April McClain Delaney, who he is now running against, has the same platform, and is doing a good job for her constituents.
Trone’s commercials are mostly about what he has done for women. But again, he clearly doesn’t trust women to do for themselves. He spent $60 million running against a great woman for U.S. Senate, and now is spending more millions running against another strong woman, trying to reclaim a House seat he gave up. Marylanders, make sure he loses again, by voting for April McClain Delaney for Congress.
Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist.
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