TRENTON - In less than two weeks, Americans will go to the polls to render judgement on the grotesque, hate-filled, corrupt and Orwellian two-year tenure of President Donald J. Trump (pictured, above, with the late Jeffrey Epstein), who daily makes a mockery of America and New Jersey.

Let's look at the record.

With the world's richest man, Elon Musk, in black and a baseball cap, at his side, the president began his tenure by firing eight independent nonpartisan inspectors general. In a suit, those former IGs subsequently claimed Trump broke the law "when he attempted to terminate them without justifying their removal or giving Congress 30-day notices." It was an early catastrophic alarm bell. If Trump had been serious about reforming government for average people, he would not have started by eliminating inspector generals and allowing the invasive presence of a billionaire eccentric to oversee the overhaul of government. While the unelected Musk pondered the fate of the U.S. Department of Education and pulled the plug on aid to Africa, the President appointed himself chairman of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts board.

A football coach and recreation director in the City of Paterson, state Senator Benjie

Wimberly (D-35) said Trump's order to do away with the Department of Education goes to the heart of the problem with his presidency. "It's the last thing we should dismantle," he told InsiderNJ last year. "There are so many parts to the Department of Education, including special education funding, student loans, professional opportunities in education for those young people who want to become educators, just as a few examples. In addition, when there is a shortage of educators, you do not want to dismantle this department. What it comes down to is this: if you want people to be less informed, and dumb down the country, take away the Department of Education. You take that away and what you're going to get is uneducated folks voting against their own interests."

Trump in his so-called big, beautiful bill started by making cuts to healthcare, Medicaid, higher education and energy, undertaking an anti-science crusade resulting in the freezing of federal grants, sweeping layoffs across federal agencies, and funding cuts for biomedical research.

Dr. Monica Driscoll, a molecular biologist and biochemist who specializes in neuro-degenerative disease research, said at the time, "I love the way the U.S. has done science - at least in the past." But now, "I am stunned and devastated by this government-mediated dismantling of an incredibly successful scientific enterprise," she said, in a packed general-purpose room in the Life Sciences Building on the Busch Campus.

While Trump obscenely made $1.4 billion in office from crypto ventures, estimates by his own administration projected federal Medicaid and CHIP reductions to the states by more than $4 billion annually and federal SNAP funding by more than $1 billion annually.

Refusing to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 presidential election, Trump pardoned 1,500 desecrators of the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, an attack that resulted in the death of a Capitol Police Office, Brian Sicknick, from South River, N.J. a former Air National Guardsman who served in Operation Desert Shield and Operation Enduring Freedom.

No doubt, some of the Confederate flag-waving seditionists and traitors and election deniers pardoned by Trump ended up behind masks and carrying guns as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) turned the streets of America into a crawling concentration camp. Working with $6 billion annually ten years ago, ICE's budget bulked to $85 billion thanks to Trump, who installed armed, quick-triggered, and panic-prone men in federal law enforcement positions, where they promptly amassed a record of terror and murder. This included the ICE-killing of ICU nurse Alex Pretti and Renee Good, both of Minneapolis, to name just two.

We felt the impact of ICE's unlawful tactics here in New Jersey, where Trump's masked goons arrested Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and his "justice" department filed charges against U.S. Rep. LaMonica McIver, honorable, elected officials trying to fact-find at the gates of a privately contracted jail in their city.

We saw people die at Delaney Hall. In August, a third man - Edwin Lopez-Cornejo - died following a medical emergency at the facility, while the ACLU of New Jersey continues to fight to end immigration detention and safeguard the individual liberties of people being unlawfully detained.

"To do this," the ACLU said in a statement, "we rely on habeas corpus, a centuries-old legal instrument that has protected our rights since before America’s founding. Habeas corpus is a cornerstone of due process. At its core, it ensures that no person can be held by the government without the right to challenge their detention before a judge. Over the past months, we have worked to expand access to habeas relief to respond quickly to unlawful immigration detention happening in New Jersey – specifically at Delaney Hall, a detention facility in Newark."

Throughout Trump's illegal overreach, we remain - or so we believe and so we can prove on Nov. 3rd - a nation of laws, not private detention centers guarded by "police" who try to look like terrorists at the Munich Olympic games.

The people coming after your elections in November figure they can keep enough people stirred up over the horrors of "illegal aliens," their words, not mine, and simpering enabling Democrats - the preferred terminology of Trump's propaganda machine - but far deeper principles are at stake.

This war on America goes on even as Trump tried to terminate funding for the Gateway Tunnel project, a union-strong job creator for thousands of New Jerseyans. Multiple times, the president attempted to quash that job, unable to provide adequate reason to the courts as the administration of Governor Mikie Sherrill repeatedly fought to protect Gateway.

Blaming the ongoing government shutdown last year on Democrats, Trump did an endzone dance as he announced his decision to stick a fork in the long-delayed tunnel to the region's core. "The project in New York—it is billions and billions of dollars of that [Senate Democratic Leader Chuck] Schumer has worked 20 years to get," Trump told reporters at a press conference broadcast by Fox News (above). "It is terminated."

The President's timing, with less than a month before Election Day in New Jersey in a close race pitting Democratic Sherrill against Republican Jack Ciattarelli, appeared to doom Ciattarelli.

In New Jersey, too, we felt the ongoing impact of Trump's effort to completely deregulate big tech and the continuing onslaught of data centers. As the president asserted the right of corporate CEOs to make decisions about our communities, New Jerseyans fought back against a massive data facility in Vineland.

From the New Jersey Monitor:

State inspectors visited DataOne’s facility on July 29 and discovered 62 1,982-kilowatt generators that had not been there during their last inspection in December, the Department of Environmental Protection announced Tuesday. The firm’s failure to get needed permits — required of any generator with a capacity of 37 kilowatts or higher — violated the New Jersey Air Pollution Control Act, and the department levied a $1.07 million fine.

“This enforcement action [a state fine of $1 million] — by far the largest ever taken against a data center in New Jersey and possibly one of the largest such actions in the nation — sends a clear message that these facilities will not be constructed or operated with impunity in this state,” said Ed Potosnak, the department’s commissioner.

No wonder one of Trump's biggest fans, U.S. Rep. Jeff Van Dew (R-2), wants to change the conversation topic.

We could go on and on here.

Don't forget that the US annual inflation rate accelerated to 3.7% in September, up from 3.4% in each of the previous two months and above market expectations, driven by higher energy prices. Gas rose 34.2% year over year, more than 27.4% in August and fuel oil prices increased 74.2%. U.S. grocery prices are up 1.8% year-over-year, with households spending an average of $270.21 per week ($1,080 monthly) on food at home. Overall food-at-home costs have risen roughly 34.6% since 2019, according to the USDA.

Throughout, this president has led the country in a disgraceful, hateful, deceitful, corrupt and cowardly way. He's waged war against the free press. He's sided with Vladimir Putin against Ukraine. He launched an attack on Iran resulting in the murder of over 100 schoolgirls. He can't get us out of Iran. He can't finish a fight he started, which costs the U.S. between $2 to $3 billion a month. He behaves like a wimp and a child. He's not a mature man. He's not a man.

When you vote on Nov. 3rd, think of the people who came before us, who served our country and depended on wise leadership in the White House. Think of people like Senator John McCain, who as a public figure repudiated the hatreds Trump indulges, which made the dying McCain Trump's hateful target. Think too, and most importantly, think of the young people now serving our nation in the uniform, in the Middle East, or poised to go, who need wise people making decisions about war and peace and whose lives must not hang in the balance of a witless, cultist madman and his minions.

As Trump crams our courts with judges loyal to him and not to the United States Constitution, who refuse to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 presidential election, most Republicans have stood by and acted like none of this is happening. Their ranks include Van Drew and Tom Kean Jr. in Congressional District 7, the latter an absolutely vanishing presence in office. One thing you can do, to be clear, in the face of those hapless lapdogs and cowards hiding while working people get dragged into detention centers by men in masks, some of whom who laid siege to the United States Capitol, where Brian Sicknick of New Jersey died in defense of our country, is, God dammit, you can put a defiant New Jersey exclamation point on the Nov. 3rd results. Give the election deniers and their beloved Jabba the Hutt positively no daylight.

Stand up for New Jersey.

Stand up for the country.