I guess it’s too much to hope that one might gain some intellectual humility from dispassionately dissecting Larry Walsh’s Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) blog. With regard to Larry’s most recent blog post, “Trump Pressures Brazil While Going After His Own Political Enemies”, one could hardly have written a more slanted, faux populist, media-driven polemic blog than the ones Larry keeps publishing and regurgitating every time mainstream media “parrots” broadcast talking points based on anything other than demonstrable facts, researched scholarship, and old-fashioned newsgathering. If anyone would like to see an array of collected opinion pieces on my own personal blog site, https://knelsonvsi.com , as well as this rejoinder to Larry’s blogs.

In the spirit of journalistic fairness, let’s address just a few egregious inaccuracies and distortions from your otherwise deeply flawed post, namely the contention that President Trump’s pressure on the government of Brazil (tariffs) and decision to order investigations into James Comey and John Brennan are entirely bereft of factual support. Without question, your protestations to the contrary aside, these and other activities of the President Trump Administration are based on far more demonstrable evidence of malfeasance and omissions of inconvenient facts than you appear to wish to acknowledge, much less editorialize upon. Let’s get to it:

First, about Trump and Brazil. Your opening line regarding tariffs of 50% against the Brazilian government’s refusal to halt the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro on coup-plotting charges smacks more of hypocrisy and double standards than it does any comment on the larger issue of the President’s prerogative, power, and standing authority in regard to leveling tariffs against a political enemy. The larger issue, of course, is Trump’s legitimate claim on July 9, 2025, to impose these tariffs in retaliation against Brazil’s refusal to extradite a U.S. citizen wanted in the United States for financial crimes has less to do with a corrupt and boorish president of the Republic of Brazil than it does the nation’s judiciary branch decision not to bow to Trump’s demands for his cronies’ release. After all, it is not as though this were a question of Trump going after a political enemy who was somehow being unjustly targeted by the federal government. In other words, the president’s claim against Lula (Brazil) and Brazil is consistent with precedents under presidents of both major parties, e.g., Obama’s Treasury Department “sanctions” against Russian money market funds and Putin’s cronies in 2014.

What’s more, your selective outrage against President Trump, duly elected by an angry and populist electorate that rightfully recognized his ability to protect the American economy from foreign exploitation and price gouging is hypocritical, at best. Can anyone honestly say that President Biden’s threats against the entire Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for failing to produce more oil in 2022 was in any way a less egregious example of presidential fiat, motivated by nothing other than personal pique at an electoral opponent’s perceived perfidy?

Needless to say, your facile comparison of President Trump’s tariffs with one Vladimir Putin’s outrageous invasion of Ukraine seems more designed to goose the online “pay per click” revenue stream than engage in a sober examination of the historic facts of that precipitating event.

Next, let’s look at your similarly disingenuous portrayal of Bolsonaro as the victim of President Trump’s high-handedness. Your characterization of Bolsonaro as a “right-wing populist who had curtailed civil liberties” and mounted “his own alleged coup” could not be further from the truth. The evidence in the case, all of which has not yet been presented in the Brazilian Supreme Court, let alone adjudicated or weighed against the evidence of his or Lula’s guilt or innocence, is not only clouded by hearsay and conjecture but is as biased and untethered to reality as your shallow political sloganeering. In short, in the midst of the chaos surrounding the riot in Brasilia on January 8, 2023, which you cite as the factual predicate for the “evidence” of Bolsonaro’s alleged coup attempt, there is not a scintilla of evidence that Bolsonaro directly instigated or conspired with the rioters, much less ordered their attack on the Brazilian Supreme Court or carried it out by his own personal direction. But your reporting of these events, including your breathless repetition of former Brazilian President Lula da Silva’s wholly unsubstantiated charge that Trump would reward Bolsonaro for a coup, sounds far more like something taken from Der Spiegel (German weekly) than Fox News or Newsmax.

Your failure to report, much less note in your shallow drivel, the manifest corruption of former Brazilian President Lula himself, a close personal friend of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is nothing short of journalistic malpractice. Lula was convicted in 2017 on money laundering charges and served time in jail before being pardoned by President Jair Bolsonaro after his acquittal on appeal on mostly technicalities. Moreover, your complete silence on the now-vastly polarized nature of Brazilian Supreme Court itself, a bastion of communist politics as usual, left unchecked by a permissive federal government, should also be cause for your readers to take your pablum with a very large grain of salt. After all, were the shoe on the other foot and a left-wing President of the United States under investigation for the same crime as Bolsonaro, there would be a virtual lynch mob on the doorstep of the Department of Justice to charge and convict, with what now passes for “due process” in a Democratic Party “law and order” administration that can do no wrong in your and their eyes. Let the facts speak for themselves. In Brazil, President Lula and his fellow Workers’ Party hacks in government would be seeking to destroy Bolsonaro, no questions asked, by bringing all government power to bear against him, as they are even now. That’s called raw political power, unchecked by the courts and a feckless, supine legislative branch of government run by people just like yourself.

Moving on to your gross exaggeration about Trump and his supposed defense of autocrats and dictators like Marine Le Pen, Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping, and Mohammed bin Salman. The claim that Trump defends “far-right figures like France’s Marine Le Pen and autocrats like North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and China’s Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman” is itself grotesquely inaccurate. In all cases of Trump’s political praise or adulation of these world leaders, whether true or not, the context of each statement was either transactional in nature (Kim/Xi) or a thinly-veiled criticism of a foreign leader’s domestic policy rather than a defense of his or her authoritarian excesses. For example, as President, Trump’s praise of Kim Jong-un and Xi Jinping in 2018 and 2019, respectively, in Singapore and Palm Beach, Florida, was designed as a calculated gesture to show fealty and good faith to both dictators at a time when progress on talks and substantive negotiations had reached an impasse, and which, on both occasions, resulted in tangible agreements, e.g., the 2018 Singapore Summit and the Xi-Trump trade deal of 2020.

President Trump’s comments in 2024 about Le Pen and the Elysée Palace’s ability to protect its domestic political actors from politicized tax investigations is no more a defense of a foreign autocrat’s power than President Obama’s criticism of the French “institution” of a protected monarchy. In Trump’s case, his comments were expressly motivated by Le Pen’s personal plight as a sacrificial lamb on the altar of Paris’s corruption of French government policies and procedures with impunity, e.g., the Macron leaks. As for Trump’s praise of Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh in 2020, despite Khashoggi’s known murder, the same logic of transactional politics trumps all other considerations, namely, Trump’s desire to free up Saudi money to buy U.S. goods and increase oil production. Biden’s own fist bump with the MBS in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, in July of 2022 shows just how cynical this policy has been by both major parties for the past generation.

Your selective short list of authoritarian admirers of President Trump, which leaves out such Democratic Party stalwarts as Hugo Chavez, Xi Jinping, Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Kim Jong-un, Fidel Castro, Bashar al-Assad, and even Muqtada al-Sadr, rings especially hollow in light of President Trump’s unequivocal condemnation of Putin, in particular, after the Russian autocrat’s unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022. Any real comparison between these two rogues would have to include Biden’s blind eye to Turkey’s slaughter of Kurdish fighters in Syria in 2022, an attack on sovereign Iraq supported by Washington, of all places.

Lastly, with respect to your wildly overblown and disingenuous account of the DOJ investigations into James Comey and John Brennan, your protestations about “Trump targeting his political enemies” and “retaliating” against them for investigating him or refusing to take orders from the White House fall woefully short of the mark on two important levels. First, both the DOJ investigation into Brennan and Comey are based on serious and substantive allegations of misconduct, election-related interference, and possible violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by both former FBI Director Comey and Brennan, the former director of the CIA. In the case of Brennan, for example, a CIA review declassified on July 2, 2025, found the 2017 ICA that claimed Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump “rushed to a flawed intelligence product” and that Brennan “moved forward” with the Steele dossier against Trump, despite “limited corroboration” and substantial reservations by CIA intelligence analysts at the time. By contrast, the referral from former Attorney General Ken Stewart’s (GOP) top investigator, John Ratcliffe, now a Congressman, is based on possible perjury by Brennan in claiming, under oath to Congress in 2023, that he “did not advocate for, promote, or include the Steele dossier” in the ICA when there is a substantial paper trail of his repeated meetings with Steele’s handler and CIA supervisory intelligence officer, Peter Strzok, during 2016.

Comey’s investigation by the DOJ is even more damning since he is the subject of an FBI probe into his potential false statements to Congress about the origins of the FBI’s original Crossfire Hurricane probe and his firing by President Trump in 2017. As for the latter, Comey lied to Congress in his testimony about being “terminated” when he clearly resigned, in a fit of pique over being effectively fired by President Trump himself. (Durham Report, 2023, pg. 277) He also gave a one-sided and untruthful account to Congress of how the Steele dossier was corroborated by multiple sources rather than what it really was, a single-source document that violated basic FBI protocol and the agency’s standards for using unverified and unvetted evidence in sensitive criminal and national security investigations. For this, among other reasons, James Comey is being investigated and may well end up in prison for contempt of Congress and perjury.

So, in your continuing efforts to misrepresent the Trump Administration, you have, once again, downplayed and distorted what amounts to a smoking gun of what happened in 2016 and the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election. The DOJ investigations into Brennan and Comey, which began on July 1 and 25, 2025, respectively, are not President Trump’s personal vendettas against two people who crossed him. They are the direct result of publicly available information that both men violated their oaths of office to the FBI and the CIA and lied to Congress in their sworn testimonies.