News stories by Peter Costantini

This is the third part of a three-part commentary. In foreign relations, as in immigration, King Don the Con appears to be channeling King John the Bad and often surpassing him.

SEATTLE. USA, April 24 (IPS) - Habeas tattoo? Among Trump’s most outrageous assaults on the rule of law has been an array of legal wrecking balls demolishing due process, habeas corpus, related foundational rights, and the separation of powers in the bargain.

SEATTLE. USA, April 23 (IPS) - After Donald Trump’s second election as president in November 2024, he said coyly that he wanted to be a dictator … but just for a day. On his first day in office, his sharpie signed an impressive pile of presidential orders, many of dubious legality. The next day he continued to govern like a DIY duce. He has not stopped since.

SEATTLE, USA, July 28 (IPS) - President Donald Trump reportedly wants to add his own head to Mount Rushmore National Memorial. But the National Park Service says there’s no room next to the four current presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. [Branch & White 6/27/2025] Here’s an innovative proposal for how to immortalize him right there in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

SEATTLE, USA, May 26 (IPS) - On May 21, I was in the Seattle immigration court accompanying a young mother from a South American country who was applying for asylum to a routine hearing. Local media had reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had arrested several people there the previous day.

SEATTLE, USA, Feb 28 (IPS) - Like any self-respecting don of a powerful crime family, Donald Trump - AKA “Don the Con” - always gets a taste of any action going down on his territory. And that territory, as recent events have made clear, knows no borders. (I mean, except for the southwest one.)

TUCSON, Arizona, US, Nov 04 (IPS) - A small incident in the mounting mayhem of the 2024 elections crystalized the state of the dark art of politics in these United States. In Springfield, Ohio, a small midwestern industrial city, a woman named Anna Kilgore noticed that her cat, Miss Sassy, had been missing for a few days. Kilgore notified the police that she feared her kitty might have been caught and eaten by the Haitian immigrants who lived next door.

SEATTLE, USA, Aug 31 (IPS) - The Yakima River runs southeast from the Cascade Mountains through central Washington state to merge with the Columbia a little north of Oregon. From the small city of Yakima on down, its course broadens from a winding canyon into a wide valley bounded by austere low ridges of gray-green sagebrush and tawny grasses. In mid-April, the new leaves of the willows and cottonwoods light up the riverbanks with luminous chartreuse.

SEATTLE, USA, Sep 09 (IPS) - For a while in 2018, the Donald Trump administration’s “family separation” policy looked like it might become the Stalingrad of his war on immigrants. It was clearly a bridge too far politically, given the global outcry it provoked. Even parts of the Republican party couldn’t stomach it. So Trump retreated strategically on family separation, and intentionally left the program so disorganized that reuniting parents and children became a still-incomplete ordeal.

SEATTLE, USA, Feb 01 (IPS) - The specters of slave patrols and Ku Klux Klan night riders haunted the viral videos. They showed cowboy-hatted Border Patrol agents on horseback insulting and threatening Haitian families with children as they crossed the Rio Grande into Texas. The outrage reverberated around the world and inside the Beltway. But the story soon disappeared from the news cycle.