Pathetic or prophetic? Looking back on America’s dark and stormy year

*Gazing into a crystal ball, not to look to the future but to understand the past. (Art: AI for TPP/ChatGPT)*

Nov. 17, 2025 by David Silverberg

Sometimes clearly seeing the future brings no joy. There is such a thing as being too prophetic.

Since 2022, as each year has dawned, The Paradise Progressive has tried to look ahead at domestic political trends and likelihoods in the year to come, trying to objectively think through the direction events were taking. What would be the big stories that would bear watching in the coming days?

But it’s not enough to just make predictions; when the year ends, anyone peering ahead has an obligation to evaluate his or her accuracy and ability as a seer.

Accordingly, in 2023 The Paradise Progressive began grading its own predictions when the year ended, first on an A to F scale and then, last year, as simply “prophetic” or “pathetic.”

It is doing this again this year, if a bit early. There’s still a month and a half to go in 2025 and given this president and regime virtually anything may happen in the next 44 days.

But in a year of momentous events it makes sense to take a pause on the eve of Thanksgiving. People who are able to afford to sit down to a full table, free from fear of sudden seizure or detention, should truly give thanks for the abundance of their blessings.

It is sad and startling to report that the predictions made by The Paradise Progressive at the beginning of 2025, just before Donald Trump was inaugurated for the second time, were horrifyingly accurate and the darkest prospects and most extreme dangers came to pass.

This analysis only includes those firm predictions that can be judged in light of later events, not the many questions and uncertainties that were raised by Trump’s election and inauguration.

Together, these predictions provide a view of what historians will surely record as one of the most—if not the most—grievous years in American history.

What were they? Let us review them together, first the predictions in italics, then the results.

Part 1—Defying darkness: Anticipating the year ahead in domestic politics

“Trump and his legions can be expected to hit hard and move fast. There will be sweeping disruptions, especially in the first 100 days of the regime, indeed probably even announced in the inaugural address on Jan. 20. Even on his first day, Trump has said he will be a dictator and issue an avalanche of executive orders to—at the very least—encourage fossil fuel exploration and usage, round up migrants and pardon January 6th insurrectionists. But numerous other orders are likely to go much further.”

Trump and his regime knew they needed to act before opposition could coalesce and their measures could be challenged through litigation or legislation. So, as predicted, they hit hard and moved fast.

Indeed, on his first day in office, Trump issued 26 executive orders, covering everything from establishing the Department of Government Efficiency to withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accord. As of this writing, he has issued a total of 212 executive orders. Some have been challenged in court and remain unresolved. But they nonetheless upended the United States government and the lives of all Americans.

Of the three matters explicitly named, when it came to fossil fuel exploitation, Trump declared a national energy emergency and prioritized oil exploration on federal lands—including in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. When it came to rounding up migrants, the Trump regime initiated what has amounted to an ethnic and racial war against Hispanics and all immigrants, sweeping up US citizens of long duration in its dragnet. When it came to the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, on his first day in office Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of the insurrectionists—and he has issued over 1,600 pardons for all kinds of federal criminals and miscreants since.

“It will be a year when Donald Trump attempts to dominate all thought, action, law, media, policy, and government and where he fails to do this personally, his cultists, followers and enablers will work on his behalf and toward his ends.”

That certainly proved prophetic. The second Trump administration not only pursued total dominance in all areas of government, it initiated a cultural revolution that attempted—and continues to attempt—a brutish cultural assault, from bullying and extorting institutions of higher learning to stop free inquiry, to suppressing critical media through threats and litigation, to disparaging and canceling individual artists and performers.

If any one act expressed this cultural revolution more than any other, it was Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, having himself named chairman of its board and even floating the idea of re-naming it for himself or his wife, neither of whom had any connection to it, its culture or its mission.

“This regime will be characterized by pettiness, cruelty, hatred, prejudice, rage, disparagement, racism, misogyny, and criminality. It will rule through threats, intimidation and defamation. It will be corrupt to its very marrow.”

This prophecy was fulfilled in so many ways that listing them would be exhausting—and redundant. Any American can recite a litany of Trump regime outrages, offenses and crimes. All one has to do is look at Trump’s Truth Social postings to document this prediction. What is more, every day brings new and often bizarre examples.

Fear has now been institutionalized as a governing principle and the regime is at war with the people whom previous presidents once served.

“For everyday consumers, anti-immigration measures will mean higher prices and harsher inflation and with national anti-immigrant measures coming on top of the ones that Florida has already enacted, the price at checkout is likely to be steep—to say nothing of the human suffering that will underly it.”

Prices are rising steeply, as anyone can see from their grocery bills (the price of coffee was up 18.9 percent in September). But it’s not just anti-immigration measures that are causing this; a major driver is Trump’s tariffs (more about them below).

Government-issued statistics on matters like inflation can no longer be automatically considered reliable. In August, Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics when he disliked a revised report on the unemployment rate. The prolonged government shutdown and purges of vital government officials severely weakened the federal government data-gathering abilities.

This affected even vital functions like setting the Federal Reserve’s prime interest rate. When Chairman Jerome Powell held a press conference on Oct. 29, he acknowledged the lack of reliable data for Federal Reserve decisionmaking and likened it to driving in fog.

“What do you do if you’re driving in the fog?” he asked. “You slow down.” In this context he meant the Federal Reserve might not change interest rates at its next meeting.

However, a variety of sources, both government and non-government put the real current inflation rate at 3 percent.

When it came to immigration, The Paradise Progressive predicted:

“…the Trump roundup can be expected to be spectacular, very public and as harsh as possible. It will likely be conducted as a television spectacle, a reality show intended to send a message of mercilessness to the world that discourages all immigration, legal and otherwise.”

This prediction is horrifically borne out daily as stories emerge of brutality by masked agents of the Department of Homeland Security’s directorate of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In every corner of the United States, people suspected of illegal residence are being snatched off the streets and in courtroom corridors by anonymous men without warrants, in unmarked vehicles, with dubious justifications. Then they’re whisked away into a gulag of unaccountable and untraceable detention facilities and denied due process or the opportunity to prove their innocence—or citizenship, or legal resident status.

Lest residents of Southwest Florida believe that they are immune, their communities are in the crosshairs too, as ICE agents descend on the town of Immokalee, round up agricultural workers and simply stop vehicles on Southwest Florida roads with people they deem suspicious or who are simply the wrong color.

“For the first time there will be concentration camps on American soil and Americans will see them on their television screens.”

Of all the 2025 predictions, this one came most horrifyingly and surprisingly true. That there would be concentration camps for the regime’s undesirables was entirely predictable. But The Paradise Progressive did not foresee that the first of these camps, the archetype and model for an American gulag, would be established in its own back yard, in Collier County, Florida, in the heart of the Everglades and that it would be designated “Alligator Alcatraz.”

“These roundups and deportations will likely be fought in the courts but with its placement of obedient judges, the regime will probably plow through the court system the same way Trump plowed through his criminal cases. Those cases that reach the Supreme Court will be adjudicated by a Trump-appointed majority of justices—and he may gain more appointments as sitting justices retire.”

The US courts have proved an occasional impediment to Trump’s arbitrary actions but they also proved little more than speed bumps on the road to autocracy. Nonetheless, some of the most egregious actions were at least delayed or reconsidered as they were tried, appealed and judged.

The judiciary, established as a co-equal branch of government, was intended by the Founders as an important check and balance on the other two branches. It has not always gotten things right.

But, extraordinarily, the six-member majority of the current Supreme Court, three of whose justices were appointed by Trump and confirmed in his first administration, has not only aided, abetted and enabled dictatorship but specifically and actively sought to confirm and elevate a Trump dictatorship. They want him as king and they’ve done everything they can to ensure his unfettered rule—not governance, but rule.

Of all this Supreme Court’s decisions—and that includes its 2022 overturn of Roe v. Wade—the most fundamentally damaging one came with its ruling in Trump v. United States in 2024 holding that presidents are immune from the law in their official actions. That ruling, which overturned the concept of equal justice under law, the bedrock of American legal principle, enabled the wild, unchecked dictatorial rampage that characterized 2025.

“If Trumpflag-waving Southwest Floridians think they will be spared crippling inflation and a scarcity of goods, they should think again. At the very least the prices for the Canadian-made replacement parts for their sticker-covered pickup trucks are going to rise to the point where they’ll have to jury-rig their swamp buggies like Cubans keeping their 1959 Chevvies on the road.”

This absolutely came true. Tariffs have placed an enormous non-tax burden on the American consumer, according to both government and non-government estimates.

*The rise in prices of common food items in September 2025. (Chart: CNBC)*

“The accession of Donald Trump to the presidency will mean the return of what has been called ‘Trumpality,’ the Trump worldview or mindset in which objective truth has little to no value.”

Further,

“But in a broader sense, the imposition of Trumpality in the coming year will be pervasive and likely crippling to a United States whose whole success has been built on determining and responding to reality.”

Also,

“That delusional thinking will not only likely be evident this year, it will be imposed from above. It will likely affect everything from public health to weather forecasting. It will pervade the media whether mainstream, social or ideological as they both report what he asserts no matter how false and acquiesce to his version of events to avoid retaliation or retribution.”

Donald Trump’s war on reality and the media was aided and abetted by his billionaire supporters, who snapped up media properties in order to impose the Trump agenda from corporate boardrooms.

The First Amendment was not violated because Congress made no law abridging freedom of the press but the entire business infrastructure undergirding independent America media was undermined and subverted. Trump-obedient billionaires traded media properties among themselves like Pokéman cards.

The fiercely independent Washington Post of Donald and Katherine Graham became the cringing organ of Jeff Bezos, blocking the editorial board’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, cheering on Trump’s destruction of the White House East Wing, and banning alternative viewpoints from its opinion pages. The once-proud CBS television network of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite became the Trump cheerleading squad headed by Bari Weiss, a partisan, far-right columnist with no broadcast experience. The New York Times, the British Broadcasting Corporation, Wall Street Journal and over 20 media organizations were threatened by billion dollar lawsuits for reporting and broadcasting facts that Trump didn’t like. Social media platforms like Facebook ripped down their community standards to allow disinformation postings and Trump propaganda.

Many media controls had been imposed to protect the public against dangerous disinformation being spread during the COVID pandemic of 2020-2022. But that changed too, as The Paradise Progressive predicted.

“The opposition to vaccines and public health measures as evidenced by the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as Secretary of Health and Human Services, has the potential to wipe out a century of medical progress and scientific advancement in promoting public health and replace it with a brew of conspiracy theories, disbelief and even outright superstition.”

After a horrifically botched response to the COVID outbreak based on Trump’s delusional assertions that “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear,” and his insistence that it didn’t matter, national science and public health staged a comeback under President Joe Biden. But as predicted, the Trump regime did all it could to undermine and subvert that, cutting jobs, dismissing scientists and experts and altering findings at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration.

“The war on equality in all forms is almost certain to take place on many fronts this year.”

As predicted, the war on basic equality as well as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in all forms—already well underway in Florida—erupted with new ferocity during the year, with it being used as a club against higher educational institutions and corporations alike who faced extortionate fines and penalties for supporting equality in hiring, teaching and thinking. It was extended to the military by Secretary of War Peter Hegseth, who dismissed high-ranking female officers and eradicated monuments to black service people and heroes both at home and abroad.

“The most obvious possible Democratic presidential candidate to challenge Trump in 2028 (if there’s an election and if Trump runs again) is Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.”

And,

“The world can expect a massive Trumpist war against Newsom and the state of California starting this year and every year that Trump is president.”

Sure enough, Trump, who persisted in calling Newsom “Newscum,” embarked on a campaign of vilification and disparagement. But he didn’t predict—and The Paradise Progressive didn’t foresee—that Newsom would hit back with a campaign of his own that turned Trump’s social media postings against him with humor and pointedly funny parodies.

With his outspokenness and determination, Newsom emerged as the leader of the resistance among elected officials. He called out Trump’s autocratic moves for what they were and took concrete steps to counter them. And what were those autocratic moves? The Paradise Progressive predicted them too.

“Indeed, throughout the country expect attacks aimed at denying Democrats any possibility of ever winning any election again at any level, whether through ballot access denial or election interference in Democratic districts and cities, especially, in response to opposition to anti-migrant roundups and deportations and possible ‘sanctuary’ cities.”

The most blatant and egregious election interference was Trump’s attempt to get states to gerrymander district lines in mid-decade in order to deny Democrats seats in Congress in the 2026 elections.

The Paradise Progressive foresaw the effort but not the specific means—the idea of a mid-decade redistricting was so bizarre and unconstitutional it was beyond imagining at the outset of the year. The state of Texas immediately redrew its lines and other Trumpist states are doing the same. In Florida Gov. Ronald DeSantis (R) said he was open to the idea but concluded that Republicans wouldn’t gain that many seats. Still, as of this writing the notion hasn’t entirely been rejected.

Newsom understood the threat and launched a counterattack in California, pushing through a referendum on redistricting and proceeding to redistrict the state to counter Texas’ effort. Other Democratic states may follow.

However the Trumpist gerrymander turns out nationally, it was indicative of Trump’s determination to rig the 2026 election, stay in power no matter what, and deny Americans a genuine say in their government, as predicted at the outset of the year.

Part 2—Defying darkness: Anticipating the year ahead abroad and the new triumvirate

As the year began, The Paradise Progressive noted that a new triumvirate had emerged to dominate the world. In a subsequent post, it theorized about the possibility that Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping could conspire to divide the world between them and support each other’s expansionist goals and territorial ambitions. (Warning: A Trump-Putin-Xi conspiracy theory.)

But just as Rome’s triumvirate didn’t last, neither did today’s. The Paradise Progressive predicted that too.

“But also militating against the survival of this triumvirate is Trump’s inveterate lying and his lifetime record of welching on commitments and contracts. Just as a Mafia loan shark doesn’t take kindly to a deadbeat borrower, Putin and his mafia-like siloviki won’t take kindly to Trump reneging on whatever agreement they had that put him in office. The embers of this conflagration already seem to be sparking.”

What The Paradise Progressive did not foresee was the degree to which Trump used international trade tariffs as wildly and whimsically as he did, imposing and lifting them without notice or explanation. He tried to use them to punish Brazil for enforcing its laws against its own would-be dictator and Trump protégé, Jair Bolsonaro. He imposed them on Canada because the province of Ontario dared to run a television ad he didn’t like. He imposed them on China, then lifted them, then altered them, then reimposed them and then lifted them again after a phone call with President Xi Jinping. There’s no telling where they’ll stand tomorrow.

All these tariffs, which Trump regarded as a cost-free form of revenue, were in fact a form of consumer tax and drove up consumer prices, exactly as predicted.

“At least initially, this year, it’s likely to result in higher prices across the board and scarcity of goods as these men’s rivalries take the form of trade wars.”

Unforeseen was Trump’s war against Venezuela. At the beginning of the year it was Canada, Panama and Greenland that seemed to be in Trump’s crosshairs. But then American forces started destroying what were purported to be drug-smuggling boats off the coast of Venezuela, a campaign that steadily escalated.

As this is written American forces are gathering in the Caribbean in what appears to be preparation for an assault on Venezuela. But history provides a note of caution. Like Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Russia, or Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, or Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a unilateral, Trump-commanded American assault on Venezuela has within it the possibility of a regime-changing catastrophe—and that regime very well might be Donald Trump’s.

Part 3—Defying darkness: Southwest Florida politics and the year ahead

Locally, The Paradise Progressive noted:

“As the year dawns the two biggest local political stories in Southwest Florida concern criminal investigations and court cases.”

“In Collier County, on Nov. 7, multiple federal agencies searched the properties of Francis Alfred “Alfie” Oakes III, the extremely conservative, outspoken and politically active farmer and grocer.”

Further,

“An easy prediction for 2025 is that it will be a major story in Southwest Florida when a public announcement is made in this case.”

Indeed it was a major story but the outcome was different than anticipated. Oakes was never charged with any crime and the heavy hand of the law fell instead on Steven Veneziano Jr., an Oakes Farms vice president. Veneziano and six other defendants pleaded guilty to defrauding the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program by falsifying crop records.

Veneziano is also being sued by Oakes for allegedly defrauding and embezzling $12.5 million from the company. The ultimate outcome of this affair may become known next year.

“In Lee County to the north, resolution of accusations against Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno for possible money laundering and misappropriation of funds will be another major political story for 2025.”

By the end of the year the threat to Marceno seemed to have evaporated. The Florida Trident, a non-profit investigative online newsroom, reported on Oct. 3 that Ken Romano, a key witness against Marceno, was worried that the case was being killed by US Attorney General Pam Bondi.

“Hey Carmine, pay attention,” Romano stated in an October TikTok video directed to Marceno. “So, word on the street from your own people, a lot of your own people, is that [Anthony] Lomangino, [a major donor to both Trump and Marceno] and Pam Bondi, the Attorney General of the United States, is gonna take all this, whatever’s happened, and put it on the shelf for you. Is that true? Answer me, answer the public. Is that true?”

Since The Florida Trident report, there have not been any publicly reported developments in the case. Marceno is reportedly thinking of running for Congress in Florida’s 19th Congressional District.

As with the Oakes affair, Marceno’s ultimate fate may be resolved in the year to come.

“The prospect for 2025 is for DeSantis to keep governing the state, with an eye to his post-gubernatorial opportunities. But a position in the Trump regime seems unlikely to be one of them.”

This too turned out to be prophetic. Despite some positions being floated, DeSantis received no offers (at least none publicly announced or acknowledged) from Donald Trump. Their animus seemed to recede when Trump came to open the Alligator Alcatraz concentration camp in July and joked that “We had a little off period for a couple of days, but it didn’t last long.” But there was never any evidence of a deeper thawing of relations or a place for DeSantis in the regime in the days that followed.

When it came to the people of Florida as a whole, The Paradise Progressive predicted:

“This population will also be less healthy than in the past as public health protections are dismantled and vaccinations dismissed. Public health will be in the hands of anti-vaxxers, both nationally (Robert Kennedy Jr., as Secretary of Health and Human Services) and statewide (Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo).”

This turned out to be spectacularly predictive. In September, Ladapo announced the lifting of all vaccine mandates for schoolchildren, denouncing them as “slavery.” Now Florida health experts fear a rise in instances of childhood diseases, in particular measles, cases of which are increasing in the state.

As though destroying defenses against childhood diseases and epidemics was insufficient, in May the state of Florida decided to wage war against dental hygiene by banning the addition of decay-preventing fluoride in community water, a move that was preceded by the Board of Commissioners of Collier County in February 2024.

When it came to the state legislature,

“Once again DeSantis will be ruling over a subservient, super-majority legislature that will likely do his bidding on all things with the exception of paving over state parks.”

However,

“There’s less incentive to follow the DeSantis ‘line,’ whatever that may be in the coming year but that doesn’t mean they won’t follow a basically Make America Great Again (MAGA) ideology.”

That prediction plays out every day. But another prediction has already come true:

“Of course, Trump will take no responsibility for any of this. He will no doubt blame the weakened Democrats and ‘far left Marxist radicals’ for any problems he causes. If the past is prologue, Fox News and the MAGA faithful will buy it.”

Unexpected—and inspiring

The Paradise Progressive did not cover or make predictions in the off-year gubernatorial elections in Virginia, New Jersey or the mayoral race in New York City. However, those elections proved to be stunning repudiations of Trump rule and the MAGA program even though he frantically denied that he was on the ballot and blamed the debacle on the government shutdown and lack of Republican fervor.

Nor did the repudiations occur only in those major races. Across the country, in towns, cities and counties that held elections there was a marked shift away from Trumpism and the Republican Party in what amounted to a blue wave.

The Paradise Progressive also did not anticipate the resistance to tyranny, the grassroots organizing and popular outrage that led to national “Hands Off” and “No Kings” protests that attracted progressively larger and larger crowds.

Just how impressive this development was could be seen in Naples, Fla., an otherwise deeply Trumpist town, where each event brought out more and more people in what amounted to a massive turnout for the area—and throughout Southwest Florida in places not otherwise known for their activism, like Port Charlotte and Sanibel.

But while enormous crowds turned out in major cities, perhaps the most impressive demonstration occurred in rural Okeechobee, Fla., far from large gatherings or other “No Kings” protests. There, Linda Winner, a grandmother who had never demonstrated in any protest throughout her 76 years took a stand.

“I grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s watching all the protests, and so I said, if I’m ever going to do it, it better be now, I might not get another chance,” she told reporter Eileen Kelley of WGCU. So she stood alone on a street corner for three hours holding a “no kings” sign,

She explained her action to her son in North Carolina, who disagreed with her. “I called him to confirm that he knew that his mother loved America, to make sure that he understood that my protest today was not because I didn’t love America, but because I did,” she said.

Standing on her street corner she received a few fingers from passing motorists but also a lot of support and was treated to a free lunch at a nearby restaurant.

When the Linda Winners of the country take to the streets alone to fight dictatorship it shows that Americans still value democracy, freedom and are willing to resist—at all levels, in all places and at all ages. When they do that Americans might just all be winners.

What will this mean in the coming year?

That is something which it will take an entirely different essay to examine. But that the examination will be made at the beginning of 2026 is one prophecy almost certain to come true.

*Linda Winner takes her lone stand for democracy in Okeechobee, Fla., on “No Kings” day, Oct 18, 2025. (Photo: WGCU/Eileen Kelley)*

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David Jolly: Believing in change and a new day for Florida

Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Jolly addresses a town hall meeting in Naples’ South Regional Library on Oct. 13.
(Photo: Author)

Oct. 19, 2025 by David Silverberg

Even in retirement-heavy Naples, Fla., it takes some kind of special magic to fill a large auditorium for a political speech on a Monday afternoon.

But David Jolly managed to do exactly that when he addressed a town hall meeting at the Collier County South Regional Library on Monday, Oct. 13.

Jolly is the Democratic candidate for governor—and if the turnout, interest and enthusiasm of the crowd was any indication, this campaign and election will certainly be intense. People are fired up—and worried.

But if Jolly is worried, he gives no indication of it.

“Believe. Believe,” he told the crowd. “My wife and I would not be in this race, I pledge to you, if we did not believe that in this moment we’ve got the best shot we’ve had in 30 years to change the direction of this state. When we change the direction of Florida, we impact national politics, we give people across the country the opportunity to look to something that’s different and better. Believe. We here believe.”

It seemed like he had the audience believing him.

It’s one thing to believe—it’s another thing to back up that belief with data, money and, ultimately, votes.

But Jolly thinks he’s got the goods.

Pure Florida

Jolly is probably as Florida as it’s possible to be for someone other than an indigenous native. He was born on Halloween, 1972, in Dunedin and grew up in Dade City.

His father was a Baptist preacher and he was raised on Baptism’s precepts, which he has made clear still affect him as “a person of deep faith.”

It was his higher education that took him out of state, to Emory University in Georgia and George Mason University in Virginia, where he graduated with a juris doctor degree cum laude.

A Republican, Jolly joined the staff of Republican Rep. Bill Young in 1994, who at the time was representing central Florida’s 10th congressional district. Jolly rose through the various staff ranks but left the office in 2007 to work as a consultant and lobbyist. When Young died in office in 2013 at the age of 82, Jolly ran in a special election in March 2014 to succeed him, and won a narrow, 2 percent victory. He then won the general election in his own right in November without either a Republican primary challenger or a Democratic opponent.

As a representative, Jolly trended what might be called center-right, favoring what was the standard Republican litany of positions. He had campaigned to repeal the Affordable Care Act and supported overturning Roe versus Wade. In office he was in favor of tighter border controls, more restrictive vetting of immigrants and worked to maintain the prison in Guantanamo Bay.

But he also veered more centrist on other issues, arguing that regulations were appropriate to keep guns away from criminals, despite his support for the Second Amendment. He also supported the legality of same-sex marriage as part of his belief in personal liberty and opposition to government interference. At the same time, he said his Christian faith made him a believer in traditional marriage.

More particularly for Florida, he supported a ban on oil drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and sought to extend the National Flood Insurance Program to cover businesses and second homes.

By the end of his term, Jolly’s approach got him ratings from The Lugar Center and the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University as Florida’s fourth most bipartisan member of Congress and the 48th most bipartisan member overall.

As the 2016 election approached, he considered a run for the US Senate seat held by Marco Rubio when Rubio was considering running for another office—but Rubio changed his mind, decided to stay in the Senate and Jolly ran again for the 13th.

This time he was opposed by former governor Charlie Crist, who had transitioned from Republican to independent to Democrat. Still a canny politician, Crist narrowly won the election by 51.9 percent to Jolly’s 48.1 percent.

Changing parties

David Jolly in repose. (Photo: Author)

There was never a single, revelatory moment when Jolly suddenly decided to switch from the Republican Party to the Democratic, he told The Paradise Progressive.

“It was more a journey. It really was,” he said. “I mean, I was a Bush 41 Republican who fought the Tea Party, right? I was an appropriator who voted to keep the government open when they wanted to shut it down. On constitutional issues like marriage equality and eventually on reproductive freedom, I was moving away. On guns, I was moving away.”

He smiles wryly: “I say Republicans didn’t want me and Democrats didn’t need me.”

And then there was the presence and over time Donald J. Trump’s domination of the Republican Party. Jolly was no Trumper. “I fought back and lost that,” he reflects.

“I knew the fight had been lost in my mind, that the party I once belonged to was never coming back and that certainly I was not a sufficient leader to try to bring it back. And I spent six years as an independent, which was the most informative part of my political life, to be untethered from a major party, major party dogma.”

It was at the time he and his second wife were expecting their first daughter that he considered leaving the Republican Party. When he did it, he did so in a very public way.

“I basically announced on Bill Maher that I was leaving,” he said of his Oct. 5, 2018 appearance on Maher’s program. “I said I wanted our kids to know, I wanted my daughter to know, that it’s important to fight for what you believe in. But there came a moment where I was accepting that I wanted her to also see sometimes there are fights you walk away from.”

Or as he put it then, “Somebody else can fight for the dignity of the Republican Party now—it’s not my fight anymore.”

Jolly went on to become a political independent and a commentator for MSNBC, where he was consistently critical of Trump.

Then, this year, after making campaign-like appearances around Florida, including an appearance and speech in Naples on May 17, Jolly announced on June 5 that he was running for governor as a Democrat.

Jolly is well aware that there are critics who question his commitment to the Democratic Party and its principles.

He himself said, “I’m in a very post-ideological space. I really am. I think the left-right spectrum confines us and restricts us.”

However, his time as an independent gave him perspective, “I just got to look at what are the big answers to our big problems?” he said.

What is more, as he said to the crowd at his town hall in Naples: “Is it okay to change your mind?” While the crowd applauded and cheered he concluded: “I actually think it is.”

David Jolly speaks outside the Collier County Courthouse on May 17 of this year. (Photo: Author)

A stark contrast

It’s hardly surprising that as a Democrat, Jolly’s positions are starkly opposite those of Donald Trump or Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) or his leading likely opponent, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-19-Fla.).

But more than partisan, his positions are aimed squarely at the concerns of everyday Floridians and away from broad, national ideological questions.

Overall affordability and the high cost of insurance are key problems to be tackled, in his view.

“The property insurance crisis is the primary reason so many people in Florida are struggling to afford a home,” notes his platform. “From renters to retirees to homeowners, the burden of property insurance continues to make housing costs in Florida unaffordable for many.” He is pledging to make alleviating that problem a key focus of his governorship.

Notably, he is pro-choice. “Reproductive healthcare decisions should be made between women and their doctors, not politicians,” states his platform. He wants Florida to codify the same rules that held during the Roe v. Wade era.

He also recognizes the reality of climate change. “Florida should accept the science of climate change, protect our beaches and state parks, and invest in resiliency throughout the state,” according to his platform.

While supporting the Second Amendment, he thinks that Floridians have suffered enough from gun violence and lax gun laws. As his platform states: “Florida should ban the sale of assault weapons, require universal and comprehensive background checks, explore licensing, and preserve and expand the red flag laws enacted following the tragedy at Parkland.”

The litany goes down the line. But most of all, he emphasizes, he’s running on a platform that transcends party dogma.

And perhaps one of his most compelling positions is his call to treat everyone with “kindness, dignity and respect.”

“Culture wars divide and demonize,” states his campaign platform. “Florida should reject the politics of division and hate, and instead create a home where everyone is valued, respected, and welcomed. We should become a place where everyone is given dignity and equity, regardless of race, creed, or color, and regardless of who you love or the God you worship. Florida should embrace our immigrant community and celebrate their contributions to our state’s culture and economy. It’s time to create a Florida for all people.”

And there’s another promise he makes when it comes to culture, as he confided to his Naples audience.

“I’ll also tell you, one of the things I want to do when we get elected governor is bring back art to the state of Florida,” he said to enthusiastic cheers. “I want to open the governor’s mansion through loan agreements with major art installations. Bring back the art that lets us see who we are, who we could be, who we’ve been. Test the boundaries, bring back culture and theater, and open it up to the people of Florida. Open it up to school kids and everyone else. Otherwise, who else wants to go to Tallahassee?”

But can he win?

Jolly is running in a state where registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by 1.4 million, where the Republican governor won by 22 points in 2022, where his likely opponent is endorsed by Trump and has $31.5 million in campaign funds.

And yet Jolly is not only confident he can win, he radiates that confidence and can convey it to a crowd.

“We’re seeing it on the ground,” he said in response to a question about his path to victory. What’s more, “we’re also seeing it in the data.” Polling backs this up, he insisted. “I feel very comfortable saying we’re in the margin of error. We have a poll that has us leading by one [percentage point]. Donalds’ [poll] has him leading by four.”

But it’s the overall political environment that fuels his certainty. “So very critically, the environment and the cycle is one of dramatic change,” he said.

Why? “It’s because people are angry, they’re worried about their economy, and they don’t trust incumbent politicians right now. And so, yes, for us, that made the decision to get in this race. I really mean this, having been involved in probably 30 races—as a candidate in only three or four—I have zero interest in chasing a generic ballot, as I say. I know there’s an opportunity for change in Florida.

“And layer into that, we have a generational affordability crisis that truly is hitting Republicans as much as it’s hitting Democrats. And so that contributes to this environment.”

He pointed out that recent special elections in Florida have swung Democratic by 15 and 16 points. It has led DeSantis to avoid special elections, for example for his appointed lieutenant governor, Jay Collins, or in counties like Palm Beach. It’s also a trend throughout the country.

“This is a race that allows an Andy Beshear to get elected in Kentucky, a race that allows Steve Bullock to get elected in Montana, and a race that allows David Jolly to get elected in the state of Florida,” he told the crowd in Naples.

But he also acknowledged that the odds present a direct challenge to him: “I have to build a campaign that can win in this moment and win in this cycle.”

That also means closing the money gap. Donalds is reporting $31.5 million in the bank. Jolly has raised $2 million.

But Jolly sees an upward trend and points out that it’s still early in the race.

“We have small dollar donors from all 50 states,” he said in our interview. “Some of the largest investors in American politics have agreed to support us. But others are just ‘wait and see,’ right? There’s no reason for them to spend money in October of ‘25.”

What’s more, the Republican fundraising advantage may not endure.

“I would also say Republicans are very likely about to have a bloodbath of a primary and spend all their money against each other. And what I’m begging Democrats is—and that’s why I said it over and over today—if I’m insufficient, make me stronger.” In other words, he wants to have the dialogue that will enable him to learn and become more effective.

He also dismisses the impact of Trump’s endorsement of Donalds in the general election.

“With a state exhausted by MAGA, it hurts more than it helps,” he observed.

He continued: “The way I look at this race is that 33 percent of the state is probably unavailable to us. I’ll make my case as hard as I can. But if 39 percent of voters are registered as Republicans, I believe we will get 15 percent [of that].” If he can win over that percentage of Republican voters he can negate six points of likely Donalds supporters.

“So I do believe 33 percent of the state is loyally behind Donalds and Donald Trump. But in the midst of a dramatic change environment, to be able to have 67 percent of the state available to us, I feel very, very good about that.”

The possibility still exists that Jolly could face another Democratic challenger for governor. Right now he’s the only Democratic candidate and both in his speech and interview he called on his fellow Democrats not to be part of what has traditionally been called “the circular firing squad”

“Be a part of how we win,” he urged. “Don’t be a part of how you tear us down. Whether that means we have a primary or not, we’ll see. Family conversations aren’t all bad. They can be good. But we just have to remember that this is about Democrats leading a new coalition in American politics. And the only way we do that is if people look at the Democratic Party and see something they want to be a part of. If we fight each other for the next year, nobody’s going to be interested in that.”

Meanwhile, Jolly is taking a leaf from another former Democratic Florida candidate. He said his strategy is to go into communities across the state no matter their apparent ideological tendencies.

“I’m going to do what Lawton Chiles did in 1970. We’re going to go everywhere, absolutely everywhere. Deep red communities, frankly like Naples.” In 1970 Lawton Chiles, campaigning for the US Senate, did a 1,000 mile trek across Florida, visiting every community en route and talking to people along the way. He won the Senate seat and then went on to be elected governor in 1991, passing away in 1998.

Similarly, Jolly intends to visit as many communities as possible and once in those communities he intends to challenge Republicans to reveal their proposed solutions.

“Republican, what are you willing to do?’ he said. “I think we need a safe cap for insurance [i.e., ensuring that insurance can cover all contingencies]. Republicans will call it socialism. So what’s your plan? Can you convince enough people in Naples that you’re going to reduce their homeowner’s insurance, Byron? I don’t think you can. Can you convince enough people that they’re safe from school shootings? I don’t think you can, Byron. So we have to be willing to go into conservative media environments, into conservative communities and have conversations that not only express our values but ask the other side to be held accountable for their view and for their vision.”

A movement within a movement?

A demonstrator at the “No Kings” protest in Naples, Fla., on Saturday, Oct. 18, shows her support for David Jolly amidst the signs opposing Donald Trump. (Photo: Author)

There’s no doubt that Jolly projects a confidence that has been sorely lacking among Florida Democrats ever since Trump won the state in 2016 and DeSantis took the governorship in 2018. It’s a tonic for the crowds that come to hear him and it has electrified audiences, particularly in Naples.

Jolly has the experience, the objectivity and the analytical capabilities to be fully aware of the obstacles he faces, particularly in a state and a country being battered by rising authoritarianism, repression and anti-democratic tricks.

Asked if he worries about threats to the upcoming elections he acknowledges the dangers but is determined to press on.

“I still have faith, but I worry about it,” he admits. “And I worry about other areas of interference shy of Election Day.

“I worry, for instance, as a candidate, that the Trump administration is going to investigate major Democratic candidates across the country. And I worry about that on a personal level. I know there’s nothing [I’ve done] that merits an investigation. But it’s easy for what I believe is the current posture of the president to launch an investigation.”

He also worries that Trump could declare a national emergency on some pretext shortly before the election and somehow try to stop it. But he continues to campaign on the presumption that the election will be free, fair and honest.E

He is also fully aware of the physical danger to candidates and public figures in the current atmosphere. After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Jolly said that he sat down with his wife and his team and had a conversation about whether to stay in the race. But he—and they—decided the stakes were too big and the outcome too important not to keep campaigning.

He also wanted to send a message to his children. “I guess with our kids, I wanted them to know that the story I’m telling is true. I want them to know we’re trying to change the world. And that, win or lose, it’s a gift.”

Jolly has set an arduous task for himself. His is a campaign that is truly grassroots, he will be campaigning everywhere in a big state; his Naples town hall was already his 81st campaign event and the campaign is still in its early stages. He knows how intense it’s going to get as time goes on and especially in a year’s time when the race has tightened and is nearing the finish line.

But if Jolly is fazed by the prospect, he doesn’t show it. If anything it fuels his resolve.

“I know what is within our power, which is to build a coalition strong enough to win overwhelmingly,” he said emphatically. “And I know that sounds like a wild aspiration in Florida, but it’s why we’re in it. It’s why we’re in this, because if we can build a big enough coalition in Florida to overcome that, then I think that people have spoken.”

He also knows the part he must play to win and that it’s long, exhausting and potentially dangerous. “But,” he continues, “if we win, it’s because Florida’s voters have decided enough is enough—and we’re going to overwhelmingly take back the state.”

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Seaside stampede: Nine Republicans jostle in race for Florida’s District 19 nomination

*A Republican seaside stampede in Florida’s 19th Congressional District. (Illustration: AI for TPP/ChatGPT)*

October 7, 2025 by David Silverberg

Correction: The correct name of the company owned by Jim Schwartzel is Sun Broadcasting, which has no ownership stake in WINK TV.

What was promising to be a messy but obscure congressional race for Florida’s 19th Congressional District was suddenly catapulted into national prominence on Tuesday, Oct. 1, when Madison Cawthorn, a 30-year-old former North Carolina congressman and media bad boy announced that he would be running.

Because of his past behavior and erratic record, national and local media suddenly focused on him and the district. But in fact he’s an unlikely candidate with long odds in a crowded field.

The real focus of all this attention is the seat being vacated by Rep. Byron Donalds (R-19-Fla.), who is seeking the governorship.

As of right now there are nine declared Republican aspirants to the congressional seat and a single Democrat.

It’s very reminiscent of the 2020 congressional election when at one point there were 12 Republican candidates scrambling for the seat of retiring Republican Francis Rooney. He stepped down after two terms and the unpardonable sin of saying that the evidence should be considered in Donald Trump’s impeachment trial.

From that scrimmage (which ultimately narrowed to nine candidates) Donalds emerged the victor. Now the seat’s up for grabs again, with a whole new cast of characters—and with a little less than a year until the Republican primary election on Aug. 18, 2026, there may be new entrants.

It needs to be emphasized that it is still very early in the election cycle. Some candidates have not yet posted websites explaining their proposals and positions. They have not yet filed Federal Election Commission campaign finance reports. Nor have they all registered with the Florida Department of State. Candidates have until noon on Friday, April 24 of next year to qualify and more may appear.

This article will survey just the Republican candidates, their backgrounds and platforms. A separate article will evaluate and analyze the race. A third article will profile Democrat Howard Sapp.

But first, a look at the district.

The 19th Congressional District

*A map of Florida’s 19th Congressional District. (Map: Ballotpedia)*

The 19th Congressional District of Florida covers the coastal area from Cape Coral to Marco Island. Its eastern boundary largely follows Interstate Highway 75 with a small, special carve-out for Donalds’ home that was made in the last redistricting so that he would reside in the district without changing his address.

The District is older, whiter and slightly richer than the rest of the country.

It has a population of 809,197 people according to one estimate based on Census data. That population is 67 percent White, 21 percent Hispanic and 7 percent Black. The median age is 53 years, which is 25 percent higher than in the rest of Florida and 1.4 times higher than in the entire United States. Women represent about 51 percent of its population.

At $52,402 per year it has a higher per capita income than both Florida and the United States and at $76,248 its median income is about the same as the rest of the country but a little higher than the rest of Florida. Even so, it has about a 12 percent poverty rate.

The Cook Political Report, the authoritative survey of congressional districts, rates it solidly Republican. For the 2026 election the Cook Partisan Voter Index is rating it R+14, meaning that in the past two presidential elections, the district’s results were 14 percentage points more Republican than the national average, making it the 88th most Republican district nationally.

The district encompasses two counties, Lee and Collier, both of which are majority Republican in registered voters. In Lee County, of 508,919 registered voters, 48 percent are Republican, 21.9 percent are Democratic, and 29.9 percent are registered as “other,” according to figures from the Lee County Election Supervisor. In Collier County, of 259,982 registered voters, 55.2 percent are Republican, 19.3 percent are Democratic, 22.4 percent have no party affiliation and 2.9 percent are registered to other parties, according to figures from the Collier County Supervisor of Elections.

This is the district that the following candidates are vying to represent in the US House of Representatives.

They are listed in alphabetical order, according to last name.

Madison Cawthorn

The instant he announced that he was running for Congress on Oct. 1, Cawthorn stole the media spotlight in Southwest Florida politics.

The reason is that he previously held the seat for North Carolina’s 11th District from 2021 to 2023. Currently separated from Christina Bayardelle, his wife of one year (from 2020 to 2021), the 30-year old Cawthorn made headlines and raised eyebrows during his brief congressional tenure.

In that time he carved out a role for himself as an extreme, vocal Trumpist and conspiracy theorist who made unsubstantiated assertions and hurled insults at opponents, journalists and fellow Republicans.

He voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election and addressed the “Stop the Steal” rally on the Ellipse that led to the attack on the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

*Then-Rep. Madison Cawthorn addresses the Stop the Steal rally on the Ellipse in Washington, DC on Jan. 6, 2021. (Image: Madison Cawthorn on X)*

His most infamous statement was his assertion in a March 2022 interview that he had been invited to an orgy by a fellow Republican lawmaker (unnamed at the time and ever since) and that he had seen prominent politicians using cocaine in front of him.

He was denounced by fellow Republicans, was the subject of numerous calls for ethics investigations and was the focus of multiple allegations of financial improprieties, favoritism, and House rules violations.

Cawthorn was defeated in a North Carolina Republican primary in 2022, after which he announced that “It’s time for the rise of the new right, it’s time for Dark MAGA to truly take command,” with “Dark MAGA” generally understood to represent vengeful Trumpism.

It was after this loss that Cawthorn purchased a $1.1 million home in Cape Coral and moved there, registering as a Florida voter in 2023.

As he states on his campaign website, “Florida gave me a second chance, and now I’m running for Congress to fight for faith, family, freedom, and the America First values we believe in. Washington is full of snakes, but I’m ready to drain the swamp and defend Florida.” He calls himself “an unapologetic conservative and one of President Trump’s strongest allies.”

As of this writing, Cawthorn was not yet registered with the Florida Department of State as a candidate.

He has, however, considerable familiarity with Florida—and Florida law enforcement.

It was near Daytona Beach, Fla., in 2014 during a Spring Break trip that he lost the use of his legs in a car accident. He was a passenger and the injury left him dependent on a wheelchair. More recently, on April 14, 2025 Cawthorn was the driver when his 2021 Mercedes rear-ended a Florida Highway Patrol car on Interstate 75 in Collier County. He was cited for driving without a license on Aug.19, 2025 and then arrested on Sept. 10 when he failed to appear for his court date.

*Madison Cawthorn following his Sept. 10, 2025 arrest. (Photo:LCSO)*

Chris Collins

Like Cawthorn, Christopher Carl “Chris” Collins is another former Republican congressman with a criminal record.

Collins, 75, represented New York’s 27th Congressional District, the area around Buffalo, NY from 2013 to 2019. He was the first member of Congress to endorse Trump for president in 2016.

In August 2018 Collins and his son were arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for insider trading and making false statements.

The charges related to a company called Innate Immunotherapeutics, where Collins recruited investors while in office. In 2017, when he received news that the company’s medication to treat multiple sclerosis had failed its tests, Collins called his son from a lawn party at the Trump White House and told him to sell the stock before the news was made public. By doing this his son and another close relative avoided nearly $800,000 in losses when the stock’s price plummeted 92 percent the next day.

Collins was charged while he was in the midst of a re-election campaign. He suspended the campaign, then restarted it, then went on to a very narrow victory in the November 2018 election and took office in January 2019.

However, Collins didn’t last long in his seat. On Sept. 30, 2019 he announced his resignation to take effect the next day and that same day pleaded guilty to the charges against him.

“By virtue of his position, Collins helped write the laws of this country and acted as if the law didn’t apply to him,” said US Attorney Geoffrey Berman, after Collins pleaded guilty.

Collins was barred by the Security and Exchange Commission from serving as an officer or director of any public company. In October 2020 he began serving a 26-month prison sentence. But that didn’t last long either—he was pardoned by Trump on Dec. 22, 2020.

Collins purchased a home on Marco Island and told a judge in 2019: “I’m now a Florida resident and will be FL for a while as the press settles down and moves on.” He served his prison time in a federal prison in Pensacola.

In June, Collins was one of the first candidates to announce his run for the 19th District shortly after Donalds launched his bid for governor. He is listed as a candidate with the Florida Department of State.

As of this writing Collins did not have a campaign website, nor had he posted any policy positions related to Congressional District 19.

John Fratto

John “Johnny” Fratto, 46, is switching his sights to the 19th Congressional District from the 26th, where he ran for Congress unsuccessfully in 2024.

Fratto’s chief claim to fame in that race was a campaign rap video extolling Fratto’s Trumpist virtues that was filmed at Oakes’ Seed to Table market and was meant to appeal to the district’s Hispanic voters.

“America’s first bloodline mafia congressman versus deep state communist,” said the opening lines of the rap, which continued with a chorus that sounded like: “The man knows, voting Johnny Fratto.”

It didn’t work. Fratto was crushed by Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-26-Fla.), who won by a lopsided 73.2 percent in the Republican primary to Fratto’s anemic 16.5 percent, despite Fratto’s endorsement by local farmer, grocer and political kingpin Francis Alfred “Alfie” Oakes III and Republican political operative Roger Stone.

In 2024, responding to questions from the website Ballotpedia, Fratto stated that he was born in Des Moines, Iowa but then seems to contradict himself with the statement: “Originally from Southern California, I moved my family to Southern Florida to be close to my wife’s family, and to raise my kids in a state that will help them become hard working, honest adults.”

He listed his career experience as “working as an entrepreneur.” He has also claimed to have been an executive producer for TV and movies.

As of this writing, Fratto did not have a campaign website for his District 19 run but he had announced his candidacy on Facebook. He did not post any specific policies or proposals but he has made clear his support for Trump and his agenda in the past. He says he wants to restore the country to “its traditional values.”

Fratto is registered as a candidate with the Florida Department of State.

*John Fratto (left) is endorsed by Alfie Oakes (right) in the 2024 campaign rap video. (Image: Campaign)*

To see Fratto’s 2024 2-minute, 38-second campaign video, click here. [Editor’s Note: You have to see it to believe it.]

Ola Hawatmeh

Ola Nesheiwat Hawatmeh is a registered candidate with the Florida Department of State.

Hawatmeh does not have a campaign website.

A LinkedIn profile states that she is a senior policy advisor, chief executive officer and founder of Mom Me Makeover and OLA Style, apparently a sole proprietorship. She is also listed as a senior policy advisor to Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-5-Ind.) as of December 2024.

The only policy statement attributable to Hawatmeh is an undated Instagram video post, made from an unidentified airport when Hawatmeh was on her way to a week of lobbying in Washington, DC on behalf of the non-profit Moms for America, a national, conservative education advocacy group.

In that post Hawatmeh earnestly says: “Today, reading about 20,000 migrants in Springfield, Ohio, killing dogs, killing cats, ducks in our parks, no accountability. It is our country. Illegals are being placed before American citizens. No accountability for them, but we have to be held accountable if we don’t pay our taxes, if we don’t pay our bills. We have no say as to who our neighbors are now? You want to place illegals in our neighborhood. We have to have a say. Never give up, never give in. Speak up. It’s our America, it’s our country.”

Hawatmeh’s connection to the 19th Congressional District is unclear from any online sources or statements. Nor does she make clear that she resides in the district or the state.

Catalina Lauf

According to an Oct. 2 article by reporter Jacob Ogles on the website Florida Politics, Catalina Lauf of Bonita Springs served in the first Trump administration as special advisor to the US Department of Commerce from December 2018 to July 2019. At that point she founded the Defense of Freedom PAC where she continues serving as executive director.

In 2022 Lauf ran for Congress in Illinois’ 11th Congressional District but lost to Democrat Bill Foster with a total of 43.5 percent to Foster’s 56.5 percent.

In 2020 she lost the Republican congressional primary in a field of seven candidates in District 14 to Jim Oberweis who garnered 25.6 percent of the vote to Lauf’s 20.1 percent. (More about Oberweis below.)

Lauf issued a statement to Florida Politics when she announced her Florida run on Oct. 2, the day after Cawthorn made his announcement.

“Southwest Florida deserves bold, principled leadership — leaders in the mold of Byron Donalds, who stand up fearlessly for our values, and who are champions of President Trump’s America First agenda. I was proud to work for President Trump’s administration and now I’m running to continue that tradition of strength, courage, and service for the people of FL-19.”

As of this writing Lauf was not yet registered as a candidate with the Florida Department of State. She had posted a campaign Facebook page but did not yet have a dedicated campaign website.

On the Facebook page she stated that “Like many Americans, Catalina is concerned with the young socialist progressive wing in Congress.”

Dylan Modarelli

According to his LinkedIn profile, Dylan Modarelli is chief executive officer of Empire Gems in Fort Myers. He lives in Cape Coral and is in his mid-30s. He’s married with one child.

He is originally from North Bergan, New Jersey but does not state on his professional campaign website how long he has lived in Florida. Nor does he mention any prior political or government experience.

Modarelli’s candidacy is registered with the Florida Department of State.

“I come from hardship, raised in a home where giving up was never an option,” he writes. “When I was just five years old, I lost my father to a heroin overdose, leaving my mother to raise me alone while relying on family donations to survive. Those early struggles taught me resilience, empathy, and the belief that our circumstances do not define our future.”

Without providing dates, he states that he served as a police officer (no mention of where), then entered the emerald trade, building a business.

He’s taking a Trumpist/populist approach. As he says on his Facebook campaign page, he’s “pro-life, pro-freedom, pro-guns.”

“I’m ready to fight. I’m tired of the grifters, the career politicians, and the power hungry elites who have forgotten the people they swore to serve,” he says in a video. “Washington has turned into a playground for the connected and the corrupt, while hardworking Americans are left behind. I’m not here to play their games. I’m here to break them. I’m here to stand up for the working man, the struggling families, the seniors, the veterans, and the forgotten communities. We’ve been ignored for too long, and I refuse to sit quietly while they sell out our future. It’s time to send a fighter to Congress who answers to the people, not the lobbyists. This is our fight and I’m just getting started.”

Unlike most of the other candidates, Modarelli has a platform with defined positions on a variety of issues.

Asked in a Ballotpedia questionnaire what areas of public policy he was most passionate about, Modarelli responded, “I’m passionate about protecting animals. I believe no animal should be killed just because it’s unwanted. I stand firmly against euthanizing healthy animals in shelters.” Indeed, on his campaign website he lists ending “kill shelters” as his third most important issue after promoting affordable housing and declaring war on fentanyl.

One particularly noteworthy issue that Modarelli lists is ending private, for-profit prisons. Florida currently operates 12 for-profit prisons and two concentration camps.

As Modarelli states: “The prison system should focus on justice and rehabilitation not corporate profit. I will fight to end for-profit prisons that prioritize filling beds over public safety, turning incarceration into a money-making scheme.” He adds: “It’s time to bring prisons under public control and ensure they serve the people, not shareholders.”

Jim Oberweis

Jim Oberweis, 79, is a veteran politician, with a mixed record of wins and losses in his native Aurora, Illinois.

Prior to politics he worked as a teacher and a financial services advisor before buying and running his family’s dairy, which had a product line of what Oberweis calls “the richest ice cream in the world.”

Oberweis began his political career in 2004 when he ran for the Republican nomination for US Senate but lost. In 2012 when he ran for the Illinois state Senate and won in District 25. He made another bid for the US Senate in 2014 but lost to Democrat Dick Durbin. He returned to the state Senate in 2012, was reelected in 2016 and rose to the position of Minority Whip.

In 2020, Oberweis ran for the Republican nomination in the Illinois 14th Congressional District, the area of Chicago’s western suburbs, centered around Aurora.

In that election he faced Catalina Lauf, who is running in the current District 19 election (see above). In a field of seven candidates, Oberweis beat Lauf, who came in third, with only 20.1 percent of the vote to Oberweis’ 25.6 percent.

However, Oberweis lost in the general election to Democrat Lauren Underwood, whom Oberweis claims stole the election.

“As of election night he had won against his Democrat incumbent opponent and was sent to Washington for New Member Orientation where he met Byron Donalds, also a newly elected Congressman,” states Oberweis’ third-person account of the election on his campaign website. “But when 20,000 previously uncounted mail-in ballots were counted, he had lost. The uncounted ballots were never initialed by an election judge as required under Illinois law but were counted anyway. After 3 days of new member orientation Jim was told he might as well go home because things did not look good.”

Oberweis thought he was permanently done with politics and, as the website puts it: “Jim went home, packed his bags and moved permanently to Bonita Springs where he and wife have owned a condominium for 16 years, and became a full-time Florida resident.”

However, with Donalds’ quest for the governorship, Oberweis decided to try again.

Oberweis is a conservative, Trumpist Republican so most of his positions reflect orthodox Trumpism. However, he does weigh in on the local environment by calling for protection of the Everglades. He says more needs to be done to protect against the polluting runoff from cane sugar processing.

“We need to return the natural southerly flow of water through the Everglades which can help reduce the threat of red tide and provide more fresh drinking water,” he states on his website. “Mother Nature is nonpartisan. Hurricanes bearing down on your home don’t care about your political beliefs. We need to do what we can to mitigate damage from future hurricanes.”

As of publication time, Oberweis had not yet responded to a question about his position on Alligator Alcatraz, which opponents say injures the Everglades’ natural environment. He is listed as a candidate by the Florida Department of State.

Oberweis has also made a major commitment to his campaign with $2 million in personal loans and outside donations that raise his total to $2.12 million.

Mike Pedersen

When most aspirants “jump into the race” it means they’re just announcing that they’re running for office. In May, Mike Pedersen literally jumped out of an airplane and parachuted to earth to make his mark.

It was a smart move. It gave him enough distinction to land a television interview with Dave Elias, political reporter for Gulf Coast News and broke him out of what was then a very small pack. He is registered as a candidate with the Florida Department of State.

Pedersen is a retired US Marine with a 20-year record of active service including 66 combat missions during Operation Desert Storm and deployments all over the world.

*Mike Pedersen. (Image: Gulf Coast News)*

He graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1979, which would put his age in the 60s, although this is not confirmed on his website or in answers to questions sent to him by The Paradise Progressive. His wife was born in the Philippines, he has three children and eight grandchildren.

He has lived in Cape Coral for 26 years and worked as a pharmaceutical salesman after his active duty, focusing, he states, “on women’s healthcare across Southwest Florida”—although he doesn’t state among his positions whether he supports women’s right to choose abortion.

His positions are, otherwise, conventionally Trumpist: America first, an unmatched military, tightly restricted elections, protection of the Second Amendment, debt reduction, tight borders, a promise to “fight to protect our kids from radical agendas in the classroom and in sports” and “Continue the DOGE Mission” to achieve government efficiency. He does not list any local issues among his concerns on his website.

Jim Schwartzel

There is no other Republican candidate that is as purely Southwest Florida-born, bred and raised as Jim Schwartzel. A native of the area, he attended Bishop Verot Catholic High School in Fort Myers and Stetson University in DeLand, Florida.

Schwartzel, 49, is a media entrepreneur whom some media outlets refer to as a “mogul.” He announced his candidacy in April and is listed as a candidate by the Florida Department of State.

He’s president of Sun Broadcasting based in Fort Myers, which owns five local radio stations and four television stations. He also owns Gulfshore Life Media, which publishes the magazines Gulfshore Life, Gulfshore Business and The Naples Press. The financial data website Quiver Quantitative puts his net worth at $15.94 million. (Full disclosure: This author writes a monthly, non-political column for The Naples Press.)

Schwartzel is very conservative and does all he can to let the world know it.

This is reflected in his media holdings, which include radio station 92.5 FM Fox News, an all-talk conservative radio station based in Fort Myers.

Another expression of this is the country-western music radio station 93.7 FM, branded as “Trump Country,” whose history provides an interesting snapshot of the Southwest Florida political climate.

On Sept. 16, 2020 the station flipped from a rock and roll format to country-western and renamed itself “Trump Country.” The format lasted only three months. After Trump lost the election, it switched to country-western “Hell Yeah 93.7” under the call letters WHEL. The station went off the air during Hurricane Ian in 2022 and when it returned it was in a Latino current hit format. It then resumed as “Hell Yeah” on October 21, playing contemporary hits. On Inauguration Day 2025 at noon it switched back to calling itself “Trump Country.”

Given his conservative history, it’s no surprise that Schwartzel’s platform is all-out Trumpist. He states that he’s running for Congress “to give President Donald J. Trump the support he needs and to fight for the conservative values that make Southwest Florida strong.” He claims to be anti-career politician and “a straight-talking outsider” who will fight the standard array of MAGA-perceived threats that include “the ruling class of career politicians,” “socialist policies” and “outside political interest groups.”

When it comes to local issues, Schwartzel lists two: water and infrastructure.

On water, he states that he’ll “support common-sense water management policies” but “not the agendas of environmental extremists or special interest groups.”

On roads, he pledges to “push for funding to complete the projects necessary to reduce traffic congestion and enhance safety… .”

Schwartzel has loaned his campaign $1 million, bringing its total to $1.2 million. But while that still trails Oberweis’ total, he expects to surpass it by the end of the year.

To come:

Analyzing where it all stands, what it all means and where it’s all going

A look at Howard Sapp, Democratic candidate

To see previous coverage of Congressional District 19, click here

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A tale of two piers: FEMA, favors, Kristi and Ian

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, center, speaks with Mayor Teresa Heitmann of Naples, Florida, and City Manager Gary Young on the city’s damaged historic pier on Aug. 29. (Photo:DHS/Tia Dufour)

Sept. 29, 2025 by David Silverberg

Who would have thought that sleepy, obscure Southwest Florida, including Collier County and the City of Naples, would move to the forefront of national attention under the second administration of President Donald Trump?

First, there was the establishment of the Alligator Alcatraz concentration camp in far eastern Collier County. Implemented by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), Alligator Alcatraz has drawn national scrutiny, condemnation, lawsuits and opposition. As intended, it has been a model for a whole gulag archipelago of anti-migrant concentration camps rising throughout the nation. Its fate is uncertain.

But now there’s a new focus: the City of Naples pier, which was destroyed in 2022’s Hurricane Ian.

New developments in the restoration of the Naples pier also serve to highlight the story of the Fort Myers Beach pier—and how each one is being treated illuminates larger trends in America today and the way government now operates.

Kristi Noem and the Naples pier

*The current state of the Naples pier, seen over the shoulder of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during her visit to Naples on Aug. 29. (Photo: Kristi Noem/Instagram)*

For those unfamiliar with it, the City of Naples is an incorporated municipality of roughly 20,000 people. It sits on the Gulf of Mexico at the southwestern tip of Florida and is primarily a tourist and leisure destination. Always a winter haven for the wealthy, its attractiveness to the millionaire—and billionaire—class has grown in recent years.

Among its attractions, Naples has an iconic pier that extends into the Gulf. Originally used for the offloading of supplies when Naples was founded and developed starting in the 1880s, it subsequently became a tourist attraction, a place above the beach to stroll and fish.

*The Naples pier in 2020. (Photo: Author)*

The pier has been destroyed by hurricanes several times, most recently by Hurricane Ian in 2022.

After Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visited Naples on Aug. 29, she immediately ordered $12 million in federal funds for its rebuilding, granted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that she heads.

It emerges that the grant was the result of city lobbying and the intervention of a major Naples-based Noem donor.

The entire story of the lobbying and Noem’s intervention is presented in an article titled “Kristi Noem Fast-Tracked Millions in Disaster Aid to Florida Tourist Attraction After Campaign Donor Intervened.”

The article was published last Friday, Sept. 26, by the non-profit investigative journalism newsroom, ProPublica, which, as it states, “investigates abuses of power.” ProPublica is known for its meticulous journalism. The article is based on emails and records obtained through public records requests, as well as interviews by its three authors: Pulitzer Prize winner Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski.

The article details how Naples Mayor Theresa Heitmann, frustrated by delays in getting the pier addressed, contacted Naples cardiologist Dr. Sinan Gursoy, who had been a $25,000 donor to Noem when she was governor of South Dakota.

At Gursoy’s urging, “Noem flew to Naples on a government plane to tour the pier herself. She then stayed for the weekend and got dinner with the donor, local cardiologist Sinan Gursoy, at the French restaurant Bleu Provence,” according to the article. Noem stayed the weekend at the Naples Bay Resort & Marina.

She toured the wrecked pier with Heitmann and City Manager Gary Young.

Afterwards she posted on Instagram: “The iconic Naples Pier was destroyed in 2022, and the city is still waiting on answers from FEMA. They couldn’t even get permission to remove the old pier. I saw this failure first-hand today with Mayor Heitmann and Gary Young, and now the project is back on track.

“Americans deserve better than years of red tape and failed disaster responses. Under @POTUS Trump, this incompetency ends.”

It is important to note that the article does not allege any illegalities or criminal activity by any party.

However, it states: “Noem’s actions in Naples suggest the injection of political favoritism into an agency tasked with saving lives and rebuilding communities wiped out by disaster. It also heightens concerns about the discretion Noem has given herself by personally handling all six-figure expenses at the agency, consolidating her power over who wins and loses in the pursuit of federal relief dollars, experts said.”

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told ProPublica that the pier decision “has nothing to do with politics,” since Noem has visited the sites of other disasters. “Your criticizing the Secretary’s visit to the Pier is bizarre as she works to fix this issue for more than 1 million visitors that used to visit the pier,” she said.

*A visualization of the restored Naples pier. (Rendering: City of Naples)*

The Fort Myers Beach pier

Noem’s treatment of Naples can be contrasted with the experience of Fort Myers Beach, just 20 miles northward, whose tourist pier was also wrecked in Hurricane Ian.

Fort Myers Beach, like Naples, is a tourist-oriented, incorporated town on the Gulf of Mexico, although appealing to much smaller and less wealthy population than Naples, both in permanent residents and visitors. Its population is about 5,300 people.

This is the town where Hurricane Ian made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane and it did horrendous damage, virtually scraping buildings from their foundations all along the sea front and well inland.

The damage included its tourist pier. (Most towns along this stretch of coastline have piers because in their early days they were supplied entirely by boat.)

Like Naples, Fort Myers Beach officials are also trying to rebuild their pier.

Also, like Naples, Fort Myers Beach officials applied for FEMA funding. They were granted funding but only for the pier’s original structure. However, the city wants to expand and lengthen the pier, adding 415 feet so that it extends 1,000 feet into the water. They also want to widen it by four feet so it spans 12 feet.

This is expected to cost the city $17.1 million and the new parts won’t be covered by FEMA. To make up the shortfall, on Sept. 16, the Lee County Commissioners voted to seek $7 million from the Gulf Consortium, which manages compensation for the British Petroleum (BP) Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010. That money is provided under the RESTORE (Resources and Ecosystems Sustainability, Tourist Opportunities, and Revived Economies) Act of 2012, administered under Florida’s State Expenditure Plan.

“The project is proceeding as planned and designed,” Lee County spokesperson Betsy Clayton told the Fort Myers Beach Observer and Bulletin. “The plan all along was to use FEMA and Tourist Development Tax [funds].”

However, if BP funds are approved, “this would reduce the need for Tourist Development Taxes,” Clayton told the newspaper.

Meanwhile, Fort Myers Beach and Lee County officials can only sit and wait to hear.

*The restored Fort Myers Beach pier as conceived.* *(Rendering: Fort Myers Beach)*

Commentary: Winners and losers

While Fort Myers Beach officials can lobby for their hoped-for BP funds to move the application process along, it seems doubtful that they can arrange a lunch with Kristi Noem and get the full funding over a weekend, as the far richer City of Naples did.

The incident also highlights why allegations of favoritism and political interference are—or should be—a sensitive issue and why inequitable distribution of government funding can be so disruptive.

What is more, both piers are very small disasters for FEMA and Noem amidst a very large array of natural events. As of Saturday, Sept. 27, FEMA was handling 58 major disasters and seven emergency declarations all around the United States and territories.

Complaints about slow responses and bureaucracy have always plagued FEMA.

However, this is nothing new. After every disaster people demand that aid arrive instantly, which, other than help from immediate neighbors, it never does. Government at all levels takes time to work, even when a response is urgent. As for its bureaucratic and procedural slowness, FEMA is bound by laws and regulations and has always had to ensure that money is properly accounted for, monitored and distributed.

But there are new reasons for FEMA delays and bottlenecks, chiefly the result of Trump and Noem’s own actions. FEMA has been battered by layoffs and staff dismissals, cuts to funding and Trump’s repeated attacks on it to the point of calling for its disestablishment.

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, FEMA was reformed and streamlined, with two Floridians taking a leading role: R. David Paulison, a former Miami fire chief, and Craig Fugate, who had been Florida’s chief emergency manager. Under their administration and that of other DHS secretaries, FEMA was reworked to provide more timely responses and be completely evenhanded and apolitical in its actions and funding. It also made a major effort to prevent future disasters through preparedness, mitigation and increased resilience.

In the first Trump administration there were fears that Trump was politicizing responses, withholding aid to Democratic states like California and reducing preventive measures that responded to climate change challenges. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint for a future administration, proposed that much more of the fiscal burden for disaster recovery fall on the states. (See “Project 2025 remake of FEMA would hit communities hard after disasters.”)

On the campaign trail Trump repeatedly attacked the agency and its responses, especially in the wake of Hurricane Helene and flooding in North Carolina. Among these he leveled baseless accusations of political favoritism by President Joe Biden.

Once in office Trump has maintained the drumbeat of criticism and repeatedly threatened to eliminate FEMA as an agency. The agency’s layoffs and dismissals have hampered its functioning and ability to respond to disasters.

Noem from the beginning has been an aggressive operative for the Trump agenda, implementing cuts to the FEMA workforce, verbally attacking the agency, as in her Instagram post, and echoing Trump’s lies.

As the ProPublica article pointed out, she has also insisted on personally approving all FEMA expenditures over $100,000, making her personally responsible for them—and since $100,000 is a very small expenditure in government operations, it means she has to be personally involved in every small and petty purchase.

This requirement vastly slows down the process of approving any sort of aid or expenditures—unless a community can short-circuit the entire system by going straight to the Secretary as Naples did. Other communities awaiting assistance and with far greater damage have been left hanging, also hoping for the kind of aid that was previously processed through established, rationally conceived procedures.

It needs to be emphasized, as previously, that there are no allegations of illegality or criminality here and certainly not on the part of Naples City officials. They were confronted with frustrating delays and a lack of response from FEMA. They chose to take action, as should be expected of city officials.

According to the ProPublica article, Mayor Heitmann tried a variety of different avenues to address the issue. The City already employed some expensive Washington consultants to guide the process but this was unproductive. She wrote directly to FEMA, attempted to enlist Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), a Naples resident, and finally decided to go directly to Noem through Gursoy, who had introduced Heitmann to Noem at a private party when Noem was governor.

When she contacted Gursoy, he agreed to “get on it.”

It has to be said: It was a good idea that produced results.

Interestingly, nowhere did Rep. Byron Donalds (R-19-Fla.) appear to play a role in any of this even though his district encompasses both towns with their piers and he would logically be the first official to contact in pursuing the city’s interests in Washington.

However, Donalds has been notoriously lax in producing results for his district in Washington, DC and he is currently running for governor, so his attention to the district, already tepid, is now nearly non-existent.

If there is fault to be had it lies with Noem. In pre-Trump days, a secretary of Homeland Security when faced with this kind of request would have declined it. Perhaps he or she would have responded: “Thank you for this kind invitation. Due to the many requests and needs from deserving communities across the country, I have to respectfully decline. However, I will forward your request to the proper offices in FEMA.”

But that kind of rectitude and propriety is a thing of the past.

The bigger issues

Beyond problems created for FEMA aid and distribution caused by Trump, Noem and the Department of Government Efficiency when it was operating, Noem’s personal intervention in the Naples pier project illustrates much broader issues of governance, personalization and inequality among communities.

The United States has been unique in creating “a nation of laws, not men,” as President John Adams put it. Constitutionally, its institutions are intended to function according to law and objective facts, not the personal preferences of any one person.

That is not the case with Donald Trump who is openly and blatantly making governance about himself, whether that applies to prosecuting his perceived enemies, or levying tariffs, or silencing those who satirize him.

As Trump has driven toward a more authoritarian, dictatorial form of government that centers entirely on his personal decisions and predilections, his personalization of government operations is leaching down into lower levels of decisionmaking.

This is glaringly evident in the case of the Naples pier. Noem may say that she’s heroically cutting red tape and taking action—and she may actually think it—but it also sends a signal to all other distressed communities around the country that the way to get disaster aid is not to follow the law and procedure but to somehow reach her personally, with paid travel and a nice dinner (at the least). It announces that emergency management decisionmaking now officially depends on her whims and personal preferences. It also announces that the American people and their communities cannot depend on a government that previously responded to their distress as one of its primary duties.

There has always been an element of personality and lobbying in government operations, whether in the legislative or executive branches. It’s what created the vast lobbying industry that exists today at all levels of government. But lobbying and advocacy was always peripheral to the government’s essential decisionmaking. Now, with Trump’s personalization and weaponization of government, it’s central to it.

In 1655 King Louis XIV of France is reputed to have said, “L’État, c’est moi!”—“I am the state.” It has gone down in history as the ultimate expression of personal power. The American revolution was an explicit rebellion against that philosophy. The state was the Constitution, an expression of “We the people”—all Americans.

As Trump drives toward becoming the embodiment of the American state, situations like Noem’s favoring Naples, or for that matter Tom Homan, head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) taking cash for favors and then escaping any kind of law enforcement, are becoming more common.

The Naples pier is just one small example of the increasing personalization of government in America today. It’s also the embodiment of increasing stratification between affluent, well-connected communities and more obscure, modest and poorer communities in getting attention paid to their needs by a government originally formed to be of them, by them and for them.

So, while the focus in this instance may be on two closely-placed towns and their structures of planks and concrete jutting out into the waters of Florida, the gulf between them is actually broader, vaster, more profound—and, unfortunately, growing.

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Breakfast table battle: Brazil and Bolsonaro, America and Trump, and the squeezing of Florida

Sept. 16, 2025 by David Silverberg

Your breakfast table is now a battlefield.

Your morning coffee and your orange juice are the weapons.

Taste them, savor them, pay attention to their flavors and subtleties and enjoy them to the fullest because they’re going to be taxed, perhaps beyond what you’re willing to pay for them in the future. What was once ordinary and routine is about to become rare and precious.

And all this is because President Donald Trump is trying to reverse a just judgment against a coup plotter, insurrectionist and would-be dictator in a land far away.

Last Thursday, Sept. 11, while Americans memorialized the terrorist attacks of 24 years ago, the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court found Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president, guilty of plotting a military coup to overthrow Brazil’s democratic government.

He was sentenced to 27 years and 3 months in prison. The likelihood is that Bolsonaro will have to serve his time—the Brazilians aren’t kidding around.

Their judgment is informed by a 21-year experience of military dictatorship. They know what it means to be governed autocratically and to lose their freedoms. So when a politician plots to overthrow a democratically-elected government and sends a mob to destroy the legislative branch of government, they know that they have to respond firmly and decisively. The guilty party has to be punished fully because nothing else will preserve the rule of law, the Constitution and democracy.

Bolsonaro closely imitated Donald Trump in numerous ways.

His fate holds important lessons for the United States and for democracies that seek to defend themselves from demagogic authoritarianism. In this affair there are warnings—and especially lessons—for Americans.

As important, all Americans, including those living in Southwest Florida, are going to feel the effects of this battle.

The ‘Tropical Trump’

*Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and US President Donald Trump share a moment in the White House during a meeting on March 19, 2019. (Photo: Isac Nóbrega, Wikimedia Commons)*

Bolsonaro was dubbed the “Tropical Trump,” a politician who took his cues from Donald Trump in both his election campaigns and governing. He was a demagogic, extremist populist campaigner and president who used insults and personal attacks both on the stump and through social media. He dismissed critical press coverage as “fake news.” He promised to “drain the swamp” of Brazilian politics.

Bolsonaro served as president from 2019 to 2023. In contrast to Trump he’d had a lengthy career in electoral politics before assuming the presidency. In 1990 after serving in the military he was elected to the city council of Rio de Janeiro and then to the Chamber of Deputies, the Brazilian House of Representatives. He served there for 27 years and became known for his conservatism. In 2018 he ran for president on a very Trump-like platform and won.

When he took office, Bolsonaro had to immediately deal with an economic crisis, which he did by favoring laissez fare economic solutions. He also rolled back protections for indigenous people and their lands and most notoriously stripped environmental protections from the Amazon rainforest in favor of agribusinesses.

He also advocated removing police restrictions to fight the country’s high crime rate. “A policeman who doesn’t kill isn’t a policeman,” he said while campaigning. In a country that had one of the highest rates of police killings in the world, he wanted greater lethality and defended the use of torture.

Once elected, Brazilian crime rates fell and the economy slowly recovered. But then, like Trump, Bolsonaro was hit with a curve ball: the COVID-19 pandemic.

Like Trump, Bolsonaro initially dismissed the disease, calling it “a little flu” and belittling media warnings as “hysteria.”

But as in the United States, COVID struck hard in Brazil. As in the United States voters didn’t forget. And like Trump, Bolsonaro paid the price when those voters went to the polls.

In the United States, Trump lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden. Unwilling to accept the results, on Jan. 6, 2021Trump incited his followers to attack the United States Capitol, overturn the election and lynch Vice President Mike Pence, when he wouldn’t de-certify the results as Trump wanted. After several hours of inaction by Trump, the insurrection was suppressed by police and National Guard troops.

*Rioters storm the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.*

In Brazil, Bolsonaro lost the 2022 election to the progressive, trade-unionist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, universally known as Lula. Like Trump, Bolsonaro refused to accept the results and on Jan. 8, 2023 a pro-Bolsonaro mob stormed government buildings in the capital, Brasilia, demanding that Lula be deposed and a military coup be staged. Unlike Trump, Bolsonaro wasn’t in the capital—he was in Orlando, Florida, where he’d gone to avoid Lula’s inauguration.

*Rioters storm government buildings in Brasilia on Jan. 8, 2023. (Photo: TVBrasilGov)*

In the United States Trump faced condemnation and impeachment but was not removed from office and did not face any criminal charges or punishment for his role despite a detailed congressional investigation.

In Brazil, however, Bolsonaro was investigated and in November 2024 was indicted for attempting to mount a coup. He was charged in February 2025, placed under house arrest in August for violating court rules and tried in the Supreme Federal Court beginning on Sept. 2.

Last Thursday, Sept. 11, he was found guilty and sentenced to 27 years and 3 months (327 months) in prison.

Protecting the protégé

Having retaken the US presidency, Trump is actively trying to protect his Brazilian protégé using the full resources of the United States.

On July 31, Trump signed an executive order imposing 50 percent tariffs on Brazilian goods and declaring a national emergency regarding the country.

“The Order finds that the Government of Brazil’s politically motivated persecution, intimidation, harassment, censorship, and prosecution of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and thousands of his supporters are serious human rights abuses that have undermined the rule of law in Brazil,” it stated.

“By imposing these tariffs to address the Government of Brazil’s reckless actions, President Trump is protecting the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States from a foreign threat,” it stated.

The order declared that Brazilian court orders were tyrannical and arbitrary and charged that Brazil had tried to extort and coerce US companies into censoring free speech. It ordered revocation of the Brazilian Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Morae’s visa to the United States and any issued to his family.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio added his own imprecations on the day Bolsonaro was found guilty.

“The political persecutions by sanctioned human rights abuser Alexandre de Moraes continue, as he and others on Brazil’s supreme court have unjustly ruled to imprison former President Jair Bolsonaro,” Rubio stated on X. “The United States will respond accordingly to this witch hunt.”

Of course, Trump is willing to go further. On Wednesday, Sept. 10, the day before Bolsonaro’s verdict and sentencing, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated that “I can tell you this is a priority for the administration and the president is unafraid to use the economic might, the military might, of the United States to protect free speech around the world.” The comments were taken as a possible military threat against Brazil.

Defiance and costs

*President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and First Lady Rosângela Lula da Silva arrive in Brasilia for his 2023 presidential inauguration. (Photo: Gov. of Brazil)*

Brazilian authorities are defiant in the face of Trump’s threats.

“A president of one country cannot interfere in the sovereign decisions of another country. If he chooses to take further action, that’s his problem. We will respond as measures are taken,” Lula told a local television station.

“Threats like the one made today by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a statement that attacks Brazilian authority and ignores the facts and compelling evidence in the case files, will not intimidate our democracy,” Brazil’s foreign office said on X.

The potential impact of the dispute on US-Brazilian trade could be considerable. Last year trade between the two countries was worth an estimated $127.6 billion, according to the US Trade Representative. What is more, the US runs a surplus, with exports worth $49 billion and imports worth $42.3 billion and until now that surplus was growing. The US exports aircraft parts, refined oil, and gas turbines to Brazil and Brazil exports crude oil, coffee, unfinished iron and beef to the United States.

Analysis: The experience of dictatorship

The Brazilian government’s stance against Bolsonaro’s attempted insurrection and coup is informed by some harsh history in the tropical nation.

On April 1, 1964, Brazil’s top military commanders launched a coup against Brazilian President João Goulart and the parliamentary republic he headed, which they alleged was heading in a communistic direction. They established a military dictatorship that engaged in all the abuses for which dictatorships are known: extrajudicial disappearances, use of torture, media censorship and suspension of due process, among other crimes.

At first tentative, as the years went on the dictatorship became harder, deeper and more intrusive. The Constitution was suspended, Congress and state legislatures were dissolved and the civilian justice system was replaced with a military one that was more repressive, arbitrary and merciless. The dictatorship reached down into everyday life, into the school system, the humanities and the arts.

Brazil’s dictatorship lasted 21 years, until 1985. Despite its early fiscal successes and an economic “Brazilian miracle,” it ultimately collapsed amidst economic stress, inflation and popular demand for a return to democracy. In 1985 an election was held to select a new president. A new, democratic Constitution was approved in 1988.

It is this dictatorship that Brazilians remember as they protect their democratic government and Constitution. They know what dictatorship means in a way that Americans, who have never experienced one, do not. It gives an urgency and determination to their administration of justice and prosecution of Bolsonaro. It also makes it likely that he will actually have to pay the penalty for his duly established crimes.

By contrast, in the United States, Trump was impeached for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection but never removed or criminally prosecuted. Without a historical memory of loss of democracy and freedom, American politicians presumed that after 2021 Trump was neutralized and no further effort was required to defend democracy. Clearly they were wrong.

Now, in addition to assaulting democracy, due process, civilian control and the Constitution, Trump is attempting to undermine democracy in a democratic Brazil and defend a rogue president who assaulted the nation’s fundamental institutions in the same way he himself did in the United States.

The United States has played an intrusive and sometimes contradictory role in Brazil. It supported the coup and its plotters in 1964. Brazilians fought back and at one point the US ambassador was kidnapped by resistance fighters but released unharmed. Then, in the mid-1970s the United States, under President Jimmy Carter, condemned human rights abuses and suspended military aid.

The current situation harkens back to the bad old Cold War days of covert American interference in the sovereign, independent processes of otherwise democratic states. Only now, instead of defending American democracy against communism, Trump’s regime is overtly and blatantly trying to protect a convicted criminal, would-be dictator and, arguably a traitor against the application of justice in his own country—and Trump is no doubt fearful of a similar fate in his own case.

Commentary: The breakfast battle

So why should Americans—and specifically Floridians—care what happens in a land far away?

Actually, everyday Americans will feel the pain of this trade war and pay its price—and they’ll feel it every single morning.

That’s because when it comes to coffee, the United States gets 35 percent of its coffee from Brazil, the largest portion of all the coffee that comes in from Latin America. (Colombia comes in second, with about 27 percent of US coffee imports.)

From the moment that Trump first announced tariffs on coffee in April, exporters and people knew that the cost of coffee was going to rise precipitously.

“If Brazilian coffee suddenly becomes 50% more expensive in the US, roasters will have little choice but to look elsewhere. But none have the scale, pricing consistency, or logistical muscle of Brazil. This could lead to shortages and price hikes, not just in the US, but globally,” warned Sarah Charles, writing for the trade website Coffee Intelligence.

But the impact on coffee is as nothing compared to the impact of Trump’s tariffs on orange juice—because Brazil provides over half of US orange juice.

Trump’s tariff is likely to drive the price of retail orange juice up by double digits. Ironically, this is likely to badly affect the Florida citrus industry, already declining because of citrus greening, migrant worker crackdowns and hurricane damage. Indeed, as Florida production has declined, the middle processing and distribution companies have become more dependent on Brazilian imports.

With all orange juice prices set to rise because of the tariffs and a likely decline in demand as a result, purchase of Florida’s orange products will also fall. The new punitive tariffs will also decrease processing companies’ profits and disrupt the supply chain.

When Trump first announced tariffs in April, Brazilian orange juice was exempted. However, now that he’s specifically targeting Brazil for political reasons, those exemptions are off the table, unless he changes his mind again.

There is a real possibility that the addition of Trump’s trade war on Brazil, coming on top of all its other woes, will bring Florida’s citrus industry to an end.

But for the everyday American, it’s in the two most common breakfast staples that Americans will feel the most immediate pain of Trump’s Brazilian tariff tantrum. After a century of promoting orange juice as a refreshing and healthful way to start the morning, orange juice may be priced out of reach. Those office coffee breaks that everyone took for granted may be a thing of the past, along with the stereotypical office coffee pot sitting on the burner all day reducing the liquid inside to a caffeinated sludge.

Coffee has been a politically-charged beverage throughout American history. In 1773 following the Boston Tea Party and protests against an English tea tax (which was a tariff), Americans switched to coffee in a show of patriotic protest. The change held and Americans have been coffee drinkers ever since.

Now a domineering president has unilaterally put a new tariff on coffee as well as other vital imports in an effort to protect and defend a fellow insurrectionist and would-be dictator against his own people’s justice and democracy.

One of the key complaints against King George III in the Declaration of Independence was that he was “cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world” and imposing taxes without the peoples’ consent.

Perhaps it’s time for another protest against an unfair, unrepresentative and damaging tariff imposed by fiat, for, as the Declaration of Independence put it: “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

Just remember that as you drink your next morning orange juice and down your breakfast cup of coffee.

On a personal note: Doing business with dictators

I first became aware of Brazilian trade issues when I worked as the international trade reporter for the newspaper Defense News.

In that capacity I made the acquaintance of José Luis Whitaker Ribeiro at a trade conference.

Ribiero was chief executive officer of the giant Brazilian firm, Engesa. In the days before e-mail, we would communicate by fax. He was always prompt in responding, was always on the record, never held back, and provided a revealing and often humorously sarcastic insight into his business and his competitors. In other words, a perfect source.

An engineer, he and colleagues had founded Engesa to manufacture oil equipment in 1958. When the United States embargoed military supplies to the Brazilian dictatorship under President Jimmy Carter, Engesa began producing equipment for the Brazilian military.

But Engesa’s biggest boost came in 1979 when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. Engesa became a major supplier to the Iraqi military and its business boomed as it churned out tough, reliable, easily operated military vehicles. It even began developing its own main battle tank, which required a major investment.

The Iran-Iraq War ended in 1988 and Engesa presented Hussein with the bill, which was considerable.

And, as Ribeiro told me, Hussein simply decided not to pay. He just didn’t feel like it. He casually refused to do it. There was no collection agency in the world that could make him.

Engesa’s business collapsed. It would never recoup its investments. It wouldn’t be paid the billions it was owed. In 1993 it declared bankruptcy.

That experience provides yet another insight into the nature of dictatorships, wherever they’re located. No matter how much contractors, corporations and related parasites may believe they’re going to profit from a dictatorship, there’s a lesson to be learned.

That lesson: Dictators don’t pay their bills.

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Driving the wedge: Florida’s anti-vaxx mandate ban is giant opportunity for Democrats – Updated

*Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announces that Florida will be the first state in the nation to abolish all vaccine mandates. (Image: YouTube/News4JAX)*

Sept. 8, 2025 by David Silverberg

Updated 10:30 am with Joseph Ladapo comments to CNN and David Jolly statement.

The decision announced on Wednesday, Sept. 3, by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo to end all vaccination mandates in Florida hands Democratic candidates an enormous opportunity in next year’s elections.

It’s a classic wedge issue, one liable to split the opposition party.

While memories of dangers and uncertainty from a deadly pandemic are still fresh, DeSantis and Ladapo deliberately introduced a new vulnerability that hits every single Florida home.

By banning all vaccination mandates they’re threatening every child going to school in the state—every single one. They’re alarming parents. They’re menacing seniors. They’re defying science. They’re outraging doctors. They’re hurting the economy. They’re also risking Florida’s tourism and hospitality industry, which is already reeling from President Donald Trump’s international bullying, insults and tariffs.

It’s a situation that’s damaging, unsustainable and needs to be corrected at the polls—but they’ve provided the means to do that.

The announcement

The announcement was delivered by Ladapo at Grace Christian School in Valrico, Florida near Brandon, before an enthusiastically supportive audience. Also speaking at the event were DeSantis, first lady Casey DeSantis, Lt. Gov. Jay Collins and Florida Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas.

Ladapo was impassioned, insistent and fervent in his six-minute address. He built his case against vaccine mandates on moral and ethical grounds.

He was emphatic that the decision applied to every mandate, every requirement that schoolchildren be vaccinated, and repeated the phrase “all of them” four times and “every last one of them” three times.

“Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and, and, slavery, okay?” he said, emotionally. “Who am I as a government or anyone else? Or who am I as a man standing here now to tell you what you should put in your body?”

He continued: “I don’t have that right. Your body, your body is a gift from God. What you put into your body, what you put into your body is because of your relationship with your body and your God. I don’t have that right. Government does not have that right.”

While states had convinced people that they had the right to mandate vaccines, they do not, he said. “They do not have the right. Do not give it to them. Take it away from them. And we’re going to be starting that here in Florida.”

People should make their own decisions, he argued. “You don’t want to put whatever vaccines in your body, God bless you and I hope you make an informed decision. And that’s how it should be. That is, that is a moral ethical universe, not this nonsense where people who don’t know you are telling you what to put in your temple, the temple of your body. That is a gift from God. They don’t have that right.”

He thanked Florida lawmakers for supporting this position. He also noted that people regretted having taken the COVID-19 vaccine and wished they could undo it. Moreover, “…if we want to move toward a perfect world, a better world, you can’t do it by enslaving people in terrible philosophies and taking away people’s freedoms.”

Then he reiterated that all vaccine mandates in Florida “are going to be gone for sure” and said that DeSantis and the legislature would “get rid of the rest of it.”

“We need to end it,” he stated emphatically. “It’s the right thing to do and it’ll be wonderful for Florida to be the first state to do it.”

(A link to the full video is at the end of this article.)

In a CNN interview on Sunday morning, Sept. 7, Ladapo admitted that there had been no data review or research prior to his call for ending mandates.

“Absolutely not,” Ladapo told Jake Tapper, when asked if there had been any research done. “ … There’s this conflation of the science and, sort of, what is the right and wrong thing to do.”

He continued: “This is an issue, very clearly, of parents’ rights. So, do I need to analyze whether it’s appropriate for parents to be able to decide what’s appropriate to go into their child’s bodies? I don’t need to do an analysis on that,” Ladapo said.

*Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis takes the stage after Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo to address the crowd at Grace Christian School.* *(Image: YouTube/News4JAX)*

The political reaction

Republican politicians were split. Those who didn’t enthusiastically endorse the ban expressed their reservations with faint praise and a lack of enthusiasm, although none condemned it outright.

On the non-committal side, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), long an antagonist of DeSantis, told Marc Caputo of the news site Axios that “Florida already has a good system that allows families to opt out based on religious and personal beliefs, which balances our children’s health and parents’ rights.”

Another Republican, state Sen. Don Gaetz (R-1-Pensacola) was tepid: “If the surgeon general has valid and reliable evidence challenging the efficacy of certain vaccinations then of course I am open to his proposal,” Gaetz said in a statement to the Florida Phoenix. “As a layman, I also hope to hear from medical authorities.”

In contrast, Sen. Ashley Moody (R-Fla.), was enthusiastic, telling the conservative cable channel Newsmax: “They don’t call us the free state of Florida for nothing. One of the things I think stood out about our state during the last years, especially when we were dealing with [COVID-19], was that we pushed back and made sure that we were giving reasoned analysis throughout that time period and making sure that people knew we as state leaders understood our limits, that we respected individuals’ rights,” she said.

Rep. Byron Donalds (R-19-Fla.), who is running for governor with Trump’s endorsement, was immediately enthusiastic about ending the mandates. Throughout the COVID pandemic, he was an opponent of masking, social distancing and vaccine mandates. (Of note: Donalds himself contracted COVID and had to quarantine.)

“I believe parents should be empowered to make vaccination decisions for their children,” he posted on X, immediately after the announcement. Of course, he effusively praised Trump: “President Trump has done a great job bringing the MAHA [Make America Healthy Again] conversation forward.”

He also made sure to praise Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. prior to his Senate testimony: “[Secretary Kennedy] is doing a great job. He is dismantling bureaucracy. He is eliminating corruption. He is Making America Healthy Again. We are undergoing a health revolution thanks to his leadership & I wish him all the best tomorrow in [the Senate Finance Committee].”

His primary opponent for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, Paul Renner, former Speaker of the Florida House, fell into the non-committal category: “As Speaker, I opposed mandatory COVID vaccines and supported strong parental rights legislation. Parents should not be forced to have their children take a vaccine that they think is unsafe. However, we should have safe and effective vaccines that save lives.”

In stark contrast to the Republicans, Democrats were immediate and outspoken in their condemnation of banning mandates.

“The DeSantis Administration’s decision to end vaccine requirements will result in the deaths of thousands of Floridians,” Democratic Party Chair Nichole (Nikki) Fried declared in a statement. “Today’s announcement is yet another morally bankrupt play that will make our communities less safe, all while Republicans are kicking 2 million Floridians off their healthcare.”

Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-24-Fla.) called for Ladapo’s firing: “Are we losing our minds? This is getting ridiculous and pathetic. Are we trying to kill millions of innocent children? Childhood vaccines save lives. Abolishing them is insanity.”

In a Tallahassee press conference Democratic state senators blasted the ban.

Sen. Lori Berman (D-26-Boynton Beach), the Democratic Senate leader, call the ban “ridiculous” and “dangerous, anti-science, and anti-child,” adding, “Nobody wants to go back to the days of iron lungs.”

Sen. Tina Polsky (D-30-Boca Raton) noted her 2023 opposition to confirming Ladapo and said “He remains determined to prioritize political dogma over smart health decisions.”

Sen. Shevrin Jones (D-34-Miami Gardens) called the move “reckless” and accused the DeSantis administration of “actively undermining public health.”

David Jolly, the Democratic candidate for governor, called for Ladapo’s firing.

“Our surgeon general should be fired—today,” Jolly said in a 1-minute, 21-second video posted on X. “The good news is that Florida’s next governor gets to do that and I will do that on my very first day in office.” He called on the governor and legislature to stop the plan to lift the mandates and on his Republican opponents to condemn it as well and support vaccines.

He warned that parents are thinking of keeping their children home from school for fear of infection.

He also warned that “we have a raw ignorance infecting our politics today. It is time to embrace science and health and yes, vaccines.”

*Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Jolly. (Image: Campaign)*

Analysis: Wielding the wedge

The big bet that DeSantis and Ladapo have made is that more Floridians will favor lifting mandates than maintaining them.

In this they listened to the extreme anti-vaxxers in Florida and in the Trump regime, most notably Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Both DeSantis and Ladapo have long been anti-vaxxers, as evidenced during the COVID pandemic. They opposed public health measures at the time and moved to abolish other health mandates. (It merits noting that DeSantis privately received the vaccine and disappeared from the public for two weeks in 2022 when he was rumored to have caught COVID.)

Given Kennedy’s all-out assault on vaccines and the scientific institutions that evaluate and administer them, like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, DeSantis and Ladapo no doubt believed they were currying favor with Trump himself.

Moreover, they were carrying forward the COVID-era anti-vaccine movement. Certainly that anti-scientific sentiment was in evidence from their immediate audience at the Grace Christian School, which cheered and applauded. In their bubble they no doubt expect overwhelming support and agreement and they may think that this base can swing the 2026 election in their preferred direction.

But just as the medical data doesn’t support the assault on vaccines, so the polling data doesn’t support the opposition to them.

In a bit of remarkable timing, the KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation) and the Washington Post newspaper conducted a survey of Floridians’ attitudes toward vaccines in July and August.

The survey found that 82 percent of the Floridians in the sample (of 2,716 people nationwide) favored requiring vaccines for measles and polio (while allowing some health and religious exemptions), with only 17 percent of respondents opposing them.

This tracked with the national results, which found that 81 percent of all respondents favored school vaccine mandates and only 18 percent opposed them. (One percent of the respondents skipped the question.)

*Results of a KFF-Washington Post poll on attitudes toward vaccine mandates. (Chart: KFF, Washington Post)*

These results indicate that Floridians as a whole are unlikely to favor the DeSantis/Ladapo vaccine mandate ban as its full consequences sink in.

In fact, it appears that DeSantis and Ladapo have handed the Democrats a precious wedge issue, one so emotionally fraught and divisive that it could split Republican voters to break for sensible, science-based Democratic candidates who care about their survival and that of their children. After all, this is a matter of life and death—and Florida has been through it before.

Democratic messaging should emphasize the threat that DeSantis and Ladapo have posed to Floridians’ kids, themselves and the state and it should be pounded home again and again and again, in every speech, statement and advertisement.

It’s as though DeSantis and Ladapo have put an iron wedge in an otherwise seemingly solid log and handed Democrats a sledgehammer to hit it.

It should be pounded hard, loud and continuously until that log splits.

Then Democrats should light a fire with the kindling—and make sure it burns hot.

To see the entire 6-minute, 13-second speech by Dr. Joseph Ladapo announcing the ending of vaccine mandates in Florida, click here.

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After Alligator Alcatraz: A modest proposal

Aug. 25, 2025 by David Silverberg

On Thursday, Aug. 21, Judge Kathleen Williams of the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida ruled that the state of Florida’s concentration, detention and deportation camp, Alligator Alcatraz, had to cease operations and be dismantled within 60 days, which falls on Oct. 21.

The State of Florida appealed the ruling within an hour of the decision’s announcement. That appeal is now pending and could go up to the Supreme Court.

However that appeal plays out, it is not too soon to begin thinking about what should happen to the site of what had previously been the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport.

This essay recommends that the site be converted into the “William J. Mitsch Memorial Wetlaculture Experiment and Everglades Restoration Project.”

The article will review the court ruling and explain the proposal.

The ruling and reaction

In her ruling, Williams found that the State of Florida, in its haste to set up Alligator Alcatraz, had violated federal laws requiring an assessment of the camp’s environmental impact.

The most relevant law was the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), “which requires that major federal actions significantly affecting the human environment undergo environmental review processes.”

While state and federal officials (Defendants) acknowledged possible “deficiencies” in their haste to establish the camp, they argued that any injunction should be vacated while the case made its way through the judicial process (i.e., the camp should be allowed to continue functioning throughout legal deliberations).

Williams was having none of it. Indeed, so blatant was the state’s indifference to due process and the rule of law that Williams’ scorn comes through even in the dry language of a court ruling.

“Here, there weren’t ‘deficiencies’ in the agency’s process,” she wrote. “There was no process.” [Emphasis ours.]

She continued: “The Defendants consulted with no stakeholders or experts and did no evaluation of the environmental risks and alternatives from which the Court may glean the likelihood that the agency would choose the same course if it had done a NEPA-compliant evaluation.”

(The full, 82-page text of William’s ruling can be read here and is also available for viewing and download at the end of this article.)

The ruling also dealt with issues of venue, finding that the Southern District of Florida was the proper court to consider the case; the degree of permanent environmental harm the camp was causing; and responsibility for the camp’s establishment and operations (the State of Florida rather than the federal government).

Because of its violations of law and environmental impact, Williams issued an injunction that prohibited the defendants from installing any new lighting “or doing any paving, filling, excavating, or fencing; or doing any other site expansion, including placing or erecting any additional buildings, tents, dormitories, or other residential or administrative facilities,” although modification of existing buildings is permitted for the sake of safety or environmental mitigation.

New detainees cannot be brought to the camp.

The order applies to everyone involved in camp operations, whether state or federal.

According to the order, “No later than sixty (60) days,” which falls on October 21, state and federal officials have to remove the fencing, lighting and “all generators, gas, sewage, and other waste and waste receptacles that were installed to support this project”—essentially, returning the site to its prior state and giving Miccosukee Tribe members complete access to the area.

Lastly, the plaintiffs were required to post a token, $100 bond.

Not only was an appeal of the order immediately filed in the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, Ga., but it was predictably denounced by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).

“This is a judge that was not going to give us a fair shake,” DeSantis said the day after the ruling during remarks in Panama City. “This was preordained, very much an activist judge that is trying to do policy from the bench.”

He continued: “This is not going to deter us. We’re going to continue working on the deportations, advancing that mission,” referring to President Donald Trump’s roundups and deportations.

The state is proceeding with plans for a “Deportation Depot” camp west of Jacksonville, Fla.

“We’re not going to be deterred; we’re totally in the right on this,” DeSantis said. “But I would also note, because of the success of Alligator Alcatraz, there’s demand for more.”

While appealing the ruling, Florida officials may simply ignore the judge’s order. There is precedent for this.

In that case, Williams was the judge whose order was defied by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier. In April she issued an injunction against enforcing a Florida law making it a misdemeanor for undocumented migrants to enter the state. Uthmeier sent a letter to police chiefs and sheriffs saying that the injunction was legally wrong and he could not force them to obey it. In June, Williams found Uthmeier in contempt but his only punishment was to produce biweekly reports on enforcement actions.

“Litigants cannot change the plain meaning of words as it suits them, especially when conveying a court’s clear and unambiguous order,” Williams wrote at the time. “Fidelity to the rule of law can have no other meaning.”

It remains to be seen if those words will have any impact on the dismantlement of Alligator Alcatraz.

A modest proposal: Restoration and renewal

*Bill Mitsch in his natural habitat, 2021. (Photo: Bill Mitsch)*

William Jerome Mitsch was one of the world’s foremost scientific experts on wetlands like the Everglades and did much of his work at Florida Gulf Coast University. In 2022 he retired after a 47-year career and passed away in February of this year at the age of 77.

(To see a full profile of Mitsch and his work see: “On a personal note: An appreciation of Bill Mitsch, a wetlands warrior.”)

In 2018, Mitsch proposed a solution to the problem of pollution affecting the Everglades.

He called it “wetlaculture.”

The concept was that pollution could be defeated by creating new wetlands and this could be done by planting sawgrass, which is native and thrives in this area. The sawgrass would filter out contaminants while letting water flow. These new wetlands could be created on previously cultivated land. He believed that the grass would create soil so fertile that nitrate fertilizers would be unnecessary.

He calculated that new wetlands could be created over a 10-year time period. At the end of that time, the soil would be flipped and used for farming for 10 years. Then, it could be flipped again to lie fallow for another 10 years and so on, indefinitely.

A small-scale Wetlaculture experiment is already under way in Freedom Park in Naples, Fla. There, 28 bins hold sawgrass and researchers experiment with different levels of water and nutrients in the different bins as the sawgrass grows. Scientists measure nutrients in the soil and see if nitrates and phosphorous are being removed. When the soil is deemed to be clean and fertile enough they’ll plant crops and see how well they grow.

*A sign marks the spot of the current Wetlaculture experiment in Freedom Park in Naples, Fla. (Photo: Author)*

Now the time has come to attempt a Wetlaculture experiment on a grander scale—perhaps the scale of the 39-acre site of Alligator Alcatraz.

Commentary: A better future

If Alligator Alcatraz is in fact closed and dismantled the “William J. Mitsch Memorial Wetlaculture Experiment and Everglades Restoration Project,” would be a most fitting replacement.

The concrete, asphalt and especially the runway could be scraped and removed and in its place be planted with sawgrass with an eye to flipping it after 10 years, or whenever scientists deem it appropriate. The plantings would likely restore water flow, cleanse pollution and prepare the soil for crops in their turn.

Instead of destroying the natural environment, the “William J. Mitsch Memorial Wetlaculture Experiment and Everglades Restoration Project” would restore it. Instead of the constant floodlights, the area would be restored to the darkness that made it part of Big Cypress’ International Dark Sky Park. Instead of noise and traffic, there would be quiet and calm. Instead of harming wildlife, animals could thrive. Instead of fencing out the public and the Miccosukee Indian Tribe, all would have access.

As for the expense, it would be far less than the $450 million expected to cost Florida taxpayers to run Alligator Alcatraz this year alone. It would also cost Florida and the nation far, far less to maintain in every subsequent year. Moreover, because it would be a scientific experiment, it would be eligible for academic and research funding.

Most of all, it would replace a concentration camp that is likely to be a blot and a stain on Florida’s history and on the history of the United States. Rather than a disgrace, Florida and the Everglades would have a site that improves the future, addresses environmental challenges and would be in harmony with the land, water, plants, animals, people and climate. Instead of punishment, the Mitsch Memorial Experiment would be a place of possibilities.

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it,” Yogi Berra, the Yankee baseball catcher famous for his malapropisms, supposedly said. Along the old Tamiami Trail, right on the Collier County-Dade County line, Florida and the American people have come to a fork in the road. One path leads to a concentration camp of deliberate human suffering, oppression and brutality. The other path leads to a restoration of nature’s balance, a hopeful future and great potential benefits.

The time has come to take the fork in the road. A “William J. Mitsch Memorial Wetlaculture Experiment and Everglades Restoration Project” is clearly the better path to follow.

*The Everglades. (Photo: National Park Service/Robert Krayer)*

To read all of The Paradise Progressive’s coverage of Bill Mitsch, click here.

Click the button below to read and download the full 82-page text of Judge Kathleen Williams’ decision.

Alligator Alcatraz closure order 8-21-25 Download

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Collier County ‘Bill of Rights Sanctuary’ law could be lifeline for Alligator Alcatraz detainees

*The ordinance establishing Collier County as a Sanctuary County.*

Aug. 21, 2025 by David Silverberg

State and federal actions at the Alligator Alcatraz detention and deportation camp that violate the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights could be nullified under Collier County’s “Bill of Rights Sanctuary County” ordinance, since the camp is in Collier County, Florida.

Violators of these rights can be personally held liable in civil litigation under the ordinance.

This may present a lifeline to detainees and a possible avenue of release for their attorneys to pursue.

The camp is intended as a holding facility for undocumented migrants seized in roundups prior to their deportation. It faces growing opposition from local residents, religious leaders, the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida and environmentalists. (For more on the camp see: “Straight outta Dachau: Past lessons and potential futures for ‘Alligator Alcatraz’.”)

The venue argument

On Monday, Aug. 18, Judge Rodolfo Ruiz of the US District Court in the Southern District of Florida ruled that the proper venue for resolution of a lawsuit regarding Alligator Alcatraz was in the Middle District of Florida.

Prior to that, lawyers for detainees being held in the camp had filed their lawsuit in the Southern District of Florida, which covers Miami-Dade County since the site sits on the boundaries of Collier and Miami-Dade counties and the facility was previously run by Miami-Dade County.

(The lawsuit brought by the detainees’ lawyer named Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem as defendant and charged that authorities at Alligator Alcatraz had denied detainees their First and Fifth amendment rights by blocking and impeding access to counsel.)

*The Southern District of Florida, comprised of Broward, Dade, Highlands, Indian River, Martin, Monroe, Okeechobee, Palm Beach, and St. Lucie counties. (Map: US District Court)*

However, the state, which established the camp and opened it on July 1, argued that the camp’s proper address was Ochopee, Florida, which is in Collier County.

(The camp sits on the 39-acre site of what was the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport. Two thirds of it is in Collier County, although the training facility was run by Miami-Dade County. Its precise coordinates are: 25°51′42″N 080°53′49″W.)

State lawyers argued that because it was in Collier County, the proper venue for any litigation was in the Middle District of Florida, which includes that county.

*The Middle District of Florida, comprised of* Baker, Bradford, Brevard, Charlotte, Citrus, Clay, Collier, Columbia, De Soto, Duval, Flagler, Glades, Hamilton, Hardee, Hendry, Hernando, Hillsborough, Lake, Lee, Manatee, Marion, Nassau, Orange, Osceola, Pasco, Pinellas, Polk, Putnam, St. Johns, Sarasota, Seminole, Sumter, Suwannee, Union, and Volusia counties. (Map: US District Court)

In his ruling, Ruiz agreed, officially establishing Collier County as the location of the camp. (The full text of the 47-page ruling is available for reading and download below.)

Collier County is a ‘Bill of Rights Sanctuary county’

On Aug. 22, 2023, by a vote of 4 to 1, the Collier County Board of Commissioners passed an ordinance declaring the county to be “a Bill of Rights Sanctuary County.”

(The full text of the ordinance is available for viewing and download at the end of this article.)

“Collier County has the right to be free from the commanding hand of the federal government and has the right to refuse to cooperate with federal government officials in response to unconstitutional federal government measures, and to proclaim a Bill of Rights Sanctuary for law-abiding citizens in its County,” states the ordinance.

It defines an “unlawful act” as “Any federal act, law, order, rule, or regulation, which violates or unreasonably restricts, impedes, or impinges upon an individual’s Constitutional rights including, but not limited to, those enumerated in Amendments 1 through 10 to the United States Constitution.”

Further, it states: “Any such ‘Unlawful Act’ is invalid in Collier County and shall not be recognized by Collier County, and shall be considered null, void and of no effect in Collier County, Florida.”

The ordinance defines penalties for violations in Section Five: “Anyone within the jurisdiction of Collier County, Florida, accused of being in violation of this ordinance may be sued in Circuit Court for declaratory and injunctive relief, damages and attorneys’ fees.”

Of note: The ordinance specifically states that “anyone” in the county may be sued if they violate a person’s constitutional rights.

Analysis: Possible implications

Because Collier County is a “Bill of Rights Sanctuary” county, Alligator Alcatraz detainees may have standing to sue the US government for violation of their constitutional rights.

What is more, their guards and the operators of the camp may be personally liable for any constitutional violations under the same ordinance.

Further, county employees, officials and law enforcement officers are prohibited from aiding, assisting or abetting federal Alligator Alcatraz activities if those activities are determined to violate constitutional rights.

Detainee lawsuits under the county ordinance—and the ordinance itself—could pause or halt transfers into the camp and force due process adherence and proper treatment. It could also be the basis for an injunction stopping the camp’s operations. (The camp is already under an injunction prohibiting construction and infrastructure expansion. This injunction is set to expire today, Aug. 21.)

The county ordinance has never been applied or tested in court. During the debate preceding its passage, opponents argued that it was unconstitutional on its face. Nonetheless, the Collier County Board of Commissioners passed it.

Environmental lawsuit

A different lawsuit filed by Friends of the Everglades, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida is currently ongoing and has venue issues similar to the one ruled on by Judge Ruiz.

That lawsuit was filed in US District Court in Miami on June 27. It named the heads of the US Department of Homeland Security, its US Immigration and Customs Enforcement directorate, the Florida Division of Emergency Management and Miami-Dade County as defendants.

To read The Paradise Progressive’s previous coverage of the Collier County sanctuary ordinance’s passage and the concept of sanctuary in general, click here.

Click the button below to read and download the full, 6-page Collier County Bill of Rights Sanctuary Ordinance.

Collier County Ordinance 2023-39 Engrossed FINAL Download

Click the button below to read and download the full 47-page ruling by Judge Rodolfo Ruiz.

08-18-25 Order Dismissing in Part and Transferring Plaintiffs’ Complaint for Improper Venue Download

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From White House to Gold House: Trump, Nero and remodeling madness

*An angry mob of betrayed Trump supporters attack the White House Ballroom in the artificial intelligence-generated video “MAGA Ballroom 2028.”*

Aug. 11, 2025 by David Silverberg

On July 31, President Donald Trump announced that he had ordered the building of a new $200 million ballroom onto the White House.

The official announcement stated that Trump was “solving” the problem of too little White House event space and the ballroom was “much-needed.” It would be “exquisite,” “ornately designed” and “carefully crafted,” according to the announcement.

He also stated that the ballroom would be paid for by private donations.

The proposed White House ballroom as conceived by the architect, viewed from above. The new ballroom is at the center, connected to the existing White House (on the right) by a columned patio or corridor. (Art: McCrery Architects)

*The proposed White House ballroom as conceived by the architect, viewed from the southwest. The new ballroom is the square addition on the right. (Art: McCrery Architects)*

*The interior conception of the proposed White House ballroom.* *(Art: McCrery Architects)*

The ballroom is hardly the first physical change Trump has made to the White House. He had the famous Rose Garden paved over to create a plantless patio.

*Before and after photos of the Rose Garden.*

He’s festooned the Oval Office and the rest of the building with the garish gold ornamentation for which he is known.

*Gold flourishes on the walls and ceiling of the Oval Office.*

*President Donald Trump walks through an Oval Office door with gold decorations he had installed.*

Trump’s building and gilding of the White House is reminiscent of another potentate who extravagantly built an elaborate domicile—and who had gold as his dominant decorating scheme.

The Gold House

A profile of Nero on a Roman gold coin called an “aureas.” (Photo: American Numismatic Society)

Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus is better known to the world as Nero, and is one of the most infamous Roman emperors for his madness, extravagance, unpredictable and arbitrary rule and extreme and indiscriminate cruelty. He served as Rome’s leading politician and decisionmaker from the years 54 to 68 of the Common Era.

Starting in 64 Nero built a palace for himself named the Domus Aurea in Latin, or Golden House in English. It was constructed on land burned by the Great Fire of 64 that leveled enormous portions of Rome—and which many critics suspected Nero had ordered set in order to clear the space.

Nero thought he was invincible and untouchable. He murdered or forced the suicide of the most distinguished and able Roman politicians and statesmen and replaced them with his own sycophants and toadies. As the historian Suetonius put it: “Transported and puffed up with such successes, as he considered them, he boasted that no princeps had ever known what power he really had… .”

Nero wanted to surpass the Hellenistic palaces of overseas kingdoms and he had a grandiose, malignantly narcissistic sense of himself, so he built to impress. The land for the Gold House is estimated by some scholars to have covered a massive 300 acres in the heart of Rome. It had 150 large and small rooms and a footprint of 16,000 square meters (over 172,000 square feet, about the equivalent of three football fields). Some rooms had ceilings 12 feet high, all of them decorated and embellished with gold and jewels, with one, a circular dining room, that had ceiling panels that could be opened to shower flower petals and perfume on diners as they revolved around Nero in the center like the sun.

*A tour guide in the remains of the Gold House displays a schematic of its plans. (Photo: Author)*

*An overhead visualization of the complete Gold House and grounds. (Art: JR Casals)*

Not one to keep his light under a bushel, Nero commissioned a 120-foot high statue of himself to stand at the entrance (the Statue of Liberty is 305 feet high).

*Visualization of the Colossus of Nero with other buildings of the time, for scale.*

He also had an immense, artificial lake built surrounded by miniature cities and landscapes of fields, farmlands, vineyards and forests populated with every sort of animal.

After a mere four years, the house was completed in 68. When Nero dedicated it, he remarked, “Good! Now I can at last begin to live like a human being.”

Nero didn’t have much time to enjoy his power or his monster mansion because that same year, faced with his misrule, extreme taxation, public discontent, provincial uprisings and mutinies by discontented generals, even the otherwise subservient and bullied Senate revolted and declared him an enemy of Rome. Now the target of all Romans, after trying to escape the city he chose to die by his own hand.

The Gold House was a huge embarrassment to all subsequent Roman emperors, who did what they could to obliterate it—and did so by overbuilding it with structures that the entire Roman public could enjoy.

On the giant lake the emperor Vespasian ordered the building of the Flavian Amphitheater, or what is today called the Colosseum. Other emperors like Titus and Trajan built huge public baths.

Nero himself was subject to a “hostis iudicatio,” a posthumous trial for treason, and he was subject to the Roman practice of “damnatio memoriae,” the damnation of his memory. His name was erased from monuments and records and his statues removed or defaced. While his giant colossus remained standing, its head was replaced with a representation of the sun god Sol Invictus.

Today there’s barely any hint of the Gold House. Tourists enter it through an otherwise obscure entrance in a hillside. Tours are underground but visitors can get a sense of its vastness in the dimly lit corridors and chambers.

*The modern entrance to the Gold House. (Photo: Author)*

*During tours visitors and guides wear hardhats in the enormous rooms. (Photo: Author)*

The Golden House is an object lesson that excess and insanity may ultimately bring about a reckoning that topples both the ruler and the buildings he constructs.

The White House

The American Executive Mansion—it wasn’t formally called the White House until 1901—while hardly a hovel, was a relatively modest presidential home for its time and so it has remained since it was first occupied in 1800.

When designed it was intended to reflect republican simplicity and virtue in contrast to the grandiose monarchical palaces of Europe. It was also intended to convey the dignity and stability of the American executive and inspire respect rather than awe. Its classical proportions and symmetry symbolized the rationality and enlightenment of the American government itself.

The design was selected in a 9-way competition. Thomas Jefferson entered anonymously but lost out to Irish-born immigrant architect James Hoban.

While the White House has been renovated many times—including a complete gutting and structural rebuilding between 1949 and 1951—the renovations were always made with respect for the building’s history, significance and the intentions of its founders, which included George Washington.

One of the most notable renewals was overseen by first lady Jaqueline Kennedy, who unveiled her efforts to the world in a television tour on Valentine’s Day, 1962. She’d overseen an interior redesign that reflected the building’s past and its historic meaning, enhancing its elegance and stature, brought back significant objects, invited widespread public participation and drew on the knowledge of experts and historians.

By contrast, Trump’s changes, including his announced ballroom, have been unilateral, secret and one might say, dictatorial. Given his almost total lack of historical perspective, knowledge or interest, they pay no respect to the building’s past or its meaning.

When Trump announced his ballroom, he had already selected McCrery Architects as designer, Clark Construction for the building and AECOM for the engineering. There were no public requests for proposals, design competitions, competitive bids, transparent selections or publicly accessible contracts. (Given Trump’s past record of non-payment, one hopes for the contractors’ sake that they’re getting their cash up front!)

As a result, the mockery began almost immediately.

*An AI image mocking the Trump ballroom. (Art: AI/anonymous)*

It has also sparked resentment, as have his other changes. Nowhere was this more clearly expressed than in an AI-generated video titled “MAGA Ballroom 2028,” created by Ari Kuschnir, a digital consultant and founder of the company “m ss ng p eces.”

This 1-minute, 45-second video depicts angry, resentful MAGA supporters suffering while Trump and his Cabinet members feast in the new ballroom. The people ultimately revolt and attack the building the same way the Trump-incited rioters attacked the Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021.

*Windows shatter inside the Trump ballroom as rioters attack it in the AI video “MAGA Ballroom 2028.”*

While “MAGA Ballroom 2028” may appear extreme and emotional, it’s a good reminder that leaders, like Nero, who behave erratically, spend extravagantly and flaunt their imperiousness in the form of ostentatious, egotistical buildings, may ultimately face a very nasty comeuppance at the hands of the people they seek to dominate.

To read a detailed account of Nero and the Great Fire of Rome, click the button below.

Nero and the Great Fire of Rome Download

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Heavily redacted Alligator Alcatraz evacuation plan sheds little light on hurricane response

*A hurricane hits Alligator Alcatraz. (Art: AI for TPP/ChatGPT)*

Aug. 4, 2025 by David Silverberg

A draft hurricane evacuation plan for the Alligator Alcatraz concentration camp in the Everglades released by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is so heavily redacted that the public and relevant officials cannot determine its effectiveness or use it for planning purposes.

(The full document is available for viewing and download at the end of this posting.)

“We can’t go by just blacked-out information in a 30-page document and just trust the DeSantis administration,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-25-Fla.) told CBS News Miami in an interview. “This is what is unacceptable. We absolutely need to have a clear, written, confirmed plan in hand from the Division of Emergency Management and ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], who are responsible for these detainees at the end of the day.”

“The 33-page draft plan appears to detail alternate facilities that could be used in an evacuation, procedures for detainee transportation and other measures that would be enacted in the event of a powerful storm or other emergency,” stated state Rep. Anna Eskamani (D-42-Orlando) in a Facebook posting. “But specific details are a secret. Officials blacked out almost all of the pages, citing exemptions in the state’s public records law that allow information about ‘tactical operations’ during emergencies to be shielded from disclosure.”

DeSantis released the draft “South Florida Detention Facility Continuity of Operations Plan” on Wednesday, July 30 in response to a report in The Miami Herald newspaper the same day that Alligator Alcatraz lacked an evacuation plan in the event of a major weather event.

“Legacy media made a mistake by concocting a false narrative that can so easily be disproven…” he posted on X. “Failed drive-by attempt…”

He released the draft to Florida’s Voice Radio, a conservative media platform, which headlined its X posting, “WRONG AGAIN! The Miami Herald reports FAKE NEWS that @GovRonDeSantis, @KevinGuthrieFL and @FLSERT have no “formal hurricane plan” for Alligator Alcatraz. Here it is.”

The Voice then posted two pages of the plan, the cover and a summary sheet. The full 33-page plan was then released to media outlets with extensive redactions. (The plan refers to Alligator Alcatraz as the South Florida Detention Facility (SFDF), its bureaucratic designation.)

The evacuation plan was not posted to any official state website that this author could determine. Since it is still a draft—essentially, the concept of plan—The Miami Herald was technically correct that Alligator Alcatraz does not have an evacuation plan.

Commentary: The hidden dangers of hiding

Because details of the plan remain secret, emergency managers, law enforcement, medical personnel and local officials cannot take it into account when they make their own hurricane plans should an evacuation be necessary, nor can they coordinate their efforts with those of authorities, either state or federal, at Alligator Alcatraz.

This is particularly acute for officials and law enforcement officers in Collier and Miami-Dade counties, where Alligator Alcatraz sits astride their mutual borders.

There is a historic precedent for a plan’s secrecy causing extreme harm during an emergency.

In 1906 the emergency plans for the city of San Francisco resided in the mind of one man: Fire Chief Dennis Sullivan, who never shared them with anyone. Sullivan was incapacitated in the first shock of the earthquake that occurred in the early hours of April 18. Living on the top story of one of the city’s firehouses, he fell through the floor into the basement when the building broke apart, getting severely scalded by a broken radiator when he hit the bottom.

Sullivan never recovered from his injuries, dying three days later. As a result, first responders and officials had no guidance or direction in their response, which contributed to the city’s extensive damage when it was ravaged by fire.

As the 2012 book Masters of Disaster: The Political and Leadership Lessons of America’s Greatest Disasters by this author states: “…A critical lesson from the San Francisco earthquake and fire is that a plan is only as good as the people who know it. Disaster plans have to be known in advance by key decisionmakers and shared among those people who will implement them. They cannot rely entirely on a single individual and ultimately, they cannot be kept secret.”

Alligator Alcatraz has been so hastily thrown together and poorly conceived that nothing about it—not its detention, inmate processing, housing, food, shelter, or evacuation plan—can be judged at face value as acceptable.

Further, its secrecy in all aspects, whether the refusal to allow unannounced inspections, the difficulties of attorneys to meet their clients (currently the subject of a lawsuit), the blindsiding of local officials, and now the covertness of its evacuation plan make everything about it suspect. As an unfinalized draft, there is no telling which officials have input into the final product. Even then, if this is the final plan, its secrecy to all but a few officials renders it ineffective.

If Alligator Alcatraz is in all respects legal and proper, as DeSantis contends, it should be open to inspection, visits, detainee access, due process, public scrutiny, press examination and all the other legal standards of incarceration that govern correctional facilities in the United States.

And an evacuation plan that’s secret to all but a few is no plan at all.

Click on the button below to read and download the full “South Florida Detention Facility Continuity of Operations Plan” with redactions.

Draft South Florida Detention Facility Continuity of Operations Plan 7-30-25 Download