They Call Him Big, Mr. Big
“He said, if it’s not out in full, we’ll sue your ass off.”
The person being threatened is Tony Dokoupil, anchor for CBS Evening News. “He said” refers to President Donald Trump. The “it’s” refers to the interview Dokoupil just conducted with the president. But the person delivering the threat is not Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s one-time fixer. It is tender, 28-year-old Karoline Leavitt, White House Press Secretary and adroit Trump henchman.
We all know Trump changed roles in 2016 from private businessman to president of the United States. It must be as obvious that he did not change tactics. With his second administration running so true to gangster script, can anyone doubt the validity of the criminal charges brought against him in his interregnum period?
Trump’s arsenal is small. It contains just a few unimaginative, but effective weapons: threat, intimidation, extortion, blackmail, calumniation, public abuse. Satisfied with those, Trump swapped out his goons. He had to. While he got away, his old gang ruined themselves in his service, getting nabbed, exposed, or convicted, then pardoned by an erstwhile boss turned president who wanted nothing more to do with them. His new coterie of hitmen was just too good: Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, and young Leavitt herself. Their various titles are meaningless. They all serve one function: Trump mugs. And their ingenious boss managed to get them on the federal payroll. Cool.
A brief review might recall those earlier, halcyon days of Citizen Trump’s trivial criminal indiscretions.
The charges Trump escaped by regaining the presidency in 2024 would sound trite to us now if we could remember what they were. A brief review might recall those earlier, halcyon days of Citizen Trump’s trivial criminal indiscretions:
Willfully retaining national defense information. Obstructing justice. Making false statements. Interfering with a federal investigation. Corruptly obstructing an official proceeding. Conspiracy to defraud the United States. Falsifying business records. Solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer.
How quaint. How our gangster has grown.
Bumptious after the July 1, 2024, Supreme Court ruling that former presidents are immune from criminal prosecution,1 Trump equipped his new pack of punks with his favorite techniques along with promises to extend his immunity to them. He then unstoppered those odious creatures with the directive to take the grievous offenses he once inflicted within his private sphere to the nation. The resulting offenses include:
Blinding U.S. citizens during illegal immigration raids. Disappearing persons unknown sans trial or charges to foreign high-security prisons. Conducting surprise bombing raids on countries Trump considers disobedient. Directing the Department of Justice to open without evidence investigations against individuals he considers threats. Dismantling federal agencies he dislikes. Withholding Congressionally allocated funding from institutions he dislikes. Threatening to impose ruinous tariffs on countries unless they agree to pay millions of dollars a year to Trump Organization for use of the Trump name for future or fantasy real estate projects.
How could the purported offender of former days have been clean if he is so rife with rot now?
Trump’s feud with Colorado is easier to grasp than his war against the world precisely because it’s so petty.
How Trump applies coercion on a more intimate level is worth noting. His feud with Colorado, for example, is easier to grasp than his war against the world precisely because it’s so petty: Colorado refused to obey Trump’s unlawful demand that they release Tina Peters from a Colorado prison and that made Trump mad. In a nutshell:
In August 2024, former Colorado elections clerk Tina Peters was convicted on seven state charges of election interference and sentenced to nine years in prison. By May 2025 Trump demanded Colorado release her. Colorado refused. Come August, Trump demanded again they release her, threatening harsh measures if they did not. Again, Colorado refused. In November, Trump’s Federal Bureau of Prisons requested the Colorado Department of Corrections transfer Peters to federal custody. This request was rebuffed. On December 11, Trump announced on Trump Social that he was granting Peters a full pardon, a meaningless gesture as he lacks authority to pardon state convictions. Peters remains in prison.
Throughout 2025, as the state persistently defied him, Trump began dealing Colorado the harsh blows he had promised, blows only a U.S. president is in a position to deliver. He started off in March subtle, but rancorous by demanding his portrait be removed from Colorado’s Capitol building, claiming it had been “purposefully distorted.”
At a press conference on September 2, Trump announced he was moving the preeminent U.S. Space Command from Colorado to Alabama. The relocation, he claimed, would create over 30,000 jobs and attract hundreds of billions of dollars in investments for Alabama. That was just Trump talking, but it indicated the damage he hoped to inflict on Colorado as a result of the move. In that press conference, Trump admitted his decision was based, in part, on how Colorado ran its elections.2 Trump did not allude to his deeper disapproval of how Colorado prosecuted an election denier for giving an unauthorized person illegal access to state voting machines to make illicit backups to help support Trump’s unfounded claim that he had won the 2020 election.
Trump’s December campaign against The Centennial State was awesome. First, he announced plans to shut down the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, including its Mesa Laboratory. He then vetoed Arkansas Valley Conduit, a widely approved nonpartisan bill of major importance for the state. The project would pipe water from Pueblo Reservoir near the base of the Rocky Mountains 130 miles to 39 communities in southeastern Colorado bereft of local sources of safe drinking water due to contaminated groundwater. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, hoped Trump’s veto had nothing to do with her November 2025 vote in favor of releasing the Epstein files. As a jolly slap to top off the holiday month, Trump called Colorado governor Jared Polis a “sleazebag.”
Though the good people of southeastern Colorado remain staunch Trump supporters, they wonder about what he did to their water project.
“I don’t understand why,” said one victim of the veto. But she had apparently thought about it. “I guarantee you he’s done it for a reason.”3
Ignorance can constipate a thinking creature for its entire lifetime. Lucky for Trump so many are so afflicted. It keeps his gangster show rolling.
We are living the land of Mr Big now. Hulked in capacious suit jacket; overbearing wide red tie; fluttering, dark, calf-length overcoat, the ungainly man looms ominously over Colorado where the parched folk highly inconvenienced by contaminated groundwater remain loyal, confident in their knowledge that he shafted them for a reason.
Ignorance can constipate a thinking creature for its entire lifetime. Lucky for Trump so many are so afflicted. It keeps his gangster show rolling. The woman from southeastern Colorado — so sure Mr. Big had a reason to cut off safe drinking water from her and her family, crippling their livelihood, hamstringing their community — will maybe wake up when it’s her daughter blinded in Mr. Big’s next ICE raid, sprayed at close range with “nonlethal” chemicals DHS4 secretary Christi Noem says those agents don’t use. Maybe that lady will wake up when it’s her elderly mother’s neck that’s broken by a Mr. Big ICE agent using a chokehold Noem says agents apply only when warranted. Or maybe this woman will wake up while sitting in her car telling one of Mr. Big’s ICE dudes she’s not mad at him, a dude who shoots her at point-blank range then swears viciously at her slumped and bloody corpse.
But that lady’s reality show will have ended. Her hero, Mr. Big, will have escaped scot-free, his bombast and foul threats never once associated in her dim mind with the horrors he committed during her lifetime on a daily basis, indeed, as a way of life.
The remaining reality show audience will surely take that simple woman’s death in stride, keen only to learn what repulsive act Mr. Big will undertake next. When he tells them, be it ever so awful — the more awful the better — delighted titters will sweep through their ranks: “Oh, he can’t do that.” And they will settle back, hushed, to watch him do just that. Until one day soon Trump does what he’s been itching to do, something they won’t believe and something they certainly won’t get to watch: Trump’s fat finger pressing the glitziest buzzer of them all, that great big beautiful nuclear war button.
- “Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.” https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf ↩︎
- Trump: “They went to all mail-in voting. So they have automatically crooked elections. And we can’t have that. When a state is for mail-in voting, that means they want dishonest elections because that’s what that means. So that played a big factor also.”
At the same press conference, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth meant to lavish praise on his boss, if only it had made sense: “What you’re doing today, Mr. President, is restoring [Spacecom] to precisely where it should be, based on what the Space Force, the Air Force, your leadership believes will give us strategic advantage in the future. That is Huntsville, Alabama.” Garnishing praise with effusion, which Trump likes, the bewitching Hegseth elaborated to all listening, no one more thoughtfully than the president, “We are way ahead in space, but this” — moving Spacecom from Colorado to Alabama, remember — “will ensure we stay leaps and bounds ahead, because that’s the most important domain.” The man of osmium* — all osmium, no brain — was not done: “Whoever controls the skies will control the future of warfare. And, Mr. President, today you’re ensuring that happens.” Clearly, President Trump thought so, too. https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-remarks-space-force-relocation-alabama-september-2-2025/
*At 22.59 g/cm3 osmium has the highest density of any stable element. ↩︎ - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/17/us/politics/colorado-water-trump-veto.html ↩︎
- Department of Homeland Security ↩︎