Grab a coffee and sit down for this one….. Ralph Nader, the man who once took on the Corvair, has a new unsafe-at-any-speed product to warn us about. This time it's the President, and according to Nader and his co-author, we're somewhere around April 1861.
What was written
On Saturday, October 10, 2026, The Philadelphia Inquirer ran an op-ed by Bruce Fein, a former associate deputy attorney general under President Reagan, and Ralph Nader, titled “The Case for Impeachment: A staggering litany of lawlessness.” It opens by announcing that the President's second term “has left the Declaration of Independence and Constitution on life support,” and it builds to this:
“Trump is attempting to accomplish what the Confederate States of America failed to do in firing on Fort Sumter to destroy the Union and the Constitution.”
Along the way they write that “He has turned the Constitution into a museum piece and claimed the infinite, unchecked power of a dictator,” and, after a long list of charges, “this is only the tip of the impeachment iceberg!” Exclamation point theirs. They close with a call for “Citizens and Congress in unity” to “awaken from their slumber and impeach Trump.”
This isn't new material for Mr. Fein. Back on July 22, at an “Impeach Trump Now” event at the Senate Visitors Center (his remarks are posted on Nader's website), he said the President was angling for “a dictatorship evocative of Hitler, Stalin, and Chairman Mao.”
Context (not spin)
The op-ed is one piece of a week-long Inquirer series called “The Case for Impeachment,” which the paper's Editorial Board launched on October 7 and wrapped up with a collection page on October 11, three weeks before the midterms. The Board says impeaching the President “is the only way to save the Constitution,” and it insists it “would be making the same case if Trump were a Democrat.” To be fair, the Board also admits removal “remains a long shot,” and some of the items on the Fein–Nader list are real fights playing out in the courts right now. Reasonable people argue about tariffs, war powers and pardons. It's labeled opinion, and they're entitled to it.
But there's arguing about war powers, and then there's putting the President in a gray uniform outside Charleston Harbor.
MOAM's diagnosis
Let's do a little history, since they brought it up. Fort Sumter was the opening shot of a war that killed somewhere around 620,000 Americans. A week after it fell, the 6th Massachusetts was fighting its way through a mob in Baltimore on its way to defend Washington. Folks around here take that history seriously. Putting a president you'd like to see impeached in the same sentence as the men who bombarded a federal fort doesn't make the case stronger. It makes it sound like the guy at the end of the bar who gets louder every time nobody agrees with him.
And look at the medical chart. In one op-ed the Constitution is on “life support,” it's also a “museum piece,” we're at the “tip” of an “iceberg,” and Congress is asleep. That's a patient with four terminal diagnoses at once. Back in July it was Hitler, Stalin and Mao. By October it's the Confederacy. At this rate, by Thanksgiving the President will have personally sunk the Titanic, and they already brought the iceberg.
Mr. Nader is a Connecticut boy, from Winsted, so he's practically a neighbor, and the MOAM says this with real New England respect for a man who's been fighting the powers that be since the Johnson administration. But when every disagreement is 1861, nobody can hear you when something actually is. Turn the volume down a notch, Ralph. We can hear you fine from Marblehead.
Severity: TERMINAL. Symptoms: comparing a sitting president to the Confederacy three weeks before an election. Prognosis: the patient has published his own chart, and the Inquirer gave it a whole series.
MOAM Out.
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