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1 week ago | 
tdcowgill.substack.com | Terry Cowgill
It almost seems irrelevant at this point, as it seems we are ultimately headed toward a cashless society, but leave it to the otherwise objectionable Donald Trump (or someone feeding him MAGA-pleasing ideas) to come up with an executive order I can get squarely behind. Trump has directed the Treasury to stop minting new pennies. How did he get this great idea? It looks like he saw it on a social media post by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency.
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3 weeks ago | 
tdcowgill.substack.com | Terry Cowgill
Never to be outdone by himself, President Donald Trump has scaled new heights of shameless grift. I try not to get too worked up over every outrage — manufactured by him for effect (making the libs cry), or simply committed out of gilded greed and depravity.
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1 month ago | 
tdcowgill.substack.com | Terry Cowgill
Since I last deigned to write about our world on March 21, a lot has happened. As is now par for the course in a Trump administration, the news proceeded — and continues to proceed — at a dizzying pace. I don’t want to lead with it, so an update on my health can be found below, near the end of this column.
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2 months ago | 
tdcowgill.substack.com | Terry Cowgill
I’ve always been amused by supporters of President Donald Trump who take extraordinary offense at harsh disapproval of their guy. Sometimes critics of the 47th president’s words are so caustic and the tone so overwrought that members of MAGA Nation are at a loss to defend him. So they came up with a dismissive term to fend off the Trump haters: Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS).
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Mar 9, 2025 | 
tdcowgill.substack.com | Terry Cowgill
Call it the law of consequences, unintentional or not. But this tiny international community on the US-Canada border has seen life at its public library rattled by the changing of the guard at the White House some 600 miles to the south. The Haskell Free Library, which straddles the international border between Derby Line, Vermont, and Stanstead, Quebec, is a majestic stone and brick building of Victorian design.
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Feb 21, 2025 | 
tdcowgill.substack.com | Terry Cowgill
My continued apologies for failing to keep up with the world in this space. My recovery from my broken hip is proceeding but more slowly than I had anticipated. The grinding world of medications, physical therapy, home exercises, my glacial bone healing and the dizzying pace of unfolding events make it very challenging for me to keep up. For paying customers, I have suspended payments until I’m ready to get back in the game on a more regular basis.
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Feb 11, 2025 | 
tdcowgill.substack.com | Terry Cowgill
In the years since I became a journalist in 1996 covering local affairs, and later as a columnist for CTNewsJunkie opining on state politics in Connecticut, I’ve often been frustrated by the slow pace of reform. Most of the time I attributed the lack of progress to those who prefer the status quo or to those who have the most to lose in the face of reform. But even when things didn’t go my way, I still had confidence in our institutions. I was always convinced the center would hold.
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Feb 6, 2025 | 
tdcowgill.substack.com | Terry Cowgill
Many of you are already aware, but to my readers and subscribers who aren’t friends or acquaintances, or who don’t follow me on social media, I apologize for being out of action since the middle of last month. While visiting my dear friend Rob Marks from my high school days in Massachusetts, I fell and injured myself pretty badly. Earlier, my friend and I had spent much of the afternoon touring the magnificent Durham, North Carolina, campus of Duke University, his alma mater.
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Jan 12, 2025 | 
tdcowgill.substack.com | Terry Cowgill
Since at least 2015, it has felt like the United States is on fire — politically and socially. The combination of Donald Trump, his supporters, his opponents and social media, have combined to create the tinder-dry conditions for political arson. Now that America’s second largest population center is literally on fire, some folks are showing their true colors. As is often the case, the platform for the hate is social media and — surprise, surprise — the haters mostly refuse to use their real names.
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Nov 6, 2024 | 
tdcowgill.substack.com | Terry Cowgill
By the time I shut my eyes last night around 11, like most observers who did not have blinders on, I was confident that Donald Trump would once again be re-elected, becoming the first president since Grover Cleveland to serve nonconsecutive terms. So after pondering why Vice President Kamala Harris lost so convincingly, the caption on the Vox video above caught my attention. But first things first: we heard for months about how this race was so close that the margins would be razor-thin.