The GOP is now forced to own its cruelty — and it's gift-wrapping the White House

Pete Hegseth getting busted for his misogyny and racism was a perfect way to kick off the first post-election week. MS NOW dug into his entire filthy campaign — which involved only using paper files and phone calls so they wouldn’t get busted — to short-circuit the military’s merit-based promotion system and replace it with a new system his office invented to specifically remove women and men of color from the senior ranks of our military.

He and President Donald Trump are apparently afraid that if they decide to turn the military against us using the Insurrection Act or a state of emergency, the women and non-white male officers may be an obstacle to their troops training their guns on the rest of us.

In doing so, they broke multiple laws as well as the traditions of our military, and much of that is now documented in Kentucky Republican Congressman Thomas Massie’s impeachment articles against “Pretty Pete” that were — unsuccessfully — submitted in the House.

A former Army Judge Advocate (JAG Corps) officer came right out and called the entire process a crime: under federal law only the president can strike one- and two-star flag officers from the promotion lists.

In addition, officers are legally entitled to both a written explanation and an appeal process when promotions are withheld, and “Pretty Pete” offered neither. He could be looking at jail, if we had anybody other than Todd Blanche in the Attorney General’s office.

But two years from now, if we can get a Democratic president, is still well within the statute of limitations.

Robert Garcia, the incoming chair of House Oversight, summed up the new reality in two words on election night: “Lawyer up.”

The next two years are going to, ultimately, be only about two things.

The first is exposing the corruption, lawlessness, and self-dealing of the Trump family crime syndicate and its GOP enablers and participants.

The second is passing legislation so popular that every time a Republican filibusters or Trump vetoes, the process becomes the foundation for a Democratic campaign ad in 2028.

Garcia has already said that his Oversight Committee will be going after Trump and his family’s corruption, DHS and ICE abuses, and the Epstein/Trump coverup.

Over at Judiciary, Jamie Raskin plans to dig into Trump’s slush funds and skeezy fundraising. They include the so-called “Board of Peace,” the “anti-weaponization” fund Trump created out of his lawsuit against the IRS and Treasury, his immunity from IRS inspection of him or his family, ballroom bribes donations, selling pardons, and no-bid contracts for Trump cronies and his sons’ companies.

Oversight Committee Democrats estimated in January that Trump, Uday, and Qusay had already pulled in roughly $9.72 billion in realized and unrealized profits off the presidency. Much of that came via World Liberty Financial, the family crypto platform into which an Emirati royal poured a reported $500 million which, presumably, ended up in the Trump family’s pocket.

Then there’s the DOGE rampage, including Musk’s pimply-faced boys making off with our personal Social Security and IRS data, the fired Inspectors general, and Pete’s Signal chat. Collectively, this will easily keep them busy through the 2028 election.

But beyond accountability for Trump and the lickspittles in his administration and Cabinet, these hearings should also focus on every Republican in the House and Senate who went along with all this — and the coverups of it up to this point — by way of Democrats in Congress demanding to know why they didn’t stop it.

Were they afraid of Trump or in on the grift? Democrats need to be merciless here; Republicans would have done no less if the tables were turned.

Then there are the legislative opportunities, featuring both what Republicans have blocked for years (like raising the minimum wage, and student and medical debt relief) and what Democrats can do for working-class families and to get homeless people off our streets and into humane housing and help for addiction and mental illness.

Every veto and “no” vote from Trump and Republicans will translate into another Democrat — and possibly a Democratic president — being elected in two years. This is the “we dare you” strategy, and Democrats in the House and Senate need to embrace it fully if their leadership will allow it.

They could start with the $38.8 billion a year that the federal government hands to the fossil fuel industry, a figure that Trump has more than doubled since 2017 and his Big Beautiful Bill added $4 billion to. Ending those subsidies or moving that money into green projects could lower the deficit or lower electric bills.

Then there’s an amazing opportunity for a “camel’s nose under the tent” with children’s healthcare.

As I detail in The Hidden History of American Healthcare, Robert Ball and LBJ wrote the Medicare legislation so it could easily become a national single-payer system simply by lowering the eligibility age by a decade every year or two (as the system grew to absorb its new enrollees) until everybody is covered. As Ball wrote back in the day:

“We expected Medicare to be a first step toward universal national health insurance.”

One slick way to get started is to make every child under 18 eligible for traditional Medicare, with no exceptions or opportunities for the sleazy Medicare Advantage scam operators in the private for-profit insurance industry.

LBJ’s own people had drawn up a “Kiddicare” plan similar to this, although Republicans blocked it. But in 1968 Nixon expanded the system to include people with disabilities, showing that it’s easy to add new groups of people.

No prior authorizations, no narrow networks, no private middlemen, no profits for the oligarchs of the healthcare industry. Just high-quality healthcare for everybody.

The group MedPAC testified to Congress that the Medicare Advantage scam plans will hustle $76 billion more out of our tax dollars than real, traditional Medicare would cost taxpayers, and offer better coverage. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget puts the 10-year overpayment to the health insurance multimillionaires and billionaires at $1.2 trillion.

Because children — generally healthy for their entire childhoods outside of accidents — are the cheapest people in the country to insure, this could be done just with the money saved by killing the Advantage scam.

After all, UnitedHealth just reported third-quarter profits of $4.1 billion (just three months!), up 75 percent from the year earlier and raised its earnings forecast for 2026 for the third time. Every dollar of that money could, instead, have paid for a child’s asthma inhaler, a pediatric cancer ward, or a rural clinic that’s since closed.

Wendell Potter pointed out that the profit surge came at the same time the company dropped so many unprofitably sick people from its Advantage plans that its medical spending dropped by $3 billion. Cigna raised its own outlook the same month and says they’re preparing to walk away from the Obamacare exchanges altogether.

So the vote in Congress would come down to a stark choice for Republicans: vote against covering kids to protect UnitedHealth’s profits, or do what’s right for our children and the nation.

Other opportunities include;

— Restoring the enhanced ACA subsidies and reversing the Medicaid cuts that will cost nearly 3 million children their coverage, along with taking apart the billionaire tax cuts from the Big Beautiful Billionaire’s Bill.

— Banning stock trading by members of Congress and the Executive branch, including staff and aides with access to insider information, and take back the tariff power that the Constitution gives exclusively to Congress.

— Ending the cap on Social Security taxes to make the program solvent for the next 75 years and give everybody on the program a $2400 raise.

— Raising the federal minimum wage to $!5, and index it to inflation going forward; nobody who works a 40-hour week, regardless of how “menial” their work may be, should be unable to afford housing, food, transportation, and medicine.

— Passing the PRO Act to reverse Reagan’s war on unions and restore democracy in the workplace while rebuilding the middle class.

— Restoring the 2021 Child Tax Credit that Biden used to cut child poverty nearly in half; it’s again exploding since Trump and the GOP killed it.

— Bringing back the inspectors general to prosecute fraud and waste in Trump’s executive branch agencies.

— Putting into law an enforceable ethics code and term limits for the Supreme Court, and looking at impeaching Roberts, Thomas, and Alito for their corruption.

— Passing the Freedom To Vote Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, and the For The People Act that would have gutted Citizens United.

Every Republican filibuster or veto becomes a gift to Democrats for 2028.

Since Reagan flipped our economy upside down with his neoliberal trickle-down policies, think tank RAND Corporation’s Carter Price calculated last year that if income had kept growing the way it did from the end of World War II through 1975, the bottom 90 percent of Americans would have earned $79 trillion more than they actually did between 1975 and 2023.

That money, instead, is buying super yachts and doomsday bunkers for Epstein-class billionaires like Zuckerberg, Musk, and Bezos.

Democrats are going to have to earn the White House and more congressional seats over the next two years, but the road there shouldn’t be too difficult if leadership can prevent sabotage from within their own party, as we saw with Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema last time around.

The key will be to be bold and unflinching in the face of the inevitable threats and fascist attempts to cow legislators, writers, media, activists, and anybody else who may resist Trump and Miller.

And for that, our Democrats will need both our support and encouragement, particularly when it comes to turning down AIPAC, corporate, and billionaire money. And that’s something we all can help with.