Godlike Trump rolls the dice on the future of humanity
President Donald Trump is taking a chance with the future of humanity.
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
MAGA turned on one of its own — then used him to gaslight the left
Charlie Kirk was insta-martyred by MAGA after he was assassinated just over a year ago. Seconds after the news was announced, without a shooter in custody or even a suspect, they immediately blamed Democrats. Within a shockingly short period of time, they had a coordinated effort to go after all liberals.
I don’t trade in conspiracies, but it seemed completely sus right away that they were all saying similar things at the same time when we had zero information about Kirk’s assassin. "This is war," screamed the right-wing X account Libs of TikTok, which Elon Musk wrote, "The Left is the party of murder." They were echoed by many more.
Just like after Butler. Weird, huh?
Democrats rarely trade in political violence, so to immediately jump to that seemed unrealistic. Meanwhile, you can easily trace the trajectory of MAGA’s track record of Trumpian retribution, from Charlottesville to January 6th to ICE murdering Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Trump has made it clear that he loves a bloody display; after all, he watched his MAGA minions carry out his orders on TV to “Stop the Steal” at the Capitol while he ate a Happy Meal.
MAGA seemed to enjoy Kirk’s murder, gleefully embracing every conspiracy so they could justify attacking liberals. If they could have, I believe they would have started a Civil War over his death.
Before we go any further, it’s important to remember who Charlie Kirk was: a right-wing podcaster who somehow rose to a position of influence he didn’t earn because he saw an opportunity to make money off of MAGA, just like Trump had. Kirk said all of the hateful things they loved and founded Turning Point USA, which claims to “advocate for conservative politics on high school, college, and university campuses.” It’s essentially just like the Hitler Youth: Immersing young and impressionable minds — mostly white, male, and “Christian” — in a program of propaganda that’s repeated over and over until they accept it as fact.
If you’re a parent, imagine your teenage son being told this: "I can't stand the word empathy, actually. i think empathy is a made-up, new-age term, and it does a lot of damage."
Or that gun deaths are "unfortunately worth it to keep the 2nd Amendment."
Karma and Irony were taking notes that day, huh?
Anyway, the higher Kirk rose in prominence, the more emboldened he became as his following grew into the millions. Like Trump, he seemed to live consequence-free, regardless of the terrible things he said about Jews, Palestinians, the LGBTQ+ community, and people of color. Whenever he “debated” a liberal, he did the typical MAGA thing of fast-talking a whole bunch of BS, so his opponent couldn’t get a word in. And if I’m being 100% honest, there was a long period of time when I kept confusing him with Ben Shapiro, because they were interchangeably terrible.
Kirk allowed his hubris to make him vulnerable to threats from within the MAGA cult after he began broadcasting some views that didn’t sit well with the White House. Kirk repeatedly stressed that Trump shouldn’t get the United States into any more endless wars, specifically with Iran. He was also very critical of Trump walking back his campaign promise to release the Epstein Files, which a lot of people believe was the final straw for the Epstein Bestie.
In July 2025, Charlie sat down with Megyn Kelly at a TPUSA event, and they both strongly agreed that if Trump had nothing to hide, then he should release the full unredacted Epstein Files to clear his name for good.
Just two days before Kirk was shot, MAGA Looney Laura Loomer tweeted what was clearly a rejection of Kirk.
Charlie had gotten too powerful for Trump, is what she was saying.
Once the authorities had suspected shooter Tyler Robinson in custody, MAGA didn’t do a collective apology tour on social media. Nobody walked back their threats against liberals or admitted they’d once again jumped to all of the wrong conclusions.
Instead, they dug in deeper, like they always do, because they can’t admit to being wrong on the internet. How that became a fate worse than death is beyond me, but as a result of the collective MAGA Mandela Effect, they all decided that Robinson was a sexually confused kid with a trans boyfriend who got “radicalized” by the “elite” liberals at the college he attended, because that’s what happens at all “liberal” universities.
Tyler Robinson was a third-year student at Dixie Technical College in St. George, Utah. Yes, the state that's 60% Mormon. As a rule, liberals aren’t Mormons and don’t use “Dixie” much for anything, since it gives real Civil War Confederacy vibes. Robinson had also completed one year at Utah State University, another notorious liberal enclave akin to Harvard (she wrote while rolling her eyes).
Tell me about a time when a fact has ever mattered to MAGA, tho.
So they did what MAGA does: they rewrote Charlie’s history to basically make him into Jesus. I’m pretty sure Jesus wouldn’t have threatened to kill Joe Biden, but maybe that’s in the Trump version of the Bible.
While every prominent Democrat was speaking out against Charlie’s murder, every prominent Republican was calling for Democrats to be imprisoned en masse. MAGA happily took that literally and began their attack on anyone who wouldn’t join them.
Like me.
Before Robinson was in custody, I tweeted that we should all wait instead of jumping to conclusions. Even with my account being suppressed, they all swarmed me.
And then they started texting me.
The threats were serious enough that I contacted local authorities, who contacted the local FBI. Even under KKKash Patel, the Portland office took care of me. Then I heard from an agent in the national office who was investigating Charlie’s murder, and she told me that my name was on a “registry” of MAGA targets, so that was super fun to learn. But because I never engaged with anyone who texted me, they got bored and stopped bugging me that way.
But they still threaten us, even as they still martyr Charlie, one year later.
Never tell me that Democrats are the party of violence.
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Loose-lipped Mike Johnson just spilled on how a defeated GOP plans to keep Congress
It isn’t the U.S. Postal Service I’m so worried about. I don’t have a giant concern that ballots won’t be distributed to eligible voters – and by eligible, I mean all of them. Even the troublesome ones in blue states. Call me crazy, but I feel like that’s a bit of a red herring – a diversion from their actual goal.
What really worries me is what happens after Democrats win control of the House and Senate and the Republicans in control (I’m talking about you, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and you, Senate Majority Leader John Thune) simply refuse to seat the duly elected senators and representatives.
Think that’s unlikely? Actually, I think it’s practically guaranteed. Consider what Johnson told the crowd on Thursday at Donald Trump’s absurd midterm convention in Dallas: “We cannot and will not allow them to take the majority in the Congress. We’re not gonna do it.”
This is what is known as saying the democracy-killing part out loud. Because in truth, you can’t just refuse to seat elected officials because you don’t feel like it. It doesn’t work that way. At least, it didn’t before Trump decided the law no longer applied to him or his party, and the Supreme Court majority wholeheartedly agreed.
Let’s focus first on the House, because it’s pretty clear that Johnson is the more eager to betray his oath and his country to do any and all of the president’s bidding without a second thought.
Suppose the Democrats win the 2026 House election narrowly — say something like:
Democrats 220
Republicans 215
Now imagine Republicans challenge the results in six Democratic-won districts. They don't announce, “We're refusing to seat Democrats.” Instead, they say, “These six elections involve irregularities, illegal ballots, certification problems, or unresolved disputes, and Article I, Section 5 of the U.S. Constitution requires the House to determine who actually won them.”
That distinction matters. Congress actually does possess substantial authority to adjudicate contested congressional elections.
The political objective could therefore be accomplished indirectly: postpone seating enough Democratic winners that Republicans temporarily keep their House majority. And January 3, 2027 — the day the new Congress convenes — finds the Republicans still in charge, superseding the will of voters.
Let’s remember that Johnson has already taken this strategy out for a test drive. He refused to seat Adelita Grijalva, the newly elected Democratic representative for Arizona’s 7th congressional district, for 50 days following her special election victory last September. He claimed that because there was a federal government shutdown at the time, his hands were tied. They weren’t, of course, but lying has never been a problem for this guy.
There is an additional complication in the case of the forthcoming midterms: the outgoing Republican majority does not simply remain the House majority indefinitely because it refuses to recognize the election. House terms constitutionally expire. The organization of the new House, the clerk's roll of members-elect, state election certificates, challenges to credentials, the election of the Speaker, and ultimately Article I procedures would all become enormously consequential.
Johnson has the power to remove the current clerk of the House, Kevin McCumber, and replace him with a MAGA loyalist who would refuse to list Democrats on the roll of those elected to the 120th Congress.
In that case, the elected Dems would need to convince a federal court to order the incoming clerk to list their names. But even if the court decides that it’s required after all, what is to stop the clerk — under intense pressure from his or her fellow Republicans — from refusing to obey said order?
That would then trigger a review by the courts that could take weeks, perhaps months, and wind up at the SCOTUS where, I don’t need to tell you, all bets are off. And meanwhile, the Republicans would continue to be in charge of Congress pending the interminable delay.
I’m sorry to report that this is not a far-fetched scenario, ladies and gentlemen. And the Senate is vulnerable to similar duplicity.
Let’s imagine that Democrats win enough Senate races to take control, but Republicans claim that one or two Democratic victories are illegitimate, for whatever fabricated reason.
The Senate also has constitutional authority to judge the elections and qualifications of senators. So, a contested Senate election could produce a genuine fight over whether someone should be seated while the election is investigated.
Again, Republicans could not just say, “You won the election, you meet the constitutional qualifications, but we're not seating you because we want to remain the majority. Tough luck.”
It’s highly unlikely that their criminality would be quite so blatant. All they need is to concoct a pretext to prevent an elected member from being seated. Because once the seating takes place, getting rid of said member becomes dramatically more difficult.
The Constitution requires a two-thirds vote to expel a sitting member. A simple majority can potentially exclude a member-elect on legitimate constitutional/election grounds, but it cannot seat someone and then immediately throw him or her out by ordinary majority vote.
That creates an incentive in any attempted power grab to prevent disputed members from being sworn in in the first place.
The truly dangerous scenario isn't a permanent legal theory that Congress may ignore elections. It's delay. If they create enough complications and chaos, the Republicans stay in charge until it can all get sorted out. And who knows? The litigation could take a year, or more.
Meanwhile, Congress moves forward with Republicans unlawfully in charge. A Speaker is elected. Committees are established. Legislation is passed or, more likely, rejected. And most crucially, Trump continues to go on his merry way free from even the thinnest constraints.
It feels like the warning signs are already there that they plan to go this route, considering that they view the rules as mere quaint suggestions for suckers. It’s all about staying in control at all costs.
I would love to believe that unfettered corruption isn’t at the heart of everything these Republicans are doing while marching in lockstep with their organized crime boss. But I’m unfortunately having a little trouble buying into that possibility.
(Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.)
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This magical 'fix' will plunge the Kennedy Center into even darker days
The Kennedy Center is reportedly facing bankruptcy within weeks. But that could all magically disappear with one action, according to Trump's lackeys on the board — put his name back on the building.
Yep, it’s that easy, apparently.
According to documents obtained by The New York Times and The Washington Post, a draft resolution circulated to the Kennedy Center's board of trustees ahead of a special meeting scheduled for today warns the venerable performing arts center could soon be unable to make payroll or pay its routine maintenance contracts.
Gee, I wonder how that happened? Let me think on that for a minute. Anyway, Trump, the documents say, has offered to help raise the money needed to keep the place afloat. Bless his heart.
But wait! Hold on! The only way he helps, or what the trustees say is "appropriate recognition of his role,” is if his name goes back up on the building. If not, then the building goes under.
One Trumper board member, Al Baldasaro, laughingly told the Times that when Trump tells people to donate, people donate. That is, of course, again, if his name is on the building. If not, then Trump won’t ask people to donate.
OK, so let me get this straight. How did this cash shortage befall the Kennedy Center? Because Trump hijacked it, and since his involvement, he’s beaten it into the ground. No one has been going there, and no one has been donating since Trump took it over and put his name on the building. The building went dark as soon as it saw Trump’s epic darkness.
So, if his name goes back up on the building, like it was before during those dark days, how will things change? Well, obviously things won’t change. In fact, they’ll get worse, and history proves that.
Three of Donald Trump's four corporate bankruptcies involved properties that had his name plastered directly on them. The Trump Taj Mahal filed for bankruptcy in 1991, buried under more than a billion dollars in junk-bond debt carrying a brutal 14 percent interest rate.
Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, renamed for him within months of opening in 1984, went down as part of the sprawling 2004 Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts bankruptcy and again in the 2009 Trump Entertainment Resorts collapse, before the building was eventually reduced to rubble by dynamite in 2021.
Therefore, putting Trump's name on a building suggests you've started a countdown clock to bankruptcy, and not a fundraising campaign.
Then there's the fourth case, and it's the one that should really worry anyone who cares about the Kennedy Center, because it shows the damage doesn't even require his name on the marquee.
The iconic Plaza Hotel in New York never became "Trump Plaza." He never renamed it. He just bought it in 1988 for roughly $400 million, called it "the ultimate work of art," compared it to the Mona Lisa, and took ownership of its identity in every way that mattered.
Before Trump made it look trashy, the Plaza was one of the great institutions of American life: the setting of the Eloise books, the hotel in The Great Gatsby, the place the Beatles stayed on their first trip to America. And Truman Capote’s unforgettable Black & White Ball in 1968.
It ran a modest profit for about two years under Trump. Then the enormous debt he'd taken on to buy it caught up with the balance sheet, ballooning past half a billion dollars, and by 1992 he'd lost the hotel to bankruptcy.
A beloved cultural landmark, almost ruined by Donald Trump.
The blinded-by-the-Trump-phony-glitz board of the Kennedy Center fails to take all this vaunted and blotted history into consideration. Further, the Kennedy Center board doesn't get to pick between the Taj Mahal outcome and the Plaza Hotel outcome, because put Trump in the mix or on the marquee, and it’ll find its way into bankruptcy court.
The Kennedy Center opened in 1971 as a living memorial to John F. Kennedy and built one of the great stages in American cultural life, the place that has handed out Kennedy Center Honors to the likes of Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, Bruce Springsteen, Meryl Streep, Paul McCartney, and Al Pacino.
Trump took over its board in February 2025 and installed himself as chairman, and almost immediately, the backlash was swift and the exodus immediate. Issa Rae canceled a sold-out show. Shonda Rhimes resigned from the board. Ben Folds quit as the National Symphony Orchestra's artistic adviser.
And the dominoes kept falling. Hamilton pulled its planned run. A college theater festival that had partnered with the Center for nearly 60 years walked away entirely. Shows that used to sell out started struggling to fill seats. Part of the ceiling literally fell in.
Now, do you see this just didn’t happen? Donald Trump became involved, and it all fell apart. And that’s his pattern. He breaks it, claims he can fix it, but the damage has already been done. He can never fix what he broke.
But we’re supposed to believe that if his name goes back up on the building, all will be OK? His almost criminal — strike that, not almost, blatantly criminal — takeover has already cost the Kennedy Center so much, and putting his name back on it will sink it for sure.
Somewhere, that radiant smile of JFK is giving way to tears of hurt and anger.
The Kennedy Center's board isn't voting this week on whether to avoid bankruptcy or survive it. Based on the only track record anyone with half a brain has to go on, they're voting on which version of the same nightmarish ending they'd prefer.
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A few lines in GOP bill blew up a red state — and one of its architects is running for gov
Kansans may remember the rise and spectacular fall of Gov. Sam Brownback’s disastrous tax experiment, which was designed to eliminate the state income tax. Less well known to Kansans is the key role that current gubernatorial candidate Ty Masterson played in the enactment and execution of the failed experiment.
The plan enacted by Republican lawmakers in 2012 gave Kansas four years of unbalanced budgets, unfair tax increases, and historic debt.
By 2016, Kansans had seen enough of the financial fiasco and elected a majority of moderate state lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats, to abandon the experiment and restore sanity to state finance. The infamous tax experiment gave Brownback the lowest approval ratings in the nation and a stigma that haunts the former governor and his lead ally Masterson to this day.
A bit of history is helpful.
For starters, Masterson was the primary beneficiary of the ouster of moderate Republican leaders from the state Senate in the primary elections of 2012. This shakeup was initiated and carried out by a handful of well-heeled donors who took control of the Kansas Chamber of Commerce and called for outright elimination of the state income tax. The Chamber PAC raised a campaign chest of nearly $1 million to carry out the purge, and it worked.
As a consequence, Masterson was elevated from his position as a freshman state senator to chair of the powerful Senate Ways and Means Committee. The primary job of this committee is to manage state finance — oversee tax revenues and spending and approve a state budget.
Over the next four years, Masterson would use his position to keep the failing tax experiment on life support. In the face of plummeting state revenues, he and his committee signed off on a sea of red ink. Their deficit spending plunged general fund balances from $709 million in 2013, to $380 million in 2014, to $72 million in 2015, to $37 million in 2016.
To save the experiment, Masterson and his committee snatched revenues from other funds. For example, in a series of sweeps from the highway fund in 2012 through 2017, $1.9 billion was diverted from highway improvements to plug the hole left by sinking income tax collections.
In 2015, they tried to hide their misdeeds: A few lines slipped into the 340-page omnibus appropriation bill allowed KDOT to issue unlimited debt. KDOT then quietly used this authority to issue $400 million in new debt, which was quickly swept to pay for income tax cuts. State tax-supported debt ballooned to an historic high of $4.5 billion, and state credit was downgraded in the process.
In the 2016 legislative session, Masterson and his committee staged a final act of desperation. With state balances underwater, they enacted a budget in which spending exceeded revenues by $100 million in an attempt to force the governor to cut core services.
Former Gov. Mike Hayden called them out: “They should be ashamed.”
In fact, the deficit would balloon to $350 million.
Kansas voters had their fill of Masterson’s financial shenanigans and mismanagement. In 2016, they elected a majority of centrist lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats, who campaigned to abandon the tax experiment. Forty contested legislative seats went against Brownback, Masterson and their allies.
In 2017, the revamped Senate majority dumped Masterson and most of his collaborators from the Ways and Means Committee and began the work of repairing state finances. To the very end, Masterson pleaded with colleagues to save the experiment, but his credibility had evaporated.
Lawmakers voted to abandon Brownback’s experiment and then voted to override the governor’s veto. In the Senate, 18 Republicans and nine Democrats voted to override Brownback’s veto and abandon the disastrous tax experiment.
In 2018, Brownback vacated the office of governor a year early and accepted an appointment in the Trump administration. That November, state Sen. Laura Kelly was elected governor on a campaign of restoring soundness to state finance.
Ty Masterson is now running for governor of Kansas pledging to cut taxes once again. Kansas voters should become informed of his experience in doing so.
This column draws from “Brownback’s Red State Governance,” chapter six in Michael A. Smith and H. Edward Flentje, eds., “Reform and Reaction: The Arc of Kansas Politics” (University Press of Kansas, 2025). Sources for the column can be found in that chapter.
H. Edward Flentje is a professor emeritus at Wichita State University and formerly was director and professor in the Hugo Wall School of Public Affairs at the university. He has written and edited numerous publications, including most recently co-writing and co-editing “Reform and Reaction: The Arc of Kansas Politics.” Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com.
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Blind panic signals something monstrous just unraveled in an AI lab
Humanity's last 300 years have seen its share of paradigm shifts: the power of steam mechanics, electric power, the assembly line, robotic automation, computers, the net. They all upended the status quo.
Moreover, even early in each transformation, everyone understood the world would never be the same. Jobs disappeared, but all to free up "human power," stuff only people could do. It never went smoothly, always requiring good government.
Now, the AI revolution is upon us — and it promises a permanent paradigm shift like none before. But what of governing?
None?
None. Unlike all previous economic accelerations, there will be no "retraining" to free workers up for "human power." AI exists to colonize humanity's last frontier: it is supposed to think through problems, come up with solutions, and do it better than the best of us. It may be the last whole makeover. And the one no one asked for.
If there was ever a time for strong presidential leadership, strong government leadership, the most powerful American "soft power" extending across the globe, it is now, before the Mad Max years, before society breaks down.
Challenge yourself. Note Donald Trump and the people surrounding him in the White House. It is nearly impossible to conceive of a more dangerous group in power over the next two years. If you wondered why billionaires ran to the inauguration, you got your answer early, when he deregulated the entire industry, throwing himself into their pockets. Even if the corruption didn't get him, the changes coming require mature thought, an understanding of history, and a big heart.
Because while our economy expands beyond measure, the exploding new efficiencies will dry up jobs lightning fast compared to the speed of change in all previous revolutions. We could see an economy growing at rates never contemplated, all with unemployment at 35%.
Moreover, something in AI development happened in the last month, maybe last week, and it's evidently scared people deep inside the industry, scared them into a willingness to self-regulate by slowing themselves down. On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote an article stating that the intelligence industry should slow its fast-moving development to give safety measures time to catch up.
Even more haunting, this letter came only two days after Jacob Coxon, one of Anthropic's top technical researchers who worked on pre-training frontier models, resigned, saying that AI companies were “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” Both Elon Musk and Sam Altman announced their support of Amodei's letter.
The letter also came two days after former President Barack Obama gave a speech imploring Democrats to make AI safety the center of their agenda over the next two years. On Sunday, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, (D-NY) said the House should take “decisive action" in regulating AI.
We cannot know with certainty, but only an idiot wouldn't assume that something terrifying happened in their labs very recently. AI's meta dangers haven't snuck up on anyone.
And rather than have a president who sees the writing on the wall — the resignation, the letter, the industry support — and calls every industry executive in to meet at the White House with top members of Congress, so everyone hears what the hell happened, ready to leap to new legislation this week and meetings with world leaders, we have one in Ireland enjoying a golf tournament on his course.
Rather than a Congress rushing to schedule meetings early this week, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson finds himself less worried about the problem. Johnson says, “We’re not going to rush in and pass a piece of legislation that would do harm to the country and put China at an edge. And so we’ve got to do this carefully.”
Right now, it appears that the thing most likely to do harm to our country is "our" AI.
The dangers are immediate. Anthony Aguirre, president and CEO of the Future of Life Institute, who called for a six-month pause for the industry’s development in 2023, says:
“They’ve kind of realized, their employees have realized, everyone has realized that they’re building Skynet... It’s pretty much become clear to the world and even the AI companies that they’re not really prepared to control the AI systems they’re racing to create.”
"Skynet," of course, is the system in the Terminator movies, the one that gained sentience. It worried humanity was about to shut it off, and started a nuclear war. Aguirre noted that no matter who builds Skynet first, if it gets here, we all lose.
What are they really afraid of? Amodei warns that within six to 12 months, AI could be capable of leading a swarm of agents that could take over the entire internet.
Given the suddenness of the resignation — the letter, Musk, Altman, Obama, all in the last few days — one fears that the industry knows that AI is already capable of shutting down the net. Losing the net wouldn't kill us off, but losing it overnight would. Your food, medicines, and electricity won't find their way to your home if the net is just "unavailable" for a month or nine. Society breaks down very, very quickly without basics.
The United States spends over $1.5 trillion dollars a year "defending itself" by building things that blow up. If the AI companies have technology that may escape our control and effectively blow us up from the inside, no boom, and no amount of money, nor time, can or should be spared in defending ourselves from that threat.
It is probably worth mentioning that Iran has computers, too, and it doesn't require an "accident" for these AI agents to get out of hand and shut it all down.
Donald Trump sounds like he doesn't have a worry in the world as he enjoys his time in Ireland: “Look, we’re leading China in AI ... "
(Maybe that's the problem. But go on.)
"We can put guardrails, we can do this and that, but I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up. And they’re bringing up things that won’t happen. But whoever wins with AI, wins.”
Except it is the executives themselves that are the negative forces and are telling us that right now AI is winning AI, and, as we've already heard, if it wins, we all lose.
Which brings us right back around to having the single worst person and administration overseeing these fast-moving developments. It is quite a thing when the people who stand to make the most money, be the "biggest winners," are the ones screaming that we need to slow down. Our golfing president's reptilian brain doesn't process that kind of nuance.
If China is a problem, get China to stop also; exchange experts to sit in various programming labs around the world as a check. If it can be done with nukes, it can be done with AI. Cute thought.
Of course, nothing needs to even really go catastrophically wrong with AI for its development to be catastrophic to the last small chunk of "middle-class" Americans. We need to talk about Universal Basic Income because fortunes will be made like never before with an economy that efficient. With 40% unemployment, with AI taking over everything from McDonald's, engineering, law, and much of medicine, and all driving, it's too possible.
All of which is why we need the best leadership right now. One yearns for the sobriety and seriousness of the Obama administration, even his willingness to reach across the aisle. Something needs to be done, and if one has any sort of intuition, it sounds like it needs to be done immediately.
This revolution isn't like the other ones, and society has gone technologically backward before — they were called the Dark Ages and lasted 300 years. And they only had mindless bacteria after them.
Jason Miciak is a Raw Story Columnist, author, political advisor, attorney, and single parent girldad. Please follow on Bluesky. He can be reached at jasonmiciak@gmail.com
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MAGA's mirth becomes terror as Trump's 'jokes' take dark turn
No one ever benefited more from putting their serious, and seriously warped, notions — whether self-aggrandizement or self-interested aspirations — out as mere meme "jokes" than Donald Trump, who uses the tactic so he can shrug off tough questions.
The pattern continues apace. They were always outrageous; they're increasingly dangerous.
This isn't about posts in which he makes himself Jesus performing a miracle ("hey, c'mon, I was a doctor, just kidding"). Right. Such posts are a window into how Trump sees himself. As offensive as those posts are, they're benign compared to the "joke" policy memes.
But more and more, he's letting deeply held imperialistic desires run to daylight, the ones that people used to laugh at with the same degree as the Jesus posts. Except now he's matching his "funny" memes with some not-so-comic real-life moves, and the world has noticed. No one is laughing.
To wit:
Trump posts a map depicting the US conquering the entirety of North America pic.twitter.com/Tu31S8QoKO
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 7, 2026
Yeah, funny, but not in a funny way. First, there is the tragically ironic notion that Trump's Caesar-esque move to "conquer" nearly the entire Western Hemisphere includes — apparently — unleashing ICE's abhorrent violence upon brown people to "deport them back," only to turn around and make everyone south of the Rio Grand citizens, or at least subjects, by planting the stars and stripes above the new states that were formerly the countries to which we booted them. Yes, there is that.
But there is also this. Please consider the U.S. response to a rabidly aggressive populist Chinese dictator who tossed out a map in which China ruled from Japan down through Australia.
The United States would not immediately go to war, but it would not be laughing, either. There would also be some serious re-thinking done in the Pentagon about the possible "expansionist aspirations" in China and protecting American allies along the Pacific rim. After all, such a president, whether in China or here, is self-evidently crazy, and thus unpredictable.
And yet that's what the world sees with "our president," and they're responding the same way we might. Such "innocent joke-posting" may never fully bloom into tanks crossing the 49th parallel or the Rio Grande, but they reflect something deeper within Trump: the belief that the world is his for the taking.
It also seems helpful to once again pull back and strongly consider what any previous president, or normal American, might dream of while looking upon such a map. The "normal 50 states" surrounded by some of the strongest, most loyal allies — friends — that a country could hope to have. Real strength. Granted, no "normal rule" ever constrains Donald Trump's deluded fantasies, no one should ever feel constrained from comparing his behavior to that of a real president, and his priorities.
The president would say they're dangerous. Because they are.
Thankfully, there are signs that a significant dent of American MAGAs are getting tired of it, too. The move to change the official name of Lake Ontario to Lake America (and perhaps even the more humiliating appeasement by Google Maps) did not go over the way Trump planned. The vast majority of Americans not only "disapprove" of the change; one senses that anger tinged with a new hint of fear: "This is getting increasingly hard to ignore; all of this hints just enough of early 20th Century Europe."
Americans best listen to that twinge of fear because Trump's newly proud imperial aspirations aren't limited to meme-maps; he's building the undergirding to support notions in which our "neighbors" are anything but close allies and friends. Take, for example, Trump's recent characterization of Canadians, formerly an example of truly a country's best friend, now reduced to the worst people. From a previous back-and-forth with a reporter:
Reporter: "Why are you so focused on doing things like this towards America's allies, instead of doing things that will target adversaries?"
Trump: "Well, they haven't treated us well. The Canadian officials have treated us very badly; they're nasty people."
Donald Trump said this of the Canadian government during a gaggle in which he mentioned his very productive talks with Vladimir Putin, leading to trust in Putin's Russia. If there were to be a novel fantasy about a Manchurian candidate, surely the last page would have that president talking about the "nasty" people in Ottawa while at the same time emphasizing that Russia's fascist butcher gives him the feels.
He does this while ignoring the well-reported fact that “Russia is providing Iran with targeting information to attack American forces in the Middle East.”
Please pause. Please. The American president praised his close talks and trust in a man helping to kill American troops, while calling Canadian leaders "nasty."
Two things: Trump says this while either ignoring or being ignorant of the fact that NORAD's current Deputy Commander is Canadian Lieutenant-General Iain Huddleston. Our primary defense against intercontinental missiles from Russia remains a joint mission with those nasty Canadians. Second, it is extremely difficult to concentrate on this fact without concluding that Donald Trump is insane and that our lives get more dangerous by the day because of it.
All of Trump's meme posting was always "crazy," but it used to be done "all in good fun" from the MAGA side because it was merely to "own the libs," to make us crazy. But somewhere along the way, perhaps sometime even in the run-up to the second administration, it went from insane attempts to "own the libs" and transitioned into "ignoring the libs, and many MAGAs" in an attempt to own the world.
Or at least "joke" about it. Except, circle back, some of the worst plans he implemented began as light-hearted memes.
It is imperative to fight the tendency to now respond with "just ignore him, he's insane." Instead, try to imagine a world in which any U.S. President could A) possibly want to put American flags up and above our conquered former allies, and B) the American president emphasizes his "good relationship" with Russia even as Russia provides Iran information to kill American forces, while calling Canadian officials ‘nasty,' for reasons we truly, truly, fear to really unravel.
But as you fight to repel the natural protective instinct to just ignore the noise, also fight the reflexive assumption that every MAGA sees this and continually supports everything Trump does because that's no longer true and thus there's a sense of optimism in treating this seriously. Every reader knows that Trump is polling at or lower than ever — those numbers come from somewhere; they're a product of former supporters, many of whom did not favor renaming Lake Ontario.
There is a certain irony in the fact that just as liberals give this man's whims decreasing attention — perhaps due to simple exhaustion — two new realities jump in to juxtapose: The world is taking him more seriously than ever, never more afraid of his next unpredictable move, because he's not just name-calling; he's punishing with trade wars and real wars, all while cozying up with real enemies. And another: it would seem that some of his voters also take him more seriously, and a significant number — certainly not most, but certainly a significant number — don't like it.
Need something more than polls? Check out Trump's summer of failures in self-promotion, the Great American State Fair, the 250th, and the empty seats at his Republican Convention.
Yes, by all means, maintain every aggressive instinct. Know that we'll have to fight to ensure a fair election come November — but do it while noting that if there was ever an opportune time to have an election that utterly rejects everything this man stands for, one unfolding before the world's eyes, and one timed to take advantage of his own supporters' disdain for all the decadence and devolution of norms, it's now.
It is true that regular Americans spent a great deal of time wondering whether any of his deranged late-night post-pumping mattered; we now know they do. And it truly doesn't matter that Trump posting as Jesus is as insane as the guy on the corner with a sign saying he's Jesus; none of it degrades Trump's ability to cause trouble around the globe as Commander in Chief and trade chief. Moreover, "Trump being Trump" no longer protects him from all MAGA pushback.
Bottom line. Trump has always been insane, but he is either unable or less willing to constrain it, now popping up just as regularly in international incidents as calling out some liberal celebrity.
No real news here. Except new reasons to be newly concerned. Never get so complacent as to not notice new dangers. This is never more true than when they come with new opportunities, even with age-old sh... adolescent posting, it's more dangerous than ever, but more people are starting to absorb what it means.
Never pass up an opportunity to inform low-info voters or MAGA-adjacent voters as to just how bad things have gotten. To murder a couple of cliches on the way out: When he throws up obvious softballs, for god's sake hit them! Let your MAGA relatives know the direction everything is moving; history is made by those who show up, even when it's just forwarding Trump's latest forays into international chaos.
Trump supporters portrayed as the stupidest, most gullible people on earth in merciless column
Trump supporters portrayed as the stupidest, most gullible people on earth in merciless columnTrump supporters and protesters gather outside a campaign rally (and accompanying anti-Trump protest) for President Trump and US Senate candidate Martha McSally. (Eric Rosenwald / Shutterstock.com)Jason Miciak is a Raw Story columnist, author, political consultant, attorney, and single parent girldad. Please follow on Bluesky. He can be reached at jasonmiciak@gmail.com.
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This NFL legend is a professional idiot — even he was smart enough to dump MAGA
Given that Aaron Rodgers has been in the NFL longer than helmets, or close enough, it is hard to remember that he was once a wily collegiate quarterback at Cal-Berkeley. So it is not surprising that one of football's all-time great quarterbacks has some political interests, given that he grew up on one of the country's most political campuses. It is surprising that Cal isn't exactly known for football, nor for equivocation or abject hypocrisy in the political positions it does often espouse.
But Rodgers did exactly all of that when he recently went on Steeler teammate Cam Heyward's podcast Not Just Football.
Now, the headlines focus almost solely on the fact that Rodgers threw a go-route right over Donald Trump in a scathing takedown of Trump's lies, even going so far as to say that "MAGA doesn't exist anymore."
“There is no MAGA movement; there is no ’Make America Great Again’ movement because the guy you elected hasn’t done any of his campaign promises."
Well, that's the right sentiment. But it's also a B-minus at best if we're talking elite Cal-Berkeley insight, because an astute political ponderer would understand that Trump lied a ton from the beginning, except when he was telling the truth about his most abhorrent policies, and with Trump, it is very, very hard to know which is worse. But where Rodgers really gets sacked is when he associates MAGA with any sort of "politics," or calling it a "movement."
MAGA's politics comes down to one non-negotiable position from a MAGA voter's perspective. "Trump hates liberals as much as me." Trump can enter a second war in the Middle East, fail to build a wall, oppose an Epstein investigation, and cause prices to rise — all lies, all political liabilities — but what he cannot do, what he won't do, is ever drop his hatred of liberals below that of his supporters' hatred. The only "non-negotiable."
Trump can even go straight socialist and be loved for it — the tariff "dividend" he promises to pay, yet another lie. Not a problem.
Rodgers' failure to recognize the only real promise, or maybe premise, is matched only by his characterization of MAGA as a political movement. As noted above, MAGA doesn't have political positions beyond hatred of liberals. A typical MAGA couldn't spell tariffs, never mind know their positions on them, until Trump told them. That MAGA is all about Trump's hatred of liberals gives his supporters an identity, not ideals. This also explains why Trump truly can do anything and get away with it. MAGAs cannot leave Trump without abandoning a part of themselves, the part they love the most: many of them live to hate liberals.
("Many" be key here, not "all." As has been mentioned here before, some people who stupidly vote for "a better economy" are not necessarily "MAGA" at heart - and they leave.)
The only real danger area for Trump is perhaps making it too obvious that he loves himself more than he despises anything blue. Granted, the two positions go hand in hand in his mind, so the distinction is a bit weird. If Trump's self-love gets in the way of cracking liberals, it creates a conflict of interest in a MAGA's pointed head. As devoted to Trump as they may appear to be, nothing, even Trump himself, stands in the way of hating liberals first and only. Lately, Trump appears to be loving himself more than his hatred of Dems.
To be fair to Rodgers, it may be unreasonable for him to recognize even obvious dynamics, given that he is, quite literally, a moron — despite coming out of Cal-Berkeley:
"He described the pandemic as a massive, coordinated effort to test how much control officials could exert over the public, pointing to closed beaches, arrested surfers, and shuttered businesses in California as examples he considered disproportionate to any public-health rationale."
Right.
Except no, because America has over one million fewer people now due to COVID, a disease that the CDC knew virtually nothing about except for perhaps how to best avoid it — and to the extent the CDC "missed," it missed on the side of safety, which most people should appreciate. After all, how much "trust" would the public have in the CDC had they erred on the other side, and 40 million died? They didn't project it as such, but it is biology and couldn't be ruled out.
A quarterback, better than nearly anyone, should know the luxury of hindsight. Oh, and not losing people.
He was and continues to be a vaccination freak, but this again goes hand in hand with hating liberals. MAGA wholly supported a vaccine when it was under Trump's "Operation Warp Speed," and — true to their cultural identity — whipsawed around when "liberals" (Joe Biden) started telling them what they had to do to best help with public health.
(MAGAs were not automatically anti-vax before Biden and Dr. Fauci, not when they had to vaccinate their kids for school or to join the military. It took... hating liberals first to figure out a position they would literally die for, going anti-vax.)
Rodgers also inexplicably let his wild right side run straight into the rush by questioning whether Blacks were better off before President Barack Obama. To the extent any portion of that statement is true, it is owed to the fact that it took a Black president to awaken the real racist bent of the Right. In effect, Rodgers is saying that Obama, on the basis of being Black, did Black Americans no favors because the racists rightly rebelled against such audacity. The Right wanted neither hope nor change for Black Americans.
As is typical, Obama cannot win. He went way too centrist for his liberal supporters while apparently not appreciating that he could have proposed the biggest tax cuts in history, built a wall, and made the military straight-hetero-Christian-white males, and still been branded a flaming "commie" by the Right due to presidenting while Black. Again, it's an identity, not political. But there is no question Black Americans are better off having had an Obama presidency.
The fact that anyone could acquire healthcare helped every American, Black or white, at levels even now not appreciated enough; same with solving the financial crisis, and yes, yes, indeed — continuing support for affirmative action on par with affirmative action for legacy applicants did help Black students.
His presidency also allowed Black Americans to give the racists one long and well-deserved "fffffffrog you," which actually was and remains important, even if many of us white Americans have yet to sufficiently appreciate it.
But all of this escapes Aaron Rodgers, not because he couldn't eventually figure it out; this isn't a MENSA test, more akin to the MOC exam, pointing to camels and lions, almost literally, because it is fundamentally about identity, who is who, what is what.
And that's ultimately likely where Rodgers fails. He just isn't racist enough to really fit in with the identity — he works around and has befriended more Black Americans than many of us meet personally in a lifetime. Yes, he is often called out for seemingly not supporting Colin Kaepernick. But even that's mostly wrong. Rodgers said Kaepernick “should be on a roster right now” and that he was “100 percent supportive” of teammates or other players who chose to protest.
There are people who are just morons, not racist. It is quite possible that Aaron Rodgers is one. After all, he went out for the football team again this year despite having long been washed up. Some powerful evidence, right there. Besides, genius comes in many types; a quarterback may make great downfield decisions while throwing a lot of political pick-sixes.
He did date Olivia Munn; that's a great read, certainly leaning toward the right identity. Just never trust his vote or political rationale, even as a Berkeley guy.
Jason Miciak is a Raw Story columnist, author, political consultant, attorney, and single parent girldad. Please follow on Bluesky, and he can be reached at jasonmiciak@gmail.com
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A Hollywood star leaped to defend a MAGA liar drowning in boos — and that's the problem
There may be no better metaphor for why Democrats keep getting pantsed by Republicans than Whoopi Goldberg asking an audience to please be respectful to Ted Cruz.
Ted Cruz.
Not Jimmy Carter. Not Mister Rogers. Ted Cruz.
Cruz appeared on The View, and when the audience became disruptive, Goldberg admonished them, essentially insisting that he was a guest and deserved to be heard.
And there it was: the Democratic Party’s entire problem condensed into one exquisitely painful television moment.
The other side shows up with a flamethrower. Democrats ask everyone to please use their indoor voices.
To be clear, Cruz should be allowed on The View. Put him on. Ask him questions. Let him speak. Free speech isn’t the problem.
The problem is the bizarre insistence that someone who helped legitimize the effort to overturn the 2020 election must also be wrapped in the warm blanket of institutional respectability while doing it. My phone blew up with texts from friends/family who couldn’t believe what they were seeing.
Cruz objected to certification of Arizona’s electoral votes even after courts had repeatedly rejected claims of widespread fraud sufficient to change the election. He wasn’t some guy in a Facebook group forwarding blurry screenshots of voting machines. He was a United States senator. A Harvard Law graduate. Former solicitor general of Texas. He understood exactly how serious the moment was.
And yet somehow the people booing him are the ones who need a lecture about decorum.
This is why Democrats will never “get it.”
Republicans figured out years ago that politics is a knife fight being held inside a country club. Democrats are still worried someone might use the wrong salad fork.
The modern GOP has spent years attacking institutions, demonizing political opponents, calling elections rigged, treating compromise as weakness and turning politics into professional wrestling. Democrats respond by polishing the lectern and reminding everybody that, traditionally, we wait until the other person finishes speaking.
Wonderful.
Maybe democracy will put that on its tombstone.
HERE LIES THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT.
IT LOST, BUT WAS EXTREMELY POLITE ABOUT IT.
This fetishization of civility is particularly maddening because it confuses manners with morality.
They are not the same thing.
You can behave impeccably while doing terrible things. History is filled with well-dressed people calmly explaining monstrous ideas. Take Joseph Mengele, the SS officer and physician dubbed the "Angel of Death." He gave out candy to the children who called him “Uncle Joseph,” before removing their spines. Conversely, an angry citizen yelling “BS” from the cheap seats may occasionally have a better grasp of the situation than the person sitting under studio lights explaining why we should all hear both sides.
There aren't always two equally respectable sides.
If somebody claims an election was stolen without evidence, the journalistic response shouldn't be, “Interesting. Let's explore that perspective.”
It should be, “Prove it.”
And when they can't, say so.
This is where Democrats and much of liberal television, not to mention the White House Press Corp., remain trapped in an obsolete fantasy: that if they demonstrate enough fairness, restraint and respect for norms, Republicans will eventually become embarrassed and reciprocate.
Any day now.
Perhaps immediately after infrastructure week.
The instinct isn't evil. In another political era, it might even have been admirable. Democratic institutions require disagreement. People with opposing political views have to coexist. Losing an election cannot mean deciding the winner is illegitimate.
Which is precisely why election denial is different.
The peaceful transfer of power is the mechanism that allows all the other disagreements to happen. Taxes, abortion, immigration, health care — we can scream about all of them because underneath the screaming is supposed to be one basic agreement: elections decide who governs.
Once politicians decide that elections only count when their team wins, we're no longer debating policy. We're arguing over whether the scoreboard itself exists.
And Democrats still seem terrified of appearing rude while pointing this out.
They worry about “norms” while their opponents discovered that norms are only enforceable when both sides care about them. They worry about hypocrisy while their opponents discovered hypocrisy has roughly the shelf life of yogurt left on a Phoenix sidewalk. They worry about being accused of partisanship by people who will accuse them of partisanship regardless.
Then, inevitably, somebody like Cruz walks onto a television set and liberals feel compelled to prove how much more civilized they are.
“Please be respectful.”
Why?
Be lawful. Don't threaten anyone. Don't assault anyone. Don't prevent someone from speaking indefinitely.
But respectful?
Respect is earned.
A functioning democracy doesn't require citizens to politely applaud politicians who tried to undermine confidence in an election. In fact, democracy depends on citizens being allowed to tell those politicians exactly what they think of them.
Loudly.
The irony is that Democrats constantly wonder why their voters aren't as energized as Republicans. Maybe it's because whenever Democratic voters actually become furious, somebody immediately appears with a rolled-up newspaper and tells them to get off the furniture.
Calm down.
Be reasonable.
Don't alienate anyone.
Respect the institution.
Meanwhile, Republicans have spent years discovering that anger is political rocket fuel.
Democrats don't need to become Republicans. They shouldn't lie more effectively, abandon democratic norms or turn every disagreement into mortal combat.
But they desperately need to learn the difference between defending norms and being imprisoned by them.
Democracy doesn't survive because everybody behaves nicely.
It survives because certain lines matter.
Trying to overturn a legitimate presidential election should be one of those lines.
Ted Cruz can appear on The View. He can speak. He can defend himself. He can even complain about the reception.
But nobody owes him applause.
Nobody owes him deference.
And Americans certainly don't need a celebrity moderator explaining that the important thing, after an attempted subversion of an election, is that we remember our manners.
That's the problem.
Republicans keep testing how far the guardrails can bend.
Democrats keep reminding everyone not to lean on them.
And then they wonder why they keep losing the argument. And for that, we say “Shame on you, Whoopi.”
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Trump's colossal botch has wrenched open an unbelievable opportunity
While Hakeem Jeffries revealed, as he trash-talked Medicare for All, that he doesn’t believe we’re in a full-blown populist moment in America, Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and the neofascist tech bros and billionaires fully realize what’s going on — and are committed to making the most of it.
As are Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed and many more Democratic candidates this year.
At its core, populism is a way of understanding politics as a struggle between ordinary people and a powerful elite that has stopped serving them. It’s not inherently left- or right-wing; it’s really a way political scientists describe a moment when the majority of a population has lost faith in the existing system and is looking for alternatives.
Arguably, the greatest failure of government in the past century was the Republican Great Depression, kicked off by Herbert Hoover with GOP tax cuts and tariffs in 1929 and lasting largely through the end of World War II. It created a populist moment that brought to power a Bernie-like populist in America named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It also brought to power a Trump-like populist in Germany named Adolf Hitler.
Because populist moments or eras typically evolve out of desperation — a third of Americans and Germans were unemployed in the 1930s — they open the door to people who offer solutions that radically depart from the norm. Breaking the old model and replacing it with a new one, in fact, is the essence of that populist pitch, be it coming from the fascist or the democratic socialist side.
And make no mistake: America is now being pulled in both directions by powerful movements from both sides. A recent Pew poll found that while almost 90 percent of Americans trusted our government to “do the right thing” for them in the Eisenhower/Kennedy 1960s, today that number sits at a shocking 17 percent.
The ground for a major, wrenching transformation of America has been seeded and the neofascist movement — which figured it out first — has, for the moment, captured control of our federal government along with about half of our states. But there’s also massive progressive pushback and dissatisfaction that, if anything, is amplifying the widespread populist sentiment.
So, which side will prevail?
The creation story of this moment is found when Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with the Iranian mullahs to hold onto their American hostages until after the election of 1980, thus destroying President Jimmy Carter’s chance at reelection. Reagan immediately began to execute a neofascist vision that had been presented to him by the billionaires who funded the Heritage Foundation with their 1981 “Mandate for Leadership,” that era’s version of Project 2025.
He destroyed the American union movement, slashed wages for working-class people, gutting the middle class, made it harder to retire on Social Security, made deep cuts to FDR’s social safety net, ended free college, killed Carter’s solar energy programs, gave trillions of tax dollars to billionaires while raising taxes on working people, slashed funding for our public schools, and repeatedly blamed the nation’s problems on Black people and “elites” in our universities.
In 1993, President Bill Clinton picked up Reagan’s neoliberal mantle and brought us “the end of the era of big government” and “the end of welfare as we know it” as Reagan’s draconian tax cuts — which no Democratic president since has seriously challenged — began the modern explosion of billionaires and monopolistic corporations.
President Barack Obama, although he campaigned on the populist-sounding slogan of “hope and change,” continued the neoliberal plan, turning our healthcare system over to a handful of massive insurance companies and their billionaire executives.
Forty-five years of neoliberalism, as I document in detail in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America, have taken us from two-thirds of us being in the middle class with a single paycheck in 1981 down to a mere 41 percent of us claiming that status and having to have two full-time jobs per family to do it today.
As the Republican Great Depression devastated average voters, so has this failed neoliberal experiment, bringing us to this second modern populist moment.
On the neofascist side, there’s a populist movement initially led by tech and fossil fuel billionaires that’s been joined by the more than 200 billionaire families and foundations who spent nearly one in five of all dollars used in the 2024 election.
They’re aided daily in their efforts by propaganda operations run by Vladimir Putin (internet trolls), Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, and Benjamin Netanyahu (AIPAC), all committed to spreading strongman ethnonationalist movements across the world at the expense of democracy. And, of course, Donald Trump and his seizure of our federal government and police agencies.
Their most compelling weapon is their control of most of our media, particularly the powerful social media sites Facebook and X. As Peter Thiel wrote in 2010, quoted in the opening of Gil Durand’s brilliant new book The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy:
“The initial founding vision was that we were going to use technology to change the whole world and basically overturn the monetary system of the world… the basic idea was that we could never win an election on getting certain things because we were in such a small minority… But maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world—without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who were never going to agree with you—through technological means… technology is this incredible alternative to politics.”
On the side that still embraces democracy, the populist progressive movement has been led by Bernie Sanders for decades, although that mantle is increasingly being picked up across the Democratic Party as politicians recognized over the past decade this populist moment.
Multiple polls from 2016 showed that Bernie Sanders could’ve easily beaten Trump, if the Democratic Party machine and the big donors Bill Clinton brought along hadn’t sabotaged him. It was verified by Politifact. Populist voters were ready to elect a populist in that election, and the only one offered to them was Trump.
They rejected the neoliberalism of Reagan and the Clintons alike, and those who vote for Democrats are clearly now opting for a reinvention of America along the social democracy lines pioneered by the Scandinavian nations.
In his book I Paid Hitler, 1930s steel baron Fritz Thyssen confesses that he was entranced by populist Hitler’s promise to “resurrect” Germany from the depths of the Depression and its loss in World War I. He organized the first seed money that got Hitler into power in 1933 and brought along many of his fabulously rich peers.
Today’s heir to Hitler’s authoritarian populist mantle is Trump (although Vance and Rubio, among others, are waiting for the king to fail so they can step into the vacuum).
During that same time, the plutocrat and former New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt turned his back on his own class and embraced a Bernie-like populist message, claiming that he could put America back together by taxing the morbidly rich at 90% and using government to meet workers’ needs.
Today’s heirs to FDR’s progressive populist mantle could well be billionaire Illinois Governor JB Pritzker or Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (although there are numerous competitors).
On both sides, the message is similar:
“The elites and the government have failed us, feathered their own nests while ignoring us and ours, and they must be overthrown and replaced. We need radical change in the direction of our government and our culture.”
The only difference is that the Republicans are saying they’ll fix things by handing the reins of government to billionaires and the stability of society to armed, masked ICE agents while Democrats are saying we must reverse Reaganism, tax the rich, and use that money to restore our middle class with free healthcare, education, and housing supports.
We’ve been in this populist moment since the middle of the GW Bush administration, although it was a slow boil until the 2016 election. The first indication was Obama winning with a populist message, and the for-sure proof was Trump winning twice on purely populist messages. The Trump movement, however, figured out that this was where America was at, long before it occurred to Democrats (other than Bernie), and Biden’s efforts, although valiant, were too little and too late.
So, here we are at this populist moment, and our country faces a binary choice: fascism or democratic socialism.
Republicans are universally lined up on the fascist side, backing Trump and ICE while feeding at the trough of their billionaire donors. That unanimity gives them tremendous power; their only problem is that they’ve failed to deliver for the people — and voters know it.
But Democrats are split, between those corrupt neoliberals like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and John Fetterman who are deeply in the pockets of corporate and wealthy interests, and a new and growing generation of politicians who often describe themselves as democratic socialists or social democrats.
This schism, a remnant of the Clinton years, is weakening the Democratic Party’s populist appeal as many believe the Perez-style Democrats will prevent the AOC- or Pritzker-style Democrats from actually accomplishing the transition to a social democracy that America needs.
Some doubt that this is the most important election in our lifetime, noting that every cycle we hear that kind of rhetoric. But, given the stakes and the boiling populist energy arrayed on both sides, it’s hard to imagine this isn’t the most critical one since 1932 America and 1933 Germany.
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Even Republicans loathe Jim Jordan — and we're about to find out why
Without question, Jim Jordan is one of the most loathsome creatures in politics, or, more broadly, in American society. The sight of Jordan makes your skin crawl, and the sound of his abrasive voice makes your ears ring for days.
He is equal parts repulsive and repugnant, which are two of his best attributes. I’d rather wrestle a pack of rats than watch Jordan on TV with the sound muted.
This maniacal egomaniac wants us to believe he's “stepping back” from his leadership roles in the House. But Jordan would lie, cheat, and steal — well, he’s already done all three things oodles of times, but he’d do it all again — to be the leader of the Republican Party.
This week, at the laugh-and-a-half joke of a first-ever Republican Party midterm convention in Dallas, Jordan announced he won't seek a waiver to keep his gavel atop the House Judiciary Committee, and he confirmed he has no interest in returning to lead the House Oversight Committee either.
After stints running two of the most aggressive investigative panels in the House, Jordan is walking away from both, and he’s not doing this to make room for the next generation of GOP House talent, or because he wants to become a back-bencher. No, no, no. Jordan’s ambition is like the hunger of a shrew.
Because Jim Jordan doesn't do anything without it being about Jim Jordan or Donald Trump. No less an authority on repugnancy and repulsiveness, Matt Gaetz, said that Jordan stepping back from Judiciary is a sign he “has his eyes on a bigger prize.”
One of Trump’s biggest bootlickers, Sen. Jim Banks, who is also one of Jordan's biggest fans (can you imagine the type of person you must be to like Jordan?) put it even more bluntly, saying that Jordan “will never be a back-bencher.”
Jordan, an obnoxious, power-hungry ogre, is circling the top of House Republican leadership, and he's doing it now, ahead of a midterm that could very well cost his party the majority.
If Republicans get wiped out in November, which we should all be saying the rosary for daily, if not hourly, the message voters will have sent is unmistakable. They will be screaming for Congress to stop the chaos, stop the extremism, stop rewarding the loudest, angriest voices in the room.
And no one encapsulates all the elements of those messages more than Jordan.
So, how would Jim Jordan and the House Republican conference respond to those messages?
By handing more power to Jim Jordan. A man who thinks he’s the tough guy, former wrestler, with his no-suit-jacket, sleeves-rolled-up costume and his jaw clenched, playing the aggrieved macho man for the cameras while wimpishly getting down on his knees for Donald Trump. Not to pin Trump, but to roll over and play dead.
He's been one of Trump's most reliable attack dogs for a decade, and now he somehow believes that loyalty, despite what voters have to say, has earned him a promotion.
Here's the thing about Jordan's tough-guy bravado. It’s the shammiest of shams. First, he is not at all liked in the House, even among his own colleagues. That’s because, let’s just be honest here, he is not a likable human being. Even if you like Jordan’s schtick, you don’t like Jim Jordan. It takes a lot of work to be that disliked.
And one of the reasons he’s anathema is because of his role in the Ohio State abuse scandal. For those unaware, an independent investigation revealed that the late Ohio State University athletic team doctor, Richard Strauss, sexually abused at least 177 male students, predominantly wrestlers, over a two-decade span while university officials and staff failed to stop him. During part of this time, Jordan was the assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State, and he claims he had no knowledge about what was going on.
Which, by many accounts, is questionable, just like everything else that comes off of Jordan’s lying lips.
Because of his apparent lies, Jordan has zero integrity. He has a documented, well-established history of denying that he knew about the abuse. Survivors have said for years that Jordan knew about the abuse happening under Strauss and did nothing.
Jordan has denied it, repeatedly and unconvincingly, for years. A very revealing HBO documentary revisited that history not long ago, and it was the wrestlers, not Jordan, who showed courage, honesty, and dignity. And in the film, Jordan is shown exactly as he was.
He abandoned these young men who trusted him to protect them. Just for this alone, putting all of his sycophancy for Trump aside, Jordan has no business being handed more power over anyone.
Frankly, his denials, despite blatant evidence to the contrary, should disqualify him from public office altogether, let alone elevate him to the top of his party's leadership.
Which brings us to another phony, Speaker Mike Johnson. If Republicans get slaughtered this fall, Johnson will be the first to go. Frankly, it would be hard to imagine that Johnson would put his name forward to be House minority leader since he’s been such an epic failure.
Jordan clearly sees the opening, i.e., thinking a bogus bruiser can replace a whiny wimp. He ran for speaker once already, in 2023, and lost. He's not going to sit quietly and watch this opportunity pass him by twice.
If Jordan does make his move, I hope it puts his pathetic past and measly record back in the spotlight where it belongs. The Ohio State cover-up, the years spent foaming at the mouth for Trump, and the fallacious tough-guy act.
Because if the House Republican conference looks at all of that and decides Jim Jordan is their guy, it will prove, definitively, that they learned nothing from whatever punishment voters hand them in November.
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The right's new war is being fought in high chairs — and daycares may not survive
Vice President JD Vance is promoting a Trump administration plan to siphon off federal money that helps working parents afford childcare and use it to subsidize parents who stay at home. The man who ran for office mocking “childless cat ladies” is now trying to stir up a cat fight between working and stay-at-home moms. That’s not remarkable coming from a federal government run by social media trolls. But the main effect of the actual policy Vance is promoting will be to make the lives of already stressed working class families, especially in Wisconsin, even harder, more expensive and noticeably worse than before.
Childcare funding has been in crisis in Wisconsin ever since the pandemic relief money that briefly stabilized providers ran out. Without that money, which “prevented system collapse,” according to the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association, supporting more than 430,000 children in nearly 6,000 programs, parents are priced out of care and one in four providers say they will likely have to close their doors.
Unlike Massachusetts and Vermont, Wisconsin does not treat childcare as a state budget priority. Ours is one of only a handful of states, including Idaho, Indiana, Nevada, and Ohio, that failed to spend any money on childcare beyond what was required to draw down federal dollars, according to a 2025 report by the advocacy group ChildCare Aware. In 2026, the state created a new school readiness program for 4-year-olds. It was a first step toward acknowledging the needs of preschoolers and their parents. But it did nothing to address the massive shortage in care for infants and toddlers.
That’s all fine with JD Vance, who wrote on X that “normal Americans care more about their families than their jobs, and want a family policy that doesn’t shunt their kids into crap daycare so they can enjoy more ‘freedom’ in the paid labor force.”
But Vance is not offering to do anything about the fact that the U.S. is the only wealthy nation on Earth that doesn’t offer paid maternity leave, even though 68% of mothers with children under 6 are employed. Nor is he promoting the kind of high-quality early childhood education system that allows parents in Denmark, after their six months of paid parental leave, to enroll their preschoolers in beautiful, enriching childcare programs they don’t have to feel guilty about.
Instead, what Vance is proposing is to take an already paltry federal childcare subsidy and make working parents fight over crumbs with nonworking parents. Mainly, his aim seems to be to punish single parents. That’s not going to leave anyone in good shape — least of all children.
One of the saddest aspects of the attack on childcare is that very recently parents, educators, business leaders and politicians of both political parties were finally coming together around the idea that childcare is an essential public good that requires public support.
The “mommy wars” attack Vance wants to revive is long out of date. It has been decades since most American families had the luxury of subsisting on a single wage-earner’s income, trad wife fantasies notwithstanding.
Another major recent breakthrough is policymakers’ realization that the magic of the free market is not going to provide childcare parents can afford.
“It was the Biden administration that put a ton of money into childcare during COVID, and we learned from that,” says Ruth Schmidt, executive director of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association. “The lesson was not just the importance of keeping childcare open so that essential workers could work, but the other piece that’s really interesting is that it demonstrated what can positively happen in childcare when you put a little more money into it.”
Thanks to direct payments to providers during the pandemic, center closures dropped off, the number of teachers leaving the workforce slowed down, tuition stopped climbing and, Schmidt says, “this industry for the first time was finally able to say, ‘Our work is important. It is essential to the functioning of our country. It’s worth investing in, because if you invest in it, these positive things can happen.”
Then came Trump.
Schmidt calls the rollout of Trump policies that slashed support for families “death by 1,000 cuts.” During the second Trump administration, cuts to food assistance, Medicaid and Head Start, along with the federal government’s move to loosen safety standards and increase staff ratios in childcare centers have taken a huge combined toll on Wisconsin families.
If it were just ideological — if the Trump administration were actually pursuing the kinds of pronatalist policies that make getting married and having children more attractive, as Vance likes to claim, it wouldn’t be as bad. But instead, while spouting rhetoric about valuing families, this administration is subjecting little kids and their parents to more and more misery.
Wisconsin could do more to protect vulnerable kids. Before leaving the Capitol to hit the campaign trail, state legislators failed to pass a bill that would have used state money to fill the gap after federal childcare stabilization funds lapsed. That set off a vicious cycle, says Paula Drew of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association. Subsidies for families were cut and their out-of-pocket payments skyrocketed, so cash-strapped parents withdrew their kids from care. Under-enrollment meant less revenue for childcare centers, so they raised their rates. “It just sort of snowballed,” Drew says. “Programs said things like, ‘We’re gonna have to lower salaries for staff.’ … so I think we’re going to lose our educators, and in fact I think we’ve already lost a big percentage of our skilled, seasoned educators.”
An unintended consequence of the state’s investment in 4-year-old pre-K is that it creates a disincentive to provide care for infants and toddlers, which is already more expensive, Drew says. “Wisconsin serves very few infants and toddlers in regulated care,” she says. “And now, with additional funding going into the Get Kids Ready pre-K program, we expect that to be even lower a year from now.”
To make matters worse, the state no longer has a surplus of federal Temporary Assistance to Needy Families funds, which it has used to cover some childcare costs for low-income families.
Sooner or later, Wisconsin is going to have to start dedicating state revenue to childcare. Schmidt and Drew hope that, with a new governor and a new Legislature, Wisconsin will use the state surplus, payroll taxes or a tax on hemp products and gambling, as Louisiana has done, to subsidize childcare. Only then can Wisconsin reduce the astronomical tuition rates that parents pay ($13,000 for home care and $17,400 for center-based care, according to state data), give providers a better wage (currently $13.55 per hour), and stop the wave of childcare closures.
They especially want the state to shore up disappearing infant and toddler care and retain experienced teachers — not just by giving them a raise but also by allowing them to continue to get higher education “and make this a profession, not just a fleeting step to something else,” says Drew.
“We need supply of care; supply means educators that can work in programs. And then we want to help parents pay for care on the demand side. … You can’t do one and not the other, because it simply won’t work,” says Drew. “You can’t just help parents pay for care, but not tend to the supply of care available. And you can’t just tend to the supply of care available, but pretend you don’t see that parents are literally going into poverty to try to pay for childcare.”
“Childcare is infrastructure,” says Schmidt. “If we turned around and said to parents with 5-year-olds, you’ve got to start paying $17,000 a year for your child to be in school, we would see empty classrooms, right? We treat these as two very dramatically different concerns. But all of it is about families’ ability to work outside the home, impact the economy, all those kinds of things. “
It’s also about having a decent society that values families and takes good care of children. That’s the kind of society we need to come together and focus on, instead of being distracted by the rage-baiting bluster of internet trolls.
Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Wisconsin Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Ruth Conniff for questions: info@wisconsinexaminer.com.
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A MAGA nemesis cracked the code on Trump
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney will gather his cabinet in Banff, Alberta, today to consider whether Canada should continue to respond to Trump’s trade war and Canada’s former retaliation for his tariffs against Canada with more tariffs against U.S. goods.
The answer is yes.
On Tuesday, Canada retaliated against 50 percent American tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods with 15, 25 and 50 percent tariffs, depending on the product. Trump responded that evening by adding more products to his 50 percent tariff list and banning the imports of several Canadian goods outright, including beer, wine and liquor.
I obviously cannot tell Carney or Canada what to do. But I can say that, based on my experience, the only way to stop bullies is to hit them back. And the only way to deal with Trump is to make it impossible for him to bully worse. Otherwise, he will continue to bully.
Most Canadians appear to feel the same way. Polls released in recent days show unusually widespread support across Canada’s fractious regions to fight back. Many Canadians want the Canadian government to go further, with measures like an export tax on electricity.
Carney is a former central banker with a doctorate in economics, but this is not an economic issue. It is a matter of political bullying.
To our friends in Canada, I say: We here in the United States are embarrassed and outraged by the ignorant ego maniac now occupying the White House. Most of us do not support him. Many of us have tried — and will continue — to fight back against his war against Iran, which the United States is losing; his war against immigrants in our communities, many of whom are terrified; and his extraordinarily stupid tariffs.
I’m sure I speak for many here in the United States when I say that whatever you do we will be your friends and allies, but that we hope you continue to fight Trump. The more of us — here in the U.S. and around the world — who take him on, the more likely it is that his bullying will stop.
We are now in the final weeks of a midterm election where control of Congress is at stake. You should know that we’re doing everything we can to take back Congress, so we can limit his ignorant megalomania.
Our best wishes to our Canadian neighbors, friends, and allies.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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