Trump haunted by ghosts of scandals past at State of Union
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
Trump will go nuts if this happens after his big State of the Union speech
I’m not going to watch the State of the Union address Tuesday night. I urge you not to, either.
I hope Nielsen (or whoever makes such estimates these days) will find that far fewer Americans watched Trump’s State of the Union than have watched any other State of the Union in recent memory. It will drive Trump nuts.
There are plenty of other reasons for not watching.
First, he doesn’t deserve our attention. He’s abused and defiled the American presidency, even worse than he did in his first term.
He’s openly taken bribes. He’s blatantly usurped the powers of Congress. He has overtly used the Justice Department to punish people he considers his enemies and pardon people loyal to him. He has willfully rejected the rule of law, broken treaties, literally destroyed part of the White House, thumbed his nose at our allies (including our closest and heretofore loyal neighbors), and utterly failed his constitutional duty to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. He lies like most people breathe. He’s a fraud and a traitor.
Second, we already know what he’s going to say because he’s already stated and restated his lies every chance he gets. He says the economy is in wonderful shape, that he’s settled six wars, that he’s brought peace to the Middle East, that he’s made America safer and more secure, that the 2020 election was stolen from him, ad nauseam.
He assumes that if he repeats these lies often enough, people will believe them. Why should we give him more of an audience for his lies?
Third, he refuses to be president of the United States but only of the people who voted for him in 2024.
He talks in glowing terms about “my” people while denigrating “them” — those of us who didn’t vote for him, who still disapprove of him, or who refuse to give him whatever he wants.
He won’t even fund so-called blue states. So far this year he’s axed over $1.5 billion in blue-state grants, contrary to the wishes of Congress.
If he doesn’t believe he’s my president, why should I treat him as my president and watch his State of the Union?
Fourth and finally, I already know the real state of the union. It sucks.
The economy has been good for big business and wealthy Americans but shitty for small businesses and average working Americans.
Although Trump repeatedly promised that his tariffs would reduce U.S. imports, shrink the trade deficit, and lead to a revival in American manufacturing, the opposite has happened. The annual trade deficit in goods last year hit a record high. And U.S. manufacturers cut 108,000 jobs.
In the 2024 election, Trump also promised to bring down prices, but inflation is still steaming ahead. Prices grew at an annual rate of 3 percent in December. He’s so out of touch with what most Americans are enduring that he calls the crisis of affordability “fake news.”
He promised to control immigration, but 6 out of 10 Americans think he’s gone “too far” by sending federal agents into American cities who have caused mayhem and murder.
He promised to avoid foreign entanglements, but he abducted the president of Venezuela, killed more than 150 Venezuelans, and is now planning to attack Iran.
His menacing the Middle East has created another inflation risk: The possibility that a key oil export route will be disrupted has caused the price of Brent crude to soar.
For all these reasons, I’m not going to watch Trump’s State of the Union. I recommend that you don’t, either.
Your senators and representatives in Congress should boycott it, too. You might call their offices to suggest this. (Some Democrats are already planning to skip it, opting instead for a counter-programming event on the National Mall dubbed “The People’s State of the Union.” Good!)
And why the hell should justices of the Supreme Court show up, especially after he says he’s “ashamed” of the six who decided his tariffs exceeded his authority — calling the three Democratic appointees a “disgrace to our nation” and the three conservatives who voted against him “fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats,” “very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution,” “swayed by foreign interests,” and “an embarrassment to their families”?
Boycott the State of the Union. It’s the least we can do.
***
PS: On a not unrelated point, I asked many of you on Friday for your advice on whether I should accept a dinner invitation, knowing that “Jim,” a strong Trump supporter, would be there. 31 percent of you thought I should go but not talk about Trump, while 29 percent of you recommended I send regrets.
Well, I accepted the invite and went to the dinner party. It was a disaster. I tried not to talk about Trump, but Jim goaded me into it. I won the argument but made an ass of myself. I should have listened to those of you who advised me against going.
- 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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'State of the Swamp' rebuttal to greet Trump at big speech
As President Donald Trump delivers his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, before an audience on the House floor dominated by Republican members of Congress, another gathering will take place nearby: a counter-program dubbed “State of the Swamp.”
Organized by Defiance.org, State of the Swamp is billed as a live rebuttal to Trump’s sure-to-be baloney filled speech, from the National Press Club in downtown Washington, D.C.
While Trump’s official address will most likely be a diatribe of lies, smears, innuendo, and petty grievances, among other useless exaggerations by the blowhard-in-chief, State of the Swamp will bring together members of Congress, other elected officials, journalists, activists, and cultural figures.
Guests are set to include the actors Robert De Niro and Mark Ruffalo alongside politicians like Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, as well as journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, both recently arrested amid anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis.
Real-time rebuttal to Trump will come from Stephanie Grisham, Trump’s first term press secretary and communications director, offering viewers a different account of the nation’s deteriorating condition. The event will be livestreamed.
At the heart of that effort is Miles Taylor, another former Trump official turned outspoken critic who created Defiance.org as a vehicle for pushback against the president’s actions.
Last April, Trump signed an executive order and a presidential memorandum targeting Taylor, who was Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first term but who swiftly turned critic, first anonymously with the bestselling book A Warning, then under his own name.
Trump also revoked Taylor’s security clearances and ordered an investigation, citing potential treason and the unauthorized disclosure of information
On Tuesday, Taylor told me that since he was targeted he has been under constant threat.
“Any day we expect it’s possible the FBI will show up at our doorstep,” he said.
“They’ll try to arrest me at an event. They’re going to bring up false charges. But if we cowered … that would say that it’s okay and that they can do that to people, so we’re not going to.”
Taylor said personal and professional costs have been steep. Before launching Defiance.org, he said, he and his wife had retreated into private life, launching a small business and focusing on family — only to see that life upended when Trump signed his order.
“It destroyed our business,” Taylor said. “It totally upended everything … there were death threats to our 18-month-old daughter.”
But he described a pivotal psychological shift when he and his wife chose to stop reacting defensively and instead adopt a posture of resistance.
“That decision to flip from a defensive crouch to a defiant one … that was a psychological game changer for us. We were like, ‘Oh, wait, we have agency here.’”
That sense of agency, Taylor said, is central to Defiance.org’s mission — answering the question he heard repeatedly from others after Trump returned to power: “What can I do?”
He traces the genesis of the organization to a late-night conversation with De Niro, who urged him to build something bigger that could offer weekly, actionable steps for people frustrated with the national moment.
Within weeks, Taylor said, he and his wife had bought their domain name and begun shaping what would become a hub for highlighting and supporting civic action, not just rallies and signatures.
“We’re a tiny little team,” he said. “Because we want to make sure that all of our member fees go toward actually countering Trump’s abuses of power, and not building some sort of big nonprofit industrial complex entity.”
Each Wednesday, Taylor said, Defiance.org announces a new initiative, from legal defense funds for reporters to constitutional challenges, to “know your rights” trainings for demonstrators.
“Every week we want to announce a tangible thing that we are doing that people can get involved in and has an actual impact,” Taylor said.
He wants to contrast that with what he views as more traditional forms of protest that lack follow-through.
Taylor said Defiance.org has purchased and distributed tens of thousands of ICE alarm whistles for frontline anti-Trump communities, with some seen being used in Minnesota.
Tuesday night’s event is part of Taylor’s broader strategy to sustain engagement beyond a single speech. Taylor estimated that roughly 600 people would attend State of the Swamp, close to capacity and potentially more than the number of lawmakers present in the House chamber during Trump’s address.
“We’re ready to fight back. We’re going to keep fighting back,” Taylor said.
“We’re happy warriors committed to persistent, organized resistance and action.”
- John Casey was most recently Senior Editor, The Advocate, and is a freelance opinion and feature story writer. Previously, he was a Capitol Hill press secretary, and spent 25 years in media and public relations in NYC. He is the co-author of LOVE: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality (Rizzoli, 2025), named by Oprah in her "Best 25 of 2025.”
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Trump's State of the Union will contain this poisonous lie — don't fall for it
Tonight is the State of the Union speech. If it follows the routine of previous GOP presidencies, Trump will use our national debt as an excuse to call for more tax breaks for billionaires along with drastic cuts to social spending, just like Reagan, Bush, and Bush did.
“The national debt is the United States’ next great war,” Jodey Arrington, the top Republican on the House Budget Committee, thundered this month about our $38 trillion national debt and $1 trillion annual interest payments on that debt.
If we’re going to use his war analogy to describe this very real crisis, the first shots were fired in 1981, when Republicans’ so-called supply-side tax cuts began a 45-year upward transfer of over $50 trillion in wealth that made billionaires fabulously rich while it hollowed out our nation’s Treasury. They stole $38 trillion from our government, and another $12 trillion (at least) from working class families via wage freezes and the destruction of unions.
Ever since 1981 — when our national debt was less than a trillion dollars — Republicans have eagerly slashed taxes for their Epstein-class billionaire donors, ballooned deficits, and then cynically blamed teachers, seniors, and working families for the red ink.
Now they warn of catastrophe, but the real catastrophe is the annual payment — now officially a trillion dollars a year in interest — for GOP policies that funneled public wealth upward while starving the middle class.
For 45 years we were told by Reagan, Bush, Bush, Trump, and their billionaire backers and think tanks that cutting taxes on the morbidly rich and giant corporations would unleash prosperity. Instead, those tax cuts have collectively drained at least $38 trillion out of the federal treasury.
Thirty-eight trillion dollars. That number is so large it barely fits in the human imagination, so let’s translate it:
- Thirty-eight trillion dollars is roughly what it would cost to fund a Medicare-for-All-style universal health care system for a decade. In other words, we could have guaranteed health care as a right in America for ten years — every doctor’s visit, every prescription medication, every surgery and ER visit — and still had money left over. And because it would eliminate the need for Medicare and Medicaid, we could run it for a lot longer than just a decade.
- It’s more than 20 times the entire federal student loan debt that our young people are groaning under. We could have made college free and wiped out every penny of student debt in this country over and over again, freeing tens of millions of Americans to buy homes, start businesses, and raise families instead of mailing checks to banks for decades.
- It’s enough money to build tens of millions of affordable homes. Even at $300,000 per unit — a generous estimate — $38 trillion could pay for well over one hundred million homes. That wouldn’t just reduce housing costs; it would fundamentally reset the housing market and break the back of the affordability crisis that’s crushing the middle class.
- It’s enough to make universal pre-K permanent for generations. And, at the same time, it could have made community college tuition-free nationwide, rebuilt every crumbling bridge, modernized the entire electric grid, gotten us off fossil fuels while it hardened our infrastructure against climate disasters, and still left trillions in the bank for health care and education.
Instead, we used that money to lower income and estate taxes on the very wealthiest Americans, and then Republicans turned around and pointed to the resulting debt as proof that we “can’t afford” child care, education, a green economy, health care, or housing.
We also just officially hit a trillion dollars a year just in interest payments on the national debt. That’s money that doesn’t educate a child, doesn’t insure a family, and doesn’t build a single home. It’s simply a transfer to bondholders, the majority of whom are already-wealthy investors and financial institutions.
And what could the $1 trillion a year we’re now paying as interest on the national debt buy instead?
- It could permanently expand Affordable Care Act subsidies and dramatically reduce premiums for millions of working families, and still leave hundreds of billions for other priorities.
- It could fund universal pre-K across America several times over.
- Two years of those interest payments would be enough to eliminate essentially the entire federal student loan portfolio.
- One trillion dollars a year could finance housing construction at a scale not seen since the World War II mobilization, ending both homelessness and skyrocketing rents.
And here’s the cruelest irony: this Republican national debt and its associated interest burden exists solely because of those tax cuts.
The GOP’s “Two Santas” strategy — cut taxes when a Republican is in the White House, then scream about deficits when a Democrat takes over — has produced exactly what its author, Jude Wanniski, wanted it to produce. Gut the middle class while elevating the Epstein-billionaire class into the stratosphere, making them richer than any pharaoh or king in world history.
Contrary to Republican lies demanding we gut social programs to pay down the national debt, we don’t have a “spending problem” in American government: we have a looting problem.
We were told the tax cuts would pay for themselves but, of course, they didn’t because they were never intended to. That was just the GOP’s dishonest sales pitch on behalf of their wealthy owners. Instead, those tax cuts for the rich paid for stock buybacks, wealth concentration, and the rise of a billionaire class that now uses its fortune to buy media, politicians, and Supreme Court judges who ask, “How high?” when billionaires yell, “Jump!”
Thirty-eight trillion dollars isn’t just an accounting number. It’s the health care people didn’t get, the homes that weren’t built, the student debt that shackled a generation, the schools that went underfunded, and the infrastructure that collapsed.
And the trillion dollars a year we now spend on interest is the bill for Reagan’s, Bush’s, Bush’s, and Trump’s 45-year “supply side” experiment.
Americans are just now beginning to realize that none of this was ever really about balanced budgets or “fiscal responsibility.” Instead, it was always about power. About spending like drunken sailors to “make the good times roll” during four GOP presidencies, and squealing like stuck pigs when Clinton, Obama, and Biden — who all tried to cut spending and balance the budget, per Wanniski’s plan — were in office.
Deficits were the weapon. Tax cuts were the bait. And the national debt — and thus the middle class — became the hostage. And the result is exactly what you’d expect if you’d designed a system to starve government of revenue while shoveling unimaginable levels of wealth at the top.
Under this 45-year-long GOP punishment of America’s working people, public schools struggled, health care bankrupted families, housing costs exploded, and college became a lifelong mortgage. Meanwhile, the Epstein-billionaire class grew so large and so politically powerful that it now writes and rewrites tax policy, regulatory policy, media ownership, and even the rules of democracy itself.
Supply-side economics — a massive and intentional fraud — was sold as a growth strategy but in reality it was always designed as a wealth transfer strategy that offered Republican presidents the ability to spend like crazy to create the illusion of good economic times. The middle class and the poor paid for it, the debt reflects it, and the trillion dollars a year in today’s interest payments proves it.
This is not some natural economic cycle: it’s the predictable outcome of deliberate Republican policy choices stretching back four decades.
And the question now, as we prepare to hear Trump’s assessment of the state of our union, is simple: do we continue underwriting a system designed to funnel public wealth upward, or do we return to 1933-1980 90%-74% income tax rates on the rich and once again tax the wealthy and corporations so we can pay down our debt and invest some of that money in the working class people who actually created America’s prosperity?
Because that $38 trillion didn’t “disappear”: it was transferred from our treasury straight into the money bins of people like Epstein, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Musk.
And what we’re living with today is the bill.
The national debt isn’t the cause of our problems: it’s the receipt. It’s the paper trail of the largest upward transfer of wealth in 250 years of American history. And until we name that and tell the truth of how four Republican presidents got us here, we’ll keep paying for it.
- Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.
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America's most precious word is now a lie
Tennessee Republican State Rep. Monty Fritts, who’s eyeing running for Governor, has proposed legislation that would put women in that state who’ve had abortions in the electric chair. Republican policy has already killed hundreds of pregnant women: those who live in a red state with an abortion ban (almost all of them) are more than twice as likely to die during pregnancy or immediately after childbirth than women who live in states that allow abortion.
The founding principle of America is freedom, a word that’s been a touchstone for the GOP since the days of Ronald Reagan. Thomas Jefferson identified what his generation meant when using that word when he wrote in the Declaration of Independence:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
Today, however, all three of these rights that secure freedom’s predicates — “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” — are under assault by Trump and his Republican lickspittles.
So much for “Life”: Masked, armed ICE thugs have murdered two American citizens and multiple immigrants on the streets of our country in the first few weeks of this year, and women are dying in red states for lack of healthcare as Republican lawmakers substitute their obsession with controlling female bodies for the judgement of physicians.
An estimated 50,000 Americans — men, women, children — die every year in this country for lack of health care (and another 500,000 families are wiped out in bankruptcy) because Republicans refuse to even consider a national health care system like every other developed country in the world has.
Or “Liberty”: Trump’s secret police are compiling lists of people who’ve protested against them, are routinely smashing in front doors and car windows and imprisoning people without the warrants the Fourth Amendment requires, and are now even demanding — again, without judicial warrants — that all of the big social media companies turn over details on anybody who’s criticized ICE online. All of the companies, it appears, are complying out of fear that Trump will retaliate against them.
Or “the pursuit of Happiness”: Two entire generations are crippled with student debt since the Reagan Revolution ended free or cheap college in America; only about a tenth of Americans have the protection of a union since the GOP declared war on organized labor in 1981; and while you and I are paying income tax rates approaching 50 percent in some states, billionaires and giant corporations pay virtually nothing.
Our freedom to know what’s happening in the world and within our government is under attack by an administration that echoes Stalin’s “enemy of the people” and Hitler’s “Lugenpresse” (“lying press” or “fake news”) language as it sues and arrests journalists like Don Lemon for doing their jobs. Funding for NPR/PBS was ended, at the same time Trump surrendered the foreign information wars to Russia by killing off the Voice of America.
Our freedom to live without being poisoned is under attack by Trump’s regime gutting clean air and water protections while Bob Kennedy cheerleads Trump’s expanding production of cancer-causing herbicides like glyphosate.
Our freedom to vote is under direct assault by Republicans who want to purge from the voting rolls women who changed their names when they got married, as well as literally hundreds of smaller attacks on our right to vote across the Red states.
Our freedom to live without fear of our homes being destroyed by extreme weather is gone, as Trump and his GOP toadies gut our protections from greenhouse gasses, kill off Biden’s green energy programs, and bring back expensive coal to produce electricity.
Our freedom to be represented by people the majority of Americans want in office is similarly crippled: as reporter Greg Palast points out, if the 4+ million citizens who were either purged from the rolls or whose votes were challenged and thus not counted in the 2024 election had been able to cast their ballots, we’d have Kamala Harris as president and a Democratic-controlled House and perhaps even Senate.
Our freedom to live in a world at peace has been kneecapped by Republican administrations that lied us into war with Iraq and Afghanistan, now threaten war with Iran, and keep increasing military spending while pleading poverty when it comes to the needs of working people and their communities.
Our freedom to live in a nation free of corruption has been destroyed by the most corrupt administration in the history of America. Tom Homan taking a $50,000 bribe. Pam Bondi taking a $25,000 bribe. Kristi Noem and her boyfriend (both married to other people) flying around at taxpayer expense in a lavish “flying bordello” 737 with two plush bedrooms. Trump’s and Witkoff’s kids making billions off corrupt deals while “representing America” overseas.
Our freedom to a stable economy free of manipulation by the morbidly rich is gone, as the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts have run up a $38 trillion national debt. We’re paying more now in interest on the national debt — over a trillion dollars a year — than it would cost to solve much of the problems of homelessness, student debt, and healthcare in this country. All so over $50 trillion could be transferred from the middle class to the Epstein billionaire class over the past 40+ years.
Our children’s freedom to a safe, secure childhood has been shattered by decades of Republican obeisance to their donors in the weapons industry; kids are regularly thrown into a state of terror by active shooter drills in their schools and the knowledge that in America — and only in American — the bullets could start flying anytime, anywhere.
Our right to religious freedom — and freedom from religion as well — is under daily assault by wealthy Christian nationalist fanatics and hypocrites like “Whiskey Pete” Hegseth forcing extremist Christianity on our troops and states forcing the Ten Commandments on their own schoolchildren. (A list of commandments that have all been violated by our current president.)
Even our businesspeople are losing their freedoms: Trump is now threatening publicly traded Netflix with “consequences” unless they remove former Obama administration official Susan Rice from their board. He’s extorting millions in “donations” and “gifts” from corporate CEOs while making billions for himself and his corrupt family. And small businesses across the nation are being crushed by monopolies that 45 years of Reaganism have allowed to flourish.
When American oligarchs and their rightwing media shills rant about “freedom,” they mean freedom from taxes and regulation so they can get richer and poison the world for profit while they systematically crush workers. They’re calling for an end to personal and corporate responsibility, but only for themselves.
Freedom isn’t a slogan (although Republicans have abused it as one for decades): it’s found in the lived experience of average people.
When Americans can no longer feel safe in our bodies and homes, secure in our votes, stable in our economy, and confident in our education and healthcare, then Jefferson’s “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” have become aspirational again rather than actual.
Which appears to be exactly how the neofascists who’ve taken over the GOP want it.
Pass it on…
- Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.
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Here's the grim truth about Trump's State of the Union
As I considered what to write about Donald Trump’s State of the Union address at the U.S. Capitol tonight, one question nagged: why call it a State of the Union at all? The phrase implies an assessment of the country as it is. What we’ll hear will be a bombastic broadcast about an authoritarian utopia.
This won’t be a State of the Union. As with the rest of his gobbledygook, his self-centered hyperbole, his ludicrous stemwinders, this will be a guide to Donald Trump’s State of Mind.
Nowhere is that more evident than on Truth Social.
If you want a preview of the big speech, don’t consult history books or past presidential addresses or listen to the dingy Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s Secretary of Propaganda.
Scroll through Trump’s Truth Social feed, any day at 3:00 a.m. That’s where the real SOTU draft lives, in all-caps tirades, malicious monologues, and conspiracy-laced hallucinations.
Those whacked-out posts will form the outline of tonight’s “address.” The teleprompter will be little more than a continuous scroll through @realDonaldTrump.
Let’s start with foreign policy. With Trump’s online pronouncements as your template, expect a wild-ride about tariffs, Trump’s lust and true love.
Go back to when his second-term Truth Social Tariff Tilt-a-Whirl Tantrums began. Last January, Trump posted about an “emergency 25 percent tariffs on all Colombian goods,” because Colombia balked at accepting repatriation flights of migrants deported from the U.S.
The tariffs were posted like a punishment. Colombia relented.
Since then, tariffs have been declared, raised, paused, scrapped and re-declared in a dizzying loop, sometimes seemingly in response to court rulings or cable news segments or just plain whim. And always via Truth Social.
On Saturday, in retaliation to the Supreme Court ruling his tariffs illegal, Trump declared a "15 percent Worldwide Tariff, effective IMMEDIATELY.”
On Tuesday night at the Capitol, he will obsess about tariffs, and about how he is WINNING, all because he lost so publicly to SCOTUS. He will be in overdrive. And he’ll publicly scold the justices — or as he called them on Truth Social the "ridiculous (and) dumb" lowercase "supreme court” — some more.
He’ll say something like what he posted recently: that tariffs are “Making America Great Again — GREATER THAN EVER BEFORE!!!”
Then there’s Trump’s Greenland annexation fixation. He’s losing here too, so he’ll try to make it sound the opposite. He'll bounce off his surreal post that the USNS Comfort, a hospital ship, be permanently stationed at Greenland, to “take care of the many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there.”
Greenland and Denmark said an emphatic no to that, so Trump will be out for revenge.
It will be his way to show that he’s “winning” via his supposed compassion for the people of Greenland, and why they should jump on his ship of imperialism.
At SOTU, moments matter. In 2020, disgustingly, Trump used the address to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the bigoted and demonic Rush Limbaugh, transforming a prestigious honor into an abject horror show. Speaker Nancy Pelosi rightly ripped that speech to pieces, behind Trump’s back.
It’s hard to imagine that stunt being topped, but I know a way Trump might try.
For years he’s been raging online about the Nobel Peace Prize, including this demented whopper from June last year: “I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for this, I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for stopping the War between India and Pakistan, I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for stopping the War between Serbia and Kosovo.”
Um, okay, yeah. Given that you didn’t do any of that. Remember, though, that he finally stole a Nobel from an actual winner.
So here’s how he will use SOTU to award himself something, and in the process one-up his honor for Limbaugh. Don’t be shocked if Trump uses his speech to rename the Presidential Medal of Freedom the Trump Medal of Freedom, then asks J.D. Vance to drape one around his rolling rotunda of a neck.
And because everything bends toward him, expect a lengthy detour into Trump’s health. On Truth Social, he has repeatedly described his medical exams as “long, thorough, and very boring,” concluding with “PERFECT Marks.” He posts boasts about how he “aced” cognitive tests and challenges rivals to take the same exam.
He also used Truth Social to call reporting on his health “seditious” and “treasonous,”
Tonight, regardless, the obese, wandering 79-year-old will dramatically declare he’s the healthiest president in history.
From there, the descent into pandemonium will continue. Trump’s feed has become a stream of insults to allies and opponents, including a New Year’s Eve wish that a fellow Republican should “ROT IN HELL,” and the use of his favorite two words, “RIGGED AND STOLEN,” to criticize Bureau of Labor Statistics data and of course elections he didn’t win.
He has laid the groundwork for contesting the midterms, trashing American elections as a global “laughing stock,” warning that without sweeping changes in his favor, “we won’t have a country any longer.”
Expect Republicans to go wild with applause. The hypocritical House Speaker, Mike Johnson, will jump up and down behind him.
The bottom line is that the speech will show no distinction between Truth Social and the State of the Union. Trump’s performance will be a regurgitation of posts, a sullying of a pulpit that once stood for democracy and decency.
By the way, there is a reason the president speaks from the middle rostrum, the Vice President and Speaker placed above him. It’s to show that the people have the power.
Trump wants to destroy that barrier.
His speech won’t be illuminating. It will simply mirror and amplify his feed. And when it’s over, and he gets in his car to return to the White House, he will pull out his phone and post: “Everyone told me, SIR YOU GAVE THE GREATEST SPEECH in the HISTORY of our country tonight.”
- John Casey was most recently Senior Editor, The Advocate, and is a freelance opinion and feature story writer. Previously, he was a Capitol Hill press secretary, and spent 25 years in media and public relations in NYC. He is the co-author of LOVE: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality (Rizzoli, 2025), named by Oprah in her "Best 25 of 2025.”
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This MAGA fixation proves dystopia is now at our doorstep
The dining room table is the civic and moral hearth of our house on Constitution Street. Upon it rest a stack of utility and other bills to be sorted and paid (with cursing as necessary), issues of various magazines including The New Yorker and Fortean Times, a dog-eared Tom Wolfe anthology, and a shaker of sea salt, a squeeze bottle of raw honey and a red-topped dispenser of soy sauce. There are chocolates still being rationed from Valentine’s Day, an airplane plant, and dozens of other artifacts of daily living.
The thing that is new on the table is Kim’s application for a passport.
I picked it up when I went downtown to the post office the other day, knowing she might need it. She has studied it and made lists of documents required, some of which are at hand and others which are not. She has her birth certificate, but unless she can find legal evidence of the dissolution of her past marriage, she’ll have to request those from Missouri.
It’s not that we’re planning a trip out of the country, but that Kim would like to keep voting. She’s cast a ballot in every general election since she turned 18 and became eligible, but MAGA-inspired legislation kicking around in the U.S. House and Senate would, if passed, impose onerous new rules that require proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate. For married women who have taken a husband’s last name, now or in the past, one of the few viable options would be a passport.
Dubbed the SAVE Act, for “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility,” the legislation would do just the opposite and disenfranchise millions. The House recently passed, 218-213, an amended version of the act that replaces the document requirement with a photo ID provision and directs states to submit voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security. Since 2012, Kansas has required voters to show photographic identification at the polls. Eleven states, including Kansas, have already agreed to hand over voter data to the feds.
The SAVE Act has no chance of passage in the Senate — for now.
But Republicans have ratcheted up rhetoric around the bill to further Trump’s (and Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach’s) claims of massive voter fraud by undocumented migrants. These claims have been repeatedly and soundly debunked, with a recent government review flagging only about 1 in 5,000 registrations. But even that number may be overstated. The verification tool used by the government is prone to mistakenly flag some citizens as potential noncitizen voters. With MAGA’s legions preparing for an all-out assault on voting rights before this fall’s midterm elections, it seems prudent for Kim to have her newly-minted passport in hand before going to vote.
This worry, on an otherwise bright February week in east central Kansas when snow and ice was just a memory, was yet another example of dystopia at the doorstep. This “show me your papers” strategy is one long favored by authoritarian regimes, past and present. The goal is to discourage voting by making it as difficult, or as risky, as possible. Also, the SAVE Act neatly folds into the Trumpian obsession with who is and who isn’t American, a centerpiece of his tinpot regime from the beginning of his second term.
The Supreme Court will hear challenges to his executive order to end birthright citizenship on April 1. This is so mind-numbing I don’t even have a joke for the date. Words and reason appear poised to fail us, given the current bench.
Among the reasons I rely so heavily on books in these columns is for the galaxy of ideas they contain. Books are the cultural currency of a rational civilization, and when you find the right book to cite, it either invokes a knowing response in the reader or, if they are unfamiliar with the title, a curiosity about the work mentioned. There are a handful of books that nearly everyone has read, or has been forced to read in high school, ranging from Fitzgerald to Orwell, that are particularly effective in illustrating a point.
Federal District Judge Cynthia Rufe also reached for George Orwell in issuing her Feb. 16 decision that the Trump administration could not scrub references to George Washington’s enslavement of nine Black people from a National Parks Service site in Philadelphia.
Rufe prefaced the ruling with a passage from Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four:
All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.
“As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four now existed,” Rufe began, “with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims — to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts. It does not.”
The city of Philadelphia sued the Trump administration after it removed exhibits about slavery from an outdoor exhibit on the site of a house once used by presidents Washington and John Adams. The removal followed an executive order last year to eliminate “divisive narratives” from museums and sites operated by the federal government. Although Washington had nine enslaved people at the Philadelphia home, during his life nearly 600 enslaved persons lived or worked at his Mount Vernon estate in Virginia.
“In its argument,” Rufe writes, “the government claims it alone has the power to erase, alter, remove and hide historical accounts on taxpayer and local government-funded monuments within its control. Its claims in this regard echo Big Brother’s domain” in Nineteen Eighty-Four:
The largest section of the (government’s) Records Department consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction.
“The government here likewise asserts truth is no longer self-evident, but rather the property of the elected chief magistrate and his appointees and delegees, at his whim to be scraped clean, hidden, or overwritten. And why? Solely because,” Rufe writes, “as Defendants state, it has the power.”
Rufe is not only sounding the alarm of an encroaching dystopia, but is referencing the most famous line from the document upon which American democracy is built, the Declaration of Independence.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
It is the greatest sentence ever written, asserts a new book by historian Walter Isaacson. It may not rank as a literarily perfect sentence, but it is undoubtedly the most revolutionary and influential political statement put to paper. It was an aspirational sentence, an idea that we have spent the past 250 years trying to grow into, our journey marked by grievous failure and luminous success.
Voting equality was at the center of this struggle, with Black persons and women and young people and Native Americans claiming hard-won victories. But now we are sliding back into a regressive past through gerrymandering and legislation in red states to disenfranchise or suppress voters. The latest front in the assault on voting is a move, articulated by Trump earlier this month, to nationalize elections.
Never mind that elections are constitutionally controlled by the states. Nationalizing elections would create chaos and fear and provide an excuse for Trump to send armed federal agents to monitor polling places. Those boots could belong to ICE, and they could be expected to use the same restraint as they did in Minneapolis, where two American citizens were shot to death while observing the deportation surge there.
Add to this nightmare scenario the actual warehousing of migrants (and presumably some citizens) snared in immigration sweeps. It used to be that “warehousing” was a term for prison overcrowding, but under the Trump administration it has become a literal strategy. ICE, now the highest-funded law enforcement agency, is buying or attempting to buy warehouses in at least 18 sites across the country to provide space for an additional 100,000 detainees. Some of the purchases, such as in Kansas City, Missouri, have fallen through because of public outcry. Elsewhere, such as in Socorro, Texas, the $38 billion program advances as warehouses are slated to become concentration camps, housing thousands of people. The Socorro facility alone is expected to hold 8,500 individuals.
To call these facilities anything but concentration camps is to deny reality. For comparison, some of the mass internment sites that held Japanese Americans during World War II were similar in size. Camp Amache at Granada, Colorado, held 7,500 over an area of about one square mile.
If we don’t change course, America is about to make a terminal mistake driven by racism and blatant criminal intent. Racist because ICE isn’t stopping white people on the street, unless they’re protesting. Criminal because due process (which under the Constitution is guaranteed even to noncitizen migrants) is being denied. What is emerging is the kind of dual state historians have warned us about.
The rule of law continues to function for one segment of society, those at the top, whose wealth or cultural or political privilege keeps their environment relatively stable. Their livelihoods and civil rights are not being threatened. In fact, if they happen to be connected to the current regime, their lives might be temporarily better than ever. But at the other end are the undocumented migrants who have been unjustly blamed for stealing elections and taking away American jobs and who are subject to capture, warehousing and deportation. In between are otherwise ordinary Americans whose careers and reputations and sometimes lives are at risk for having liberal tendencies such as speaking out on behalf of the oppressed, teaching history as fact and not propaganda, or leading lives of personal nonconformity.
Democracy requires the balancing of conflicting values, an adherence to an equitable rule of law, the protection of vulnerable populations, elections conducted in nonpartisan safe zones, and checks on the disproportionate or capricious use of power. Dystopias – both real and fictional – despise all of these.
In 2024, on the occasion of my 100th Kansas Reflector column, I examined America’s growing fascination with fascism. I also described how opinion editor Clay Wirestone had dubbed my brand of commentary as “late-breaking history.” What I have done, in most of my pieces, is to link some current event to something similar in the past. Today you are reading my 200th opinion essay, and the speed of the political moment over two years has outstripped my ability to compare it to something historical.
Like Judge Rufe, I rely on Orwell.
At the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith is broken by the state. He has betrayed his lover, Julia — and she him. Through gin-scented tears, Winston has finally surrendered and come to “love” Big Brother.
That’s the end of the story, but not the book.
In an appendix, Orwell gives us the “Principles of Newspeak,” the totalitarian language of the state. Newspeak, a kind of propagandist babble, was in the novel used to control the masses by changing history and purging language of original thought. All language must be scrubbed and bent to conform to ideology, although there were some remnants of the past that were difficult or unsuitable for transforming into Newspeak. The example given that was impossible to change or classify as anything other than CRIMETHINK began like this:
We hold these truths to be self-evident …
That was written in 1949.
Well, I guess I found a historic hook after all.
The passport application remains on the dining room table, waiting for Kim to gather the rest of the documents required. With luck, she and millions of other American women won’t have to rely on their passports to vote come November. Without luck, her passport — and mine — just might be needed for an unexpected trip out of the country. Or across state lines.
- Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the 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
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Trump gets icy reception as he readies State of the Union boasts
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Clear evidence shows Trump is in steep decline — but we should still fear worse to come
I’ve always been a cup-half-full kind of guy, even when the cup is a tenth full.
So I’m delighted that federal troops are leaving Minneapolis. Also that communities across America are mobilizing to block ICE warehouses. And that Democrats have temporarily stopped the funding of the Department of Homeland Insecurity.
I’m pleased that the Supreme Court has struck down Trump’s tariffs.
And that some Republicans in Congress have stopped doing whatever Trump tells them to do.
And I couldn’t be happier that Trump’s approval rating continues to plummet. More voters now disapprove than approve of his job performance in all of the seven swing states he won in 2024!
So, I’d like to believe the worst is over. I wish I could tell you (and myself) to relax.
But I have to be honest with you: I fear worse is to come.
Why? Because ICE is recruiting like mad in a massive $100 million effort targeting military and gun enthusiasts, NASCAR attendees, and users of tactical gear, while utilizing “wartime” rhetoric and neo-Nazi imagery in its advertisements.
Because Trump’s billionaire backers and sicko sycophants know they have only 11 months to do their worst before Democrats might take control of at least one chamber of Congress and stop them.
Because Trump also knows this and will do whatever he can do to intimidate Democratic voters in the midterms, fiddle with ballots, change results, or prevent certifications to avoid a Democratic takeover. He has already demonstrated he has no compunction about trying to destroy electoral processes to get his way.
There is also the U.S. armada now stationed in the Middle East. Although Trump lacks congressional authorization to go to war, he told reporters on Friday that he was considering a “limited” military strike to pressure Iran into a deal.
But mostly I fear worse to come because time and again — especially when he feels like he’s losing — Trump doubles down on stupid. (He just announced, for example, that in light of the Supreme Court’s tariff decision, he’s imposing a 15 percent tariff on every country we trade with around the world.)
And his toadies — Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — double down on their cruel mindlessness, if only to demonstrate to Trump their kindred stupidity.
ICE has left downtown Minneapolis but has reportedly increased its activities in the suburbs of the Twin Cities. “As far as Homan’s announcement of a drawdown, there’s no difference,” said Alex Falconer, a Democratic state representative for Minnetonka and Eden Prairie. “In fact, it’s become a little worse.”
Due to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vax campaign, the U.S. is experiencing a surge in measles. South Carolina is the epicenter of the outbreak, with over 960 confirmed cases, and the virus continues to spread, with 26 states reporting new cases this year. Last year, two children in the U.S. died from measles. Both were unvaccinated.
The United States continues to strike small fishing boats in waters around Central America, alleging without proof they are smuggling drugs into the United States. Three people were killed Friday in the eastern Pacific.
Trump continues to use racist memes, as he did two weeks ago when posting an AI-generated depiction of former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as apes.
The corruption, too, is worsening.
This means you and I and all sane Americans cannot relax our vigilance. In fact, we must mount an even more powerful resistance to this ongoing calamity.
We are in a de facto war for freedom and democracy, and Trump and his regime have shown themselves to be a bunch of gangsters — racists, misogynists, nativists, traitors, and murderers.
As Abraham Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural: “The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation … We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth.”
Be well. Be safe. Hug your loved ones.
- 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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Trump was caught pulling off the biggest heist of the 21st century
On Friday, the Supreme Court struck down Donald Trump’s tariff scheme, because the power of taxation goes to the Congress, not the president. “The Framers did not vest any part of the taxing power in the Executive Branch,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court’s majority.
The news was framed as a loss.
“The 6-3 ruling is a major blow to the president’s signature economic policy,” NPR said.
It “represents a stinging political setback,” the Washington Post said.
“The first major piece of President Trump’s broad agenda” has been upended, the AP said.
In truth, the court probably saved Trump from himself.
Hours before the court’s ruling came news of the US economy slowing down to a degree much greater than economists expected, because consumers pulled back so sharply. They did so, of course, because Trump’s tariffs scheme amounted to the biggest tax increase of the last three decades, according to the Tax Foundation. (JP Morgan Chase, in an assessment published last April, said it’s the biggest since 1968.)
The New York Times said the government collected nearly $290 billion in custom duties last year, triple what was collected the year before. Last week, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York issued a report saying more than 90 percent of that came out of the pockets of American consumers. (This quarter was shaping up to be worse than the last, as consumer confidence “collapsed” last month to its lowest level since 2014.)
So the court probably stopped Trump from burning up the rest of the American middle class, and sparking a broad-based backlash against him in this year’s midterms, threatening to take his party down with him. (Even people who do not pay attention to politics, indeed, who know almost nothing, rated his handling of prices at -40 percent.)
Still, in saving Trump from himself, the court made something clear to Americans that may not have been clear before Friday morning’s ruling — tariffs are taxes. Not only that, thanks to the court, everyone now knows the biggest tax hike since the Clinton administration was illegal.
So you could say the court saved Trump, but you could also say it gave his enemies strong grounds for accusing him of pulling off the biggest heist of the 21st century, and, because of the massive scale of the burglary, the economy came to a crawl. Again, we’re talking about nearly $290 billion, almost all of it paid for by you, me and everyone we know. (I’m using that figure. Others estimate upwards of $1 trillion.)
Even Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested, though without meaning to, that there’s been a robbery and victims are entitled to just compensation. In his dissent, the associate justice said that Trump’s tariff scheme is too complicated to unwind, with the primary complication being “refunds.”
“The court’s decision is likely to generate other serious practical consequences in the near term,” Kavanaugh wrote. “One issue will be refunds. Refunds of billions of dollars would have significant consequences for the US treasury. The court says nothing today about whether and if so how, the government should go about returning the billions of dollars that it has collected from importers, but that process is likely to be a ‘mess,’ as was acknowledged at oral arguments.”
Of course, Kavanaugh is talking about refunds to importers, which deepens the injustice of it all. They didn’t ultimately pay! We did!
I think Democratic leaders should make a deal with voters: Give us the Congress in November and we’ll pass a law forcing Trump to give back the money he stole from you. Moreover, I think the Democrats should dare their GOP counterparts to codify Trump’s tariffs and risk the allegation, entirely justified, that not only did the president pick the people’s pocket but his party now wants to make pickpocketing legal.
The Republicans probably won’t have to go that far given that Justice Kavanaugh, in his dissent, actually suggested ways for the president to get around today’s ruling, and wouldn’t you know it, that’s what Trump is going to do. In his press conference, during which he said he was “absolutely ashamed” of the high court, Trump announced a new set of global tariffs under a different law that restricts levies to 150 days.
It’s often said Trump doesn’t understand how tariffs work, but he does. He gets what they really are: leverage against rich people, corporations and countries he’s seeking to extort. It was reported today that he was angry with the court, but it wasn’t because it “set back his agenda.” It was because it took away his most powerful tool for seeking bribes.
The president’s criminal intent snapped into focus during the presser, though it was so subtle that it went mostly unnoticed. A reporter asked why Trump didn’t work with the Congress to establish import taxes, rather than pursuing another round of tariffs that will end up being challenged in court again. Trump’s reply: “Because I don’t have to.”
“I have the right to do tariffs,” he said. “I’ve always had that right to do tariffs. It’s all been approved by Congress. There’s no reason to do it.”
Rewind: The Supreme Court had just said he can’t do tariffs unilaterally, that “the Framers did not vest any part of the taxing power in the Executive Branch,” and that actions to the contrary are illegal. (Plus: Congress has not, and almost certainly will not, approve new taxes.)
Even though the Supreme Court ruled Trump’s tariffs are illegal, the criminal intent behind them hasn’t changed. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, in so many words, that the theft of the American people will continue through 2026. As for the money already stolen from us, he said: “I got a feeling the American people won’t see it.”
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Trump's fervent obsession lifts the veil on a grim reality
Stephen Colbert joked that Donald Trump wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about him on television because “all Trump does is watch TV.” It was a punchline, but it also revealed something darker: when political power becomes obsessed with controlling the screen, the most effective way to silence dissent isn’t through raids or arrests. It’s through ownership.
In today’s America, the battle over free speech isn’t happening in courtrooms, it’s happening in quiet White House dinners with greedy billionaires. And it’s following an old script.
When Viktor Orbán — the Hungarian strongman who Marco Rubio visited this past weekend to tell him how much Trump loves him and supports him — wanted to crush opposition media in his country he didn’t need police, courts, regulatory agencies, or even threats. He didn’t even need the Hungarian mafia to break the knees of Budapest media owners or threaten reporters.
Orbán simply invited a few morbidly rich Hungarian oligarchs over for dinner and told them that if they’d buy out the big media outlets and spin the news in his favor, he’d make sure their government contracts and business opportunities in other non-media areas would more than compensate them for their hassle and expenses.
Orbán let Republicans in on the strategy in May 2022, when he spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest and told the American Republican crowd:
“Have your own media. It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left.”
It’s a pretty straightforward business proposition that we see Trump embracing right now: “Give me good media coverage and I’ll make you additional billions; use your media to crap on me and I’ll have the FCC harass you and my billionaire friends buy you out.”
And, sure enough, check how it’s working out for the non-media companies (rockets, AI, data, web services, etc.) owned by media moguls Elon Musk (Twitter/X), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta/Facebook), Larry Ellison (Paramount/CBS/TikTok), and Jeff Bezos (Washington Post) that now get hundreds of billions of dollars every year in contracts from the federal government. No doubt it’s just a coincidence that their media outlets have all become cheerleaders for Trump.
Putin did the same thing in Russia, and the media in most other autocratic nations is similarly all or mostly owned by regime-friendly oligarchs on similar terms.
This model, pioneered in Germany in the 1930s, is now used to keep in power strongman regimes in the Czech Republic, Serbia, Slovenia, Turkey, India, Brazil, the Philippines, Colombia, Tunisia, Turkey, Peru, and Ghana, among dozens of others. It’s rapidly spreading across the world.
It’s produced headlines like these:
- “How oligarchs seized Central Europe’s media”
- “Serbia: State Influence on Media Ownership: Igor Žeželj and Telekom Srbija”
- “Media in the Balkans: the rise of oligarchs”
- “Media Oligarchs Go Shopping”
- “The Media in Indonesia: Journalism Between the State and Oligarchs”
- “Slovene Media Owned by Oligarchs, Corrupt Politicians”
And now, here in the United States:
- “When Billionaire Government Contractors Are Also Media Moguls”
- “Musk and Bezos Get Their Billion-Dollar Federal Contracts After Sucking Up to Trump”
- “Meta Gains Approval To Supply AI Services to US Government Departments”
- “Paramount Has a Secret Plan to Buy Hollywood Before the Cops Arrive”
To be fair, Republicans didn’t just suddenly adopt this strategy when Orbán suggested it to them. They’ve been doing it since the days of Ronald Reagan; it just went on steroids with Trump.
We used to have laws and rules to prevent this sort of thing. But in 1985, Reagan greased the skids for Rupert Murdoch to become a citizen so he could buy US media outlets. In 1987 Reagan repealed the Fairness Doctrine, and in 1988 Rush Limbaugh debuted on 56 major radio stations.
In 1996, Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act, overturning laws dating back to the 1920s that prevented any one oligarch or company from owning multiple newspapers or radio or TV stations, leading to an explosive consolidation that today gives us 1,500 oligarch-owned rightwing radio stations and hundreds of rightwing oligarch-owned TV stations across the nation.
Republican screams of a “liberal media” dating back to the 1980s notwithstanding, there isn’t a place in America where you can’t get a large daily dose of pro-fascist, pro-Trump media. Drive from the East Coast to the West Coast, from the Canadian border to the edge of Mexico, and you’ll never be without a rightwing radio companion telling you how wonderful Trump, Vance, Putin, et al are.
As Colbert joked this week:
“Let’s just call this what it is: Donald Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV because all Trump does is watch TV.”
And now, Matt Stoller is reporting that the Ellisons — who now own CBS — have a “secret plan” to acquire CNN as well, a goal that Trump has explicitly and publicly gushed about. As the network itself reported, Trump said, “It’s imperative that CNN be sold” and David Ellison recently “offered assurances to Trump administration officials that if he bought Warner, he’d make sweeping changes to CNN.”
But the Putin/Orbán/Trump strategy to end all media independence in America may be facing headwinds if Democrats can take control of the House, Senate, or both this fall.
Axios and Raw Story report that:
“DC insiders and partners Matthew Miller and Tucker Eskew have issued warnings that Democrats will aggressively pursue corruption allegations against the president and Trump administration officials.”
Miller and Eskew added:
“The subpoenas are coming. The only question is whether companies will be ready.”
State attorneys general also have real power over media concentration. In 2015 a coalition of state AGs joined federal regulators in challenging Comcast’s proposed takeover of Time Warner Cable, and Comcast abandoned the merger rather than face trial.
In 2018 several state attorneys general urged regulators to block Sinclair Broadcast Group’s acquisition of Tribune Media, after which the FCC moved to reject the deal and it collapsed. And in 2019, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Virginia attorneys general sued to limit Nexstar’s purchase of Tribune stations, forcing major divestitures before the merger could proceed. History shows that when states intervene, consolidation often fails or is dramatically reduced.
Citizen activism has also repeatedly changed the behavior of partisan media without any hint of government involvement or censorship. For example, after the 2012 Limbaugh Sandra Fluke controversy, dozens of national advertisers left his program and many never returned.
And following Trump’s January 6 attack on our Capitol, advertiser boycotts and viewer pressure led companies to suspend advertising on certain Fox News opinion programs, and several cable carriers reconsidered their carriage agreements. Organized brand-safety campaigns have also pushed social media platforms to demonetize rightwing and fascist extremist content.
In each case the speech itself remained “legal,” but because of public outrage the economic incentives changed, showing how average citizens in a market-based democracy can reshape media behavior by influencing the revenue that sustains it.
If ever there was a time ripe for revisiting the laws and rules that gave us the relatively unbiased media landscape — that vigorously supported American democracy — between the 1930s and the 1980s, it’s now. And the same is true of the immediate need for citizen activism, like we saw in awake of Trump’s attempt to use pressure on media owners to silence Jimmy Kimmel.
Hopefully, Democratic politicians and citizen activists are paying attention, because the crisis — and the opportunity — has never been more urgent.
- Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.
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This weekend of lunacy was just another shining example of Trump's unfitness for office
On Sunday, news broke that an intruder had been shot and killed at Mar-a-Lago. Donald Trump wasn’t there. He was at his gilded northern chalet.
While wintry weather blanketed 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the atmosphere inside was less “let it snow,” more Overlook Hotel. Less festive cheer, more psychotic crisis.
The White House, already cavernous, creaky, and drafty, felt even more so given the gaping hole where the East Wing used to be. And Trump’s habitually gaseous state helped keep that cold breeze flowing.
The “people’s house,” as it was called before a dictator turned it into a gold-plated casino, can feel isolating on weekends. Especially because Melania wouldn’t be caught dead there at any time of year.
Add a looming State of the Union address, sagging poll numbers, mounting legal setbacks, and Trump’s deteriorating health, delusion, and dementia, and you have the makings of a Stephen King novel, filmed by Stanley Kubrick.
Any normal president would be huddled with speechwriters and strategists, pacing through SOTU drafts, testing applause lines, ensuring messaging. That’s how presidencies work.
But Trump isn’t a normal president, or a normal human being. He doesn’t do rehearsals. He prefers improvisation, impulse, the dopamine rush of a crowd laughing while he mocks a disabled person or singles out a Black attendee.
Roaming the White House hallways, left to his own devices, Trump spent the weekend giving us his best impression of Jack Torrance, Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining.
The symmetry was uncanny.
The most surreal moment was the re-emergence of a voice from the past. A caller identifying himself as “John Barron” called into C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, to rail against the Supreme Court.
To most, it sounded like a prank call. To anyone who has followed Trump since the 1980s, it sounded familiar. C-SPAN said it wasn’t Trump but in this era, when it comes to Trump, nothing is to be believed.
It was surely Trump. It had to be, at least to those of us who know the lengths Trump will go to to create a distracting media narrative by resorting to old tricks.
Trump has a long and oddly committed history of role-playing as his own publicist. In his tabloid heyday in New York, he would ring up reporters posing as “John Miller” or “John Barron,” fictional spokesmen whose sole purpose was to explain how staggeringly wealthy and romantically irresistible Donald J. Trump was.
All these years later, like Jack Torrance chatting with Lloyd the ghost bartender in an empty ballroom at the Overlook, Trump appeared to be talking to himself through the media, pacing the imaginary gilded expanse of his own soon-to-be ballroom, conjuring an advocate who reassured him in his wildest imaginations.
Now do you believe it wasn’t Trump?
The psychological hedge maze at the center of Trump’s mania is, of course, the Supreme Court. After SCOTUS bludgeoned his tariff authority on Friday, the bloodied Trump didn’t just bristle. He swung Jack Torrance’s ax.
Tariffs are Trump’s wildest obsession, his panacea for everything. His blood boiled.
In a fit of “all work and no play,” Trump swung-out on Truth Social, slicing out posts with the rhythm of someone typing the same sentence over and over, taking whacks at the justices, battering them as “fools and lap dogs.”
Instead of recalibrating, he doubled down. Gobsmackingly, most likely illegally, he raised global tariffs to 10 percent on Friday, in the wake of the ruling, then on Saturday absurdly increased them to 15 percent.
It was less about moderation and negotiation, more in the vein of, “I’m not gonna hurt ya, I’m just gonna bash your brains in.”
But this impulse to rip apart isn’t confined to trade statutes, international agreements or wayward justices. It has found a home within White House walls razed and bulldozed, like the East Wing, or spattered in gauche gold.
In the newly renovated aureate bathroom within the Lincoln Bedroom suite, one pictures Trump’s heirs, Don Jr. and Eric, playing their own version of the Grady twins, scrawling “REDRUM” on newly polished mirrors.
You can almost hear drafty corridors and vestibules echoing with whispered conspiracies while the Trump boys hover at the end of the hallway, chanting, “Come play with us. Come play with us.”
But Trump was busy with another game. Moving on from Barron and tariffs, the president wandered to the first floor and the White House Green Room.
In a move both berserk and bonkers, he announced he was sending a “great hospital boat” to Greenland. Greenland and Denmark responded that they did not need or request any such nautical mercy mission.
Classic Jack Torrance logic: if they won’t accept your offer, insist they’re too sick to know what’s good for them. Even Trump, whacked as he is, must have thought, “I must be losing my mind.”
That may be validated on Tuesday, when Trump finally escapes the White House and wobbles on wide ankles to the lectern in the Capitol, to give his SOTU speech.
He will declare the state of the union strong, the economy unparalleled, the tariffs transformative. It will go on and on and on, a loop of alternative facts, line after line, page after page, until the words lose meaning and only the churlish cadence remains:
“All work and no play makes Donny a dull boy. All work and no play makes Donny a dull boy. All work and no play makes Donny a dull boy…”
Finally, he may lean into the microphone and, with a more predatory grin than Jack Torrance could hope for, chillingly leer: “Heeeeere’s Donny.”
- John Casey was most recently Senior Editor, The Advocate, and is a freelance opinion and feature story writer. Previously, he was a Capitol Hill press secretary, and spent 25 years in media and public relations in NYC. He is the co-author of LOVE: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality (Rizzoli, 2025), named by Oprah in her "Best 25 of 2025.”
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Minneapolis resonated more than past outrages. Why?
By Gregory P. Magarian, Thomas and Karole Green Professor of Law, Washington University in St. Louis.
The president announces an aggressive, controversial policy. Large groups of protesters take to the streets. Government agents open fire and kill protesters.
All of these events, familiar from Minneapolis in 2026, also played out at Ohio’s Kent State University in 1970. In my academic writing about the First Amendment, I have described Kent State as a key moment when the government silenced free speech.
In Minneapolis, free speech has weathered the crisis better, as seen in the protests themselves, the public’s responses — and even the protest songs the two events inspired.
Protests and shootings, then and now
In 1970, President Richard Nixon announced he had expanded the Vietnam War by bombing Cambodia. Student anti-war protests, already fervent, intensified.
In Ohio, Gov. James Rhodes deployed the National Guard to quell protests at Kent State University. Monday, May 4, saw a large midday protest on the main campus commons. Students exercised their First Amendment rights by chanting and shouting at the Guard troops, who dispersed protesters with tear gas before regrouping on a nearby hill.
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With the nearest remaining protesters 20 yards from the Guard troops and most more than 60 yards away, 28 guardsmen inexplicably fired on students, killing four and wounding nine others.
After the killings, the government sought to shift blame to the slain students.
Nixon stated: “When dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy.”
Minneapolis in 2026 presents vivid parallels.
As part of a sweeping campaign to deport undocumented immigrants, President Donald Trump in early January 2026 deployed armed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection agents to Minneapolis.
Many residents protested, exercising their First Amendment rights by using smartphones and whistles to record and call out what they saw as ICE and CBP abuses. On Jan. 7, 2026, an ICE agent shot and killed activist Renee Good in her car. On Jan. 24, two CBP agents shot and killed protester Alex Pretti on the street.
The government sought to blame Good and Pretti for their own killings.
Different public reactions
After Kent State, amid bitter conservative opposition to student protesters, most Americans blamed the fallen students for their deaths. When students in New York City protested the Kent State shootings, construction workers attacked and beat them in what became known as the “Hard Hat Riot.” Afterward, Nixon hosted construction union leaders at the White House, where they gave him an honorary hard hat.
In contrast, most Americans believe the Trump administration has used excessive force in Minneapolis. Majorities both oppose the federal agents’ actions against protesters and approve of protesting and recording the agents.
The public response to Minneapolis has made a difference. The Trump administration has announced an end to its immigration crackdown in the Twin Cities. Trump has backed off attacks on Good and Pretti. Congressional opposition to ICE funding has grown. Overall public support for Trump and his policies has fallen.
Protests, recordings and songs
What has caused people to view the killings in Minneapolis so differently from Kent State? One big factor, I believe, is how free speech has shaped the public response.
The Minneapolis protests themselves have sent the public a more focused message than what emerged from the student protests against the Vietnam War.
Anti-war protests in 1970 targeted military action on the other side of the world. Organizers had to plan and coordinate through in-person meetings and word of mouth. Student protesters needed the institutional news media to convey their views to the public.
In contrast, the anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis target government action at the protesters’ doorsteps. Organizers can use local networks and social media to plan, coordinate and communicate directly with the public. The protests have succeeded in deepening public opposition to ICE.
In addition, the American people have witnessed the Minneapolis shootings.
Kent State produced a famous photograph of a surviving student’s anguish but only hazy, chaotic video of the shootings.
In contrast, widely circulated video evidence showed the Minneapolis killings in horrifying detail. Within days of each shooting, news organizations had compiled detailed visual timelines, often based on recordings by protesters and observers, that sharply contradicted government accounts of what happened to Good and Pretti.
Finally, consider two popular protest songs that emerged from Kent State and Minneapolis: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Minneapolis.”
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Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young recorded, pressed and released “Ohio” with remarkable speed for 1970. The vinyl single reached record stores and radio stations on June 4, a month after the Kent State shootings. The song peaked at No. 14 on the Billboard chart two months later.
Neil Young’s lyrics described the Kent State events in mythic terms, warning of “tin soldiers” and telling young Americans: “We’re finally on our own.” Young did not describe the shootings in detail. The song does not name Kent State, the National Guard or the fallen students. Instead, it presents the events as symbolic of a broader generational conflict over the Vietnam War.
Springsteen released “Streets of Minneapolis” on Jan. 28, 2026 — just four days after CBP agents killed Pretti. Two days later, the song topped streaming charts worldwide.
The internet and social media let Springsteen document Minneapolis, almost in real time, for a mass audience. Springsteen’s lyrics balance symbolism with specificity, naming not just “King Trump” but also victims Pretti and Good, key Trump officials Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem, main Minneapolis artery Nicollet Avenue, and the protesters’ “whistles and phones,” before fading on a chant of “ICE out!”
Critics offer compelling arguments that 21st-century mass communication degrades social relationships, elections and culture. In Minneapolis, disinformation has muddied crucial facts about the protests and killings.
At the same time, Minneapolis has shown how networked communication can promote free speech. Through focused protests, recordings of government action, and viral popular culture, today’s public can get fuller, clearer information to help critically assess government actions.
- Gregory P. Magarian has written and taught for 26 years about constitutional law, specializing in the freedom of expression and with secondary interests in gun regulation, law and religion, and regulations of the political process. He wrote Managed Speech: The Roberts Court's First Amendment (Oxford University Press, 2017) and has published dozens of academic articles, book chapters, and general audience essays. He has taught at Washington University since 2008 and previously taught at Villanova University. He clerked on the U.S. Supreme Court for Justice John Paul Stevens and on the U.S. District Court (D.C.) for Judge Louis Oberdorfer, and earned his law degree magna cum laude from the University of Michigan, where he was editor-in-chief of the Michigan Law Review. He received his undergraduate degree summa cum laude from Yale.
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