MAGA gets exactly what it voted for this Easter
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
This is the untold truth behind Pam Bondi's spectactular flameout
The word “bimbo” has been in the news lately. I don’t use the word lightly. I was raised by remarkable women. I’ve spent my career championing them, and they have carried me innumerable times.
The word carries a history of misogynistic dismissal that I find genuinely repugnant, and I’ve never had much patience for men who deploy it casually to diminish women they simply don’t like. I imagine Donald Trump talking this way about Kristi Noem, who he axed last month, and Pam Bondi, who today followed the glammed up Noem out the door.
But I’m going to use the word “bimbo” today. And I’m going to explain why.
A bimbo, in the truest sense, is not a woman who lacks intelligence. It’s a person who trades away their dignity, judgment, and principles for the approval of someone who will never deserve it.
By that definition, Pam Bondi is the fullest expression of the word, in how she carried herself after being sworn in as U.S. Attorney General last February.
And now, predictably, Donald Trump has fired her. And unlike Noem, she gets no consolation prize of another job.
I’ll be honest and bipartisan first: Bondi came into this job with real credentials. She served as Florida’s AG - she was a horrible and divisive AG in my opinion; nevertheless, she had legal experience. Compared to Pete Hegseth, and others, Bondi was a sigh of relief after Trump first nominated the reprehensible Matt Gaetz.
She had a leg to stand on. You could argue she was qualified. And that’s precisely what makes her tenure so damning. She didn’t use her credentials to uphold the law. She used them to demolish it. She arrived at DOJ not as its guardian, but as Trump’s most pliable judicial instrument,
She was Bimbo Bondi not because she was foolish, but because she suckled at the teat of the most corrupt man ever to occupy the White House and called it public service.
She made a mess of the Epstein files, playing them like a shell game. Look on her desk. Look in the redacted documents. Then try to find them in the last-minute “mysteriously vanished” two million pages that answered almost nothing while exposing survivors whose names were left unredacted.
I firmly believe that disclosure was intentional. Likely orchestrated by Trump, it was a last-ditch attempt to shame and scare survivors, and she enabled it. They continue to receive death threats. She bears total responsibility.
She promised transparency. She delivered the opposite. While survivors sat in a congressional hearing room in February, she prepared not to answer or apologize, but to attack Democrats with a “burn book” stuffed with oppo research and screenshots.
She tracked who viewed documents and when. She didn’t come to testify. She came to fight for Trump. And in the end, that burn book exploded in her hands.
She threw 23,000 criminal cases in the garbage while redirecting DOJ power at immigrants who’d committed no crime.
The DOJ has always maintained an arm’s-length relationship with the president. Not under Bondi. When Trump posted, she jumped. She became the obedient purveyor of his retribution tour. In a gesture so lacking in self-respect it defies description, she hung an enormous portrait of Trump outside DOJ headquarters.
She turned a blind eye when Deputy AG Todd Blanche met with Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted sex trafficker, and then sent her to a low-security prison.
Bondi supported Trump’s racist agenda. She disbanded the civil rights division. She spread racialized venom through the machinery of the most powerful law enforcement body in the country. She wallowed in Trump’s pigsty and then showed up to hearings to fling mud at Democrats.
She followed Trump every time, without hesitation. When he had a whim, she acquiesced.
Now he’s fired her. And we are supposed to be surprised?
We shouldn’t be. Nobody survives bending the rules for Donald Trump. Not Flynn. Not Cohen. Not Manafort. Not Noem - another who traded her soul for his favor and got dumped.
The trail of discarded loyalists stretches back years. Every one of them handed Trump everything and ended up cast aside. The pattern is so consistent, so merciless, so predictable, you wonder how Bondi believed she could be different.
Trump saw her “bimboness” a mile away, likely using the word himself behind her back. “Let me eat this bimbo alive,” he might as well have said.
That is the untold truth inside Bondi’s story. She watched others fall. She saw Trump destroy careers and reputations, even those closest to him. But she thought she could wrap him around her finger.
She likely thought hanging his portrait outside the doors of her building would save her job. She called him “the greatest president in history” under oath, with Epstein survivors sitting behind her. She thought it would protect her.
It didn’t. It never does. Everyone ends up burned. And Bondi has severe third-degree burns.
The scarlet letters D-J-T are now branded on her reputation. No one will take her tenure as AG seriously. She failed in her duty to the country and did no justice to the Justice Department.
She destroyed lives. She failed survivors. She gutted civil rights enforcement. She turned the DOJ into a personal law firm for a man who threw her away when he got bored.
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A deep red state launched a surprising revolt against major conservative cause
Friends,
This week’s video is important. It shows a clear path to getting rid of the Supreme Court’s horrific 2010 decision Citizens United vs. Federal Election Committee.
That decision opened the floodgates to campaign spending by giant corporations. The high court reasoned that corporations are people who have First Amendment rights to free speech, and that corporate spending on elections is a form of free speech.
But the Supreme Court never got to the more fundamental question of corporate power, because since the early twentieth century states haven’t limited corporate powers to do much of anything.
Yet corporations are creatures of state law. States create and define corporations. Whatever powers corporations have come from state decisions to grant them those powers.
This principle is embodied in an 1819 opinion by Chief Justice John Marshall declaring that a corporation “possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it.”
It wasn’t until the early 20th century that states began to give corporations all the powers human beings have. But states don’t have to do that. States can decide to give them the powers they need to do their business, but not the power to spend money on elections.
This isn’t about corporate rights. It’s about the more basic question of corporate powers. If a corporation doesn’t have the power to do something in the first place, it obviously doesn’t have any right to do it. Without the power to do it, a corporation cannot do it. The state hasn’t empowered it to do it.
Montanans will be voting next fall on whether Montana should remove from corporations doing business in Montana the power to spend money on elections.
Hopefully, their answer will be yes. There’s absolutely no reason why states should grant corporations this power.
So far, lawmakers in 9 other states have introduced bills mirroring the Montana plan. Proposals are active in California, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Rhode Island, Washington state, and Hawaii, where a version has already cleared one chamber.
Here’s more information on the Montana plan.
Please push your state to follow Montana’s lead. Organize and mobilize. Share and use this video — so we can get rid of “Citizens United” for good.
- 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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This mob lawyer's fingerprints are all over Trump's terrifying stunt
Ten minutes before oral arguments began at the Supreme Court on Wednesday, a hush fell over the courtroom.
Then Donald Trump walked in.
No sitting president had ever done this before. Trump took a seat in the public gallery—the same rows reserved for tourists and law students and the merely curious—and watched as nine justices prepared to hear arguments on one of the central legal questions of his presidency: birthright citizenship.
He wore a red tie. He sat with his hands clasped in his lap. The thumbs that usually spend the morning firing off threats on social media were, for once, perfectly still.
He stayed a little more than an hour. He was, by all external appearances, the picture of decorum. But that wasn’t fooling anyone.
Trump didn’t wake up Wednesday morning with a sudden appetite for civics, nor an interest in the complexities of the law.
Trump showed up to intimidate the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court—or at least the ones he likes to refer to as “my justices.” He wanted them to look up from the bench and find him staring back.
Just weeks ago, Trump called Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett—his own nominees—“an embarrassment to their families” after they ruled against him on tariffs. Earlier this week, he insisted the justices needed to “prove their intelligence” by siding with him on birthright citizenship.
Then, on the very morning those arguments were heard, he materialized in their courtroom—a few rows behind the bench where Gorsuch and Barrett sat.
They most certainly knew why he was there.
Trump has long modeled himself on mob lawyer Roy Cohn, the notorious fixer and red-baiting enforcer who taught him that power is performed as much as exercised. Cohn’s method was never the paper trail—it was the presence, the stare, the message delivered in person without a word spoken. Wednesday’s courtroom visit had Cohn’s fingerprints all over it.
The case itself is the heart of Trump’s nativist agenda. Birthright citizenship—the 14th Amendment guarantee that anyone born on American soil is a citizen—has been settled law for more than 150 years. It barely registered on the American political radar until Trump weaponized it as a centerpiece of his 2015 campaign—a move straight out of the authoritarian playbook.
Trump wants to end birthright citizenship by executive order, claiming the amendment was intended solely to grant citizenship to freed slaves after the Civil War. Even many conservative constitutional scholars think he’s wrong. The justices across the ideological spectrum spent the morning pressing his lawyers hard on exactly that history.
Trump sat behind his own Solicitor General—watching his employee plead his case to his appointees. He left after the government finished its argument. Of course, he didn’t stay to hear the other side, because that’s not what authoritarians do.
Outside the building, people watching understood exactly what they had witnessed. “I think it’s basically kind of a strong-arming tactic,” one observer told reporters. “Make a decision while I’m here, looking you dead in your eye—and don’t make the wrong decision.”
That sums it up as well as any legal brief could.
Experts had warned that Trump’s presence would create an “awkward” atmosphere in what is normally a formal, even reverent proceeding. Awkward is far too polite.
The Supreme Court is supposed to be the one institution in American government beyond the reach of presidential pressure. Its independence doesn’t rest on statutes. It rests on norms, on tradition, and on the unspoken understanding that the executive branch doesn’t stand over the judiciary’s shoulder while it works.
Trump has spent his presidency testing every such norm to destruction. Wednesday was no exception. It was as brazen an act of impropriety and intimidation of the U.S. Supreme Court as any president ever perpetrated.
He walked into the room.
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Trump's prime-time lies capped an April Fool's disgrace
April Fool’s Day, and the biggest fool in the U.S. - um, the world celebrated it in grand style...
In the morning, Donald Trump, cankles in tow, shuffled into the Supreme Court gallery like Tony Soprano checking on his crew at Satriale's Pork Store. Trump was convinced his lumbering physical presence would bully his own appointed justices into compliance.
Then, tonight, he capped “fools” day by wobbling to the cameras to deliver the old familiar lies, same contempt for our troops, our country and our allies.
Only a fool would believe Trump about the war he started, and take his word that all is good.
At the Court this morning, Trump watched Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, his justices, methodically dismantle his birthright citizenship case, barely disguising their skepticism in his presence. His hand-picked Solicitor General, doing his best RFK, Jr., gurgling through a series of weak arguments.
Trump fled after an hour and foolishly took to Truth Social to declare that America is “the only Country in the World STUPID enough” to allow birthright citizenship. Roughly 30 countries have it.
There is a through-line connecting this morning’s courtroom humiliation and tonight’s prime-time performance. And that is why? Why go to the court today and give the speech tonight?
Why this speech? And why now?
Prime-time presidential addresses about military action have a traditional purpose and timing. You give the speech before the war to build public support, to explain the mission, to lay out the strategy, to bring the country with you.
Trump gave no such speech on February 28th, just a video from ritzy Mar-a-Lago, when he launched this war. No Oval Office address. No coalition. No congressional authorization. No public mandate. He simply started a war and expected the American people to cheer him on.
They haven’t. His poll numbers are at record lows - across the board. And support is slipping quickly. And those numbers are going to drop even more after the baloney he served tonight.
Trump declared victory in Iran, insisting nuclear threats were eliminated and the war would end within weeks, while offering little evidence. He touted economic strength despite rising gas prices, contradicted himself on goals like regime change, blamed allies, and largely repeated familiar claims without answering key questions.
Rather than new information, the address recycled a stream of wild, rambling lies he’s been bombarding us with on Truth Social.
Thirty-three days in, public support is somewhere between thin and nonexistent. Tonight’s speech wasn’t a victory address. It was a desperate attempt to change a narrative that has already escaped him, and you cannot change a narrative without a strategy, and you cannot sell a strategy you don’t have, and you cannot build public support one month after the shooting starts.
Iran still controls the Strait of Hormuz. Over twenty percent of the world’s petroleum passes through that waterway. Trump threatened to bomb Iran into submission if they didn’t open it. They didn’t open it. He didn’t follow through. TACO II.
And now he’s telling European allies it’s their problem. Trump, a fool and a loser, is a man who embarrassingly picked a fight, lost the fight, and is loudly declaring victory.
Only a fool and a loser lifts sanctions against Iran. He started a war against Iran, and then surrendered the one non-military lever of economic pressure we had over Tehran. In return for what, exactly? Nothing. Iran got sanctions relief and kept the Strait.
Then there is NATO. Trump’s attacks on allies, calling them “cowards” for not joining a war they had no role in starting, are diplomatically crushing to us and alarmingly dangerous to the troops currently deployed in a region where America has never been more isolated.
When you are fighting a war, you do not simultaneously push off and upset your alliances.
You do not tell the people who might need to reinforce you, supply you, or extract you if things go bad to go to hell. Because our allies can tell him - and us - to go to hell, and all hell will break loose. Wait and see.
The American public is not fooled. They see the gas prices. They read and see more troops being deployed. They see the Strait still closed. They hear that the son of a murderous thug is a chip off the old block - and maybe even more brutal than his father.
Trump says regime change. But the reality is much, much, much worse.
Americans heard all of those contradictions tonight - the war is won, the war is still being fought; Iran is defeated, Iran still controls the waterway, and still firing rockets at its neighbors; we’re leaving in two weeks, we’re sending more forces.
Thirty-three days in, this president still has no coherent strategy, no public mandate, and no endgame. None.
Tonight he declared victory anyway. The war is “militarily won.” Troops home in two to three weeks. Gas prices dropping any minute now. Iran decimated. Regime changed. Greatest military triumph since Churchill.
It’s all lies upon lies upon falsehoods upon untruth, upon delusion.
Watching tonight, I couldn’t shake a grim and uncomfortable thought. Swap Trump’s setting for a checkered cloth and a different backdrop, and his speech tonight could have been broadcast from Tehran. A leader at a podium, assuring the faithful that the enemy has been defeated, that sacrifice was worth it, that the Supreme Leader’s wisdom carried the day, that glory is just around the corner.
And the audience comes away fearful and questioning the authenticity of what they just heard.
We were lied to tonight by a man who started a war without a plan, is prolonging it without a strategy, handing Iran sanctions relief while they kept the Strait, calls our allies cowards, and is now standing before the cameras on day 33 asking us to believe it all.
Folks, this is a war. A fatal one. An incomprehensibly dangerous one, with severe consequences. This isn’t some White House ballroom that needs to be redrawn, or used as a distraction. And only an unabated, unabashed fool would think and act otherwise.
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Trump's disastrous miscalculation is so grossly stupid it's barely believable
It’s pretty clear by now that our “president” has not the thinnest clue of what he’s doing with regard to this Iran War. And quite frankly, it’s making me feel pretty annoyed.
Trump keeps talking about conducting these imaginary “serious discussions” with Iran as if anyone is going to believe him when it’s crystal clear he’s lying. It’s like you or me dreaming about the Easter Bunny delivering colored eggs to children and, upon awakening, insisting this actually occurred.
He does it to manipulate the Dow Jones and artificially/temporarily prop up the market. This isn’t a terribly savvy strategy. By about the fifth time he makes the claim, “No, really this time, I’m talking to these people I can’t name in a location that doesn’t exist,” it doesn’t even register on our cerebral cortex. We all just yawn and move on.
Because I mean, Trump himself has admitted he’s already bored with this whole Iran thing. It’s the one thing that comes out of his mouth we can believe. I mean, come on. There’s no gold in that country to speak of, no ballrooms to save. What’s there to care about?
We’re only weeks into the war, and Trump’s instinct is to look for the nearest exit and concoct whatever story he can to rescue his reputation (such as it is). Tellingly, Mr. “The Art of the Deal” seems suspiciously short on actual negotiation skills.
Trump clearly thought he was dealing with a country that would get on its knees and cower at the first sign of American bombers. But that turned out to be a gross miscalculation of the enemy’s fighting skills. Iran is hardly Venezuela.
Now that Iran is nowhere close to surrender and has no intention of joining Trump and his merry band of morons (I’m talking about you, Pete “We Do It For Jesus” Hegseth) at the negotiating table, this is how our Bully In Chief sees as his best strategy over Truth Social:
“If for any reason a deal is not reached shortly, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately ‘Open for Business,’ we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalination plants!), which we have purposely not yet ‘touched’.”
This is actually an outright threat of a war crime, as any attack on civilian infrastructure (including plants that make seawater drinkable) is prohibited by the Geneva Convention. Not that Trump has ever let the law get in the way of doing whatever the hell he wants.
What’s the motivation for Iran to make a deal with Trump when he and Israel are actively looking to kill the people they say they want to come to terms with? “Say yes or I’ll blow you away” is never found to be terribly effective. It’s right up there with, “Give me your lunch money or I’ll beat you up.”
It’s all part of Trump’s and Hegseth’s approach of treating this war like a video game. Hegseth seems to think he’s on a mission from God, invoking Christ and Christianity at every turn. Note: I have it on good authority that our Lord is sleeping this one out.
If it weren’t so disastrous for its impact on the oil barrel and gasoline prices, it would be hilarious just how clueless Trump has been in miscalculating what the gargantuan impact of Iran’s closing of the Strait of Hormuz would be.
It seems the Pentagon took the Iranian military for fools. But they ain’t. They are instead setting the rules and dominating the battlefield because the country is controlling traffic at the strait, where fully a fifth of all the world’s oil passes through.
What’s next? Our sending in ground troops seems increasingly likely, since Trump sees no moral issue risking the lives of American soldiers to help him save face. And that’s already where we are. You know he’s going to try to create the illusion of victory no matter the cost, since it’s never not about him.
Why are we bombing Iran? Why did we go in there in the first place? These questions remain mysterious and unanswered. There were only vague promises of the need for regime change. But that was achieved weeks ago. Now, Trump is simply fighting a war to achieve conditions that existed before the war started – namely, going through Hormuz.
Nice going there, Einstein.
My guess is that Trump will make some sort of deal with Iran that will reopen the strait to U.S. traffic and get Iran to spout some gibberish about capitulating to his demands, in exchange for all sorts of secret goodies.
The reason is, of course, that this war is already proving disastrous to Republicans. Oil has zoomed well over $100 a barrel. The cost of a gallon of gas now exceeds $4.00 nationally and, in California, it’s closer to $6, at minimum.
After 14 months in power, we’re seeing just how effective this guy is at president-ing. He’s embroiled us in a war of choice, not necessity. He’s created the worst global energy crisis in nearly half a century. He’s overseen rising inflation and declining job growth. He’s intimidated Republicans into abdicating their authority to provide guardrails. And he’s cemented a partial government shutdown that looks like it’ll go on for months more.
Oh, and Trump has so alienated our allies in Europe that they won’t raise a finger to help us, fearful not only of getting dragged into a fruitless conflict but of lending assistance to a madman.
One thing Trump has successfully managed to do is make America less popular on the world stage than even Russia, his number one frenemy. Casting Putin as calm and reasonable by comparison is indeed a feat worthy of attention. But it’s nothing to be proud of.
Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.
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This fool is a deadly threat to Trump — and he knows it
Kash Patel is a joke. Seriously.
He’s the “Make-A-Wish Director,” according to former FBI senior executive Christopher O’Leary — a nickname agents allegedly gave him because they felt his tenure was about fulfilling personal desires rather than focusing on duty.
Comedian Nimesh Patel jokes that Kash is the first Patel he’s ever encountered who is disliked by other Patels. There’s also “Keystone Kash,” a jab comparing his disorganized management style to the Keystone Cops.
And perhaps the reason for all the jokes is that Patel treats the uber-serious role of FBI director like an Animal House frat party, making Donald Trump, by extension, the chubby Kent “Flounder” Dorfman character.
But all jokes aside, Patel is dangerous, not only to the security of the country, but to Trump as well.
Iran just hacked Patel’s personal email account, dumped his private photos online, and publicly mocked him as a “successfully hacked victim,” and I don’t know if it was just me, but nobody in Washington seemed particularly concerned about the irony, just the pundits on social media.
The Iran-linked hacker group Handala, which has been carrying out cyberattacks against U.S. interests since the bombing of Iran began, breached Patel’s personal email last week and posted photos of him posing by a sports car and puffing a cigar, along with personal documents and correspondence stretching back to 2011.
The FBI’s response was that the breach involved “no government information,” that it was all “historical in nature,” and, oh, by the way, we’re offering $10 million for anyone who can identify these hackers.
For anyone who still wonders why the FBI’s rank and file describe their bureau as a “rudderless ship” paralyzed by fear, consider the message this sends. The director of the world’s most storied law enforcement agency gets his personal email cracked by a foreign adversary. WTF, right?
Kash Patel is incapable of taking his job seriously because he was never hired to take it seriously. He was hired to be a hound dog sniffing out Trump’s enemies, and, of course, to hide anything damaging to Trump that might exist in the Epstein files.
In that sense, Patel is performing exactly as expected. But he’s also become a public embarrassment to the Trump administration with his party-boy, frat-brat behavior. Trump hates embarrassment, which raises the obvious question: why not fire him?
Because Patel is too dangerous to fire.
Patel once berated former FBI director Chris Wray over luxury travel. Now he treats a $60 million government jet like his own personal shuttle, hopping around the country to attend his girlfriend’s country music shows and hunting retreats.
The hypocrisy is obvious, but hardly unique. In a Trump administration full of overt hypocrites, Patel fits right in. They’re following the example set by their Dear Leader.
But here’s where Patel’s hypocrisy becomes something worse. He spent years promising to blow the lid off the Epstein files. He built his reputation on it. The moment he took the oath of office, he became their most devoted gatekeeper.
It’s a slap in the face to MAGA supporters who believed him, and especially to Epstein’s victims.
Patel’s vindictiveness knows no bounds. He published an enemies list in the appendix of his book and is now reportedly dispatching agents to dig up dirt on one of them, Rep. Eric Swalwell, pressuring them to release decade-old investigative files on a congressman who was never charged with a crime. FBI veterans are warning that doing so could compromise sources and investigative methods.
Patel doesn’t care. He’s not the director of a law enforcement agency; he’s a mafioso. And while he’s no capable Don, that doesn’t make him any less potent.
Patel knows where the bodies are buried, figuratively, and maybe literally. Trump knows that Patel knows, and Patel knows that Trump knows he knows. The Epstein files didn’t disappear; they’re sitting metaphorically in the glove compartment of Kash’s luxurious special, armored BMW X5.
That’s his leverage. And whatever his many deficiencies, Patel is smart, and vindictive enough to use it.
So instead of firing him, Trump lets him run wild.
Recall Patel’s appearance at the Winter Olympics in Italy earlier this year, where he was filmed chugging beer and champagne in a locker room with the gold medal–winning U.S. men’s hockey team.
It was cringe-worthy: a 45-year-old intelligence official getting hammered with 20-somethings on the government’s dime. Either he was drunk enough not to care, or oblivious enough not to realize the footage would go viral, and that his boss would see it.
As the Final Four tips off in Indianapolis, don’t be surprised if Patel suddenly discovers some “urgent national security matter” that requires his presence there. Because he clearly doesn’t care about the outrage.
Upcoming “national security matters” will no doubt include the Kentucky Derby in May. And if you need Patel in June, good luck! He’ll be busy hopscotching between the World Cup, the NBA Finals, and the Stanley Cup.
Patel is a beer-guzzling, country-music-loving sports fanatic who knows the rules don’t apply to him.
He knows the FBI’s career agents despise him. He knows morale is collapsing. He knows his personal email was hacked by Iran, and likely won’t be the last time. More to come. He knows allies and adversaries alike see him as unserious.
And he has decided, deliberately, that none of it matters.
What separates Patel from every other Trump cabinet official is simple - he has nowhere to go.
When Kristi Noem gets fired, she positions herself for 2028, or finds some political off-ramp. RFK Jr., Marco Rubio, Pam Bondi, Howard Lutnick. they can all be cut loose and still land on their feet.
They’re politicians and power brokers with reputations to protect. The incentive structure keeps them loyal, even after they’re gone.
Patel has no such future. Before Trump handed him the FBI, he was essentially a podcaster, a loud, self-promoting MAGA personality parroting Trump’s conspiracies. Strip away the title, and that’s what he returns to.
Except this time, he’ll have something new - firsthand knowledge.
A humiliated, cast-aside Kash Patel with a microphone, a grudge, and access to the most sensitive information in the country is the last thing Donald Trump wants. And Patel is vindictive, remember. He would “Kash in,” loudly and aggressively, on everything he knows.
That’s why Patel’s party-hearty tenure at the FBI will continue.
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Trump just got a humiliating civics lesson — and he's not happy
Friends,
Today, U.S. district judge Richard Leon blocked Trump from proceeding with construction of his $400 million ballroom on the site of the White House’s demolished East Wing. This has halted, at least for now, one of Trump’s most visible efforts to reshape the symbolic center of the federal government’s executive branch.
In a 35-page opinion, Judge Leon — an appointee of Republican President George W. Bush — wrote that Trump likely did not have the authority to make changes to the White House that could endure for generations, without consulting Congress.
This marks, by my calculation, the eighty-ninth time that a federal judge has instructed Trump that he cannot simply do whatever he wants; his actions must be authorized by Congress.
Focus for a moment on the word authorized. It’s from the Latin auctoritas and auctor — to originate, the originator.
In our system of government, a president is not the originator of power. Power comes from the people. And among the three branches of government, the people are most clearly represented by Congress. This was the Founder’s design in the Constitution, which is why the very first article, Article I, enumerates Congress’s powers.
The decision by Judge Leon puts the ballroom project on hold while the lawsuit continues. When a federal judge grants a preliminary injunction, it means that the judge views it likely that plaintiffs (in this case, the National Trust for Historic Preservation) will prevail on the merits of the case, and that allowing whatever is going on to continue (in this case, construction of Trump’s humongous 90,000-square-foot ballroom) will cause the plaintiffs irreparable harm.
In December, the National Trust sued Trump after he razed the East Wing (originally constructed in 1902 and expanded during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency) to make way for what Trump says will be the “finest” ballroom in the country.
As designed, that ballroom is larger than the Executive Residence and the West Wing combined. If constructed, it would become the dominant edifice of the White House — symbolically shifting its focus from where the president works and lives to where a president might lavishly entertain, as in a king’s throne room.
Trump has repeatedly emphasized that his ballroom is funded entirely by private donors, so its cost won’t be borne by taxpayers and it doesn’t need a congressional appropriation. He says he’s raised more than $350 million from personal backers and around two dozen tech, cryptocurrency and defense corporations to fund the the structure without government support. Translated: he’s extorted $350 million from monied interests eager to suck up to him.
But Judge Leon insists this doesn’t give Trump authority to destroy part of the White House and erect a giant ballroom in its place: “No statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims to have.”
Judge Leon adds: “The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner!” [exclamation included].
The idea that Trump is the steward of anything for future generations rather than an owner must seem odd to Trump. I doubt that the former real-estate developer has ever once thought of the presidency as a stewardship.
Which is why the notion that he’s not authorized to do whatever he wants — raze the White House for a grand ballroom, deploy ICE and Border Patrol agents to terrorize immigrants and murder Americans trying to protect them, attack Iran — is inconceivable to him.
In his first public reaction to the court order, Trump called the National Trust “a Radical Left Group of Lunatics” that’s suing him for a “ballroom that is under budget, ahead of schedule, being built at no cost to the Taxpayer, and will be the finest Building of its kind anywhere in the World.”
To real-estate developer Trump, all that matters is being under budget, ahead of schedule, and at no cost to taxpayers. Even if he demolishes the entire White House and erects a Trump Tower in its place. Even if he extorts every CEO in America to pay for it. Even if he erects a giant arch across the Potomac with his name emblazoned on it.
But the people have not authorized him to do any of this. Which means — as long as we have an independent federal judiciary, and have any hope for a Congress that will stand up to him — he cannot.
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These awful maladies plague red states — and Trump wants to emulate them
Turn on your local billionaire-funded right-wing media (it’s ubiquitous, after all) pretty much any day of the week and you’ll hear a similar rant, uttered with the same grinning certainty:
“ICE is going to surround the polls this November, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
They’re not floating it as an idea or something up for debate. They’re not raising it as a question of legality or even practicality. They’re promising it, celebrating it, and daring those of us who believe in democracy to try to stop them.
Steve Bannon says it nearly every broadcast. Hate-monger Jesse Watters applauds it on Fox “News” in prime time. Professional victim Ben Shapiro calls it reasonable. Newsmax, owned by two billionaires and Sheikh Sultan bin Jassim Al-Thani, hosts commentators who treat it like a done deal.
They’ve decided, in the open and on camera, with a swaggering confidence that no Republican will dare stand against them, that armed, masked thugs will stand at the entrance to your neighborhood polling place this fall, just like the Klan did in our great-grandparents’ generation in the South. Especially if you live in a neighborhood with a lot of Black and Hispanic voters.
And if you or some of your neighbors are frightened enough to turn around and avoid the building or even simply stay home, well, that’s precisely the point of this awful echo of some of the worst of America’s history.
The 150+ billionaires who bankrolled Donald Trump’s return to the White House now own the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House, and enough of our nation’s media to make their threat feel like it’s simply inevitable. As I’ve pointed out before, they’ve spent decades and billions of dollars building a media and think-tank infrastructure to keep working people confused, divided, and willing to believe whatever bullshit they’re fed.
But what these wannabe fascists don’t own yet, at least not completely, is your right to vote. And, looking at the prospect of a Blue Tsunami, that’s exactly what hard-right Republicans are working to fix before November.
“You’re damn right we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November,” Bannon announced on his podcast back in February, and he’s been repeating it in variations ever since.
Fox “News’” Jesse Watters thinks it’s a splendid idea. Ben Shapiro is fully on board. Newsmax hosts have been cheerleading it for weeks. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche — formerly Trump’s criminal attorney — stood at CPAC and asked, with feigned innocence, why anyone would object to armed, masked goons menacing people by standing outside polling places. You know, just like in the 1920s and the 1880s in the Deep South.
They’ve wrapped the whole scheme in the claim of “election integrity,” which is the same language every authoritarian in history has used when he decided the wrong people were voting too easily. It was the underlying logic and rationalization for Jim Crow in previous generations.
The real target of this obscene scheme isn’t some mythical army of illegal voters: as the Heritage Foundation discovered, they literally don’t exist in any meaningful way. Their real target is you, particularly if you’re not a straight white man, and the one of the several tools they’re planning to use is raw, naked fear.
And it’s not like they don’t know exactly what they’re doing. The Heritage Foundation’s own voter fraud database, assembled by people who have every political incentive to find a crisis, has documented exactly 68 cases of noncitizen voting going back to the 1980s. Sixty-eight cases across four decades in a country of 330 million people having cast billions of votes.
And when Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security conducted an internal review specifically to build the legal and political case for this “emergency,” they came back with the same answer: there is no evidence of widespread fraud. None.
The “crisis” Republicans have been using to justify making it hard to vote since the 1960s is entirely fictional. The emergency was cynically manufactured by rightwing operatives including William Rehnquist and proclaimed in 1980 by Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich. But the armed thugs they want to plant at your polling place will be very, very real, and their effect on who decides to show up and vote will be very, very real, too.
What they’re proposing is also, not incidentally, a federal felony.
Title 18 of the United States Code, Section 592 — a law written in the aftermath of the Civil War by horrified legislators who’d personally watched armed and officially deputized members of the Klan threaten Black voters with nooses and at gunpoint — makes it a crime punishable by up to five years in prison and the loss of any elected or appointed position to deploy armed federal personnel to any polling location, anywhere in America:
“Whoever, being an officer of the Army or Navy, or other person in the civil, military, or naval service of the United States, orders, brings, keeps, or has under his authority or control any troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held, unless such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both; and be disqualified from holding any office of honor, profit, or trust under the United States.” (emphasis added)
That law has been on the books for more than a century because the people who wrote it understood that the moment we let the government sanction terror at voting locations, we no longer have a real democracy. Which, of course, is exactly the point of these rightwing fascists.
The cruelty of the scheme becomes even clearer when we consider how closely what ICE has been doing resembles previous generations’ experience of the Klan. A 2025 Supreme Court “shadow docket” ruling written by Pillsbury Doughboy imitator Brett Kavanaugh in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo says ICE can profile Americans based on how dark their skin is, where they work, or how they talk — the so-called “Kavanaugh Stops” — and what’s followed has been a wave of well-documented harassment of brown-skinned U.S. citizens.
A 20-year-old American citizen named Mubashir Khalif Hussen, for example, was stopped by masked ICE agents while walking from work to lunch in Minneapolis, shackled, and violently dragged off to a federal building — as he repeatedly protested that he was a US citizen and carried in his pocket the proof of it — before being threatened, humiliated, and ultimately released. He repeated “I’m a citizen, I’m a citizen” the entire time, but the agents, hungry for their bonuses and high on functional Vice President Stephen Miller’s racism, didn’t care.
A ProPublica investigation found more than 170 cases of U.S. citizens beaten, shackled, or dragged off at raids and protests, and that’s probably just the tip of a very large, very deep iceberg.
According to the Cato Institute, 73 percent of people booked into ICE detention since October 2025 had no criminal convictions whatsoever. You don’t need a scientific study to know what happens to Latino voter turnout when an ICE thug is the first thing you see when you walk up to cast your ballot.
The Brookings Institution found around 75 percent of Latinos across the country can speak Spanish well enough to be flagged under ICE’s “Kavanaugh Stop” profiling criteria, making enormous numbers of Latino citizens vulnerable to harassment and detention based on nothing more than how they sound. Not to mention that Brett Kavanagh’s diktat allows for harassment and arrest based on the color of their skin.
And Republicans know it. That suppression of the vote isn’t an incidental side effect of this GOP plan. It is the plan.
And what gets suppressed along with those votes is everything that working people in this country depend on to survive.
This — in addition to trying to keep Trump, his grifter family, and his toadies out of jail — is also the most recent way Republicans are going after FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society programs that built the modern middle class.
Research from the Economic Policy Institute documents how the states with the most aggressive voter suppression are also the same states with the lowest wages, the weakest labor protections, and the highest rates of poverty.
Red states with aggressive voter suppression have, in fact, the highest rates in the nation of:
— Spousal abuse
— Obesity
— Smoking
— Teen pregnancy
— Sexually transmitted diseases
— Abortion (at least before Dobbs; now it would be “forced births”)
— Bankruptcies and poverty
— Homicide and suicide
— Infant mortality
— Maternal mortality
— Forcible rape
— Robbery and aggravated assault
— Dropouts from high school
— Divorce
— Contaminated air and water
— Opiate addiction and deaths
— Unskilled workers
— Parasitic infections
— Income and wealth inequality
— Covid deaths and unvaccinated people
— Federal subsidies to states (“Red State Welfare”)
— People on welfare
— Child poverty
— Homelessness
— Spousal murder
— Unemployment
— Deaths from auto accidents
— People living on disability
— Gun deaths
That’s not a coincidence, and, for social scientists, it’s not a mystery. When working people can’t vote union rights evaporate, so corporate bosses don’t have to negotiate with their workers. When working people can’t vote, the minimum wage stays frozen, healthcare gets stripped, unions get busted, and social services are cut to pay for tax cuts so the morbidly rich keep all the money they’ve made from the labor of the people at the bottom.
Research from Equitable Growth has gone even further, showing a direct causal link between higher voting rates and higher minimum wages, more generous state support programs, and lower income inequality overall, which is why Blue states consistently have the highest standards of living in the country.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965, by breaking down barriers that kept Black workers from the polls, actually reduced the Black-white wage gap. When five corrupt, racist Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted key provisions of that Act in 2013, the racial wage gap got worse again.
The ballot box isn’t just a civic ritual. For working people, it’s the democratic lever that moves everything else. It’s how you get a raise, keep your healthcare, and make the people who write the rules answer to the people who must live under them.
That’s why what Bannon, Trump, and his billionaire backers are doing is so nakedly corrupt. They know that if Black, Latino, and young voters, along with hourly workers and people in the communities ICE is currently terrorizing, all show up in November, the GOP will experience an electoral bloodbath.
When their congressional allies lose their majority, the billionaires’ and Trump crime family’s looting gets interrupted. Two years of ruinous tariffs, Medicaid cuts, tax giveaways to the morbidly rich, and the demolition of every federal agency designed to protect workers rather than owners all face a reckoning. Trump’s lickspittles — including his Attorney General — face prison, just like over 40 of Nixon’s aides and his Attorney General did.
That’s what they’re in an absolute panic about. That’s what armed, masked thugs at the polling place are designed to prevent.
I’ve spent enough time studying the history of authoritarianism, both in literature and in countries I’ve visited or worked in, to recognize what this moment represents. Every Putin-, Orban-, and Trump-style strongman who’s converted a democracy into an authoritarian state started by making “certain people” afraid to participate.
Today’s Republicans aren’t even original in their obscene threats of implied violence at the polling places. For almost a century after the Civil War, this was completely normal in the previously Confederate South.
And as the Klan taught previous generations of Americans, intimidation also doesn’t need to be legal to work. The chilling effect lands the same way whether or not the statute books say it’s permissible, which is exactly why they’re planning this in open defiance of federal law, and exactly why we have to name it for what it is: an attack on our constitutional right to determine our own leaders and thus our own nation’s future.
Call your member of Congress (202-224-3121) and demand they go on record opposing any deployment of ICE or other armed Trump goons to polling places. Let them know it’s a federal crime that should be enforced, and any federal official — including the president — who pushes it must “be disqualified from holding any office” and lose their job.
Check your voter registration right now at vote.org and make sure nothing has changed since the last time you looked, particularly if you live in a Red state.
Then bring every person you know to the polls this November, because the people trying to scare us away from the ballot aren’t just doing it for fun; like previous generations in the South, they well understand the vote’s power better than most of the people who take it for granted. It’s well past time the rest of us caught up.
- 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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The unfathomable reason MAGA remains infatuated with Trump — despite his contempt
Hypocrisy, thy name is Donald J. Trump.
And yet the MAGA cult refuses to see it.
Trump is Biff from Back to the Future, always giving noogies to MAGA’s George McFly. Only they enjoy it and ask for more.
He is the embodiment of “Rules for thee, but not for me,” by preaching a lifestyle he’s never lived to the same people he’s been grifting for over a decade. And they love him for it, fully unaware that he can’t stand any of them.
Trump isn’t a Christian, and he’s never read the Bible, because if he did, he’d be able to name his favorite passage when asked. He doesn’t read anything, not even his daily briefings, preferring a “Good Parts Only” video presentation because he has the attention span of a gnat.
Trump has no idea how much a gallon of gas costs, because he doesn’t drive a car (he also can’t ride a bike, because no one ever loved him enough to teach him how, which is why he mocked Joe Biden for falling off his bike one time).
Trump has no idea what food costs, because he’s never been grocery shopping once in his life. I like to imagine someone gently escorting Sundowning Paw Paw into his local Publix and him reacting to the abundance on the shelves with the wonderment of a caveman discovering fire. Telling him how much coffee prices have spiked would be meaningless to him, because he doesn’t drink coffee.
The price of his beloved Diet Coke, like all other Coca-Cola products, has increased 4% thanks to his arbitrary tariffs, but he doesn’t care because he never pays for anything.
Trump is a con man who’s bankrupted multiple casinos while laundering money for the Russian mob and also has multiple other bankruptcies, but he’s told MAGA he knows more about all of the things than anyone else. In reality, they’re the constant dupes who can’t stop falling for the never-ending game of Three Card Monte he’s been playing since he descended that gold escalator in 2015 and flung his loaded diaper all over our political norms.
Trump’s hair is fake, he wears lifts in his shoes, and he spackles on makeup in hues that vary from Circus Peanut to Burnt Umber without bothering to blend. I call this look the MAGA-not Line *rimshot*
While MAGA makes fun of drag queens. Trumpocrites are gonna Trumpocrite to the last.
Trump bullies reporters who ask him questions based on facts. He never answers, but turns it around by asking “Who do you work for?” as if they’re not standing in the same room with OAN, Fox, and Newsmax, and therefore everything he says is being covered by all of them at the same time. MAGA can’t grasp that the truth about Trump is true no matter who’s reporting it, but that’s also why he’s buying up the media. “Fake news” is just the truth he hates, but ten years of eating his lies has left them unable to consume anything good for them.
Trump violates the Constitution just by existing. He makes untold millions, even billions, on crypto deals and shady investments, has accepted “donations” from foreign interests that most people would call “bribes,” and has invited war criminals to the White House. He’s never gone hungry a day in his life, but he was fine with cutting off SNAP benefits during the holidays and expected Americans to simply buy fewer gifts and cut out a few Thanksgiving side dishes.
Trump is a petty, thin-skinned, jealous, convicted felon and sexual abuser whose name appears in the Epstein Files just as much as Jeffrey Epstein’s and Ghislaine Maxwell’s, if not more. His fear of being revealed as the fraud he is has led to the current chaos he’s causing in Iran and elsewhere around the globe. It’s why he attacked Greenland and Venezuela, then moved on to the Middle East, even after promising MAGA “no new wars.” U.S. Navy ships have taken up a presence around Cuba, which will be the next Epstein distraction that only adds to Trump’s unspeakable body count.
Trump has never once delivered on a promise. He stole Joe Biden’s campaign slogan, “Promises Made, Promises Kept,” as if being willfully obtuse is a replacement for doing any actual work. Trump promised “No new wars,” but tell that to the families of the dead kids in Iran. He promised to lower prices and has instead brought the global markets to the brink of another Depression.
The MAGA cult is happy to keep up the Trumpocrisy. They called President Biden “Genocide Joe” while they ignore Trump and Netanyahu in cahoots with Putin to flatten Gaza, turn it into the Atlantic City of the Middle East, and install Jared Kushner as their Nucky Thompson.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), on the brink of expulsion thanks to cheating on her Congressional expense report, still tweets about the Epstein survivors without mentioning Trump. Openly gay married father of two, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, ignores Trump’s homophobia, as well as the demands to comply with the Senate Finance and House Oversight Committees by giving them access to the US Treasury’s own set of Epstein Files. Which not enough people know about, because of Trump’s inexplicable chokehold on the media.
This week, while still calling any elections Republicans lose “rigged” ahead of the 2026 midterms, it was revealed that Trump had voted by mail. Which is the exact opposite of what he wants MAGA to do. And when he was asked about such egregious hypocrisy, guess what happened?
He was in Palm Beach, but he was so busy cheating at golf that he had someone else fill out his ballot for him and drop it in the mail. And yet, he gets away with that non-answer because the media can’t push back with any consistency, and MAGA will never hold him accountable.
But I always will.
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Trump just earned an economic title he'll never brag about
Friends,
When he ran for president again in 2024, Trump made three promises to the American public:
(1) He said he’d “secure” the southern border. Most Americans now believe he’s gone too far in this.
(2) He’d avoid foreign wars. He said: “We’ve spent $8 trillion in the Middle East, and we’re not fixing our roads in this country? How stupid. How stupid is it? And we’re not fixing our highways, our tunnels, our bridges, our hospitals, even.” Umm. How well has this promise turned out?
(3) His third promise was to bring prices down and create more jobs. He said: “Starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again, to bring down the prices of all goods.”
In fact, Trump has pushed prices way up.
As of today, the price of Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, is above $116 a barrel. The average price for a gallon of gas in the United States is now $4.00, and many people are paying far more. Food costs are also heading upward.
He’s also raised tariffs on imports. This has increased the prices of everything we buy from abroad.
He has also pledged to be “the greatest jobs president that God has ever created.”
But he’s been the worst jobs president in American history.
In his first term, Trump presided over a historic net loss of nearly 3 million jobs, the worst jobs numbers ever recorded under an American president.
So far in his second term, he has presided over a loss of 150,000 jobs. (By contrast, in the final 14 months of Joe Biden’s presidency, the economy added 1.74 million jobs.)
The only thing Trump has done to make any Americans better off is to cut taxes on the rich and big corporations. He did this in his second term. It was also his major economic policy in his first term (which he promised would result in $4,000 annual raises for everyone else. How did that work out? Did you get a $4,000 raise?)
May I speak plainly? Trump has turned the American economy into s---.Trump’s economic record is only slightly worse than that of every Republican president before him. Here’s the historic truth that everyone needs to understand: The American economy does worse under Republican presidents. Since 1933, the U.S. economy has grown nearly twice as fast on average under Democrats.
Wage growth slowed after Reagan’s tax cuts for the rich and big corporations. And the Bush and Trump tax cuts didn’t trickle down, either.
These giveaways to the wealthy have come at the expense of investments in infrastructure, education, and health care — making life more expensive and difficult for everyone who isn’t rich.
They’ve also exploded the debt and deficit.
Reagan oversaw a 186 percent increase in the national debt — the biggest percentage increase in over 70 years.
Look at the historic record and you see something else: Republican presidents have led us into the three worst economic crises of the last hundred years.
The Great Depression began in 1929 under Herbert Hoover. The Great Recession began in 2008 under George W. Bush. The pandemic recession of 2020 began under Trump.
Democrats (FDR, Obama, and Biden) led us out of these Republican economic crises.
Republicans talk about “running the country like a business.” Sure. They’ve run it the way Trump ran his businesses: with massive debts, a string of failures, and payouts for the folks at the top, while average workers get shafted again and again.
Given Republicans’ track record, why would any hardworking American put their financial security in the hands of a Republican president (or, for that matter, a Republican Congress) ever again?
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 gets a look at who isn't bending the knee
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
The GOP has handed us the tactic to bring down Trump
Standing in the Oval Office last week, Donald Trump declared that the war with Iran — a war he started without a declaration of Congress, apparently at the urging of MBS and his son-in-law who takes $25 million a year from Saudi Arabia — is “won,” and then added that “the only one that likes to keep it going is the fake news.”
Iran, for its part, flatly denied that any negotiations are even taking place. And the network news covered it just like that: Trump says the war is won, Iran says it isn't, here's the weather.
Nobody on camera yesterday morning even bothered to ask why Jared Kushner, who was simultaneously soliciting a fresh $5 billion from the Saudis who lobbied hardest for this war, was one of the people at the table in Geneva when the last chance for a deal collapsed.
That omission isn't an accident. It’s the result of a thirty-year Republican strategy to bully the press into docility, and it’s long past time for Democrats to fight back using the exact same playbook.
An old friend dropped me a note this week with a complaint that, once you hear it, you can’t stop noticing everywhere you look in our nation’s media. He’d been watching one of the three major network TV evening newscasts and noticed that Trump and other Republicans are on every single night, almost always without serious pushback or fact-checking, while Democrats are rarely featured at all.
When a Democrat does show up, it’s usually to react to something Trump just did or said, a process that reinforces the Republican frame of the news even when it pushes back against it (see: George Lakoff).
I’ve been in the media much of my life; was a radio news reporter for a top station in the 1970s and have been writing books and articles about democracy and politics regularly for the past three decades. What my friend is describing is neither an accident nor a coincidence.
It’s the fully ripened fruit of a successful strategy Republicans have been running to get the media to spin stories for them since the early 1980s. And it’s long past time for Democrats to stand up and fight back hard with exactly the same playbook.
Back during the 1992 Clinton/Bush Sr. presidential race, Rich Bond, then chairman of the GOP, explained his party’s media strategy with unusual candor:
“There is some strategy to it,” he said of their habit of bashing the so-called liberal media. “If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is ‘work the refs.’ Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one.”
Lee Atwater had been running a version of this strategy for years before Bond said the quiet part out loud. The genius of it was that they never needed to prove that the media was actually infected with “liberal bias.”
Which was good for them, because the mainstream media’s never really had any sort of political bias other than status quo; it’s just that the GOP has relied on so many lies over the years like “trickle down,” “murderous immigrant invasion,” “evil union bosses,” “non-citizens voting,” “queer predators,” etc., etc., that when they get confronted with reality it seems to them like bias.
All they needed was for the accusation to be repeated often enough that journalists and producers would end up sufficiently intimidated to lean over backward to prove they weren’t pushing a liberal line. And it worked.
Media scholar Eric Alterman documented the phenomenon in detail at the Center for American Progress: conservative columnists like George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and Bob Novak had prominent perches all over the allegedly “liberal” media showing up on major TV programs weekly, while genuinely progressive voices like Paul Krugman and E.J. Dionne almost never got television slots.
A study comparing Sunday morning talk shows during Obama’s first two years versus Trump’s first two years (first time around) found that by the Trump era, every single major Sunday show, including NBC’s Meet the Press and CBS’s Face the Nation, was featuring more Republicans than Democrats. And a FAIR analysis found Republicans outnumbering Democrats 56% to 40% in Sunday show appearances during Trump’s first post-election transition period.
Here’s how effectively this strategy worked: When Bush was president, the networks said they “needed more Republicans” on television because “Republicans are in power.” When Obama was president, they said they “needed more Republicans” on TV “because Democrats were in charge,” and “it’s important to hear from the opposition.”
Heads Republicans win, tails Democrats lose, every single time, under almost every conceivable circumstance and on pretty much every topic. That’s not journalism. That’s genuine media bias. In favor of the GOP.
And while that particular scheme was playing out, the billionaires on the hard right were simultaneously building media empires of their own that now include roughly 1,500 rightwing radio stations, Fox “News,” Newsmax, One America News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, more than half of America’s local newspapers, and now, CBS itself.
Meanwhile, CNN may soon land in the hands of the same billionaire nepo-baby buyer, reportedly eager to move it in a similar direction. Just ask Pete Hegseth, who recently said, “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”
Even the White House and Pentagon press pools, once home to credentialed reporters from established outlets, are now packed with “reporters” from fringe rightwing websites and sketchy podcasts, while serious journalists and representatives of progressive outlets often find themselves locked out.
The hypocrisy here, particularly since the media now either ignores or treats Trump family and cabinet corruption as something normal, is breathtaking.
For example, Jared Kushner has been simultaneously acting as Trump’s Middle East “peace envoy” while raising a new $5 billion round of investment from the same foreign governments he’s supposedly negotiating with.
Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which is controlled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), already pumped $2 billion into Kushner’s private equity firm right after he left the first Trump White House, and pays him $25 million a year in management fees.
According to reporting in The Washington Post, MBS was making private phone calls to Trump for weeks before the bombing of Iran started, urging him to strike, since Iran is Saudi Arabia’s chief regional rival.
Kushner himself met with Iran’s foreign minister in Geneva just before the bombs fell. Iran’s foreign minister later said a deal “was within reach,” suggesting Kusnher may have been playing them for suckers on behalf of MBS and/or Netanyahu (an old Kushner family friend).
Senators Ron Wyden and Jamie Raskin have called for investigations into whether Kushner violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act and the Constitution’s emoluments clause. Not to mention policies against nepotism. And that’s Trump’s peace envoy. That’s the person steering American foreign policy toward a war that explicitly benefits and may even be being fought — at the cost of American lives and treasure — on behalf of his biggest client.
At the same time, Qatar handed Trump a $400 million luxury Boeing 747 jumbo jet to ultimately keep for himself and you and I are now paying a billion dollars to outfit it. Multiple constitutional law scholars have called it a textbook violation of the Foreign Emoluments Clause, which prohibits presidents from accepting gifts from foreign governments without congressional approval.
The New York Times has reported that Trump has already personally pocketed at least $1.4 billion from the presidency through his family’s various business deals; other investigations suggest the number could be well over $4 billion.
The administration has also been killing people on boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean — at least 151 people killed in 45 strikes since last September — including at least one Colombian fisherman, all without a declaration of war or congressional authorization. And then they bombed and invaded Venezuela, killing more than 80 people including civilians, seizing its president without any legal authority whatsoever under international law.
Now, consider what would have happened if Barack Obama or Bill Clinton had done any of this? What if Clinton’s son-in-law had taken $2 billion from a foreign government and then whispered in Clinton’s ear to start a war that benefited that same foreign government? What if Obama had accepted a $400 million jet from Qatar? What if a Democratic administration had been killing people on boats in international waters without congressional authorization?
Republicans would have been incandescent, holding news conferences and hearing after hearing after hearing. Fox “News” would have run wall-to-wall of outraged coverage for months. The Sunday shows would have featured nothing but Republicans demanding impeachment or worse.
And the mainstream media would have covered those hearings seriously and continuously, because they’d have been terrified of being called “liberal” if they didn’t.
That’s the mechanism. That’s how it works. Republicans institutionalized the accusation of “liberal media bias” so thoroughly that the media now polices itself on their behalf, even when the corruption on the other side is jaw-dropping.
The solution to this media crisis that’s so damaging to our democracy is straightforward, and Democrats need to do it now.
Every senator, every congressperson, every governor, every mayor, every Democratic surrogate who goes on television needs to be trained to say the words “rightwing media bias” early and often, not occasionally, but constantly, institutionally, the same way Republicans “worked the refs” for thirty years.
It means pressuring the networks directly. It means holding hearings — even if they have to be unofficial “shadow” hearings — right now about media consolidation and the capture of the press corps by rightwing interests. It means pointing out, loudly and specifically, every single time a network gives a Republican five minutes of uncontested airtime and then gives a Democrat thirty seconds to “respond.”
Republicans didn’t spend forty years bleating about the “liberal media” because the liberal media actually existed. They knew it didn’t but were relentless about the accusation nonetheless, and they had the infrastructure to amplify it everywhere, all the time.
Democrats can do the same thing today, and unlike the GOP, they have the truth on their side.
This starts with you. Call your Democratic senators and representatives today and demand they raise this issue publicly and loudly, in press conferences, in hearings, in every television interview. Share this article. Talk with your neighbors about it.
The refs change their calls when the voices get loud enough. It’s time to start speaking out loudly.
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