Opinion
The GOP's hero called this the backbone of America. Trump just broke it
The American media refuses to call them out, so I guess the job falls to me: you can cut the racism with a knife, it’s so thick. With the Trump administration, the Confederacy is actively rising again, using the Lost Cause mythology/lie as its basis.
Trump this past week, apparently just in time for Veterans Day, erased tributes to Black U.S. soldiers who died fighting fascism — removing displays and plaques honoring African American liberators in Europe and removing similar memorial content at home — not merely to rewrite history but to say that only white men’s stories matter.
First, he claimed that brown-skinned people from south of the border were “murderers and rapists,” openly promoting racist tropes and activating enthusiastic bigots all across America to his side.
He whipped up a white mob who attacked the Capitol building and beat Black Capitol Police officers, screaming the N-word at them, while he watched on TV with apparent glee. He then pardoned all of them.
He reinstalled the statue of notorious Klan member, traitor, and Confederate general Albert Pike, while removing references to the horrors of slavery or early American presidents’ slaveholding from national parks and other federal monuments.
Trump’s white supremacists removed references to Black and female soldiers’ sacrifices from the Arlington Memorial Cemetery website.
Meanwhile, “Whiskey” Pete Hegseth is sweeping out senior‐level military leaders — women and people of color disproportionately — for daring to exist in leadership, and has ended military recognition of Black and women’s history events.
Trump’s henchman Russell Vought is finishing DOGE’s purge of Civil Service protections and DEI programs, with Black men and women especially hit hard.
This isn’t mere bureaucratic housekeeping: it’s the return of a white-male-supremacist architecture taking root in the GOP and the administration with echoes of the old Confederacy and the masked Klan in modern uniforms and executive orders.
But the even larger issue here is not only the racism: it’s the systematic assault on democracy and diversity itself. This is not just about statues or plaques or websites. It’s about the rewriting of our national identity, the redefinition of who counts as American, and the hasty, one-presidential-term reconstruction of a two-tier democracy: one for white men and one for everyone else.
Democracy depends on memory. When we lose sight of who fought, bled, and sacrificed to make this country more just, we lose our understanding of what democracy is supposed to mean. By erasing Black liberators, women leaders, and the long, painful march toward equality, this administration is saying: Only one story matters: the white, male, Confederate one.
That’s not just historical revisionism; it’s political weaponry. It’s a way of teaching future generations that the only people who truly belong in the story of America are white men with power.
This is how authoritarianism takes root, not just through violence, but through erasure. When diversity and equality are scrubbed from public memory, when entire groups of Americans are made invisible, it becomes easier to justify their exclusion in the present.
And once exclusion is normalized, democracy itself begins to die.
This Confederate revival we’re witnessing is not nostalgia: it’s a blueprint. The Lost Cause myth was always about rewriting defeat as heroism, slavery as benevolence, and white dominance as divine order.
That same logic is now being reinstalled at the highest levels of government. It’s an ideology that says equality is a threat and diversity is an invasion. It recasts white resentment as patriotism and paints those demanding fairness as enemies of the state. It’s why Hegseth condemned DEI in front of his generals and admirals and Trump and Fox “News” constantly rail against it.
But democracy, real democracy, cannot coexist with white supremacy. The two are fundamentally opposed.
Democracy requires inclusion, the recognition that every person’s voice and dignity matter. Diversity is not a “side issue” or a “political correctness” distraction; it is — as Ronald Reagan pointed out (ironically) — the very mechanism that keeps democracy alive. Reagan famously said (and Trump now repudiates):
“This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation.
“While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow.
“Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier.
“This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”
A government that silences or excludes women, Black people, immigrants, and other marginalized voices is no longer democratic and no longer looking or striving toward the future. It is frozen, stale, hierarchical, authoritarian, and fragile.
When the Trump administration erases diversity from its institutions — by firing people of color, ending DEI programs, banning the celebration of women’s history or Black soldiers’ sacrifices — it is not just discriminating. It is redefining the nation’s soul.
It is saying: only white male Americans count. Only they deserve to be remembered. Only they deserve to hold power, control wealth, and lead.
That is a true danger.
It’s an attempt to create a pseudo-democracy that exists in name only, one that maintains the trappings of elections and laws but has hollowed out the moral core of equality beneath them that upholds and sustains our republican system.
If this continues unchecked, we won’t simply be facing a rollback of rights; we’ll be watching the slow, deliberate dismantling of this noble 249-year democratic experiment itself.
And so, we must fight, not just for memory, but for meaning. We must insist that our national story remain whole and honest. We must demand that the sacrifices of every American — Black, brown, white, female, queer, immigrant — are honored, taught, and celebrated.
Because democracy without diversity is tyranny in disguise.
All Americans of conscience and goodwill must demand an end to these purges of women and minorities in memorials, jobs, the military, and civil service.
We must demand that our politicians stand up to Trump and his white supremacist lickspittle’s while insisting on a return to our foundational promise: equality, equal opportunity, and recognition for every person who serves and sacrifices.
Because if we don’t stop them now, the erasures become the new normal and our children will wake up in a country that no longer remembers it ever stood for freedom at all.
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Trump spent years building this Epstein denial — a Karoline Leavitt slip just destroyed it
Donald Trump just showed up — allegedly — somewhere no one would ever want to be found.
”Spending time” at Jeffrey Epstein’s house with one of the convicted child-sex predator’s victims.
The allegation is one of several politically radioactive revelations in emails released by the Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday. They are part of a trove of materials provided to the committee by Epstein’s estate.
Trump will have a hard time lying his way out of this one. Give White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt an “A” for effort, though.
“In a statement on Wednesday, Leavitt said, ‘The Democrats selectively leaked emails to the liberal media to create a fake narrative to smear President Trump.’” CNN reported.
“‘The ‘unnamed victim’ referenced in these emails is the late Virginia Giuffre, who repeatedly said President Trump was not involved in any wrongdoing whatsoever and ‘couldn’t have been friendlier’ to her in their limited interactions,’ Leavitt said.”
That might be a bit more plausible were it not for the fact that Leavitt’s statement blows up every syllable of every word of denial that Trump has uttered for years about having little to do with Epstein. Now, she’s not even denying he was at Epstein’s house — just that if he was, it was to spend time with the one (deceased) Epstein victim who says Trump was nice to her.
Funny, they never mentioned that exculpatory detail before in all the coverage of Giuffre’s death and subsequent book release.
Well, if it’s not a news story, why was Leavitt putting out an instant statement about it?
The emails cut through years of calculated denial. The core evidence is a 2011 exchange between Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, long after Trump and Epstein were supposedly estranged.
Epstein wrote to Maxwell: “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump.”
Then came the definitive line: “[A victim] spent hours at my house with him … he has never once been mentioned.”
That single email destroys the entire narrative. This wasn’t Trump hearing rumors about Epstein’s operation. It was Trump spending hours at Epstein’s house with one of the victims — and saying nothing.
The 2011 date is what makes this impossible to escape. Epstein had no reason to lie in private correspondence to his closest co-conspirator. Trump was a reality TV host with no political power. He couldn’t grant pardons or commute sentences. The email wasn’t a threat or blackmail play. It was a statement of calculated, relied-upon truth between two people who understood the power of silence.
That reality explains Trump’s desperate obsession with burying the full Epstein files. He promised transparency during the campaign. Then he actively obstructed Congress. His administration stonewalled investigators. Republicans split over it. Right-wing supporters broke with him. Now we know why: these emails don’t just contradict his story — they place him in the room.
Every denial collapses under that timeline. Trump didn’t “barely know” Epstein. Their falling-out wasn’t a simple Palm Beach real estate squabble. Trump wasn’t some peripheral figure at a few parties.
The record gets worse. In 2019, months before Epstein’s arrest, Epstein emailed author Michael Wolff that Trump “knew about the girls, as he asked Ghislaine to stop.” You don’t ask someone to stop unless you have concrete knowledge of what they’re doing. And you don’t spend hours in a predator’s house with a victim unless you understand exactly where you are and what is being ignored.
It’s hard to fathom why Maxwell would be asked “to stop” unless she was seen as holding the ultimate currency — firsthand knowledge of what Trump knew and when he knew it. Maxwell, of course, is another person Trump publicly claimed he hardly knew but somehow — after an unprecedented softball interview in prison from Todd Blanche, Trump’s personal lawyer (now Deputy Attorney General), by pure coincidence — Maxwell found herself transferred from the worst women’s prison possible to the system’s Ritz-Carlton equivalent.
Sudden white-glove treatment of a felon sentenced to 20 years hard time for sex-child trafficking.
It happens.
This is why Trump has fought relentlessly to keep these files sealed. From all appearances, he simply cannot withstand the truth coming out.
The House is now expected to vote on release of the Epstein files, an event I’ll believe when I see it. It does appear that House Speaker Mike Johnson has finally run out of tricks to delay the swearing in of Rep. Adelita Grijalva, D-AZ, a cool 50 days after she won her seat in a special election.
Grijalva has been seen as the pivotal vote, allowing Democrats and four Republican defectors to call for the full release of the files. But even if that happens — and there’s no guarantee it will — count on Trump to pull out every stop to keep those files from seeing the light of day.
This fight is a long way from over.
You see, Trump knows what’s in those files because he was there.
And now, thanks to Epstein’s own words, we’re beginning to find out as well.
- Ray Hartmann writes on Substack at Ray Hartmann's Soapbox
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Squirming Trump now all alone as allies admit this terrible truth
It appears the extent of President Donald Trump's involvement with Jeffrey Epstein is about to finally fall into the open. Left unanswered is whether anything means anything anymore. But even in this cynical age, perhaps almost quaintly, the matter of the infamous late financier and child sexual abuser probably still does. The world will soon find out.
Now, everyone sentient and sensible has long suspected that Trump was grossly involved in Epstein's world. How, we don't know — though of course, Trump was found liable for sexual abuse in another case, involving E. Jean Carroll. But he had to have knowledge of what Epstein did to his girls. At one point, the two men were best friends. Epstein surely wasn't the one who called his own plane "the Lolita Express." Those around him did.
Trump knew but did nothing. Then, recently, he did something. He blessed Ghislaine Maxwell's move to more comfortable prison surroundings, her conviction in relation to the crimes of Epstein, her former partner, be damned.
Keep that thought.
Because if there is one thing we know about Trump, he sympathizes only with himself. What may occasionally look like care for others is just expression of fear for himself. When talking about Maxwell, Trump "wished her well" — a lot more than he would ever say for judges, Democrats, Barack Obama, even George W. Bush. In the fate of Ghislaine Maxwell, Trump feels invested. Duly noted.
One of the weirder characteristics of emails in a wired world is that moments still get frozen in time. The emotions and motivations behind correspondences, references to certain people, remain as alive today as when first tapped out. Messages and urgencies conveyed long ago may always bloom again.
Epstein's own words are now laid bare. More will come out. Like the girls Epstein used, in a way, Trump will be exposed, with little to no defense. Then Trump will do what he always does: attack. Who? His critics, certainly. But Trump's escapes usually require redefining reality itself. After all, we now live in a world in which he was the purported victim of Russian interference in the 2016 election, and January 6 was a day on which patriots fought for democracy.
But reality cannot be redefined in the face of hardened evidence — like emails directly referencing Trump's alleged knowledge of Epstein's activities and time at Epstein's houses, or birthday cards with messages about "secrets." All are now coming out. This will mirror the reaction to the Access Hollywood tape, back in 2016: the supposed "locker room talk" in which Trump bragged about sexual assault. But this time we're talking about victims who were kids. And we're talking about cold, hard text:
Michael Wolff: “I hear CNN planning to ask Trump tonight about his relationship with you — either on air or in scrum afterwards.”
Epstein: “if we were able to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be?”
Wolff (next day): “I think you should let him hang himself. If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt.”
It appears that Epstein wasn't going to say anything that would incriminate himself. But it also strongly seems that he had the "goods" on Trump, and others knew it.
Read the above while knowing that a man in his late 40s should never be spending social time around a teen girl — especially without her having a parent there. Never. All decent people understand that. Then read the words below, from 2011, Epstein to Maxwell, in legal jeopardy, still wondering whether his circle would hold:
“i want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump.. [VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. im 75 % there”
The same day, Maxwell replied: “I have been thinking about that…”
Trump was a major figure in Epstein's orbit, a dog prominent enough that one bark could be fatal. But Trump hasn't barked — except to protect himself. Nothing for the girls, either.
Most men would push back, expressing sympathy for Epstein's victims and anger at themselves: "I didn't do nearly enough, and I am aching, thinking back to what those girls endured." But we know Trump, and he won't acknowledge anyone's pain but his own.
This scandal may not be enough to drive him from office. Only an exploding economy will wake enough Trump supporters to see him clearly. “Nice ballroom, Ace”.
But it is reasonable to link Trump to Epstein's crimes. He's the "grab 'em by the p---y” guy, after all. And he remains terrified. Epstein is dead but Maxwell got moved to comfy prison quarters after talking to Trump's former attorney, the deputy AG.
There's no way out of this one. Too many parents and decent moderates now sit with an undeniable fact. Trump knew, and never took a side against him or Maxwell.
Everything has changed. Maxwell likely won't get a pardon. What good can the "goods" do her? Watch Trump squirm. He needs to pardon her, but can't. This subject is fire, and too many people know it. FBI agents, Trump's cabinet, Speaker Mike Johnson. They know.
Trump is on his own, which is fitting. So were Epstein's girls.
- Jason Miciak is an American attorney, former associate editor at Occupy Democrats, executive editor of Political Flare, and writer at large for Politicalzoom. He can be reached at jasonmiciak.com, @JasonMiciak, and on Bluesky
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The Epstein puzzle is about to be solved
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Trump just sent an ominous warning with his latest manufactured crisis
For decades, Washington has sold the world a deadly lie: that “regime change” brings freedom, that US bombs and blockades can somehow deliver democracy. But every country that has lived through this euphemism knows the truth — it instead brings death, dismemberment, and despair. Now that the same playbook is being dusted off for Venezuela, the parallels with Iraq and other US interventions are an ominous warning of what could follow.
As a US armada gathers off Venezuela, a US special operations aviation unit aboard one of the warships has been flying helicopter patrols along the coast. This is the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR) — the “Nightstalkers” — the same unit that, in US-occupied Iraq, worked with the Wolf Brigade, the most feared Interior Ministry death squad.
Western media portray the 160th SOAR as an elite helicopter force for covert missions. But in 2005, an officer in the regiment blogged about joint operations with the Wolf Brigade as they swept Baghdad, detaining civilians. On Nov. 10, 2005, he described a “battalion-sized joint operation” in southern Baghdad and boasted, “As we passed vehicle after vehicle full of blindfolded detainees, my face stretched into a long wolfish smile.”
Many people seized by the Wolf Brigade and other US-trained Special Police Commandos were never seen again; others turned up in mass graves or morgues, often far from where they’d been taken. Bodies of people detained in Baghdad were found in mass graves near Badra, 70 miles away — but that was well within the combat range of the Nightstalkers’ MH-47 Chinook helicopters.
This was how the Bush-Cheney administration responded to Iraqi resistance to an illegal invasion: catastrophic assaults on Fallujah and Najaf, followed by the training and unleashing of death squads to terrorize civilians and ethnically cleanse Baghdad. The United Nations reported over 34,000 civilians killed in 2006 alone, and epidemiological studies estimate roughly 1 million Iraqis died overall.
Iraq has never fully recovered — and the US never reaped the spoils it sought. The exiles Washington installed to rule Iraq stole at least $150 billion from its oil revenues, but the Iraqi parliament rejected US-backed efforts to grant shares of the oil industry to Western companies. Today, Iraq’s largest trading partners are China, India, the UAE, and Turkey — not the United States.
The neocon dream of “regime change” has a long, bloody history, its methods ranging from coups to full-scale invasions. But “regime change” is a euphemism: the word “change” implies improvement. A more honest term would be “government removal” — or simply the destruction of a country or society.
A coup usually involves less immediate violence than a full-scale invasion, but they pose the same question: Who or what replaces the ousted government? Time after time, US-backed coups and invasions have installed rulers who enrich themselves through embezzlement, corruption, or drug trafficking — while making life worse for ordinary people.
These so-called “military solutions” rarely resolve problems, real or imaginary, as their proponents promise. They more often leave countries plagued by decades of division, instability, and suffering.
Kosovo was carved out of Serbia by an illegal US-led war in 1999, but it is still not recognized by many nations and remains one of the poorest countries in Europe. The main US ally in the war, Hashim Thaçi, now sits in a cell at the Hague, charged with horrific crimes committed under cover of NATO’s bombing.
In Afghanistan, after 20 years of bloody war and occupation, the United States was eventually defeated by the Taliban — the very force it had invaded the country to remove.
In Haiti, the CIA and US Marines toppled the popular democratic government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004, plunging the country into an ongoing crisis of corruption, gang rule, and despair that continues to this day.
In 2006, the US militarily supported an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia to install a new government — an intervention that gave rise to Al Shabab, an Islamic resistance group that still controls large swaths of the country. US AFRICOM has conducted 89 airstrikes in Al Shabab-held territory in 2025 alone.
In Honduras, the military removed its president, Mel Zelaya, in a coup in 2009, and the US supported an election to replace him. The US-backed president Juan Orlando Hernandez turned Honduras into a narco-state, fueling mass emigration — until Xiomara Castro, Zelaya’s wife, was elected to lead a new progressive government in 2021.
Libya, a country with vast oil wealth, has never recovered from the US and allied invasion in 2011, which led to years of militia rule, the return of slave markets, the destabilizing of neighboring countries, and a 45 percent reduction in oil exports.
Also in 2011, the US and its allies escalated a protest movement in Syria into an armed rebellion and civil war. That spawned ISIS, which in turn led to the US-led massacres that destroyed Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria in 2017. Turkish-backed, al-Qaeda-linked rebels finally seized the capital in 2024 and formed a transitional government, but Israel, Turkey, and the US still militarily occupy other parts of the country.
The US-backed overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014 brought in a pro-Western leadership that only half the population recognized as a legitimate government. That drove Crimea and Donbas to secede and put Ukraine on a collision course with Russia, setting the stage for the Russian invasion in 2022 and the wider, still-escalating conflict between NATO and Russia.
In 2015, when the Ansar Allah (Houthi) movement assumed power in Yemen after the resignation of a US-backed transitional government, the US joined a Saudi-led air war and blockade that caused a humanitarian crisis and killed hundreds of thousands of Yemenis — yet did not defeat the Houthis.
That brings us to Venezuela. Ever since Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998, the US has been trying to overthrow the government. There was the failed 2002 coup; crippling unilateral economic sanctions; the farcical recognition of Juan Guaido as a wannabe president; and the 2020 “Bay of Piglets” mercenary fiasco.
But even if “regime change” in Venezuela were achievable, it would still be illegal under the UN Charter. US presidents are not emperors, and leaders of other sovereign nations do not serve “at the emperor’s pleasure” as if Latin America were still a continent of colonial outposts.
In Venezuela today, Trump’s opening shots — attacks on small civilian boats in the Caribbean — have been condemned as flagrantly illegal, even by US senators who routinely support America’s illegal wars.
Yet Trump still claims to be “ending the era of endless wars.” His most loyal supporters insist he means it — and that he was sabotaged in his first term by the “deep state.” This time, he has surrounded himself with loyalists and sacked National Security Council staffers he identified as neocons or warhawks, but he has still not ended America’s wars.
Alongside Trump’s piracy in the Caribbean, he is a full partner in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the bombing of Iran. He has maintained the global empire of US military bases and deployments, and supercharged the US war machine with a trillion-dollar war chest — draining desperately needed resources out of a looted domestic economy.
Trump’s appointment of Marco Rubio as secretary of state and national security adviser was an incendiary choice for Latin America, given Rubio’s open hostility to Cuba and Venezuela.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made that clear when he met Trump in Malaysia at the ASEAN conference, saying: “There will be no advances in negotiations with the United States if Marco Rubio is part of the team. He opposes our allies in Venezuela, Cuba, and Argentina.”
At Lula’s insistence, Rubio was excluded from talks over US investments in Brazil’s rare earth metals industry, the world’s second largest after China’s.
Cuba bashing may have served Rubio well in domestic politics, but as secretary of state it renders him incapable of responsibly managing US relations with the rest of the world. Trump will have to decide whether to pursue constructive engagement with Latin America or let Rubio corner him into new conflicts with our neighbors. Rubio’s threats of sanctions against countries that welcome Cuban doctors are already alienating governments across the globe.
Trump’s manufactured crisis with Venezuela exposes the deep contradictions at the heart of his foreign policy: his disastrous choice of advisers; his conflicting ambitions to be both a war leader and a peacemaker; his worship of the military; and his surrender to the same war machine that ensnares every American president.
If there is one lesson from the long history of US interventions, it’s that “regime change” doesn’t bring democracy or stability. As the United States threatens Venezuela with the same arrogance that has wrecked so many other countries, this is the moment to end this cycle of imperial US violence once and for all.
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This supposed GOP silver bullet doesn't work, and other lessons from Dem election wins
Within hours of the 2024 presidential election, we saw lots of blame being thrown on Democrats’ championing of LGBTQ rights and, in particular, trans rights, as a major reason for Kamala Harris’s loss.
This, even as Harris hardly discussed trans rights. Incessant attention was nonetheless paid to one anti-trans ad that research even showed didn’t actually effectively sway many voters.
Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts was among the first of the critics, telling the New York Times days after the election, “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
His comments rightly sparked backlash, but he doubled down. We then saw story after story for months throughout 2025 about the Democrats’ supposed “trans problem.”
But now, as he pursues a primary challenge against Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), Moulton is singing a completely different tune, promising to “support and lead legislation like the Transgender Bill of Rights.” Moulton says he’s, “spoken with many in the trans community. I’ve listened, I’ve learned, and I understand why those words hurt people. I take responsibility for that.”
What happened?
Certainly there’s political opportunism here, as Moulton is taking on a liberal champion of LGBTQ rights. But there’s also the realization in the past few months, as Republicans blitzed the airwaves in election campaigns with anti-trans ads but saw their polling unmoved, that this issue was blown way out of proportion. When a candidate like Harris loses by 1.4 percent in the popular vote, you can try to blame it on anything.
But the election results last week have now proved it. We saw landslide elections in New Jersey and Virginia, where Republican candidate Winsome Earle-Sears basically used opposition to trans rights as her platform, as Republicans believed their own hype and thought it was the ticket to winning after 2024, pouring money into anti-trans ads. But Sears lost by a larger margin — almost 15 points — than any Republican in Virginia since 1961, when a segregationist candidate was on the GOP ticket.Anti-trans attacks didn’t work anywhere, as trans candidates even won re-election and a transgender mayor was elected in Pennsylvania, along with other historic firsts for gay candidates in the state. As we saw in Zorhan Mamdani’s stunning win in the New York mayor’s race — as he championed trans rights and funding for gender-affirming care — affordability and the economy were the issues Americans cared about, just as they were in 2024.This played out in race after race last week, in state after state, and in local races for city council and town council. People were horrified by Trump’s attack on democracy and his broken promises on the economy. That did in the GOP.
The GOP thought they had magic in a bottle after 2024 and spent millions on anti-LGBTQ ads that didn’t work in 2025.
We expect Republicans to push hate and glom onto desperate lines of attack. But we should not accept it when Democrats impulsively buy it as well, and then cast blame, throwing marginalized groups under the bus.
We saw this from Governor Gavin Newsom of California and Democrats early this year, and from centrist groups like Third Way. Like Moulton, Newsom now seems to have dropped the anti-trans stuff, realizing there’s more electoral gold in hitting Trump hard on his attacks on democracy and his broken promises on the economy.
In countering the misguided claims, I wrote after the election about how the LGBTQ vote grew in 2024 to a substantial 8 percent of the electorate, and voted for Harris by 86 percent, a big increase over Joe Biden. That’s a powerful voting block, and, politically, it’s smart for Democrats to court it rather than jettison it based on impulse. It’s also the right thing to do.
The shutdown cave in, and the future
On Monday on my SiriusXM program, the phones were flooded with callers angry about the Senate Democrats cowardly caving in on the shutdown and not getting the Obamacare subsidies extended. There’s been a lot written about it, and about the eight Democrats who voted with the GOP, two of whom are retiring, and others not up for re-election for years — and how it all looked orchestrated by leadership (Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY)) to protect incumbents up for re-election this year from angering the base. So I will not belabor that.
I want to say that the discussion yesterday on the show was nuanced, with some people seeing the Democrats as having made their point and using the shutdown to their advantage, and some even said they won it. Republicans will now own the rising Obamacare premiums as there either won’t be a promised vote or they will vote it down. Democrats, in their demand, were always giving Republicans something they needed, and many of the vulnerable GOP House members will be done in by this and everything else they’ve voted for with a gun to their heads by Trump and Mike Johnson.
We also saw Democrats listen to the base longer than they have in the past, keeping the shutdown going for long enough to raise awareness about the healthcare issue. It means they are responding to the base. Even if they collapsed, they’re collapsing less quickly, and that’s a good thing. We need to hash this out, certainly talk about new leadership, and then move on to bigger and dangerous fish to fry — Trump and the GOP. The Washington Post has a story about how, on balance, Democrats have actually learned to fight back over the course of this year, listening to the base. Let’s make sure they listen a lot more.
Please go read….
… Mark Joseph Stern’s piece on the Supreme Court, and Kim Davis’s idiotic attempt to overturn marriage equality. It annoyed me that her long-shot challenge got the attention it did. Thousands of people unsuccessfully appeal to the Supreme Court each year. Too much of the media is portraying the court not taking the case as an example of the Supreme Court defending marriage equality. But Davis’ case was never the case they were going to use to overturn Obergefell, and, more so, they are harming LGBTQ rights and gay and lesbian couples in so many other ways, and we can’t lose sight of that.
- Michelangelo Signorile writes The Signorile Report, a free and reader-supported Substack. If you’ve valued reading The Signorile Report, consider becoming a paid subscriber and supporting independent, ad-free opinion journalism.
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Here's why Democrats are so undisciplined — and Republicans so regimented
Chuck Schumer couldn’t hold his senators together at a time when their unity and toughness were essential. Yet Trump cracks the whip and gets all Republicans to do his bidding.
Does this mean Schumer should go? Yes.
But the problem runs deeper — to a fundamental asymmetry at the heart of American politics: Democrats are undisciplined. Republicans are regimented.
For as long as I remember, Democrats have danced to their own separate music while Republicans march to a single drummer.
That was the story in 1994, when Bill Clinton couldn’t get the Democratic Senate to go along with his health-care plan, on which Clinton spent almost all his political capital.
And when Al Gore didn’t demand a statewide recount in Florida in 2000.
And when a majority of Democratic senators voted for Bush’s 2002 resolution to use military force against Iraq.
And when Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema blocked Joe Biden’s agenda.
And now, when Democrats appear weak and spineless in response to Trump’s authoritarian takeover of the government.
I don’t want to over-generalize. Of course Democrats have on occasion shown discipline while Republicans have fought one another bitterly.
But overall — and even before Trump — Democrats have tended to cave or come apart when the going gets tough, and Republicans have tended to hold firm.
There’s a psychological-structural difference between the two parties.
Democrats pride themselves on having a “big tent” holding all sorts of conflicting views. Republicans pride themselves on having strong leaders.
People who run for office as Democrats are, as a rule, more tolerant of dissent than are people who run for office as Republicans. Modern-day Democrats believe in diversity, E Pluribus. Republicans believe in unity, Unum.
Research by the linguist George Lakoff has shown that in our collective subconscious, Democrats reflect the nurturing mother: accepting, embracing, empathic. Republicans represent the strict father: controlling, disciplining, limiting.
The reason why the Democrats’ “brand” has been weak relative to the Republican brand, why Democrats often appear spineless while Republicans appear adamant, and why the Democratic message is often unclear while the Republican message is usually sharper has a lot to do with this asymmetry.
Even over the last few weeks, as Democrats tried to hold the line over expiring health-care subsidies that could send millions of Americans’ insurance prices soaring, voters have still favored Republicans on the economy and cost of living. Why? Because the Democratic message has been so garbled.
I don’t mean this as either criticism or justification of Democrats; I offer it as an explanation.
As America has grown ever more unequal and contentious, people who identify as Democrats tend to place a high value on the tenets of democracy: equal political rights, equal opportunity, and rule of law. That’s a good thing.
People who identify as Trump Republicans tend to place a high value on the tenets of authoritarianism: order, control, and patriarchy. (In fact, Trump authoritarianism is the logical endpoint of modern Republicanism.)
A majority of the current Supreme Court, comprised of Republican appointees, is coming down on the side of order, control, and patriarchy — which they justify under the legal fiction of a “unified executive” — rather than equal political rights, equal opportunity, and the rule of law.
None of this lets Schumer off the hook. He failed to keep Senate Democrats in line at a time when they finally had some bargaining power, and when the public mainly blamed Republicans for the shutdown. And none of what I’ve said exonerates the seven Senate Democrats and one Independent who broke ranks to join with the Republicans.
What’s the lesson here? Not that Democrats should adopt a more authoritarian organization or process. If they did, they wouldn’t be Democrats.
The real lesson is that when we — their constituents — want Democrats in Congress to hang tough, we need to force them to hang tough.
Republican voters can pretty much assume their senators and representatives will be unified and tough because that’s what Republicans do: they march to the same drummer (who these days sits in the Oval Office).
But we Democrats cannot and should not make this assumption. When we want our senators and representatives to be unified and tough, we have to let them know in no uncertain terms that we expect them to be unified and tough. We must demand it.
And if they’re not, we must hold them accountable.
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One simple step will help Dems fight Trump and avoid more humiliating defeats
What we witnessed this weekend in the United States Senate wasn’t “compromise.” It was surrender: the kind of gutless, morally bankrupt capitulation that betrays American families and feeds the billionaires devouring our democracy.
Eight senators who caucus with the Democrats joined Republicans to end the government shutdown, not in victory, not to secure healthcare for millions, but to hand Donald Trump and his morbidly rich cronies a gift-wrapped political win.
And standing at the center of this disgrace is Chuck Schumer, the so-called “leader” of the Senate Democrats, who orchestrated — or at least approved or failed to stop — the entire debacle from behind the curtain, then had the gall to vote “no” at the last minute to wash his hands of it.
Let’s be clear: this was Schumer’s deal. He built it, he pushed it, and he enabled it. His fingerprints are all over this betrayal.
And what did Democrats get in exchange for reopening the government? What did the American people get? Nothing.
Not a penny restored to Medicaid (or the hit Medicare will take in a year under Trump’s Big Ugly Bill). Not a rollback of Trump’s rescissions that gutted essential agencies. Not even a meaningful vote to protect Affordable Care Act subsidies or food stamps.
The so-called “promise” of a vote in the Senate within 40 days is a joke, a political placebo meant to sedate the public while the insurance industry counts its profits.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was right to call Sunday evening’s vote a “very bad night.” The deal explodes health-care premiums for over 20 million Americans and paves the way for 15 million to lose coverage altogether.
That lack of coverage, experts estimate, will cause 50,000 preventable deaths a year. These are real people and their children, their deaths sacrificed at the altar of Trump’s and the GOP’s lust for wealth and power.
And it wasn’t just cowardice: it was also cash.
The health-care industry owns far too many Democrats, and this vote appears to prove it. The same corporations that profit from denying you care are stuffing the pockets of the very lawmakers who just “compromised” your future.
When Democrats vote with Republicans to gut health care, it’s not bipartisanship. It’s corruption, legalized and laundered through Citizens United campaign finance loopholes created by five bought-and-paid-for Republicans on the Supreme Court. Bribery by another name.
Schumer has presided over this kind of rot for years, protecting incumbents who serve donors instead of voters, blowing up efforts to promote genuine progressives like Bernie in 2016, while building a machine that runs on Wall Street money and insurance and banking industry cash. He was so ineffective he couldn’t even stop Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema back in the day, even though he wields enormous power.
Schumer’s’ leadership — and, generally, the leadership of the Democrats since the 1990s Clinton years — have turned the Democratic Party from the party of FDR into a cautious club managed by well-paid consultants who tremble at their own shadows while they fill their bank accounts with blood money.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, Trump is showing us exactly what real political power looks like, as well as what it fears.
The simple reality is that Trump was about to break. He was freaking out.
Before the eight senators caved to the GOP, Trump was so frantic that he was demanding Senate Republicans end the filibuster altogether, so he could “ram through legislation that will make sure no Democrat ever gets elected again.”
GOP leaders — including (and especially) Senate Majority Leader John Thune — are terrified at the possibility of ending the filibuster, not out of principle, but out of self-preservation. They know ending it could expose just how extreme and deranged the Republican agenda really is.
As I’ve argued before, the filibuster has been a scam for a half-century, a tool that since the Reagan era both Republicans and corporate Democrats use every year to fool their base and donors into thinking their hands are tied.
It obscures Republican radicalism, while similarly protecting the so-called “moderate” Democrats who spit-shine the boots of their corporate masters.
Trump believes killing the filibuster will increase his power. In reality, it would tear his party apart and lay bare its madness for the world to see because Republicans could no longer say, “We couldn’t pass that bill to [fill in the blank] because those damn Democrats filibustered it.”
But the filibuster should be ended, and if these eight Democrats hadn’t surrendered, Trump might have forced it. That would’ve been the best thing for America.
And make no mistake: Trump’s terrified or he wouldn’t have even considered killing the filibuster. As Steve Bannon bluntly said, if Democrats ever regain full control, “a lot of Republicans are going to prison.” Presumably including Trump himself.
Compounding Trump’s freak-out, alleged horrors are leaking out about how Trump appears in the Epstein files. Reporter David Schuster noted:
“A few GOP House members say they’ve heard from FBI/DOJ contacts that the Epstein files (with copies in different agencies) are worse than Michael Wolff’s description of Epstein photos showing Trump with half-naked teenage girls.”
Trump knows what’s in those files; he partied with Epstein for a decade and is now throwing bennies at Ghislaine Maxwell to try to keep her quiet. That’s why he’s trying to distract his supporters by hosting his Great Gatsby parties at Mar-a-Lago, making incoherent threats about cash check “rebates” to Americans and war in Venezuela, and hustling billions from foreign dictators to insulate himself and his boys before the walls close in.
If Democrats are going to really confront Trump’s authoritarianism and the corporate corruption that fuels it — which is absolutely necessary now to rescue and sustain American democracy — we need a Senate leader with a spine, not a strategist for surrender. Chuck Schumer’s brand of 90s politics, to triangulate, capitulate, and hope nobody notices, has failed us for decades.
He embodies the rot of the old guard: a generation of post-1992 Democrats who think fundraising prowess equals political courage.
It doesn’t. Times have changed, and we’re now standing in the midst of a progressive populist era. Just look at New York’s mayoral race.
Leadership means fighting for working families, not finessing deals for donors. It means standing up to Trumpism, not whispering in back rooms while pretending to resist.
We need new leadership. America — and Democrats — deserve statesmen and women willing to call out corruption in their own ranks, to reject the blood money of lobbyists, and to stand unflinchingly for universal healthcare, living wages, and democracy itself.
Americans are sick of being sold out. We’re done watching our supposed champions cave while billionaires pop champagne. The fight for our democracy won’t be won by appeasing bullies or bowing to donors.
It’ll be won when Democrats rediscover their courage, and when Chuck Schumer finally steps aside to be replaced by a true fighter.
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Seven reasons Dems should drop this failed leader — now
If the Democrats want the best possible chance of winning the midterms, Chuck Schumer needs to step aside now. Even when the Senate Minority Leader does the right thing, as he did in standing up for Obamacare subsidies during the shutdown, he does it badly. And the Democrats have now caved on this because he couldn’t hold his caucus together. So just as Abraham Lincoln repeatedly changed generals in the middle of the Civil War, helping the Union win, it’s time to replace Schumer without delay.
Schumer isn’t the only reason for the Democrats’ dismal 33 percent approval rating, which stays that low even as Donald Trump’s wrecking ball leadership combines with strong Democratic candidates and grassroots energy to produce nationwide Democratic wins. But as minority leader, Schumer has been the party’s most salient public voice — every day and in crises like the shutdown. And he functions as a dead weight anchor, with a -26 percent net favorability rating and 62 percent of Democrats in a recent poll supporting new leadership.
Here are seven reasons to press Democratic senators to ask Schumer to follow former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s lead and step aside now. And if he doesn’t do so voluntarily, to remove him with a vote:
- Schumer inspires no one. With Trump destroying lives and institutions daily, Democrats need leaders who can make the consequences of Republican choices clear and present credible alternatives. Schumer’s words are leaden and responses timid. His idea of resistance is sending a “very strong letter” to Trump. One press release had a 35-word title. Effective political leaders don’t always have the full gift of prophetic voice, but Schumer’s so far from this, it conditions people to expect nothing.
- He doesn’t get modern communication. Schumer has a built-in advantage on social media because of his position representing the party. But combining every major platform, he has 4 million followers, mostly on Twitter/X, vs 32 million for Bernie Sanders, 31 million for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 18 million for Elizabeth Warren, and 8 million for Gavin Newsom. AOC built her following with just six years in Congress and no special position. At this point, South Park has done more to oppose Trump and break apart his coalition, and it isn’t close.
- Schumer is an old-looking, old-talking, and old-thinking 74, staring down, with faltering energy. That’s a combination particularly toxic to young voters, a key constituency that the Democrats must continue regaining. The betrayal young voters felt from the constant assurances that Joe Biden was fine continues to damage the party, and Schumer is the most visible symbol of leadership past its prime. Yes, young voters embrace Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren continue to be a powerful voice in her 70s. But Schumer is the leading visible symbol of the party, and has none of their vitality, directness, and genuineness.
- He’s turned his back on the future. He wouldn’t endorse Zohran Mamdani for New York City Mayor after Mamdani won the Democratic nomination by engaging precisely the kinds of voters the Democrats need to win back. That’s a massive indictment of Schumer’s distance from the party’s base and from the energy that could help drive its revival.
- Schumer is isolated from critical feedback. Democrats who’ve strongly spoken out against Trump have taken every opportunity to meet and engage the public, whatever wing of the party they represent, Schumer has withdrawn, afraid of the blowback, even canceling his book tour.
- Schumer lacks the strategic and tactical skills to meet the unprecedented challenges of the moment. Pelosi led the way on every piece of key legislation the Democrats have passed and held every faction of her caucus together (yet still knew when to step down). Whether the Democrats were in the majority or minority, Schumer has never really led. In terms of challenging Trump’s profoundly destructive actions, other Democratic officials and grassroots activists have had to step forward on their own, even though it was Schumer’s responsibility to plan a coordinated response. The budget fight cave in is just the latest setback, one built in part on his failure to act last spring.
- Schumer is also fundamentally compromised on critical issues, in ways that validate every stereotype of Democrats as barely better than the Republicans. Firstly, regaining the support of working-class Americans of all ages is key for the party. But Schumer’s role as longtime Wall Street champion, and massive fundraising from financial interests makes him a terrible symbol to address America’s runaway inequality. Secondly, Schumer is one of four sitting Democratic senators who voted for the war in Iraq, a mistake that cost the Democrats and the country dearly and gave Trump the opening to run (falsely) as an antiwar candidate. Thirdly, Schumer continued to support every Israeli action in Gaza, while just 8 percent of Democrats and 19 percent of all younger voters supported Israel’s horror show. This summer, Schumer smiled for a photo with Benjamin Netanyahu and opposed any limitations on aid, while kids were dying to get food. By linking the Democrats with Netanyahu’s war, Schumer drove voters away in 2024 and continues to do so, even with the ceasefire.
It’s tempting to say, “Schumer is terrible, but we’re stuck with him.” That's something I’ve heard too often. People worry about fracturing the Democratic coalition in a time when united resistance to Trump is critical. But inertia in a time of crisis, even an existential one, is never an excuse.
Pretty much any Democratic senator would be an improvement, except those who caved on the shutdown, though it would help if the new leader were younger, more dynamic, better at communicating, and yes, less compromised. And could hold together the Democratic coalition like Pelosi did consistently and Schumer has not.
Since we don’t have a Lincoln to simply replace ineffective generals, it will take organizational and grassroots pressure to get Schumer to step down. Indivisible has just launched a campaign asking people to pressure their democratic Senators to vote him out. Other groups should promote it as well. If we can succeed in replacing Schumer, that very fact can began to change the image of the party toward one willing to grapple with the kind of vision for the future it needs to fight for.
- Paul Rogat Loeb is author of Soul of a Citizen, The Impossible Will take a Little While, and three other books on social change, totaling 350,000 copies in print. He’s written for the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Miami Herald, and AARP Bulletin.
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Trump voters do the unthinkable — and prove they aren’t untouchable after all
While the media has covered extensively Democratic successes in the 2025 off-year elections, there is one story that has been dramatically undercovered. This is the fact that the 2025 Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races show that Democrats can win over Trump voters.
Granted, these are not dramatic slices of the Trump coalition, but they are enough in these hyperpolarized times to win elections.
According to CNN polling, in New Jersey, Rep. Mikie Sherrill, in her race for governor, was able to win 7 percent of those who had voted for Donald Trump in 2024. Interestingly, the Virginia exit polling data shows that Rep. Abigail Spanberger won an identical 7 percent of Trump voters.
The New York Times’ Nate Cohn is one of the few journalists who has pointed to the New Jersey and Virginia Democrats’ ability to win over Trump voters. He concludes that:
Instead, the two Democrats won so decisively because they also flipped a crucial sliver of voters who said they supported Mr. Trump in 2024. Ms. Sherrill and Ms. Spanberger both won 7 percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters, according to the exit polls. It may not seem like much to flip 7 percent of Mr. Trump’s backers, but consider: When a voter flips, it adds one voter to one party and also deducts one from the other, making it twice as significant as turning out a new voter.
Looking at the exit polling data makes it clear that while the Democrats' margins in New Jersey and Virginia were helped by increased Democratic turnout, winning over 2024 Trump voters was critically important.
One of the key parts of the Trump coalition has always been strong and even almost overwhelming support from rural voters. An analysis by Politico of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows that:
Spanberger’s victory was largely driven by massive turnout in northern and eastern Virginia’s urban areas. But she picked up support across the state’s deep-red central and western counties, where Trump’s tariffs have hit the manufacturing and agricultural industries especially hard. Even as her GOP opponent won most of those places, Spanberger posed the best performance by a statewide Democratic candidate in several cycles, according to a POLITICO analysis of voting data in the localities classified as “rural” by the federal government.
To her great credit, Spanberger targeted rural voters and consistently hammered away on how the Trump administration’s tariff policies were hurting them. In comparison with former Vice President Kamala Harris’s performance in 2024, Spanberger outperformed Harris’ margin in 48 of Virginia’s 52 rural localities. The exit polling shows that Spanberger won 46 percent of rural voters — an eight-point deficit to Republican candidate Lieutenant Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, and a 19-point swing from 2021 gubernatorial Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe’s 27-point disadvantage.
There is also data in the exit polling data indicating that Democrats won back in 2025 Hispanic voters who backed Trump in 2024. The Washington Post reports:
This year, most Democratic statewide candidates won Latino voters by at least 30 points in exit polls, re-creating the margins their party held before 2024. In New Jersey, 18 percent of Latino voters who backed Trump last year cast their ballot for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, exit poll data showed.
The fact that Democrats won over Trump voters in 2025 has profound implications for Democrats in both the 2026 midterms and the 2028. The message is clear: Some Trump voters will back Democrats if the candidates reach them where they are and talk to them about the issues that they care about most. To assume that all Trump voters are absolutely committed to Trump no matter what the circumstances is a mistaken assumption that only hurts Democrats. Successful politics is always about addition.
Hopefully, Democrats learn from their success in 2025 and realize that they can make some Trump voters part of their winning coalition.
- Martin Burns has worked as a congressional aide, polling analyst, journalist, and lobbyist. He was on the campaign trail for Harris-Walz in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. In addition to Common Dreams, his work has been published by The Hill, Irish Central, and the Byline Times. Martin resides in Washington, DC with his wife, and regular coauthor, Mary Liz. His website is Martinburns.news.
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Trump's desperate new gambit should have even Republicans screaming bloody murder
I learned basic arithmetic skills in third grade. I wasn’t exceptional — everyone in my public school third-grade class learned them. Of course, we all can now use computers to have calculations done for us in a fraction of a second. But still, somehow, we have major national debates that show zero understanding of even the most basic arithmetic.
The latest example is the $2,000 tariff dividend check that Trump is promising us. The arithmetic here is about as simple as it gets. We have roughly 340 million people in the country. Let’s say 10 percent don’t get the check because they meet Trump’s category of “high-income.”
That leaves over 300 million people getting Trump’s $2,000 checks. That comes to more than $600 billion. Trump’s tariffs are raising around $270 billion. That means we will be paying out $330 billion more in Trump tariff dividend checks than he is raising in tariff revenue. That would add $270 billion to the deficit — this coming from the same guy who is making an obsession of paying down our national debt.
And just to be clear, we were already looking at a budget deficit for 2026 of $1.8 trillion. If we add $330 billion, the deficit for the fiscal year will be $2.1 trillion. To put this in simple language that even a reporter for a major national news outlet can understand, Trump is proposing to add $2.1 trillion to the debt in 2026. He is not paying it down.
I acknowledge not being a deficit hawk and am not terrified by a deficit of this size, which is roughly 7 percent of GDP. But I suspect most of the politicians in Washington are, and certainly anyone who thinks we need to be paying down the debt should be screaming bloody murder.
But watching the reaction in major media outlets, there seems almost no appreciation of the fact that Trump was floating what would ordinarily be considered a very large increase in the deficit. In fact, if Trump were to give this tariff dividend check every year over the next decade, it would add close to $4 trillion to the debt (counting interest payments), almost as much as the big tax cut Congress approved earlier this year.
It’s also worth comparing Trump’s tariff dividends to other items in the news. The government shutdown was in large part over the $35 billion in annual payments for enhanced subsidies for people buying insurance in Obamacare exchanges. Trump and Republicans in Congress claimed that we didn’t have the money to pay for these subsidies. Trump’s tariff dividend checks would cost more than 17 times as much as the enhanced insurance subsidies.
To make another comparison, Trump saved us around $6 billion a year by shutting down PEPFAR, the program that has saved tens of millions of lives by treating people in Africa for AIDS. This means that Trump’s tariff dividend checks will cost us 100 times as much as the AIDS program that he said we couldn’t afford.
And just to throw in one more comparison, the annual appropriation for public broadcasting was $550 million. Trump’s tariff dividend checks would cost more than 1,000 times as much as the government’s payments for public broadcasting.
People can differ in their views on how important it is to save lives in Africa or provide people here with health care. They may also differ in their assessments of how important deficits are. But it really would be good if media outlets could make knowledge of third grade arithmetic a job requirement for reporters who deal with budget issues.
It should be their job to provide meaningful information to the public on the topic. Letting someone talk about $2,000 dividend checks, and also about paying down the debt, is a sick joke.
- Dean Baker is the co-founder and the senior economist of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of several books, including "Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better bargain for Working People," "The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive," "The United States Since 1980," "Social Security: The Phony Crisis" (with Mark Weisbrot), and "The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer." He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues.
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The GOP is keeping Americans on the hook — even if the shutdown ends
As New Mexicans, we know what it means to take care of each other. When our neighbors are struggling, we help them.
That’s why our state leaders stepped in to make sure families could still get food during the appalling and unprecedented suspension of SNAP food benefits. And that’s why the Trump administration’s choice to block SNAP during a government shutdown, despite having the emergency funds, struck such a deep nerve — it’s not just cruel, it’s unnecessary.
When the shutdown ends, many federal workers and families will finally get some relief. But that relief won’t last long. The truth is: even after the government reopens, the cuts to food and healthcare programs will keep coming, and they are about to get worse.
Buried in the details of H.R. 1 — the federal budget bill pushed by House Republicans — are huge cuts to SNAP, Medicaid, and marketplace health insurance. These cuts will hurt hundreds of thousands of New Mexicans, ripping away support that keeps our families stable and healthy. These are not temporary disruptions caused by a funding gap — these are long-term structural changes designed to take away food and healthcare from our families.
New Mexico’s federal lawmakers aren’t staying quiet. Senators Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján, along with Representatives Melanie Stansbury, Teresa Leger Fernández, and Gabe Vasquez, are fighting to protect food assistance and healthcare, and rural clinics that are lifelines in our communities.
In New Mexico, we’ve seen what works. When families have access to healthy food, health care, and stable housing, our whole state is stronger. We’ve made progress in recent years: expanding child hunger programs, improving access to affordable healthcare, and creating state initiatives that keep working parents on their feet. That progress is now under direct threat from Washington DC.
As our lawmakers prepare for the upcoming 30 day legislative session, protecting that progress must come first. Lawmakers must continue the important work that began in October’s special session: building state-level solutions to shield New Mexico families from the harshest effects of H.R. 1’s cuts. That means investing in our state food assistance programs, protecting healthcare coverage, making sure rural hospitals and clinics are funded, and ensuring no child in New Mexico goes hungry.
We don’t have to accept a future where federal politics decide who in our communities eats, who gets medical care, or who is left behind. The values that define New Mexico — community, resilience, and compassion — are stronger than any budget cut.
The shutdown will end. But our responsibility to one another will not.
- Sovereign Hager is from Albuquerque, NM and is the Public Benefits director at New Mexico Center on Law and Poverty.
- Source NM is part of the States Newsroom network
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