The only thing scarier than Jason this Halloween
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
There's a chilling explanation for why the House went AWOL
A lot of language that never used to be part of America’s political discourse has come into vogue since Jan. 20. Like “Rubicon,” that ancient Roman river that’s come to symbolize a divide between democracy and dictatorship, and has been crossed more times lately than the Hudson on a busy Monday-morning rush hour.
Or this one: “Reichstag Fire.”
On Feb. 27, 1933, less than a month after Adolf Hitler was named Germany’s chancellor, an alleged arson fire destroyed much of the nation’s legislative building in Berlin, the Reichstag. A Dutch Communist was blamed for the blaze, which sparked the ruling Nazis to implement the Reichstag Fire Decree — expelling leftist lawmakers and sending political foes to newly created concentration camps. The now-Nazi-dominated Reichstag soon passed the Enabling Act giving dictatorial powers to Hitler, and so “Reichstag Fire” has come to symbolize a crisis — real or manufactured — used to justify tyrannical rule.
What’s interesting is that the Nazi regime never abolished the Reichstag. It continued to meet — rarely, and as a ceremonial rubber stamp — until Hitler died inside his bunker in 1945. That’s typical under strongman rule to this day. For example, Russia’s Duma continues to meet and pass laws — but only the ones that Vladimir Putin tells them to enact.
Is any of this starting to sound familiar?
In Washington, the House of Representatives has met for only 12 days over the last three months, even as the nation confronts a wave of crises either linked to, or overlapping with, the shutdown of the federal government that began when Congress couldn’t approve a budget bill by the Oct. 1 deadline. After passing its own dead-on-arrival spending plan on Sept. 19, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) — in a measured tone meant to mask the increasing insanity of what he’s saying — keeps find one excuse after another to shut down the branch once dubbed, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, as “the People’s House.”
The Louisiana Republican has insisted — without any historical precedent — that there’s no point in the House conducting business as long as the gridlocked Senate refuses to pass the lower chamber’s bill to keep the government open. Many cynics have honed in on an alternate explanation — that Johnson is using the shutdown as an excuse not to swear in Democratic Arizona Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva. She would be the 218th vote to force likely passage of a measure to open up the government’s files on the late millionaire sex-fiend Jeffrey Epstein, including its likely references to President Donald Trump.
The cynics are right. The resistance among Trump and his allies to any reopening of the Epstein case is surely a motivation for Johnson’s obstruction — but I also can’t help but wonder whether the flap over the Grijalva swearing in is also a cover for something that is much more deeply disturbing.
The virtual disappearance of the House for most of three months, and the nagging fears that the body isn’t returning anytime soon (or ... ever?) is looking more and more essential to the authoritarian project of a movement that pleaded for a “Red Caesar“ to crush ”woke“ liberalism with unchecked executive power.
For the Founders who mapped out the American Experiment here in Philadelphia in 1787, the House was central to their vision of what democracy looks like. The idea was based on smaller districts and every-two-years elections that would closely bond its members to the people. It was, in other words, supposed to be the antidote to Western civilization’s monarchy problem.
For Trump, the absence of a functional Congress — despite the need to keep the world’s largest military, essential services like air traffic control, and definitely not-essential services like a masked secret police force running through the shutdown — makes it easier for him to run the country by fiat.
This is not a completely new problem. Over the course of my lifetime, I’ve watched Congress grow from a body fiercely committed to its own power and independence — especially in the early 1970s when the House and Senate went after Richard Nixon’s crimes and passed a War Powers Act aimed at restraining future Vietnams — to only caring about the fate of their party, and its president.
These “lawmakers” aren’t troubled when Trump no longer rules by law but by executive order. I’m pretty sure there’s a word for a would-be strongman who rules by dictate.
“I’m the speaker and I’m the president,” Trump has reportedly said in private conversations, according to inside sources blabbing to the New York Times. And in the supposed speaker of the House, Trump has found the perfect vessel for his ambitions. Johnson — a soft-spoken true believer who acts like he just emerged from a Manchurian cave whenever he’s asked a question he doesn’t want to answer, which is pretty much all of them — seems to love the trappings and the attention of the job, even as he cedes all of the job’s actual power to the president.
This supposed budget impasse isn’t only preventing the House from opening up the Epstein can of worms, but from doing any real oversight of a president who seems to have two or three Nixonian Watergates every week, including his family’s shady crypto deals and even drone consulting work. And that 1973 Wars Powers Act? Trump and his “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth are blowing up boats and murdering persons unknown off the coasts of Latin America, and the castrati up on Capitol Hill are not going to do a gosh-darned thing about it.
With Congress sidelined, Trump — in an extreme flouting of the Constitution — is issuing dictates (that word again) on who’s not getting our tax dollars, including 40 million Americans who depend on food aid to feed their families, and who is. The latter category seems to include the over-the-top drive to recruit 10,000 new masked goons for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and — quite tellingly — supporting the troops.
Earlier this month, Trump announced that, unlike other federal employees, active-duty soldiers would get paid, at least for now, with $8 billion that the regime “found” by killing off research and development projects that had been authorized by Congress. Adding some icing on that cake, the president then claimed that an “anonymous” donor — quickly outed as right-wing billionaire Timothy Mellon — had donated another $130 million toward a few more hours of military paychecks.
It’s probably worth noting that both of these moves are almost certainly illegal — in blatant violation of the “antideficiency” laws that Congress has been passing since 1870 to prevent an administration from spending money without authorization. Trump is clearly banking on popular political support for the troops, but also the neutering of Congress, a Justice Department that works for him and not the citizenry, and a corrupt and compliant Supreme Court will all lead to nobody stopping him.
But what’s even scarier is that Trump surely hopes that by paying the troops, he is also buying their loyalty, which he will surely need as his abuses of power continue to mount. If you study tyrants beginning with Benito Mussolini and Hitler all the way through Putin, you know that strongman rule depends on many things, but especially a rubber-stamp legislature-in-name-only and a faithful military.
So, yes, the House’s endless summer is about Epstein, but it’s about more than Epstein. With Speaker Johnson in Trump’s back pocket, the touring ex-Talking Head David Byrne isn’t the only performer “Burning Down the House” this autumn.
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I've found the secret sauce for Democrats to win back power
Rather than belabor you today with the latest Trump outrages, I want to share with you conclusions I’ve drawn from my conversation yesterday with Zohran Mamdani (you can find it here and at the bottom of this piece) about why he has a very good chance of being elected mayor of New York City on Tuesday.
He has five qualities that I believe are likely to succeed in almost any political race across America today. If a 34-year-old state assemblyman representing Astoria, Queens, who was born in Uganda and calls himself a democratic socialist, can get this far and likely win, others can as well — but they have to understand and be capable of utilizing his secret sauce.
Here are the five ingredients:
- Authenticity. Mamdani is the real thing. He’s not trying to be someone other than who he is, and the person he is comes through clear as a bell. I’ve been around politicians for most of my life (even ran once for governor of Massachusetts) and have seen some who are slick, some who are clever, some who are witty, some who are stiff, but rarely have I come across someone with as much authenticity as Mamdani. Authenticity is the single most important quality voters are looking for now: someone who is genuine. Who’s trustworthy because they project credibility and solidity. Whose passion feels grounded in reality.
- Concern for average working people. Mamdani isn’t a policy wonk who spouts 10-point plans that cause people’s eyes to glaze over. Nor is he indifferent to policy. Listen to his answers to my questions and you’ll hear a lot about the needs of average working people. That’s his entire focus. Many politicians say they’re on the side of average working people, but Mamdani has specific ideas for making New York City more affordable. I’m not sure they’ll all work, but I’m sure voters are responding to him in part because his focus is indisputable and his ideas are clear and understandable.
- Willingness to take on the powerful and the wealthy. He doesn’t hesitate to say he’ll raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for what average working people need. You might think this would be standard fare for Democrats, but it’s not. These days, many are scared to propose anything like this for fear they’ll lose campaign funding from big corporations and the rich. But Mamdani’s campaign isn’t being financed by big corporations or the rich. Because of New York City’s nearly four-decade-old clean elections system that matches small-dollar donations with public money, Mamdani has had nearly $13 million of government funds to run a campaign against tens of millions of dollars that corporate and Wall Street Democrats — and plenty of Republicans — have spent to boost Democratic former governor Andrew Cuomo. We need such public financing across the nation.
- Inspiration. Many people are inspired by Mamdani. Over 90,000 New Yorkers are now going door-to-door canvassing for him (including my 17-year-old granddaughter). Why is he so inspiring? Again, watch our conversation. It’s not only his authenticity but also his energy, his good-heartedness, and his optimism. At a time when so many of us are drenched in the daily darkness of Trump, Mamdani’s positivity feels like sunshine. It lifts one up. It makes politics almost joyful. He gives it a purpose and meaning that causes people to want to be involved.
- Cheerfulness. Which brings me to the fifth quality that has made this improbable candidate into a front-runner: his remarkable cheerfulness. Watch his face during our discussion. He smiled or laughed much of the time. This wasn’t empty-headed euphoria or “morning in America” campaign rubbish. It’s directly connected to a thoughtfulness that’s rare in a politician, especially one nearing the end of a campaign — who’s had to answer the same questions hundreds if not thousands of times. He exudes a buoyancy and hope that’s infectious. It’s the opposite of the scowling Trump. It is what Americans want and need, especially now.
There’s obviously much more to it, but I think these five qualities — authenticity, a focus on the needs of average working families, a willingness to take on the rich and powerful in order to pay for what average working families need, the capacity to inspire, and a cheerfulness and buoyancy — will win elections, not only in New York City but across America.
Mamdani hasn’t won yet, and New York’s Democratic establishment is doing whatever it can to stop him (Michael Bloomberg, New York City’s billionaire former mayor, just put $1.5 million into a super PAC supporting Cuomo’s bid and urged New Yorkers to vote for Cuomo).
If Mamdani wins, his success should be a lesson for all progressives and all Democrats across America.
- YouTube www.youtube.com
- Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
- Robert Reich's 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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These key defections show Trump is losing his grip
Kids and cops got tear-gassed in Chicago, a judge is holding ICE/CPB officials to account, Americans are horrified by the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, and even UFC fighters are starting to turn away from Trump.
What’s going on? Is he really as strong as he appears to think?
In 1999, I was working in a remote part of rural Russia for a German-based international relief agency; building housing and trying to teach peasant agricultural methods to people who’d only ever known massive, collective factory farms. I was staying in the home of a family of four with two young children. Dad was Russian and Mom — her name was Olga — was from East Germany, although she’d grown up watching West German TV.
The night before the first open and fair election in Russia’s entire history, we were watching Russian TV news and eating dinner in the midst of a huge snowstorm when a wild-eyed fellow came on the screen. He was giving some sort of speech, and his face was twisted with a kaleidoscope of extreme emotions. He pounded his fist and shook his finger at the camera, then became soft and soothing in his voice, then began shouting again.
He was followed by a news anchorwoman, sitting behind a desk, making commentary with a solemn expression. Olga suddenly broke out in laughter, although her husband’s face was serious, if not confused.
“What’s that about?” I asked Olga. (My German is pretty good, but not my Russian.)
“Vladimir Zhirinovsky [the extreme right-wing candidate],” she said in German. “He’s a candidate in tomorrow’s election, and he says that everybody who votes for him will get a liter of vodka and a turkey after the election. The news lady is wondering where he’ll get all the turkeys.”
“People fall for that?” I said.
She nodded. “Remember, Russia has been here nearly a thousand years. And this is the first democratic election ever. Ever! People have no idea what to do, how to do it, or what to believe. And he doesn’t really care what he promises; if he gets elected he’ll do whatever he pleases.”
Donald Trump seems to be bringing Zhirinovsky’s political strategy to America.
He made a simple, straightforward deal with his supporters. It included elected Republicans and his base voters, and was elegant in its simplicity.
He promised that he’d make life miserable for Blacks, Hispanics, women, queer people, academics, and people living in big cities. The deal was first offered when he came down the infamous escalator in 2015, and repeated in rally after rally, campaign commercial after campaign commercial, for the past decade.
He also promised to make life better for his white male base, saying he’d “end inflation on day one,” “make America affordable again,” “slash energy and electricity prices by half within 12 months,” “unleash American energy,” and “get prices down” on “groceries, cars, everything.”
In exchange, he asked them to let him steal as much as he could from the public treasury, get away with past and present crimes, ignore his marital infidelities, and look away from his associations with his Miss Teen USA Pageant and Jeffrey Epstein.
His loyal followers did their part. They ignored his payoffs to a porn star and a Playboy bunny, his bragging about sexually assaulting women, his adjudication as a rapist, his 34 convictions for stealing the 2016 presidential election by fraud, his hustling made-in-China campaign swag, even the hundreds of millions he and his third wife made selling nearly worthless digital tokens.
Loyal preachers and even business leaders groveled before him, basking in the glow of his base’s love. Apple’s Tim Cook embarrassed himself and his company by slobbering over Trump as he handed him a chunk of 24 karat gold. Thirteen billionaires in his cabinet simpered when the cameras came on, repeatedly and pathetically reassuring Donald of his brilliance and nobility.
House Speaker Mike Johnson engineered a coverup of Trump’s association with Epstein, and Republicans averted their eyes as Ghislaine Maxwell was moved from a real prison to a Club Fed where she lives in an unlocked dormitory and can entertain herself with tennis and puppy training.
They disregarded his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, his placing his own personal lawyers in charge of justice in America, and his subsequent weaponization of the Justice Department against their own former lifelong Republican peers.
Now they’re defending his defilement of the White House, his depraved sons taking billions from foreign governments, and his betrayal of Ukraine in his never-ending deference to Vladimir Putin.
Republican politicians who for years warned about “jackbooted thugs” as they waved “Don’t Tread On Me” flags are suddenly fine with masked secret police openly and brutally beating American citizens as they build a massive network of concentration camps across the country.
It’s been a good run and a great grift. But scams like this — even well-engineered ones with the power of a corrupted government behind them — usually don’t last.
Richard Nixon went down in flames, and his attorney general went to prison. Warren Harding’s health was destroyed, many biographers claim, by his association with Teapot Dome. Bill Clinton lost his law license and was impeached for his lies about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.
Now, it appears, it’s Trump’s turn to pay the price for his cozenage. Although all but a small handful of elected Republicans don’t yet seem to realize it, Trump is losing his grip.
Four Republicans in the House are demanding to know the details of his association with child rapists. Five Republican senators yesterday voted to block his illegal and unconstitutional tariffs against Brazil.
Several Republican senators have voiced concerns about his illegal murder of “drug traffickers” in the Caribbean. The public is aghast at his destruction of the historic “people’s” White House.
His approval in every category is underwater. Seven million or more people poured into the streets two weeks ago to defy him. His ICE and CPB thugs are pursued by citizens with whistles and apps to identify their locations.
Instead of fixing inflation, his tariffs have caused it to take off again. Instead of increasing employment, jobs are increasingly hard to find.
Instead of making groceries and housing more affordable, Trump’s policies have made things worse.
Instead of cutting energy prices, his killing off Biden’s green energy projects in exchange for fossil fuel campaign money is jacking electricity prices sky-high nationwide.
About the only thing holding up so far is the stock market, and most of that is being driven by an AI boom (which may be a bubble) that started under Biden — 21 states are in or near full-blown recession now as a result of Trump’s tariffs.
Republican politicians openly worry about the 2026 elections as they desperately try to rig them with outrageous and transparently corrupt gerrymanders and widespread voter suppression, mostly by voter roll purges in Red states.
Meanwhile, America’s allies around the world are recoiling from Trump’s embrace of Putin and Netanyahu, his betrayal of Ukraine, and his saber-rattling against Venezuela. His misguided tariff policies have devastated our relations with our nearest neighbors and traditional partners, while China and Russia play him for a sucker.
Most importantly, the racist, homophobic, misogynistic base Trump made his original deal with — the deal that put him into office twice — is turning away from him, disillusioned.
His “get the brown people” deportation scheme is wreaking havoc with the economy, devastating farmers and low-wage industries, and causing even the most hateful racists to admit he’s shooting America in the foot.
The LA Times, owned by a Trump-humping billionaire, is even pointing out that Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and podcasters like Andrew Schultz have “caught the scent of blood in the water” and are turning against him.
Even MAGA Republicans in the US Senate turned against Trump’s most recent nominee, Paul Ingrassia, because of his pro-Nazi postings.
How long can Trump hold things together?
That’ll mostly depend on what happens with the larger economy. If prices continue to rise, employment stays paralyzed, and Republicans do nothing about healthcare and housing costs, there’ll be a huge reckoning in November, 2026.
Similarly, if the media continues to desert him over corruption and foreign policy, and even deals like Don Jr.’s with Fox’s primetime host Laura Ingraham fail to hang onto network loyalty, his fall could be spectacular. No matter how many networks David Ellison buys, he and Rupert/Lachlan Murdoch won’t be able to cover up the wreckage.
America is not Russia or Hungary. Both were ruled by dictators for millennia while we’ve practiced democracy for 250 years. Most of us believe in it. We want it to continue.
Sophocles famously said, “Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud.” Trump thought he could invert that, but three thousand years of history taught us that the truth generally triumphs over lies and corruption.
It’s just a matter of time.
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This Republican heartland hypocrite can't hide behind his copy of the New York Times
If you didn’t know better, you might believe Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) was ushering in a new era of bipartisan compassion with his op-ed this week in the New York Times.
Headlined “No American Should Go to Bed Hungry,” Hawley’s piece struck all the right notes about why the nation must act immediately to preserve SNAP food assistance for 42 million people — now endangered by the government shutdown.
Trouble is, that’s if you didn’t know better.
And the public record knows better.
Less than four months ago, on July 1, Hawley voted to slash SNAP by at least $120 billion over the next decade — the Congressional Budget Office had it at $187 billion. And he can’t even claim party loyalty as a defense: Republican Sens. Susan Collins, Thom Tillis, and Rand Paul all voted no.
But the SNAP cuts were just the appetizer. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” —Trump’s sweeping budget package that passed 51-50 with Vice President J.D. Vance breaking the tie — was a banquet of cruelty. Every Democrat voted no. Hawley voted yes.
The bill included:
- More than $1 trillion cut from Medicaid — the largest rollback in U.S. history.
- Work requirements that mostly punish people already working.
- Removal of coverage for lawfully present immigrants.
- Restrictions on provider taxes that help keep rural hospitals alive.
On that last point, Hawley warned colleagues about devastating rural hospitals. He negotiated a $25 billion band-aid spread over five years — then voted to gut the programs anyway. The senator always manages to rationalize his hypocrisy by introducing fig leaf bills he knows are going nowhere.
The bill’s SNAP provisions imposed crushing work requirements and bureaucratic hurdles designed to kick people off the rolls. It penalized states with high “error rates,” meaning Missouri — at 10.2 percent— would lose 25 percent more in funding, despite already struggling to administer the program.
The same bill eliminated Affordable Care Act subsidies for 22 million Americans. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 10 million will lose coverage overall — a devastating blow to working families, low-income seniors and lawfully present immigrants who’ve paid into Medicare for years.
The timeline doesn’t quite line up with Hawley’s soaring rhetoric today.
In May 2025 —just two months before the vote — Hawley wrote another Times op-ed titled “Don’t Cut Medicaid.” In it, he warned that slashing health insurance for working people would be “morally wrong and politically suicidal.”
He even asked: Would Republicans be “a majority party of working people, or a permanent minority speaking only for the C-suite?”
Then in July, he voted for the C-suite.
Now, in October, as his party’s shutdown threatens the food security of 42 million Americans, he’s back with another heartfelt op-ed and a narrow bill to preserve only SNAP. The rest of the government — furloughed workers, shuttered services, disrupted lives — can wait. They’re not in this week’s parable.
You wouldn’t know any of this from today’s Times essay. In it, Hawley casts himself as a cross between FDR and the Apostle Paul.
“Love of neighbor is part of who we are,” he writes. “The Scripture’s injunction to ‘remember the poor’ is a principle Americans have lived by.”
Now, I don’t claim to be a Christian. But from what I understand about the words of Jesus, I’m not aware of any indifference to the poor — or even equivocation — that would inspire slashing SNAP payments or blowing up health-care coverage.
For that matter — and again, I’m no expert — is there language in the New Testament telling us to welcome strangers as long as their immigration papers are in order?
Jesus just fed the hungry and reached out to everyone. There wasn’t any ambiguity involved. And definitely not a residency requirement.
As my readers know, I don’t buy the un-American notion that ours is a Christian nation. It is definitively not — and it belongs to all of us of different faiths, or no faith, as much as it does to Hawley and others who worship as he does.
But even on his best behavior, Hawley today offered Christian benevolence with an asterisk. He warned of “fraud” and “illegal aliens” abusing SNAP, as if that were a national crisis. It’s not. Unauthorized immigrants are mostly ineligible, and fraud rates remain minimal.
But this is more about optics than facts. Hawley portrays the worthy poor as native-born and properly documented — not strangers at the gate.
Hawley does stand out from fellow Republicans who dare not go off script about the poor for fear of crossing Donald Trump and his MAGA minions. The text of his op-ed was just splendid.
But talk is cheap. And it’s heinously cheapened when you just voted against your own piety.
- Ray Hartmann writes on Substack at Ray Hartmann's Soapbox.
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These Republican cowards won't call out Trump even as he decimates their state
There was a time in the distant past when Idaho elected officials had moral compasses and were dedicated to serving the interests of the Gem State. Since agriculture is so important to the Idaho economy, they were constantly on guard against federal plans and schemes that would harm that vital industry. As legislative assistant to former U.S. Sen. Len Jordan in 1970-72, I had a front row seat to the action.
Every time there was even a hint of Idaho water being poached by another state, the entire Congressional delegation – Sens. Jordan and Frank Church and Reps. Orval Hansen and Jim McClure – spoke out loud and clear against it.
When President Richard Nixon ended beef import quotas in June of 1972 so as to bring in more beef and lower prices, the delegation collectively raised hell.
Jordan always vigorously opposed actions that would harm farmers in other states, figuring there was strength in numbers.
Len Jordan was the epitome of courage, having stood up to a president of his own party numerous times. He spoke out and voted against Nixon’s two segregationist U.S. Supreme Court nominees – Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell. He led the Senate floor fight in 1972 to force Nixon to spend funds lawfully appropriated by Congress. He supported the president when he thought he was right and opposed him when he was wrong.
With Jordan’s example in mind, it is frightening to see the craven cowardice of Idaho’s top politicians – Sens. Jim Risch and Mike Crapo, Reps. Mike Simpson and Russ Fulcher and Gov. Brad Little. When Donald Trump acts against the interests of farmers, we don’t hear a peep from these officials who are supposed to represent our interests.
When Trump announced to Californians a year ago that he wanted to send them Columbia River waters, our politicos remained silent. His Jan. 24 executive order meddling with irrigation water in federal storage did not elicit a peep. We can only hope he doesn’t try that in Idaho, as it does not appear our elected heroes will push back.
Our congressional delegation is afraid of telling Trump that the constitutional power to set tariffs is theirs, not his, and that his tariffs are raising farmers’ costs for fertilizer, machine parts, lumber, chemicals and practically everything they buy.
Sen. Crapo should take a particular interest in the tariff problem because he is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which is responsible for setting tariffs. Somebody should probably wake him up and let him know that Trump tariffs are hurting folks on the farm.
Idaho is not big into soybeans, but Midwestern farmers are desperate for help. China bought $12.6 billion in U.S. soybeans last year, but absolutely none this year, thanks to retaliation for Trump’s erratic tariffs.
Trump admires Argentina’s nutty President, Javier Milei, and spent 20 billion U.S. taxpayer dollars to keep him in office. Milei won at the expense of Midwestern farmers. China bought more than one million tons of Argentinian soybeans to fill its need and will likely purchase Argentinian and Brazilian soybeans long into the future.
U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said the Argentine bailout was “probably one of the grossest things” she’s ever seen. Idaho’s top elected officials could not crank up the courage to protest.
Closer to home, Trump is throwing a haymaker at Idaho’s beef producers. I grew up in the cattle business. For many years my father, Henry Jones, had the largest beef operation in southern Idaho. It is kind of a boom or bust business. It happens to be the one bright spot on the agricultural scene in Idaho and across the country, but there have been many bust years and producers finally have a chance to make up for them.
But destroying the market of U.S. soybean farmers was not enough to help President Milei, so Trump now wants to quadruple beef imports from Argentina to knock down beef prices in the U.S. Trump claimed he had to help because Argentina was “dying, all right? They are dying.” Cattlemen in Idaho and across the country are justifiably outraged.
Rep. Greene said, “Honestly it’s a punch in the gut to all of our American cattle ranchers.” Senators representing South Dakota, Utah, Montana and Utah have publicly objected to Trump’s plan, but our congressional delegation and governor have remained silent, apparently frightened to stand up for our farm community.
That’s not really surprising because none of them will say anything about the thuggish tactics employed by ICE against Idaho’s undocumented workers who harvest our crops, milk our cows and do the important work that keeps Idaho’s agricultural sector operating.
If our officials can’t muster the courage to do their jobs, they should either undergo spinal transplants or check themselves into retirement homes.
- Jim Jones served as Idaho attorney general for eight years (1983-1991) and as a justice of the Idaho Supreme Court for 12 years (2005-2017). His weekly columns are collected at JJCommonTater.com.
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How Trump plunged us into two constitutional crises at once
Donald Trump’s demolition of the East Wing of the White House isn’t just an architectural abomination — it’s symbolic of the wrecking ball he’s taken to the Constitution. Driven by his unbounded megalomania and supported by the high-tech oligarchy and a Cabinet of fawning sycophants, the 79-year-old president has precipitated a constitutional crisis and set the nation on the road to authoritarianism and democratic collapse.
Since resuming his seat behind the Resolute Desk, Trump has issued more than 360 executive orders, presidential memoranda and presidential proclamations, effectively replacing the system of checks and balances and separation of powers that forms the backbone of the Constitution with strongman-style rule.
Among his most notorious decrees are those that:
- end federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs
- roll back environmental protections, encourage energy exploration and production on federal lands and waters, and eliminate electric vehicle mandates
- impose sanctions on liberal law firms and elite universities
- would restrict mail-in voting and impose national voter ID requirements
- empower the Department of Government Efficiency to reduce the size of the federal workforce and dismantle the administrative state
- authorize mass deportations and expedite removal proceedings to secure the borders and protect the nation from a claimed “invasion”
- seek to end birthright citizenship by reinterpreting the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment
- designate antifa as a domestic terrorism organization
- create a “Joint National Terrorism Task Force” to “investigate, prosecute, and disrupt” the work of “entities and individuals” who sponsor, fund or “otherwise aid and abet” acts of “political violence,” including alleged attacks on Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities and “anti-police and ‘criminal justice’ riots”
- federalize the National Guard and dispatch troops to American cities
- impound congressionally authorized funds for foreign aid and medical research
- levy tariffs on imported goods without congressional approval
- authorize Trump to fire members of independent federal agencies without cause under the auspices of the “unitary executive theory,” which posits that all executive power is concentrated in the person of the president.
Trump has also openly teased about running for a third term in contravention of the 22nd Amendment; secured three indictments and counting against his political critics; launched a lethal air campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific without congressional authorization and in arguable violation of international law; and demanded that the Justice Department hand him $230 million to compensate for the federal investigations into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election and for prosecuting him in the Mar-a-Lago documents case.
Confronted with this wreckage, most legal scholars now believe we have crossed the Rubicon.
“We are in the midst of a constitutional crisis right now,” Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky told the New York Times last February after Trump’s initial spate of executive orders. “There have been so many unconstitutional and illegal actions in the first 18 days of the Trump presidency. We never have seen anything like this.”
Although there is no universally accepted definition of a constitutional crisis, Princeton University professor of politics Keith Whittington has written that constitutional crises fall into two general categories: operational crises, which occur when vital political disputes can’t be resolved within the existing constitutional framework; and crises of fidelity, which happen when a major political actor no longer feels bound by constitutional norms.
The United States is beset by both calamities at once. As Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman explained on the eve of Trump’s first impeachment, Trump’s abiding lawlessness means that “we no longer have just a crisis of the presidency. We also have a breakdown in the fundamental structure of government under the Constitution. That counts as a constitutional crisis.”
In Trump 2.0, the dangers have multiplied, extending from the executive branch to the supine Republican majority in Congress and the Supreme Court. The Republican Party has been completely captured by Trump and the MAGA movement, both at the state and national levels.
The Supreme Court has similarly surrendered the last vestiges of actual judicial independence.
All claims to the contrary evaporated last July with the court’s 6-3 decision on presidential immunity (Trump v. United States), authored by Chief Justice John Roberts. The decision not only killed special counsel Jack Smith’s election subversion case against Trump, but it also altered the landscape of constitutional law, endowing presidents with absolute immunity from prosecution for actions taken pursuant to their enumerated constitutional powers, such as pardoning federal offenses, and presumptive immunity for all other “official acts” undertaken within the “outer perimeter” of their official duties.
In a scathing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor blasted her Republican colleagues for inventing “an atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable” concept of immunity.
“The Constitution’s text contains no provision for immunity from criminal prosecution for former Presidents,” she wrote, citing the famous Watergate tapes decision of United States v. Nixon. She concluded in a sad and angry lament, “The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”
Trump’s ascent has exposed the inherent weaknesses, loopholes and limitations that have always existed in the imperfect system created by the venerated Founding Fathers, who for all of their failings (slaveholding chief among them), tried to erect formal structures to protect the republican form of government they established.
Many realized the frailties of the project they undertook. Alexander Hamilton, perhaps the most prescient of the Founders, all but prophesied the rise of a Trump-like demagogue, warning in a letter to George Washington written during of the financial panic of 1792:
When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper … is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity, he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’
Hamilton’s warning isn’t just a curiosity for professional historians to ponder. It’s an announcement of a five-alarm fire in 2025.
The all-important question is how we fight back. The first step, plainly, is to realize the gravity of the moment. American exceptionalism — the idea that this country is immune from authoritarianism — is a myth.
The second step is to realize that Trumpism is not just another form of partisan politics. It cannot be countered by lethargic appeals by establishment Democrats to re-embrace the political center.
Winning the fight against Trumpism requires building a new progressive politics guided by energetic leaders like Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for mayor in New York City, who can articulate a small “d” democratic vision for the future. And it will require a commitment from each of us to engage for the long haul, and never forget that together we have power, and that alone we have none.
- Bill Blum is a Los Angeles lawyer and a former state of California administrative law judge.
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Want to know what Trump has in store next? He just blurted it out
He’s now saying it out loud — blurring the line between his so-called “war” on alleged foreign drug smugglers and his war on the “enemy within” the United States. Both now involve the deployment of the U.S. military. Neither requires proof of wrongdoing.
That was his message yesterday when Trump told American troops in Japan that he would send “more than the National Guard” into cities to enforce his crackdowns on crime and immigration:
“We have cities that are troubled, we can’t have cities that are troubled. And we’re sending in our National Guard, and if we need more than the National Guard, we’ll send more than the National Guard, because we’re going to have safe cities … . We’re not going to have people killed in our cities. And whether people like that or not, that’s what we’re doing.”
In the same speech, Trump defended U.S. military strikes against suspected drug smugglers — more than a dozen on vessels from South America that have killed 57 people so far, without evidence they were actually smuggling drugs. (Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on Tuesday that the military had carried out three more strikes on Monday.)
Trump repeatedly condemned Joe Biden. He told the troops that the 2020 election had been rigged. He savaged Democratic governors who have resisted the military in their cities.
“People don’t care if we send in our military, our National Guard,” Trump told the troops. “They just want to be safe.”
Trump also called out the “fake news media,” and encouraged the troops to deride journalists.
This was the third politically-charged speech Trump has made to members of the U.S. armed forces within the month — following his late-September address to the military’s top brass and his self-described “rally” of U.S. Navy sailors in Virginia the following week.
Trump’s speech yesterday to American troops — seeking to justify the use of lethal force against anyone suspected of acting illegally, domestic or foreign — is his clearest statement yet about what’s really motivating him and his lapdogs.
He’s not seeking to stop drug smuggling, nor to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, nor to display the military might of America to world leaders, nor to extrude undocumented immigrants from the United States, nor rid the U.S. of alleged criminals.
These are all pretexts. His real goal is quite different.
In the short term, it is to intimidate Democratic mayors and governors and potential Democratic voters in order to suppress Democratic turnout in next fall’s midterm elections.
His long-term goal — shared by his sycophants Hegseth, Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, JD Vance, Kristi Noem, and Pam Bondi — is to turn America into a police state.
I don’t think it an exaggeration to say that Trump envisions himself as commander-in-chief of a domestic military force that would target alleged criminals (but not the white-collar sort), rid the nation of undocumented people, and remake America into a white, straight, male, Christian nation.
The good news is he’s now starting to say some of this in the open — directly to active-duty troops. He’s openly readying them for the role he wants them to play.
Essentially, he’s daring the top brass of the military to stop him. For now, they won’t. They’re worried and bewildered. He’s their commander-in-chief but they have an overriding responsibility to the nation to uphold democratic institutions, including the Constitution.
He’s also daring the rest of us to stop him — in the courts, in the now-defunct Congress, in the now-shuttered government. Also to stop him with our votes, our unwavering determination, and our nonviolent resistance.
Every American who shares the values for which American troops have been fighting and dying for almost 250 years, should join us on the side of democracy and against Trump’s emerging police state.
- Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
- Robert Reich's 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's sinister buddies have proven protest alone won't crush him — here's what will
Trump and the billionaires and foreign fascists he’s aligned with are both stronger than most think and weaker. Today I’ll deal with the stronger part; tomorrow, the weaker.
We’re living in a moment when the line between democracy and dictatorship is far less clear than we like to believe. As a recent analysis by Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die, puts it, we’ve already moved onto the midpoint along the spectrum between democracy and dictatorship where “competitive authoritarianism” lives.
That’s the world of regimes that hold elections but use their control over the nation’s systems to skew the rules, restrict opposition, weaponize institutions, vandalize the truth, and destroy/ignore democratic norms. We’re more than halfway down that road in just ten short months.
In the United States today, it’s impossible to ignore how much of that template was laid out by Viktor Orbán to the Heritage Foundation, which embedded core strategies of his authoritarian rule over Hungary into Project 2025, and is now being executed step-by-step by Trump and his lickspittles.
And with ICE making warrantless arrests while brutalizing and now spying on protesters with Stingrays and Pegasus, Putin’s FSB’s secret police are also providing a model for Trump.
We often comfort ourselves with the idea that elections alone guarantee democracy, but the fact is that democratic institutions can be hollowed out from within even as ballots are still being cast.
In Hungary, under Orbán, elections exist, but the playing field is so tilted using tools like gerrymandering that the opposition never has a fair chance, the media was captured by Orbán-aligned oligarchs, and both the courts and the legislature were packed to the point where they lost their autonomy.
That Hungarian model is now being mirrored in America. Project 2025’s blueprint doesn’t call for an overt single‐party take-over; rather it tweaks the administrative levers, centralizes power, bypasses checks and balances, staffs courts, commissions and agencies with loyalists, undermines election administration, and deploys state power to punish dissent while preserving the appearance of normalcy.
Where are we on the spectrum? Much further than many pundits will admit.
We now have elected and Trump-appointed officials who openly defy precedent, judicial rulings, and the rule of law; we have partisan weaponization of powerful institutions capable of punishing dissenters, ranging from the DOJ to the FBI and the IRS; we have dark-money networks influencing everything from policy to courts with the blessing of a corrupt Supreme Court; and we have billionaire capture of most of our media, producing widespread disinformation and naked attacks on the very idea of truth.
That is less a democracy and more a system of “managed competition,” where electoral outcomes are shaped in advance, not determined by a fair contest. In short, the clock is running fast toward a complete loss of democracy, the “autocratic breakthrough” I’ve written about before.
And while millions of Americans show up for protests — which matters — protests alone are nowhere near enough.
In effect, while protesters may feel emboldened and signal a national discontent, in the absence of durable organization, leadership, and strategy the protests are easily absorbed, marginalized, or rendered irrelevant by Trump’s fascist forces and billionaire supporters once the streets are empty again.
This is precisely the gap the Trump-Orbán-Putin model exploits. At the same time the marches are occurring, the foundation of the GOP’s up-and-coming fascist autocracy is being built: the staffing of key agencies, the rewriting of rules under emergency or administrative power, the gerrymandering and court packing, the stealth takeover of local precincts and state and county election commissions.
We must be careful that the dazzle of street energy doesn’t blind us to the quiet but decisive work of tearing down the institutional foundations of authoritarian rule that Trump, the GOP, and their morbidly rich backers are quickly laying. If we’re to stop America’s slide toward fascism we must face that stark reality.
The details underlying Project 2025 echo Hungary’s path with startling specificity. In that country a small, wealthy clique around Orbán orchestrated the capture of media, courts, electoral oversight bodies, and the constitution itself, which they then re-wrote (as Republicans are planning to do to ours when they get control of just a few more states).
Orbán changed campaign finance rules, muzzled the press, and built a client state reliant on personal loyalty rather than democratic accountability. Want a government contract? Toss some money Orbán’s way, or at his family, or to his closest cronies. Want a pardon? Ditto. An exception to rules, laws, or even taxes? Ditto again.
In the U.S. we see an analogous thinning of institutional independence, combined with the same type of cult of personality that always characterizes autocratic strongman governments. Trump’s openly expressed contempt for civil service norms, his threats to independent agencies, Republicans’ ideological staffing of courts all were cloned from the Hungarian template.
And while the U.S. remains superficially democratic — voting still happens — the basis of open, free, fair, competitive elections is under vigorous assault by “tech bros” and other billionaires who openly disdain democracy itself.
Trump announced last week that he’s sending “election monitors” to California and New Jersey — even though these are entirely state and not federal contests — presumably to intimidate both voters and election officials around the balloting happening in those states next week.
Red states are gerrymandering to prevent Democrats from ever again controlling the House of Representatives. As I lay out in The Last American President, voter purges and ballot challenges knocked over 4 million mostly-Democratic voters off the rolls or prevented the ballots they cast from being counted in 2024, giving Trump and the GOP the White House and Congress.
So what must Democrats — and unaffiliated/independent democracy advocates — do?
We have to go beyond showing up in the streets and writing outraged posts on social media (although both do help). Movements that fail to coalesce around leaders and build institutions typically die in the glare of their own moral light.
We need leadership and institutions capable of organizing, strategizing, and executing on multiple fronts: precincts, courts, local elections, media ecosystems, and state regulatory agencies. Protest without public faces and follow-through is like fireworks: beautiful, brief, and gone before the smoke clears.
Our challenge is both structural and strategic, and, lacking hundreds of morbidly rich billionaires funding us like Trump has, we’re already way behind.
It’s not enough to oppose; we must propose, build, and defend. Like Bernie Sanders is constantly pointing out, we must fight for reforms that fortify democracy: enforce campaign finance transparency, build public horror of concentrated media and money power, demand independent courts, safeguard election administration from partisan capture, and work to guarantee that our vote is harder to take away than our guns.
We must train a generation of leaders who don’t just show up for the “march” but stay for the precinct meeting, the town hall, the election board challenge. We must invest in institutions — particularly the DNC — that outlast ephemeral flare-ups of outrage and build resilient and genuinely progressive democratic infrastructure.
This is, after all, a progressive populist moment, as the Zohran Mamdani campaign in New York City and crowds showing up for Bernie and AOC’s Anti-Oligarchy Tour show. We just have to join it fully and ride its power.
Here’s the plain truth: any movement that wants democracy to prevail must realize that its job is just beginning when the banners are raised and the cameras roll. The billionaire-funded rightwing movement bent on authoritarianism has its candidates, its loyalists, its media echo-chamber, and its policy train.
This moment demands no less. We can no longer simply debate about policy or personality; we’re in a contest of governance models, of democratic vs authoritarian futures. James Carville recently told Jen Psaki that, “You aren’t scared enough yet!” Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and the entire Democratic Party need to hear that message and act now. Along with the rest of us.
The longer we leave the field uncontested, the more power we hand to those with a blueprint. The window is narrowing, and the Hungarian/Russian lesson is clear: when the opposition wins the street but not the state, democracy loses.
All of us who believe in a republic of citizens — not subjects — must work to build not just rallies but infrastructure, not just energy but strategy, not just slogans but institutions.
Join progressive organizations and get inside the Democratic Party. Bring energy, enthusiasm, and passion. If you’re inclined and capable, run for office yourself.
The hour is urgent. The stakes are existential.
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This looming contest may be our last chance to stop Trump's march to one-party rule
Perhaps like most Americans, I didn’t take seriously enough the significance of the rousing welcome that Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Victor Orbán, received from Republicans at their 2022 CPAC conference in Texas. In retrospect, it was an alarming portent of the authoritarian direction in which the GOP was determined to take the country.
It also dispelled my naïve belief that Americans were united in their reverence for American democracy and commitment to preserving it. Millions of Trump supporters are more than willing to see America moving in the direction of Hungary’s “illiberal democracy,” as characterized by Orbán.
An illiberal democracy is a faux democracy where the government manipulates electoral processes, restricts civil liberties, suppresses dissenting voices, bends the rule of law, destroys checks on government power, and institutes virtual one-party rule.
In Hungary, Orbán’s Fidesz party has been in power for 15 years. In that time, Orbán and his allies have dismantled Hungary’s democracy: undermining checks and balances, taking control of the country's media, civil society and universities, and consolidating power.
Trump and his anti-democratic allies are trying to accomplish at breakneck speed what Orbán accomplished over considerable time, hoping to secure a tight enough grip on the country by the 2026 midterm elections to ensure a Republican victory and authoritarian future. To accomplish his purpose, Trump has yet another year to continue his election rigging, with every extrajudicial scheme on the table.
Some political analysts have posited that the 2026 midterm elections could be the last free and fair elections Americans will see. In fact, we may have already seen America’s last free and fair election.
A great deal of rigging has already occurred to skew voting results in 2026 in Republicans’ favor.
Trump has demanded red-state gerrymandering to create more Republican-dominant districts. Republican-controlled states have enacted voter suppression laws that include shortening the time period for mail-in ballot returns, limiting drop box locations, disqualifying all legally dated ballots received after Election Day, changing an individual’s registration status to “inactive” after missing one election, adding documentation requirements in order to vote, limiting polling hours, banning drive-through and overnight early voting, and empowering partisan poll watchers.
The worst may be yet to come. The House has passed a bill requiring proof of citizenship for all federal-election voters, which could disenfranchise more than 21 million legal voters.
Cleta Mitchell, an anti-voting lawyer involved in Trump’s failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election, believes Trump could declare a national emergency in 2026 to allow the federal government to take control of national elections from the states. Who would put it past him?
While Trump has a year to plot more ways to rig the midterm elections, states committed to democracy have been expanding access to voting. In 2023, 47 new laws expanding voter access were enacted in 23 states, 13 of which are controlled by Democrats and four which have split control. At least six Republican-controlled states expanded voter access.
At least 80 national organizations are also working to ensure that no legal voter is deprived of his or her constitutional right to vote, including the League of Women’s Voters, the NAACP, AARP, ACLU, Alliance for Youth Organizing, Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause, The Voter Participation Center, VoteAmerica, and Voto Latino Foundation.
Countering the voter-suppression movement of the authoritarian right, these organizations are working overtime to ensure that no voter suppression hurdle will prevent any American from exercising his or her constitutional right to vote.
The 2026 midterms will be more than a referendum on how Americans feel about Trump’s presidency. They will be a referendum on how committed we Americans are to preserving our democracy.
If submissive Republican legislators hold their congressional majorities in 2026, American democracy as we have known it for 238 years will no longer exist, the constitutional checks-and-balances system demolished. Trump’s assault on democracy the last 10 months would be but a small preview of the chilling authoritarianism awaiting the country the next three years.
Americans who truly want to help save our democracy will not only vote in the midterms but will help to register voters, participate in GOTV outreach, advocate for voters’ rights legislation, and work for pro-democratic candidates.
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy inspired a nation by asking, “If not us, then who? If not now, then when?” May we be so inspired.
Uncertainties abound. Do the 7-8 million Americans protesting at No Kings rallies represent the over 75 million Americans who constitute the majority of voters? Does that portion of voters who support a more authoritarian Trumpian government extend well beyond the MAGA faithful? Could a rigged election preclude a fair outcome? Is preserving our democracy even a significant voting issue for most Americans?
Only the 2026 midterm election results can answer those questions — as the fate of America’s democracy hangs perilously in the balance.
- Tom Tyner is a freelance editorialist, satirist, political analyst, blogger, author and retired English instructor
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A Kentucky leader's AI post shows just how deep Republican racism runs
A few days ago, Bobbie Coleman — the chairperson of the Hardin County Republican Party — shared an AI video on the county party’s Facebook page with former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama portrayed as grinning apes.
Coleman took the video down and eventually posted an apology, which began, “Earlier today, I shared a video from social media that was intended to celebrate President Trump’s successful policy achievements by depicting him as a Lion King, triumphing over liberal Democrats.”
She closed with, “I believe the Republican Party is the vehicle to save our country from the far-left and I look forward to continuing to support our Republican candidates and Make America Great Again.”
The Obamas left the White House almost nine years ago. Other than being Black, what do they have to do with Trump’s alleged “policy achievements?” With making America great again? With supporting Republican candidates? With their obsession to “save our country from the far-left?”
What’s odd about today’s latent obsession with Barack and Michelle Obama is how little their obsession has to do with policy. If anything, Obama as president is viewed by those on the “far-left” (Coleman’s word choice in her apology) as someone who was not all that liberal, as someone who played it too careful and too close to the center.
But realities like these do not matter in Trump’s Republican Party.
Obama, almost a decade post-presidency, is not a cartoon figure for today’s Make America Great Again crowd because he is influencing policy. Obama is a MAGA cartoon figure because he is Black.
Racism sells.
At the end of Kentucky’s 2024 General Assembly, I wrote a recap of what I’d witnessed over the course of those many weeks titled, “Undercurrent of racism fueled this legislative session.” This is not a title a writer chooses without a pretty long list of strong, supporting evidence.
There was Senate Bill 6 and House Bill 9 that year which aimed to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion — DEI — in our education system and would pass in the next session because, hey, who needs diversity?
There was Sen. Gerald Neal’s proposed Crown Act, a repeat bill that never gets anywhere, “which would have outlawed discrimination on the basis of a hairstyle historically associated with a person’s race.”
There was Rep. Jennifer Decker (who is white) telling an NAACP audience that her white father was a slave and then doubling down on the claim when asked to explain.
There was Rep. Jason Nemes (who is white) ranting in anger at Rep. Derrick Graham (who is Black) for daring to tell the truth on the House floor about how the Jefferson Davis statue was “taken out for a reason,” the reason being that he led the Confederacy, which was built on the backs of slaves, and the insurrection that kicked off the Civil War.
And later in 2024, a bunch of white university presidents prostrated themselves before the interim education committee in our state Capitol, assuring them that they were not, no-way-no-how, teaching diversity of thought or helping people of color in their education systems, even as one brave Black woman sat right there in the front row wearing a bright red t-shirt that read in bold white letters, “Make America Not Racist for the First Time.”
Racism is not a side item in today’s Republican Party, with its masked ICE agents profiling brown people on the streets; it’s a main menu selling point.
The president told a gaggle of reporters on Air Force One Monday that U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett is “a low-IQ person” which is the same derogatory statement he makes regularly about professional Black women, insisting they can’t be smart because they’re Black.
And speaking of women — because GOP misogyny runs in the same creek as their racism — a 35-year-old Louisville Republican named Calvin Leach is currently running for state Senate after once writing in an online article in that young women are “promiscuous skanks,” “coddled americ--ts,” “party whores” and “damn sloots” (internet slang for slut).
When asked about this in an interview with Kentucky Public Radio, Leach described his writing as dating advice, saying that diversity, equity and inclusion has gotten out of hand.
It is notable that I also wrote — during the same 2024 General Assembly that was fueled by racism — that our GOP supermajority is often nothing but a good old boy, misogynistic, frat-house-like romp masquerading as serious lawmaking. With Leach as a candidate, it appears they like it this way.
Apologies for the digression. There is so much rampant sexism and racism in the KY GOP, it’s hard to keep up.
If the Republican Party of Kentucky does not want to be viewed as racist — if they do not want their leaders out in the counties posting racist videos — they might start by not telling tall tales about how their white fathers were slaves, by passing bills *allowing* Black people to wear their natural hair at work, by not obsessing about how one whiff of diversity or Black history might dare appear on a college syllabus.
“Racism greeted Obama in both his primary and general election campaigns in 2008,” Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in his book, We Were Eight Years in Power. “Photos were circulated of him in Somali garb. Rush Limbaugh dubbed him ‘Barack the Magic Negro.’” After “Obama won the presidency in defiance of these racial headwinds, traffic to the white-supremacist website Stormfront increased sixfold.”
We will soon approach two decades since Obama’s 2008 campaign, but overt racism is alive and well here in the commonwealth. Just last week the Frankfort Police Department advised the public that KKK propaganda was strewn around and that they were looking for ring-cam footage and any other evidence of the perpetrators.
I watched and rewatched the video posted on social media by the GOP chairperson in Hardin County, opening as it does with Barack and Michelle Obama portrayed as grinning apes, and I was not surprised.
I read and reread the article about KY GOP candidate Calvin Leach and his use of “promiscuous skanks” and worse to describe women, and I was not surprised.
Let’s face it, you aren’t either.
- Teri Carter writes about rural Kentucky life and politics for publications like the Lexington Herald-Leader, the Courier-Journal, The Daily Yonder and The Washington Post. You can find her at TeriCarter.net.
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Dems can win this red-state race if they can find the right face
With Brian Kemp leaving the governor’s office after next year’s election, Georgia Democrats have an opportunity to make history.
All they need now is a candidate.
The alleged frontrunner for the 2026 nomination is Keisha Lance Bottoms. According to a poll of Democratic primary voters commissioned by her own campaign last month, Bottoms “pulls more support than all other named candidates combined,” drawing 38 percent of likely primary voters.
However, I’d argue that’s more a sign of weakness than of strength. Only 9 percent of voters polled in that survey said they haven’t heard of Bottoms, which tells us that she’s a well-known commodity with less than overwhelming support, even in a field of relative unknowns.
And frankly, it’s hard to envision Bottoms winning a statewide general election. She is a former Atlanta mayor, which historically puts her at a disadvantage in much of the rest of the state. More important than that, Bottoms proved mediocre in the mayor’s office, accomplishing little and declining to run for re-election after her first term, without offering voters or supporters much of an explanation for walking away.
At a time when Democrats are looking for fighters, I’m not sure that’s a resume they should find attractive.
If Democrats do make Bottoms their nominee for governor, they also guarantee an endless run of commercials retelling the tragic tale of Secoriea Turner, the eight-year-old Atlanta girl who was shot dead by vigilante gang members in 2020. Secoriea was shot while riding with her mother in the back seat after Bottoms, as mayor, allowed gang members to take and keep control of a site in southwest Atlanta.
That’s a hard, even impossible thing to explain to voters.
In an election season that Republicans are desperately trying to turn into a soft-on-crime referendum, Secoriea’s story would become an anchor around the neck of every other Democrat on the ballot, from the U.S. Senate down to local races.
Bottoms’ best-known challenger is Geoff Duncan, the former lieutenant governor and, more famously, a Republican recently turned Democrat. Duncan deserves credit for recognizing that the party of Donald Trump bears no resemblance to the party of Lincoln, Reagan and Johnny Isakson, and for having the moral clarity and guts to act on that recognition. As far as I can tell, his conversion to the Democratic cause is sincere, but in an era of heightened tribal identities he’s asking a lot from primary voters to place their faith in him.
So far, I’m a little surprised by the open reception he’s getting, but translating voter curiosity into actual ballots will be difficult. If Duncan can pull it off, it would be a major miracle and a national news story, but I’m not seeing much in the way of political miracles these days.
The other two major announced candidates, Jason Esteves and Michael Thurmond, offer an important generational contrast, and my guess is that one of the two will emerge as the nominee.
Esteves, 42, is a former chair of the Atlanta Board of Education and a former one-term state senator. He comes across well in public and has built an impressive slate of endorsements from those who have worked with him in his previous roles. In the investment world Esteves might be touted as a growth stock, and sometimes they work out and sometimes they don’t.
Thurmond, 72, has served ably in a variety of state and local offices, including state legislator, state labor commissioner and DeKalb County executive. He knows the state and state government, he has the resume of a governor and he campaigns and operates as a moderate. But for Democrats, he’s also the last holdover from a political era that a lot of Georgia voters either don’t remember or never experienced in the first place.
In the current environment, that might not be to his advantage.
- Jay Bookman covered Georgia and national politics for nearly 30 years for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, earning numerous national, regional and state journalism awards. He has been awarded the National Headliner Award and the Walker Stone Award for outstanding editorial writing, and is the only two-time winner of the Pulliam Fellowship granted by the Society of Professional Journalists. He is also the author of "Caught in the Current," published by St. Martin's Press.
- Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
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The trillion-dollar question: When will we have had enough of this guy?
Tesla’s profit fell 37 percent in the third quarter. Yet Elon Musk is demanding a pay package of $1 trillion.
A trillion dollars is hard to envision. It’s a thousand billion. It’s a million million. It’s almost the entire GDP of Indonesia, a country of 284 million people. It’s the annual output of North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho, Arkansas, Mississippi, and West Virginia put together. It’s close to Tesla’s entire current market value.
Elon is demanding $1 trillion even as the legal battle continues over his 2018 pay package, then valued at a relatively paltry $56 billion. (He’s now seeking a package that’s roughly 18 times the size of that contested plan.)
Tesla’s shareholders will be voting on this absurd pay package next week, but it’s not just other Tesla shareholders who’ll be shafted if Elon gets what he’s seeking. Musk is moving the national goal posts for CEO pay all the way to Mars, at a time when American CEOs are already getting paid far more than they’re worth by any reasonable accounting of their contributions to the U.S. economy.
Tesla’s board — handpicked by Elon — is telling Tesla shareholders that the trillion-dollar pay package is necessary to keep Musk “focused and incentivized.” The board’s words in proposing the $1 trillion package are worth repeating:
“Musk also raised the possibility that he may pursue other interests that may afford him greater influence. Simply put, retaining and incentivizing Elon is fundamental to Tesla … becoming the most valuable company in history.”
But he’s already Tesla’s largest shareholder. He’s raking in billions. He’s the richest person on the planet. If he’s not already adequately motivated to stay focused on Tesla, why the hell does his board believe a trillion dollars will do the trick?
What are the “other interests” that could possibly “afford him greater influence?” He might devote more time to supporting authoritarian movements around the world, such as his favored far-right AfD party in Germany. Or the right-wing leaders in Italy, the Netherlands, the UK, and Argentina who he’s been pushing for. Or to his makeover of X into a cesspool of right-wing bigotry.
If not adequately paid to stay focused on Tesla, his attention might drift to one of his other businesses, such as the Boring Company, which is now digging a tunnel under Nashville for a Tesla-powered “people mover.”
That tunnel, by the way, doesn’t have the approval of Nashville officials, who are worried about it with good reason. Boring has dug one such tunnel under Las Vegas, where Nevada officials have charged the company with violating environmental regulations nearly 800 times over the last two years for such things as releasing untreated water onto city streets, spilling muck from its trucks, and flooding. Nashville officials worry that flooding there could be far worse because Nashville gets 10 times the amount of rainfall as Vegas.
Musk’s Boring Company says it will eventually do an environmental impact study, but excavation is already underway. Sort of like taking a wrecking ball to the East Wing after promising you’ll leave it intact.
Or Musk could be distracted by his SpaceX business, which is so behind on its moon landing contract that Trump is reopening bidding on it, causing Musk to go on an epithet-laden social media tirade.
I naively assumed that once he stopped running Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (or DOGE) and went back to the private sector, Musk would pose less of a hazard to humanity. I was wrong.
Some say that even with his faults — his greed, his support for right-wing regimes, his public-be-damned approach to everything he does, the mess he made at DOGE, the cesspool he’s made of X — Musk is so innovative that he’s still a net positive for humanity.
What do you think?
- Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
- Robert Reich's 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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