Trump finally removes his name from the Kennedy Center
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
Here's what created Trump — and why we'll keep getting more of him
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Friends,
It’s impossible to understand American politics without also understanding the American economy (and vice versa). Politics and economics may be different disciplines but they’re two sides of the same coin.
This came home to me again when I saw Thursday’s report on the U.S. gross domestic product.
Numbers can be pretty boring but bear with me. Worker compensation—wages and benefits — grew 0.8 percent from the fourth quarter of 2025 to the first quarter of 2026. Corporate profits grew 2.7 percent.
When you adjust for inflation, hourly wages have risen 3 percent since the end of 2019. Corporate profits have risen 50 percent.
Worker’s share of the nation’s income has now dropped to the lowest it’s been since records began in 1947. Profits’ share is the highest since 1950.
Most people who depend on wages for a living are struggling, while a small minority at the top who own most shares of stock and private equity — that is, people who rely on capital gains — have never had it as good.
The trend toward lower wages and higher profits began in the 1980s, increased in the 2000s, picked up speed after the pandemic, and is about to explode as Artificial Intelligence takes over.
In coming months three companies centered on AI will go public — Space X, OpenAI, and Anthropic — with expected valuations of around $1 trillion each (reflecting the gargantuan profits investors expect). But what about workers?
This is not just morally wrong. “Income from capital risks replacing income from labor,” Pope Leo wrote in Magnifica Humanitas, his encyclical letter devoted to the effects of AI, released this week.
It also threatens the future stability of our economic and political system.
What accounts for the increasing shift of the American economy from wages to profits, even before AI?
One big reason is monopolization. The economy has become concentrated in a few giant corporations with the power both to raise prices and keep wages down.
Sure, there are still lots of small businesses and mom-and-pop operations. But the gravitational center of the U.S. economy is now Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Walmart, Costco, Home Depot, Kroger, United Health, Cigna, CVS, AT&T, Verizon, ExxonMobil, Chevron, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Vanguard, Fidelity, Blackstone, Apollo, and KKR.
These giants control large swathes of the economy. They also exert significant political power. They’re like black holes in space, sucking in vast sums of money.
Their political power makes it impossible to know whether government policy is based on the public interest or private gain.
Consider Trump’s war in Iran and its resulting surge in energy prices. The energy-price rise has caused after-tax disposable income to drop and the profits of energy companies to soar. Did Trump decide to go to war because he thought it necessary, or because Big Oil nudged him into it?
Workers, meanwhile, no longer have any countervailing power. In the 1950s, over a third of workers in the private sector were unionized. That gave them enough bargaining power to claim a significant share of the total economy. Now, only 6 percent of workers are unionized. Their bargaining power has been further eroded by their easy replacement by lower-wage workers in Asia and by software. AI will further erode it.
This trend is not sustainable. It feeds growing anger at the system, which demagogues like Trump exploit for their own ends.
What should be done? Let me list five steps (I’ll go into each in greater detail in coming months).
1. For one thing, we’re going to need a new era of antitrust. Giant corporations will have to be busted up.
2. We’ll also need to tax those at the top, especially on the value of their ownership of capital. (California voters will likely be asked to vote on a billionaire tax in November.)
3. We’ll need regulate AI and simultaneously provide a universal basic income to cushion those who lose their jobs because of it.
4. Universal health care will be a necessity (perhaps via Medicare for all) along with subsidized childcare and eldercare.
5. Finally, we’ll need to distribute capital far more widely, so that the broad American public has a palpable stake in the rip-roaring stock market and the AI tsunami.
None of these fixes will be easy. Even if all are implemented, they may still be insufficient.
But, my friends, we have no choice but to try. We’ve already witnessed what mass anger can do to America, in the form of Trump. Unless we act soon, we’re likely to have Trumps, or worse, as far as the eye can see.
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This stinging slap has MAGA in full on implosion mode
We don’t have enough time or internet space to delve into everything that’s terrible about Miller, but as an American Jew (who’s also a staunch atheist), I can tell you that no one in the Tribe claims such a glaring example of Jewish self-hatred. The guy who separated breastfeeding infants from their mothers at the border (presumably to drink their blood, although I can’t confirm that), describes human beings as “illegals,” and tweets hateful propaganda about all minorites got his vampiric snowflake feelings hurt over the kind of reply liberals usually get from MAGA trolls.
Stephen Miller's X account.
I realize that’s not the height of political discourse, but it’s just perfect. Short, succinct, and hits MAGA right where they live. I have live replies right now from MAGA trolls that are far worse than that, and it doesn’t even matter when you’re reading this. Because they’ll always be the worst part of social media as long as their cult exists.
Liberals immediately began sharing screenshots of the “shut up you ugly f--k” reply to use as evergreen responses to MAGA’s weaker meme game. MAGA snowflakes started with their usual manufactured outrage because their entire default setting is one big perceived slight.
Things escalated rapidly thanks to Nosferatu’s wife, Katie, who decided to take it further by revealing the tweet was written by Paulina Mangubat, the DNC’s Deputy Chief Mobilization Officer. Maybe it was just her pregnancy hormones getting the best of her, because Katie is currently carrying their fourth unholy spawn, but she went full MAGA Mean Girl on Paulina.
“She’s 30, unmarried with no kids. Put your name on it next time. This is what a sad, unhappy, female Liberal looks like,” KKKatie tweeted, along with a photo of Mangubat. “It’s why Pew reports 50% of them have been diagnosed with a mental condition.”
We haven’t been, btw. Single liberal women are pretty happy not to be stuck with an ancient traitorous succubus hanging upside-down all night above our beds, for example. I often find myself hoping that the Millers have designated actually decent people as godparents for their kids, because once both of them are in prison forever, someone needs to make sure those kids unlearn any hate they’ve been carefully taught.
Anyway, Paulina has plenty of support online from her co-workers, who understand exactly how effective her tweet was.
Paulina also went on the Meidas Touch podcast and was basically all, “I said what I said.”
I love her SO MUCH. This is the non-apologetic energy we need to be seeing from Democrats until November. We have only good things to promote about our candidates, while MAGA continues to align behind the worst traitors this country has ever produced.
Gone are the days of “When they go low, we go high,” my friends.
Democrats are all too often accused of not fighting hard enough, but we’ve seen enough “Nerds vs Bullies” movies to know that we’ve hit the moment in the third act when we build a clubhouse during a montage that’s set to “New Song” by Howard Jones and start doing some serious PT to get ready for the final battle.
What first started with Gavin Newsom’s digi team co-opting Trump’s posting style to mock him has now become a full-on campaign tactic for the Democratic Party. Using MAGA’s methods, as well as their own words, is such an incredibly effective tactic.
All it took was a little creative use of AI, and boom, MAGA Snowflakes falling everywhere.
You know MAGA is worried about the midterms just from the way they’re attacking James Talarico, who’s running for Senate in Texas. Aside from falsely framing him as a vegan in the meat-loving Lone Star State, Stephen Miller’s tweet suggesting Talarico is transgender is full-on defamation. Talarico’s opponent, sex offender Ken Paxton, actually called the devout Christian “Talafreako,” because projection language goes hand-in-hand with their bullying.
So what did Talarico’s team do? They took a note from “Dark Brandon” and co-opted his bully’s words to start a trend instead.
You can now purchase “Talafreako” t-shirts on his official campaign website. BRILLIANT!
I’d wear that and I spent plenty of time tweeting my support of Jasmine Crockett over James Talarico, because I understand the importance of boosting ALL Democratic candidates in ALL states.
And I also understand the importance of never letting up on MAGA. We know how to hit them in the feels, and that’s where we need to keep hitting them. Mocking their defense of Trump with screenshots from the Epstein Files is especially effective because they can’t come up with any excuses for defending him. Every time I ask one of them why both Bill and Hillary Clinton had to testify under oath about Jeffrey Epstein but Donald Trump still hasn’t, they either disappear or reply with a dumb meme about Joe Biden smelling a kid’s head, which is just a strange thing to be fixated on. MAGA has yet to learn the difference between “good touch” and “bad touch,” and that’s putting it mildly.
The true profanity here isn’t the F word; it’s Trump himself and any justification for his sexual violence against women and children. He’s even going after E. Jean Carroll again, with MAGA’s gleeful blessing, just so they never have to admit he’s an adjudicated rapist.
This is who MAGA still is, and we have every right to still mock them for it, with or without swears.
Something remarkable just happened in court — and Trump won't be happy
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Friends,
I can’t overstate the importance of Judge Kathleen Williams’s decision on Friday to reopen Trump’s $10 billion case against the I.R.S.
She said she wants to investigate “grievous allegations” that the hasty deal to resolve it was “premised on deception,” and she ordered Trump’s lawyers to tell her by June 12 whether the lawsuit should be formally reopened because “the court was the victim of a fraud.”
The “deception” and “fraud” Judge Williams refers to were allegedly carried out by Trump and his Justice Department.
This is a big deal.
Judge Williams’s decision came in response to court papers filed on Wednesday by a bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges who urged her to revive the case and dig into the details of the agreement to settle it.
The judges’ brief is also a big deal. They call it a motion for relief from judgement or order or, alternatively, “leave to appear as amici curiae by thirty-five former federal judges.”
I don’t recall a similar instance of 35 former federal judges filing such a motion or amicus (friend of the court) brief.
In it, the judges argue that the parties’ — Trump and the Justice Department’s — so-called “settlement” agreement was made to circumvent the court ‘s possible finding that the case presented no actual controversy, since Trump is on both sides of it.
This, they conclude, constituted a fraud on the Court.
Let me quote the remarkable brief filed by the 35 former federal judges:
“The parties have used this lawsuit—which was never an adversarial proceeding over which the Court even had jurisdiction—as a means to allow a “commission” controlled by the President to dole out $1.776 billion in taxpayer dollars without constitutional or congressional authority to do so, and to confer unlawful private benefits to the President and his family by purportedly prohibiting the United States from prosecuting any and all claims against them.
And the parties have plainly tried to shield this conduct from necessary judicial scrutiny by short-circuiting this Court’s inquiry into whether the lawsuit is in fact an actual case or controversy by [seeking to dismiss the case] before they announced the “settlement”—clearly in hopes of preventing the Court from ever completing that inquiry, which, if it comes out against the parties, will undo their collusive “settlement.” ….
Accordingly, because “[t]he parties’ ‘collusive’ activity perpetrated a fraud on the judicial machinery itself, by fostering an appearance that the litigation involved adverse parties, when, in fact, it did not,” the Court should void its prior dismissal and reopen the case to assess in due course whether a fraud occurred.”
In her order on Friday, Judge Williams said she wanted to investigate the circumstances surrounding Trump’s efforts to settle the lawsuit in a way that benefited him and his allies.
She added that a federal court rule requires attorneys to ensure that court filings are “not presented for any improper purpose” and that “a party’s decision to file a frivolous lawsuit for the sole purpose of forcing a settlement may qualify as such an improper purpose.”
She also noted that the settlement appeared to run afoul of Department of Justice policies that require any settlements to be “specifically limited to the immediate subject matter of the claim.”
Finally, Judge Williams pointed out that a settlement addendum that waives all tax claims the U.S. may currently have against Trump, his two eldest sons, and his businesses and trusts was signed only by Todd Blanche, the acting Attorney General.
This could result in questions being asked of Blanche. Ultimately, it could result in his debarment or even imprisonment. Recall that Nixon’s Attorney General, John Mitchell, was convicted of conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of justice for his role in the Watergate break-in and cover-up. He served 19 months of a two-and-a-half to eight-year sentence in federal prison before being paroled. He was the first Attorney General in United States history to be incarcerated.
Let me just say that there are forces in this country — specifically, Judge Kathleen Williams and the bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges — bent on preventing Trump from exercising authoritarian power.
In so doing, they’re displaying extraordinary courage and commitment to democracy and the rule of law. They are in effect representing all of us — our system of justice.
We owe them a great debt of gratitude. (I’m awarding them this week’s Joseph N. Welsh Award for Courage in the Face of Tyranny.)
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Attorney Joseph N. Welsh, who stood up to Senator Joe McCarthy in the Army-McCarthy Hearings of June 1954
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org