The ties that bind: Trump celebrates his own version of Independence Day
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
Senate Republicans are passing the worst bill in history
One of my objectives is to equip you with the facts you need. As the Senate approaches a vote on Trump’s giant “big beautiful” tax and budget bill, I want to be as clear as possible about it.
First, it will cost a budget-busting $3.3 trillion. According to new estimates by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the Senate bill would add at least $3.3 trillion to the already out-of-control national debt over a decade. That’s nearly $1 trillion more than the House-passed version.
Second, it will cause 11.8 million Americans to lose their health coverage. The Senate version would result in even deeper cuts in federal support for health insurance, and more Americans losing coverage, than the House version. Federal spending on Medicaid, Medicare, and Obamacare would be reduced by more than $1.1 trillion over that period — with more than $1 trillion of those cuts coming from Medicaid alone.
All told, this will leave 11.8 million more Americans uninsured by 2034.
Third, it will cut food stamps and other nutrition assistance for lower-income Americans. According to the CBO, the legislation will not only cut Medicaid by about 18 percent, it will cut Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps) by roughly 20 percent. These cuts will constitute the most dramatic reductions in safety net spending in modern U.S. history.
Fourth, it will overwhelmingly benefit the rich and big corporations. The CBO projects that those in the bottom tenth of the income distribution will end up poorer, while the top tenth will be substantially richer.
The bill also makes permanent the business tax cuts from the 2017 legislation, further benefiting the largest corporations.
Finally, it will not help the economy. Trickle-down economics has proven to be a cruel hoax. Over the last 50 years, Congress has passed four major bills that cut taxes: the 1981 Reagan tax cuts; the 2001 and 2003 George W. Bush tax cuts; and the 2017 Trump tax cuts. Each time, the same three arguments were made in favor of the tax cuts: (1) They’d pay for themselves. (2) They’d supercharge economic growth. (3) They’d benefit everyone.
All have been proven wrong. Here’s what in fact happened:
(1) Did the tax cuts pay for themselves?
No. Rather than paying for themselves, the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts each significantly increased the federal deficit. In total, those tax cuts have added over $10.4 trillion to the federal deficit since 1981 compared to the CBO’s baseline projections.
(2) Did the tax cuts supercharge economic growth, create millions of jobs, and raise wages?
Absolutely not. Rather than growing, the economy shrank after passage of the Reagan tax cuts. And unemployment surged to over 10 percent. Following the enactment of the Bush and Trump tax cuts, the economy did grow a bit, but at rates much lower than their supporters predicted.
(3) Did the tax cuts benefit everyone?
Heavens, no. Rather than benefiting everyone, the savings from the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts flowed mainly to the richest Americans. The average tax cut for households in the top 1 percent under the Reagan tax cut ($47,147) was 68 times larger than the average tax cut for middle-class households ($695). The Bush tax cut for households in the top 1 percent was 16 times larger than the average tax cut for the middle class. The 2017 Trump tax cut for households in the top 1 percent was 36 times larger than for middle-class households.
Summary: If the bill now being considered by the Senate is enacted, 11.8 million Americans will lose their health insurance, millions will fall into poverty, and the national debt will increase by $3.3 trillion, all to provide a major tax cut mainly to the rich and big corporations. There is no justification for this.
Never before in the history of this nation has such a large redistribution of income been directed upward, for no reason at all. It comes at a time of near-record inequalities of income and wealth.
What you can do: Call your senators and tell them to vote “no” on this calamitous tax and budget bill. Congressional switchboard: (202) 224-3121.
Beyond this, help ensure that senators who vote in favor of this monstrosity are booted out of the Senate as soon as they’re up for reelection.
- 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/.
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Rats to a burger joint dumpster: Why does Florida have such awful politicians?
Younger readers may be unaware there was a time when politicians followed the rules, almost as if they cared about good government.
Certainly there were liars, fraudsters, and zealots, your Sen. Joe McCarthys, your Sen. Styles Bridges, and, of course, the great-granddaddy of corruption and sleaze, Richard Nixon. But most lawmakers actually seemed to believe in, you know, the law.
Seems almost quaint.
Take a look, if you can stomach it, at Florida’s sitting attorney general, one James Uthmeier Esq.
A federal judge has held him in contempt for violating a court order halting SB 4C — last session’s bill allowing the state to arrest anyone who might kinda sorta look “illegal.”
Brown folks rounded up by handcuff-happy cops included at least one American citizen.
Uthmeier took to X, proclaiming, “If being held in contempt is what it costs to defend the rule of law and stand firmly behind President Trump’s agenda on illegal immigration, so be it.”
Older readers will detect an echo of former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who did her damnedest to stall ballot recounts in the great Gore-Bush imbroglio of 2000, and who would grandly quote the Biblical Queen Esther, “If I perish, I perish.”
The AG appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, half of whom were appointed by Trump. They told him (in judicial language) to get lost.
Scofflaw history
Uthmeier’s lucky U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams didn’t fine him or throw his arrogant backside in jail.
Still, it’s early days: Hope Florida, the nonprofit founded by the state’s ambitious First Lady, is under investigation by North Florida State’s Attorney Jack Campbell. Uthmeier is up to his eyeballs in this one.
State Rep. Alex Andrade (R-Pensacola) has accused Uthmeier of criminal fraud and money laundering.
Seems Hope Florida got a $10 million “donation” of taxpayer money, of which a good chunk went to a PAC controlled by Uthmeier.
You can’t use that money for political purposes; nevertheless, that’s just what Uthmeier’s PAC did, spending it on ads to defeat last year’s recreational marijuana amendment.
DeSantis hadn’t yet elevated Uthmeier, then his chief of staff, to the AG job, but still: The guy was an officer of the court, a member of the Florida Bar.
You’d think he’d get it.
Then again, Florida under DeSantis is not known for adherence to the rule of law.
Remember in 2022 when the governor tricked a bunch of Venezuelan asylum seekers onto a plane and flew them to Martha’s Vineyard? Legally dubious? Ethically ugly? Yes and yes.
De Santis is also the guy who suspended one state attorney for saying he wouldn’t pursue abortion cases and another because, he claimed, she wouldn’t enforce state law.
“State attorneys have a duty to prosecute crimes as defined in Florida law,” he said. “Not to pick and choose which laws to enforce based on his personal agenda,” adding that those outlaw prosecutors were “basically saying that they didn’t want to enforce statutes that the Legislature had done.”
Yet when James Uthmeier said he wouldn’t enforce a statute passed by the Legislature, namely, Florida’s 2018 law forbidding anyone under 21 to buy a long gun, the governor shrugged.
He said that law is unconstitutional anyway and that Uthmeier’s stance was a “good-faith position.”
What’s the difference? The two state attorneys he suspended are Democrats.
Besides, as Floridians all know, the sacred right to pack heat matters more than actual human beings like the two people killed by a white supremacist Trumper on the FSU campus in April.
Unfortunately for us, DeSantis and his enablers aren’t particularly troubled by a bit of violence, as long as it’s perpetrated by the right people.
While he initially criticized the Jan. 6 riot, calling it “unacceptable,” he soon fell in line with MAGA-speak, denying there was an “insurrection” of any kind and defending Trump’s role in what was clearly an attempted coup.
So what if a few Capitol police got roughed up? They were on the wrong side.
In Florida, we like cops to be on the right side, making sure Marxists, environmentalists, feminists, BLM radicals, LGBTQ-types, and other outside agitators get what’s coming to them.
And, according to the governor, citizens can play cop, too.
In advance of the No Kings protests on June 14, DeSantis decreed that any patriotic, God-fearing, Trump-voting motorist who felt threatened or even just mildly inconvenienced by those freaks marching in one of the 70-odd demonstrations across Florida had his permission to give ’em a little automotive nudge.
“If you drive off and you hit one of these people, that’s their fault for impinging on you,” he said. “You don’t have to sit there and just be a sitting duck and let the mob grab you out of your car and drag you through the streets.”
DeSantis clearly cut con law class the day they discussed freedom of assembly.
Something in the water?
You begin to wonder if there’s something about Florida that encourages a complete disregard not just of decent behavior but of the rule of law.
Maybe it’s some kind of mosquito-borne illness? Maybe the toxic algae choking our waters emits a foul miasma that clouds the brain’s moral center?
Maybe it’s a fish problem, you know, rotting from the head down?
In any case, scofflaws flock to Florida like rats to a burger joint dumpster.
We’ve a long history of criminality: Al Capone hung out in Miami Beach, and Charles Ponzi sold worthless swampland to rubes dreaming of a life in “paradise.”
It’s no surprise the current occupant of the White House, a casino-bankrupting grifter with 34 felony convictions, chose Palm Beach County as his home.
For a brief period in history — way back there, from the 1960s to the 1990s — Florida was known as a good-government state, with leaders such as Reuben Askew, Bob Graham, and Lawton Chiles, who promoted education, conservation, and transparency.
Again, quaint.
In the past couple of decades, however, we’ve elected such prize porkers as a governor whose company perpetrated a huge Medicare and Medicaid fraud and an attorney general who saw nothing untoward in taking a $25,000 campaign contribution from Donald Trump then dropping an investigation into his shady “university.”
Rick Scott is now a U.S. senator; Pam Bondi is now the attorney general of the United States.
Bondi’s busy demonstrating how much she learned in Florida, doing her damnedest to destroy the separation of powers enumerated in the Constitution.
She’s suing every single federal judge in the state of Maryland for having the brass-faced gall to issue orders insisting on due process for people the Trump regime wants to deport.
Doing their job, in other words.
Lawyers or lawless?
Meanwhile, back down here in the sunniest state with the shadiest government, DeSantis and Uthmeier are back with a brand new bad idea: “Alligator Alcatraz,” a huge ICE detention camp in the Everglades.
The state seized the land from Miami-Dade County to park a 5,000-bed facility bang in the middle of the state’s greatest environmental treasure.
Who cares if it’s legal? It sure ain’t moral.
Despite the state’s claims that the place won’t hurt the surrounding wetland ecosystem (apparently 5,000 people in housing pods won’t create any run-off and all the trucks and buses transporting people and supplies will not make a mark upon the land), it’s an assault on a vulnerable and irreplaceable place.
Remember that the next time you hear DeSantis’ bleating how he wants to “save” the Everglades.
DeSantis, Bondi, and Uthmeier may call themselves lawyers, but they are lawless.
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Trump got played as NATO finally figures him out
Claiming that Donald Trump is a sociopath has become so common it’s pretty much a cliché these days. That said, most people don’t know what sociopathy is or what they can expect from — or how to identify — a sociopath.
I did a deep dive into Trump’s childhood and history to discover the roots of his behavior — and how we can deal with it and repair America from it — in my newest book The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink.
What I found was fascinating and provides an easy way for people with no training in psychology to identify not only Trump’s problem but to figure out who else in their lives may incline toward sociopathy (CEOs are particularly notorious; some suggest it’s what makes them ruthless but successful).
The easy way to describe sociopathy to a lay person is to explain that if young children were tested for the condition they’d often test positive, which is referred to by professionals (and the DSM) as “Antisocial Personality Disorder” (ASPD).
That’s because their personalities are still developing and they haven’t yet fully developed empathy, impulse control, or a stable sense of morality, traits that are still emerging during childhood and adolescence.
This is why clinicians are careful not to diagnose children with sociopathy or ASPD outright; instead, they may diagnose Conduct Disorder, especially if the child shows persistent patterns of aggression, deceit, or cruelty. If these behaviors continue into adulthood, and particularly if they begin before age 15, the diagnosis may later shift to ASPD/sociopathy.
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), adults with ASPD or sociopathy display a consistent and persistent set of characteristics. Those include a pervasive pattern of disregard for the rights of others; chronic violation of social norms, rules, and laws; deceitfulness, impulsivity, and aggression; and a near-complete lack of remorse or empathy.
But the simplest way to explain this is to simply note that adult sociopaths usually tend to act like young children. Consider Trump’s public behavior. He:
— Ignores or apparently doesn’t care about the rights of other people or the impact of his actions on others. He’ll send non-criminals to a hellhole concentration camp in El Salvador or deport them to South Sudan, even though it may be a death sentence — and is certainly an open door to torture — apparently without a second thought or twinge of conscience.
— Defies social norms, bragging about sexually assaulting women and how he could murder somebody on Fifth Avenue and get away with it.
— Ignores or tries to get around laws and court orders with apparent delight.
— Lies about those actions and decisions that hurt others or even damage our nation.
— Makes things up on the fly, chronically lying when it’s not even remotely necessary.
— Bullies judges, lawmakers, people who work for him, and anybody he considers disloyal.
— Almost never, ever admits errors or wrongdoing and is so constantly wrapped up in himself that he doesn’t know how to experience what others are feeling.
This is the behavior of a child who’s not yet been socialized, and in Trump’s case it’s rooted deep in his childhood, having been raised by a troubled father and a distant mother.
The leaders of Europe’s NATO countries appear to have figured this out (as did Putin, Musk, and the Saudis, Emiratis, and Qataris before them); when Trump showed up in The Netherlands this week, they lavished him with praise and positive attention, instead of shunning and implicitly or subtly ridiculing him like they did five years ago.
His response was exactly what they wanted; reconsidering aid to Ukraine and suddenly changing his position to embrace the US’s commitment to the mutual defense provisions embodied in Article 5 of the organization’s charter.
This doesn’t mean that Americans should coddle Trump’s tantrums, demands for revenge, and petty grievances. He will always and obsessively be preoccupied with getting his own childish needs met, and at the top of that list is avoiding discomfort and complexity.
Like the bully he is, when he’s seriously confronted — at least so far — he’ll back down (TACO) if the confrontation threatens to consume lots of his time, trouble, or money. This is why consistent and ferocious opposition to his most puerile actions is absolutely necessary.
History teaches us that when self-centered national leaders aren’t constrained by their own people, the results are usually tragic. During his first presidency, Trump had largely surrounded himself with normal adults who succeeded in moderating his behavior and restraining his worst impulses.
This time, however, he’s succeeded in surrounding himself with people just as pathetically child-like, morally and developmentally, as he is. They’ll lie, cheat, or bully on his behalf, as we’ve recently seen with the public statements of many of his most senior officials.
As we’ve seen with their attacks on and arrests of a state judge, member of Congress, US Senator, and Newark’s Mayor, among others, when a troubled man like Trump succeeds in surrounding himself with other people who share his developmental stunting — and has disposed of “the adults in the room” — the results can be horrific.
The next three-and-a-half years will be both critical and dangerous for the future of democracy in our republic both because of Trump’s psychopathology and the willingness (or even enthusiasm) of the people around him to facilitate his infantile rages and desires.
In the book — and in future articles here — I lay out a variety of ways Americans can deal with this national mental health crisis and the consequences with which it hits average working class people. The first and most important step, though, is to identify his disability and spread the word.
Not only is that the first step toward constraining him and those around him, but it’ll also help voters avoid electing more troubled man-babies to public office in the future.
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Trump moves to dismantle democracy — and silence the judges who defy him
The hardest part of my nights usually occurs around 3 am when my brain starts obsessing about upsetting things, such as what Trump is doing to America.
I’m sure many of you are like me. Our days are filled with all sorts of distractions, but in the wee hours of the morning, we tend to drift back to big and often terrifying realities.
Last night I couldn’t get out of my head that Trump is intent on abolishing the two branches of the government with the constitutional duty to constrain him.
As every American school kid learns, the U.S. Constitution establishes three branches of government that are supposed to check and balance each other.
Every school kid, that is, except Donald Trump and the people around him who have been usurping congressional authority and going to war against the judiciary.
Trump and his lackeys want there to be only one branch of government — the executive branch, under Trump.
Congress has now all but disappeared because it’s controlled by Republican zombies who will say and do whatever Trump wants.
This leaves the federal judiciary as the only remaining check on Trump. So far, federal courts have paused about 80 of Trump’s executive orders until judges have an opportunity to hear arguments and sift through evidence at full trials.
But even this is too much for the dictator-in-chief.
On Friday, a majority of the Supreme Court — at the prodding of Trump’s Justice Department — decided that federal judges could pause executive actions only for the specific plaintiffs that bring a case. (Previously, any of the nation’s more than 1,000 judges in its 94 district courts could issue nationwide injunctions that immediately halted government policies across all 50 states.)
On Tuesday, Trump and his lackeys filed a lawsuit against 15 federal judges who serve on the bench in Maryland, seeking a court order that would block them from making any ruling that might “interfere” in “the president’s powers to enforce the nation’s immigration laws.”
Beyond these are Trump’s personal attacks against federal judges who rule against him, calling them “monsters” who want America to “go to hell,” and “radical left lunatics” or worse — even demanding their impeachment.
These attacks have incited some Trump followers to threaten the lives of federal judges and their families. Threats have surged in recent months, including bomb threats and swatting incidents.
For Trump and his lackeys, all who push back against what they want to do — including federal judges — are considered the “opposition.” Attorney General Pam Bondi even accuses federal judges of “meddling in our government.”
But the federal judiciary is not an opposing party. It’s an inherent part of the government. Federal court rulings don’t “interfere” in a president’s powers. They determine what those powers are. Federal judges don’t “meddle” in government. They are a vital part of government.
We were supposed to have learned this in school. Apparently Trump and his coterie — including Trump’s appointees to the Supreme Court — never learned it. Or now that they’re in power, have erased it from their minds.
If all of this makes you pessimistic, I understand. The immediate future does look bleak.
But please do not become cynical. Don’t lose hope. Don’t give up the fight.
Pessimism is different from cynicism. Pessimists believe an outcome will be bad. But cynics don’t even try for a different outcome because they’ve lost all hope.
Trump and his lackeys want us to be cynical because then we’ll stop fighting. If we stop fighting, they win everything — not just the entire government but our entire society.
It looks dark today, but it will not remain dark. The Caligula on the Potomac is getting nowhere on tariffs. Inflation threatens. The vast majority of Americans oppose his plan to cut Medicaid and give the rich a huge tax cut. His popularity continues to plummet. He is facing mounting opposition from the rest of the world.
Do not succumb to cynicism. We must keep fighting. Too much is at stake. We will prevail.
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/.
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John Roberts' Supreme Court will have blood on its hands within a week
No, the Supreme Court did NOT strike down birthright citizenship in the decision handed down Friday, Trump v. Casa et.al. Instead, the Republican majority voted to purposefully sidestep the merits and substance of the birthright citizenship question and decided to treat the case as a procedural issue.
The result of the 6-3 ruling along partisan lines? The Roberts court just gave Trump unfettered power to continue s---ting on the Constitution.
As a 30-year federal litigator, I am outraged. I don’t see how the rule of law can survive this decision, especially at a time when our executive is so clearly and demonstrably unhinged.
What the partisan majority did
Focusing on equitable authority to issue injunctions instead of the 14th Amendment right to birthright citizenship, the Roberts court elevated procedure over substance.
As explained in the dissent, the majority opinion “ignores entirely whether the President’s Executive Order (on birthright citizenship) is constitutional, instead focusing only on the question whether federal courts have the equitable authority to issue universal injunctions. Yet the (Executive Order’s) patent unlawfulness reveals the gravity of the majority’s error and underscores why equity supports universal injunctions as appropriate remedies in this kind of case.”
What the Republican majority did was far worse — and far more dangerous — than ending birthright citizenship:
Held: Universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts. The Court grants the Government’s applications for a partial stay of the injunctions entered below, but only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue. Pp. 4–26.
Translation: they struck down nationwide injunctions, the main tool federal courts have used to stop Trump from bulldozing the Constitution. Their shameful decision is NOT limited to the birthright citizen question; it applies without limitation. It gives Trump license to trammel every law, every clause, and every amendment to the Constitution.
Writing for the partisan 6-3 majority, Coney-Barrett continued:
The Court’s early refusals to grant relief to nonparties are consistent with the party-specific principles that permeate the Court’s understanding of equity. “[N]either declaratory nor injunctive relief,” the Court has said, “can directly interfere with enforcement of contested statutes or ordinances except with respect to the particular federal plaintiffs.” Doran v. Salem Inn, Inc., 422 U. S. 922, 931. In fact, universal injunctions were conspicuously nonexistent for most of the Nation’s history. Their absence from 18th and 19th century equity practice settles the question of judicial authority.
It's Dobbs déjà vu all over again
Just as these same partisan hacks did in Dobbs to erase abortion rights that had been in existence for 50 years, they are erasing the history of nationwide injunctions, focusing on what happened in the 1700s and 1800s instead of the last 100 years.
Nationwide injunctions have been used in the U.S. for over 60 years. They are the strongest and surest remedy to keep elected officials from violating federal law or the Constitution. Now, in service to Trump, that remedy has been removed, that protection for the little guy has been erased.
From Sotomayor’s dissent: “The gamesmanship in this request is apparent and the Government makes no attempt to hide it. Yet, shamefully, this Court plays along. A majority of this Court decides that these (birthright) applications, of all cases, provide the appropriate occasion to resolve the question of universal injunctions and end the centuries-old practice once and for all. In its rush to do so the Court disregards basic principles of equity as well as the long history of injunctive relief granted to non-parties.”
Translation: Everyone who wants to stop Trump from illegally harming them now has to sue, and appear personally before the court, or join a class action, which can take years to certify. I defended class actions for over 15 years — they are an expensive, time-consuming and cumbersome way to try to fight back against the government.
Sotomayor ‘s outrage is also palpable. She continues: “In partially granting the Government’s remarkable request, the Court distorts well-established equitable principles several times over. A stay, this Court has said, “‘is not a matter of right,’” but rather “‘an exercise of judicial discretion….For centuries, courts have “close[d] the doors” of equity to those “tainted with inequitableness or bad faith relative to the matter in which [they] seek relief… Yet the majority throws the doors of equity open to the Government in a case where it seeks to undo a fundamental and clearly established constitutional right. The Citizenship Order’s patent unlawfulness is reason enough to deny the Government’s applications.”
Hear, hear. I second, third, fourth and fifth amendments that. This horrific, legally absurd, and grossly partisan decision comes just as Trump’s goons are becoming more and more violent.
They are physically tackling Democrat officials to the ground. Bored ICE agents on power trips are attacking brown people on the streets, in parking lots, in restaurants, beating them in front of their children.
The Roberts court is aware of what Trump is doing; the justices don’t live in caves and presumably are well-read. They know exactly what is happening, but have shamefully chosen to look away and let Trump do his worst AFTER they gave him immunity to break criminal laws.
Justice Jackson’s dissent hit it hard: “The Court’s decision to permit the Executive to violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law. It is important to recognize that the Executive’s bid to vanquish so-called “universal injunctions” is, at bottom, a request for this Court’s permission to engage in unlawful behavior. When the Government says “do not allow the lower courts to enjoin executive action universally as a remedy for unconstitutional conduct,” what it is actually saying is that the Executive wants to continue doing something that a court has determined violates the Constitution— please allow this. That is some solicitation. With its ruling, the majority largely grants the Government’s wish. But, in my view, if this country is going to persist as a Nation of laws and not men, the Judiciary (had) no choice but to deny it.
The Roberts Court will will have blood on its hands within the week. This decision will be cited in history books explaining how the fall of America’s rule of law converted the world's strongest democracy into a fascist autocracy.
That is if history books are even allowed in five years.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
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A made-for-TV war came with made-for-TV humiliation for Trump
The president used a bad word on live television yesterday morning. The Washington press corps seems to have taken that as a sign of paternal rebuke, as if Israel and Iran were children who’d gotten into trouble and Donald Trump the father who’d taken off his belt.
But far from seeming dominant, he looked old and weak.
Late Monday night, Trump announced that he had brokered a ceasefire between those two warring nations. At the time, he was preparing for the NATO summit, where he would present himself as a conquering hero, the only one who could “completely and totally destroy” Iran’s nuclear program. He would be the unifier, the savior, the lawgiver, the peacemaker, the embodiment of Pax Trumpana.
But then Israel shot at Iran and Iran shot back.
That spoiled everything and Big Daddy got mad.
“We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing," he said.
The Post reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been planning to attack Iran for at least a year, even as Trump was trying to bargain over its nuclear program. Later, the Times reported that the president “marveled” so much at how Israel’s bombardment looked on live television that he wanted some of that glory for himself. So he did what Netanyahu had been wanting him to do: he joined his war.
Someone knew what he was doing.
As for Iran, its nuclear program has been set back by a few months, according to an internal Pentagon assessment that was reported Tuesday by CNN, the Times, the AP, the Post and Reuters. That may be due to its facilities being located too deep underground or to Trump’s war-posturing going on for so long that, according to the Times, the Iranian had time to move their enriched uranium out of harm’s way.
Either way, the result of all the bunker-busting bombs, and the billions spent dropping them, is far cry from Trump’s claim over the weekend of having “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. Either way, someone knew what he was doing and it wasn’t Trump.
You can tell Trump feels humiliated. At the NATO press conference this morning, he repeated the “totally obliterated” lie. To those who reported on the Pentagon assessment, he called them scum. He got Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to spin the lie in various and sundry ways, adding their disgrace to his.
Trump got a made-for-TV war.
It came with made-for-TV humiliation.
As a result, Hegseth said the FBI is going to investigate the leak of the Pentagon assessment. Trump has lost face and someone must pay. And in order to protect Trump's snowflake ego, the regime intends to limit the amount of classified information its shares with the Congress.
But that’s not the only consequence. Since Iran suffered little more than a flesh wound, Netanyahu will have more incentive to find more ways of roping Trump into more war with Iran. Meanwhile, Iran is more united internally than it was prior to last weekend’s bombing, and with that more incentive to ramp up its nuclear program as a result of Netanyahu’s successful initial attempt to rope Trump in. Trump says talks with Iran will restart next week. We can expect the Iranians to say OK, sure, but then keep doing what they’re doing.
Trump wanted a “brief and explosive American intervention in the Middle East to end with the satisfying tidiness of a prime-time season finale,” according to the AP. At this morning’s NATO presser, Trump said the war is “over,” as if he and he alone were the bringer of peace.
But the world isn’t so tidy.
Global leaders are not the base of the Republican Party. His people are willing to overlook anything, even when he humiliates them and himself. The rest of the world isn’t bound by the same factors.
Indeed, in this interview below with William Adler, a professor of political science at Northeastern Illinois University, I said I couldn’t think of another time in my life when an American president had been led by the nose so publicly. Has there been one in our history? I asked.
Professor Adler said he wasn’t sure, but past presidents have sometimes determined that it’s easier to say yes to warmongers than it is to say no. That tracks with our TV president. He is so weakened by his own humiliation that next week, during talks, he will ask Iran to promise to never build a nuclear bomb. They will lie and say okie dokie. Then Trump will accept the lie as true in order to claim victory.
Netanyahu planned to attack Iran months ago, according to the Post, and worked to “recruit” Trump, even as the president was seeking a non-proliferation deal with Iran. The Times reported that Trump was so impressed by how Israel's bombing was “playing” on TV that he wanted to get in on the action. Did Trump get played?
It's clear that Netanyahu has wanted to do this for a long time, and undoubtedly Israeli military planners have been preparing to do it should the political leadership decide to go forward. I don't think that Trump got "played", exactly, but he did seem to give Israel much more leeway than has generally been the case when Israel has preemptively acted. Trump wanted to be involved, wanted the credit, and it's also true that the attack on Fordo could not have taken place without the US dropping the bunker busters that only American planes carry.
Has there been a president who has been led by the nose like this before? These are my words, but I don't think they are inaccurate.
I'm not sure, honestly. Some presidents of the past have gotten themselves in situations where moving forward was the easiest solution when pulling back seemed too difficult politically. James Madison comes to mind. The War of 1812, historians generally feel, was not really his idea. Western congressmen known as "war hawks" pushed him into it, because they wanted an expansionary war against the British and their native American allies, so Madison eventually followed when Congress declared war. Another example might be William McKinley and the Spanish-American War, although McKinley got involved prior to Congress actually declaring war.
It seems to me that Trump does fine when his opponents have to obey the rules and he doesn't. He struggles when faced with opponents (and friends like Netanyahu) who break the rules as easily as he does. This seems to apply to the "ceasefire." Thoughts?
I think Netanyahu was actually restrained here by Trump, at least by the end. This morning it was clear that Trump was pissed off at both Iran and Israel and was even specifically posting on Truth Social telling Israel to stop its planes from hitting any high-value targets today, so Israel only hit a small radar station instead. Clearly in the beginning Israel had the shackles off to do what they wanted, of course. In some ways Netanyahu is difficult for all presidents because he does what he wants and isn't polite about it. Back in Bill Clinton's presidency, when Netanyahu lectured him in the Oval Office about something, Clinton walked out and said to an aide, "who's the fucking superpower here?"
By all accounts Barack Obama and Bibi didn't get along, and even with Joe Biden, who liked Bibi and knew him for a long time, it's clear that Netanyahu was able to take advantage of the situation. Netanyahu has also angered Trump in the past, like when he congratulated Biden on winning the 2020 election before almost any other world leader.
So it's a mixed bag.
It seems to me that what you're saying illustrates that Netanyahu really does know what he's doing despite Trump saying otherwise, using colorful language. I mean, as things stand, we really could be dragged into another war. We're seeing a calm before the storm.
I don't think anyone knows the long-term yet here. But Iran does seem seriously weakened at the moment. The humiliation of Hezbollah, the fall of Assad in Syria as Iran's proxy, the ongoing war with Hamas (also an Iranian proxy), and now the revelation that Iran's defenses were just a paper tiger. But I don't think Trump wants a wider war and Iran's decision to retaliate in only the most gentle way imaginable implies this may actually be at an end, at least for now.
So perhaps talk of the maga civil war is premature?
I think this reflected real divides within Trump's base. JD Vance really did oppose the strikes, by all accounts, as did [Middle East envoy] Steve Witkoff and maybe others. Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth seemed to be in favor, not surprisingly. Some MAGA types like Marjorie Taylor Greene truly opposed it. Tulsi Gabbard opposed it. But many want America to use its military might for quick, hard things like this, regardless of the potential consequences. Trump has temporarily papered over those divisions, because he can sell this as a success (though polls show the use of force against Iran was unpopular).
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Trump's ignorance will never bend this arc of progress
Our nation’s founders embraced equality as a guiding principle in the Declaration of Independence with these words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
Abraham Lincoln gave meaning to the founders’ words while on the campaign trail in 1857; he countered the infamous Dred Scott decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared that persons imported from Africa, whether free or enslaved, were not American citizens.
Lincoln responded that the nation’s founders saw equality as an aspiration of American democracy:
“They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society … constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”
Critical steps in removing barriers to equality would be taken through constitutional change only after a bitterly fought Civil War. Three post-war amendments sought to make people of color in the US more equal, specifically:
- The 13th Amendment (1865) abolishing slavery;
- the 14th Amendment (1868) providing that all persons born or naturalized in the US, including formerly enslaved persons, are citizens and are guaranteed equal protection under the law; and
- the 15th Amendment (1870) specifying that US citizens shall not be denied the right to vote on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.
Major steps toward advancing equality were taken in the 20th century through Social Security (1935), Medicare (1965) and Medicaid (1965).
The Social Security Act equalizes access to income support for seniors, the unemployed, families with dependent children and people with disabilities. Seventy-million Americans rely on Social Security benefits each month, and nearly 590,000 Kansans receive monthly benefits through Social Security.
Medicare equalizes access to health care primarily for seniors and disabled persons, and Medicaid equalizes access to health care for poor and disabled persons. Seventy-million Americans are now enrolled in Medicare, and 70 million Americans are covered by Medicaid. More than 570,000 Kansans are enrolled in Medicare, and more than 350,000 Kansans are covered by Medicaid.
The nation has made historic commitments to equalize access to civil rights, specifically through:
- The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which guarantees access to public accommodations, education and employment for those discriminated against as a result of race, color, religion, sex or national origin;
- The Voting Rights Act of 1965, which assures access to the ballot box for those denied access as a result of race or color; and
- The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which provides access to employment, public accommodations, transportation and telecommunications for persons with disabilities.
President Donald Trump has declared war on equality as an aspiration for American democracy. He has twisted civil rights protections inside out: from safeguards intended to uphold the rights of people of color, women, and disabled persons to a protection for white men.
Trump has ordered that:
- Initiatives in diversity, equity, and inclusion are illegal and immoral and should be terminated both within and outside of government;
- Evidence of inequalities in the form of “disparate impact” be banned from use in determining discrimination against minority groups and people of color;
- The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission stop assisting state and local civil rights offices from investigating discrimination based on disparate impact; and
- The Department of Justice “modify, rescind, or move to conclude” consent decrees or agreements designed to eliminate racial discrimination in local police departments and as a result such measures were subsequently abandoned.
Trump appointees have turned civil rights offices in departments of Justice, Education, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission away from addressing claims of discrimination by people of color and women toward complaints against measures that advance diversity, equity, and inclusion for such groups. They have also used federal grants and contracts as leverage to force schools, colleges and universities to abandon initiatives related to diversity, equity and inclusion, whether federally funded or not, and terminate grants or contracts concerned with equity.
In Trump’s world, even the celebration of achievement of those from marginalized groups is viewed as diminishing white people.
Our nation’s drive for equality over two and a half centuries now permeates our government and institutions throughout society. Trump acts out of ignorance against our determination and may temporarily disrupt progress. I remain confident, however, that he can never bend the arc of history away from our aspiration for equality.
H. Edward Flentje is a professor emeritus at Wichita State University and formerly was director and professor in the Hugo Wall School of Public Affairs at the university. He has written and edited numerous publications, including most recently co-writing and co-editing “Reform and Reaction: The Arc of Kansas Politics.” Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
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We just got a deafening message — ignore it at your peril
I want to spend just a few minutes on the blockbuster New York City mayoral race, because everybody else seems to be doing it, and very few of them seem to be getting it right.
Zohran Mamdani flattened the establishment Democrat, Andrew Cuomo, in the city’s primary Tuesday because the vast majority of Americans on both sides of the political divide are sick and tired of establishment Democrats and Republicans.
Thanks for reading …
OK, a little more:
Look, the American electorate is angry, scared to death, and finally might be ready for a revolution. I mean, unless you weren’t paying attention to the recent No Kings marches, or that New York City mayoral primary …
Our angry, disenfranchised American electorate is how we got the grotesque Donald Trump again in November, and why Democrats need to start doing a helluva lot more listening to what people are actually saying and doing, and stop trotting out women-groping has-beens like Bill Clinton and Andrew Cuomo to prove my point.
It’s why Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer walks around with two black eyes and a 17-percent approval rating, and why Democrats have never been less popular.
And listen to me: I’m not here to lash out and beat up Democratic politicians because, like it or not, they are the only answer we have to stop Republicans’ sickening, Christo-fascist, authoritarian goose-step toward the end.
I am here to beat up the people in the party who still don’t think it is in some desperate need of radical change, and most of all: some new blood, like Mamdani.
Democrats didn’t lose in November because people didn’t turn out in numbers they hoped for. In fact, new data which reflects how people actually voted is showing us quite the opposite. They lost because, for the first time in memory, they are losing younger voters and minority voters in big numbers.
From the Pew Research Center:
Donald Trump won with a voter coalition that was more racially and ethnically diverse than in 2020 or 2016, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of the 2024 electorate. Young, nonwhite and irregular voters defected by the millions to Trump costing Kamala Harris both the Electoral College and the popular vote.
Add that to the working-class voters they have been hemorrhaging for years, and, well, “Houston, we have a problem.”
But sure, guys like Clinton, Cuomo and Schumer have an answer for all that, despite being the problem.
Serious question: Why won’t they just go away?
Predictably, we are already hearing from some center-Left Democrats and Republicans that Mamdani's progressive policies that would make life more affordable for the majority of Americans are too radical, but minority billionaires like the grotesque Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Trump controlling upwards of 50 percent of our nation's wealth aren’t.
This is absurd.
Why is this so damn hard to understand?
I am going to liberally borrow from a New York Times piece written Wednesday to lay out Mamdani’s '“radical” stances on just a few important issues, and why he, unlike other Democrats, was able to connect with younger voters Tuesday:
Affordability
“Every politician says New York is the greatest city on the globe,” Mr. Mamdani said in his first campaign ad, released eight months ago. “But what good is that if no one can afford to live here?”
So began a campaign tightly focused on the cost-of-living crisis plaguing the city. His platform, detailed on his campaign website, was simple: “New York is too expensive. Zohran will lower costs and make life easier.”
One of his ideas to tackle rising costs was to create a city-owned grocery store in each borough. The stores would operate on city-owned land or in city buildings, buy food wholesale and be exempt from property taxes, which would keep the cost of their offerings down, he said.
Experts say the logistics of such a plan are complex, but similar initiatives are already in place in other parts of the United States. Municipalities in Kansas and Wisconsin have operated similar models since 2020 and 2024, and Chicago and Atlanta are working on their own versions.
To fund his affordability initiatives, Mr. Mamdani plans to raise the corporate tax rate to 11.5 percent, which he says will create an additional $5 billion in revenue. He also plans to charge the wealthiest 1 percent of New Yorkers a flat 2 percent tax.Transportation
Among Mr. Mamdani’s most distinctive campaign promises is his vow to make city buses free. As a state legislator, Mr. Mamdani worked with Gov. Kathy Hochul to start a pilot program offering free fares on five bus routes for a limited period. (He later sought to expand the program, but the pilot was not renewed.)
Mr. Mamdani supports congestion pricing and has said the tolling program is succeeding in reducing smog and improving traffic in Lower Manhattan. Mr. Mamdani, who was raised in Manhattan and lives in Queens, told The New York Times earlier this month that he does not own a car. He rides the subway every day, he said, and often bikes.Housing
In outlining his vision for the city, Mr. Mamdani identified the high cost of housing as the leading reason that residents had left New York in recent years. His main campaign promise was to freeze rents for nearly one million New Yorkers via his appointments to the Rent Guidelines Board, which decides on rent increases for stabilized apartments.
He promised to triple the number of available affordable housing units, with 200,000 new homes to be built over the next decade. Mr. Mamdani also said he would double the amount of money the city currently spends to preserve public housing.Immigration
Mr. Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and is a naturalized U.S. citizen, has said that New York City should strengthen its sanctuary laws, which have come under attack during the Trump administration. On his campaign website, Mr. Mamdani pledged to bar Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers from city facilities while increasing legal support for immigrants being targeted and protecting their personal data.
“Trump’s ICE has adopted a policy of guilty until proven innocent with immigrant New Yorkers, disappearing New Yorkers from their homes without charge,” he told The Times in April. “Our city should fight for their release while defending the First Amendment and due process rights.”Child Care
The rising cost of child care is among the most pressing issues for parents in New York City. Mr. Mamdani has promised to make free child care available for children between six weeks and five years old and to deliver “baby baskets” to new parents that would include educational resources and necessities like diapers, baby wipes and swaddles.
For older children, Mr. Mamdani has suggested closing some streets outside schools to car traffic in an effort to reduce the risk of traffic fatalities and pollution affecting students. Mr. Mamdani has also proposed making City University of New York tuition free for all students.
Chilling, “radical” stuff, eh? Only if you are billionaire …
Republicans aren’t scared programs like these won’t work in places like New York, as much as they are terrified they will. THAT is why they are in a frenzy right now blasting them to smithereens. They did the same thing with programs like Obamacare, and social security.
We’ve already tackled why too many Democrats can’t get behind these new, common-sense measures: M-O-N-E-Y. I’d also add intellectual laziness, and a failure to communicate as major, secondary issues.
And nobody is saying the New York City fix is applicable to the fix so many people in the suburbs and our rural areas are in right now. The Democrat best able to articulate how they will address the local concerns of their furious electorate will win going away.
There isn’t a Democrat I have talked to who is satisfied with the direction of the party, but every one of them was at that big march two weeks ago. They want change, and they want it now.
If we can make it to the midterms — and at the pace Republicans are destroying everything in their sight that is a 50-50 proposition — there is going to be some serious bloodletting at the polls in 2026.
Bookmark that.
There will be no such thing as a “safe” seat anywhere, because America is not a safe country right now.
Nothing motivates voters more than fear and anger, and the politician who doesn’t understand that, better be prepared to find some real work.
(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.)
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From bad to worse: Trump's 3-pronged attack on working Americans
What’s the biggest single economic challenge facing working and middle-class Americans? Housing. Its supply isn’t nearly keeping up with demand. This means higher home prices and higher rents.
Data released by the Census Bureau this month show fewer housing starts in May than in any month since the 2020 pandemic.
So what’s Trump doing about the slump in new housing? Three things. All will worsen it.
1. He’s put a tariff on Canadian lumber, which is driving up the cost of a key component of new homes. Trump is considering even higher tariffs on wood materials including lumber.
2. He is pushing a bill through Congress that will explode the national debt, causing long-term interest rates to rise. It’s estimated that the additional debt will boost average annual mortgage payment by $1,450 by 2034 and boost the lifetime cost of the average mortgage by $44,000 in 2034. These added costs will also make houses and rental units less affordable.
3. He’s intent on deporting a large number of the people who construct homes — the people who do the excavating, roofing, carpentering, and installing of drywall and insulation. Undoubtedly, this too will drive up the costs of homes, making them less affordable.
You couldn’t come up with a worse housing policy if you tried.
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/
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Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Database’ is here—and it’s darker than you think
Sometime in the late 1980s, I was talking with a friend on my landline (the only kind of telephone we had then). We were discussing logistics for an upcoming demonstration against the Reagan administration’s support for the Contras fighting the elected government of Nicaragua. We agreed that, when our call was done, I’d call another friend, “Mary,” to update her on the plans. I hung up.
But before I could make the call, my phone rang.
“Hi, this is Mary,” my friend said.
“Mary! I was just about to call you.”
“But you did call me,” she said.
“No, I didn’t. My phone just rang, and you were on the other end.”
It was pretty creepy, but that was how surveillance worked in the days of wired telephone systems. Whoever was listening in, most likely someone from the local San Francisco Police Department, had inadvertently caused both lines to ring, while preparing to catch my coming conversation with Mary. Assuming they’d followed the law, arranging such surveillance would have involved a number of legal and technical steps, including securing a wiretapping warrant. They’d have had to create a physical connection between their phones and ours, most likely by plugging into the phone company’s central office.
Government surveillance has come a long way since then, both technically and in terms of what’s legally possible in Donald Trump’s United States and under the John Roberts Supreme Court.
All the President’s Tech
Government agencies have many ways of keeping tabs on us today. The advent of cellular technology has made it so much easier to track where any of us have been, simply by triangulating the locations of the cell towers our phones have pinged along the way.
If you watch police procedurals on television (which I admit to doing more than is probably good for me), you’ll see a panoply of surveillance methods on display, in addition to cellular location data. It used to be only on British shows that the police could routinely rely on video recordings as aids in crime solving. For some decades, the Brits were ahead of us in creating a surveillance society. Nowadays, though, even the detectives on U.S. shows like Law and Order SVU (heading for its 27th season) can usually locate a private video camera with a sightline to the crime and get its owner to turn over the digital data.
Facial recognition is another technology you’ll see on police dramas these days. It’s usually illustrated by a five-second interval during which dozens of faces appear briefly on a computer monitor. The sequence ends with a final triumphant flourish—a single face remaining on screen, behind a single flashing word: “MATCH.”
I have no idea whether the TV version is what real facial recognition software actually looks like. What I do know is that it’s already being used by federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the FBI, under the auspices of a company called Clearview, which is presently led by Hal Lambert, a big Trump fundraiser. As Mother Jones magazine reports, Clearview has “compiled a massive biometric database” containing “billions of images the company scraped off the internet and social media without the knowledge of the platforms or their users.” The system is now used by law enforcement agencies around the country, despite its well-documented inability to accurately recognize the faces of people with dark skin.
The old-fashioned art of tailing suspects on foot is rapidly giving way to surveillance by drone, while a multitude of cameras at intersections capture vehicle license plates. Fingerprinting has been around for well over a century, although it doesn’t actually work on everyone. Old people tend to lose the ridges that identify our unique prints, which explains why I can’t reliably use mine to open my phone or wake my computer. Maybe now’s my moment to embark on a life of crime? Probably not, though, as my face is still pretty recognizable, and that’s what the Transportation Safety Administration uses to make sure I’m really the person in the photo on my Real ID.
The second Trump administration is deploying all of these surveillance methods and more, as it seeks to extend its authoritarian power. And one key aspect of that project is the consolidation of the personal information of millions of people in a single place.
One Database to Rule Them All
It’s been thoroughly demonstrated that, despite its name, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has been anything but efficient in reducing “waste, fraud, and abuse” in federal spending. DOGE, however, has made significantly more progress in achieving a less well publicized but equally important objective: assembling into a single federal database the personal details of hundreds of millions of individuals who have contact with the government. Such a database would combine information from multiple agencies, including the IRS and the Social Security Administration. The process formally began in March 2025 when, as The New York Times reported, President Trump signed an executive order “calling for the federal government to share data across agencies.” Such a move, as Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Aaron Krolik note, raises “questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.”
In keeping with the fiction that DOGE’s work is primarily focused on cost cutting, Trump labeled his order “Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos.” That fiction provided the pretext for DOGE’s demands that agency after agency grant its minions free access to the most private data they had on citizens and noncitizens alike. As The Washington Post reported in early May:
The U.S. DOGE Service is racing to build a single centralized database with vast troves of personal information about millions of U.S. citizens and residents, a campaign that often violates or disregards core privacy and security protections meant to keep such information safe, government workers say.
Worse yet, it will probably be impossible to follow DOGE’s trail of technological mayhem. As the Post reporters explain:
The current administration and DOGE are bypassing many normal data-sharing processes, according to staffers across 10 federal agencies, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution. For instance, many agencies are no longer creating records of who accessed or changed information while granting some individuals broader authority over computer systems. DOGE staffers can add new accounts and disable automated tracking logs at several Cabinet departments, employees said. Officials who objected were fired, placed on leave or sidelined.
My own union, the American Federation of Teachers, joined a suit to prevent DOGE from seizing access to Social Security data and won in a series of lower courts. However, on May 31, in a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court (with the three liberal judges dissenting) temporarily lifted the block imposed by the lower courts until the case comes back to the justices for a decision on its merits. In the meantime, DOGE can have what it wants from the Social Security Administration. And even if the Supreme Court were ultimately to rule against DOGE, the damage will be done. As the president of El Salvador said in response to an entirely different court ruling, “Oopsie. Too late.”
Musk’s Pal Peter Thiel—and Palantir
Anyone who’s ever worked with a database, even one with only a few thousand records, knows how hard it is to keep it organized and clean. There’s the problem of duplicate records (multiple versions of the same person or other items). And that’s nothing compared to the problem of combining information from multiple sources. Even the names of the places where data goes (“fields”) will differ from one base to another. The very structures of the databases and how records are linked together (“relationships”) will differ, too. All of this makes combining and maintaining databases a messy and confusing business. Now imagine trying to combine dozens of idiosyncratically constructed ones with information stretching back decades into one single, clean, useful repository of information. It’s a daunting project.
And in the case of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Database, that’s where Peter Thiel’s company Palantir comes in. As The New York Times reported recently, at the urging of Elon Musk and DOGE, Trump turned to Palantir to carry out the vision expressed in his March executive order mentioned above. In fact, according to the Times, “at least three DOGE members formerly worked at Palantir, while two others had worked at companies funded by Peter Thiel, an investor and a founder of Palantir.”
Palantir, named for the “seeing stones” described in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is already at work, providing its data platform Foundry to several parts of the government. According to the Times:
The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. (This does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.)
Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies—the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service—about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions.
Who is Peter Thiel, Palantir’s co-founder? In addition to being a friend of Musk’s, Thiel was an early Trump supporter among the tech elites of Silicon Valley, donating $1.25 million to his 2016 campaign. He is also credited with shaping the political career of Vice President JD Vance, from his campaign to become a senator to his selection as Trump’s running mate. Thiel is part of a rarified brotherhood of tech and crypto-currency billionaires who share a commitment to a particular project of world domination by a technological elite. (And if that sounds like the raw material for a crazy conspiracy theory, bear with me again here.) Thiel was also an early funder of Clearview, the facial recognition software mentioned earlier.
In hiring Palantir and turning our data over to the company, Trump makes himself a useful tool, along with Vance, in the service of Thiel’s vision—just as he has been to the machinations of Project 2025’s principal author Russell Vought, who has different, but no less creepy dreams of domination.
The Dark Enlightenment
Thiel and his elite tech bros, including Musk, Internet pioneer and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, and Clearview founder Hoan Ton-That, share a particular philosophy. Other believers include figures like fervent Trump supporter Steve Bannon and Vice President Vance. This explicitly anti-democratic worldview goes by various names, including the “neo-reactionary movement” and the “Dark Enlightenment.”
Its founder is a software developer and political blogger named Curtis Yarvin, who has advocated replacing a “failed” democratic system with an absolute monarchy. Describing the Dark Enlightenment in The Nation magazine in October 2022, Chris Lehman observed that, in his run for Senate, JD Vance had adopted “a key plank of [Yarvin’s] plan for post-democratic overhaul—the strongman plan to ‘retire all government employees, which goes by the jaunty mnemonic ‘RAGE.’” (Any similarity to Musk’s DOGE is probably not coincidental.)
So, what is the Dark Enlightenment? It’s the negative image of an important intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Enlightenment, whose principles formed, among other things, the basis for American democracy. These included such ideas as the fundamental equality of all human beings, the view that government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, and the existence of those “certain unalienable rights” mentioned in the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
The Dark Enlightenment explicitly opposes all of those and more. Lehman put it this way: “As Yarvin envisions it, RAGE is the great purge of the old operating system that clears the path for a more enlightened race of technocrats to seize power and launch the social order on its rational course toward information-driven self-realization.” That purge would necessarily produce “collateral casualties,” which would include “the nexus of pusillanimous yet all-powerful institutions Yarvin has dubbed ‘the Cathedral’—the universities, the elite media, and anything else that’s fallen prey to liberal perfidy.” Of course, we’ve already seen at least a partial realization of just such goals in Trump’s focused attacks on universities, journalists, and that collection of values described as diversity, equity, and inclusion.
On that last point, it should be noted that Yarvin and his followers also tended to be adherents of an “intellectual” current called “human biological diversity” championed by Steven Sailer, another Yarvin acolyte. That phrase has been appropriated by contemporary proponents of what used to be called eugenics, or scientific racism. It’s Charles Murray’s 1994 pseudo-scientific Bell Curve dressed up in high-flown pseudo-philosophy.
However, there’s more to the Dark Enlightenment than authoritarianism and racism. One stream, populated especially by Thiel and other tech bros, has an eschatology of sorts. This theology of the Earth’s end-times holds that elite humans will eventually (perhaps even surprisingly soon) achieve eternal life through physical communion with machines, greatly augmenting their capacities through artificial intelligence. That’s important to them because they’ve given up on the Earth. This planet is already too small and used up to sustain human life for long, they feel. Hence, our human destiny is instead to rule the stars. This is the theology underlying Elon Musk’s hunger for Mars. Anything that stands in the way of such a destiny must and shall be swept away on the tide of a tech bros future. (For an excellent explication of the full worldview shared by such would-be masters of the rest of us—and the rest of the universe as well—take a look at Adam Becker’s new book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity.)
Surveillance Everywhere?
Back in my own corner of the world, the San Francisco Police Department has come a long way since those ancient days of clumsy phone tapping. Recently, a cryptocurrency billionaire, Chris Larsen, gave the SFPD $9.4 million to upgrade its surveillance tech. They’ll use the money to outfit a new Real Time Investigation Center (RTIC) with all the latest toys. “We’re going to be covering the entire city with drones,” claimed RTIC representative Captain Thomas MacGuire. Imagine my joyful anticipation!
How should defenders of democracy respond to the coming reality of near-constant, real-time government surveillance? We can try to shrink and hide, of course, but that only does their job for them, by driving us into a useless underground. Instead, we should probably live as if everything we do, even in supposedly “secure” places (real and virtual), is visible to the Trump regime. Our response must be to oppose Trump’s onrushing version of American fascism as boldly and openly as we can. Yes, some of us will be harassed, imprisoned, or worse, but ultimately, the only answer to mass surveillance by those who want to be our overlords is open, mass defiance.
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Top ally's careless boast may doom Trump
While the long or immediate-term fallout from Trump’s decision to bomb Iran’s enriched uranium facilities remains to be seen, legal experts are still debating whether Trump’s conduct was Constitutional.
There are plenty of legal opinions on both sides. Here’s mine: No, it wasn’t, because there was no evidence that either the US or Israel faced an imminent threat; Israel announced that it had set back Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon by several years days before Trump jumped into the brawl. Three or four years is not “imminent” under anyone’s definition.
Worse, by unilaterally bombing a sovereign nation that had not attacked the US, despite the laudable goal of disarming a terrorist-supporting state, Trump has accelerated the US’ dangerous slide into authoritarianism.
The Founders intended for Congress, not the president, to declare war
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the power “To declare War.” In contrast, Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution names the president commander in chief of the armed forces. The point at which Art. I cedes to Art. II or vice versa, ie, the point at which a president needs congressional approval before launching military activity, can be grey and is fact-contingent.
To Constitutional originalists, who claim to hew to the original language, intent and meaning of the Constitution as it was written during the founding era, no, the Constitution does not authorize presidents to deploy military forces against foreign seas, soil, or sky, without advance congressional authorization.
Kermit Roosevelt, constitutional law expert at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, wrote, “The Constitution says that Congress has the power to declare war, and the records of the Constitutional Convention are pretty clear that the drafters did not want to give one person the power to take the United States into war. Presidents (can respond unilaterally) to attacks by using the military, but that’s not relevant to this situation because obviously we were not attacked. So the president was not supposed to be able to start a war without Congressional authorization. That’s pretty clear.”
The counter position
Well before the Iran attacks, Republicans in Congress had essentially rolled over for Trump by failing to push back meaningfully on his unprecedented power grabs at the expense of their own. As Senator Lisa Murkowski admitted, many Senators are genuinely afraid of Trump, too afraid to follow their own Constitutional oaths. Whether that fear is political intimidation—based on Trump’s promise to primary anyone who opposes him—or existential, given Trump’s explicit encouragement of political violence against anyone who opposes him, remains unclear.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s most reverential sycophants, has declared that Trump did not need Congress to send ordnance bombs to Iran. Appearing on NBC news right after the bombs fell, Graham claims Trump acted “within his Article II authority. Congress can declare war or cut off funding. We can’t be the commander in chief. You can’t have 535 commander in chiefs. If you don’t like what the president does, in terms of war, you can cut off the funding. All of these other military operations were lawful. He had all the authority he needs under the Constitution. They are wrong.”
The right assessment, according to House Speaker Mike Johnson, is whether the situation was so urgent the president calculated whether the “imminent danger outweighed the time it would take for Congress to act. The world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, which chants ‘Death to America,’ simply could not be allowed the opportunity to obtain and use nuclear weapons.”
Both positions would sound plausible, or at least not dangerous, if at any time there was any evidence of an “imminent danger.” Not only did Israel announce that it, alone, had bought several years with its own bombs, removing it from immediate harm, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence testified in March that intelligence assessed that there was no development of weapons-grade uranium in Iran. When asked about that assessment, Trump said, bluntly, “I don’t care what she said” and offered no countering facts or theories whatsoever.
What motivated Trump’s decision?
So what, then, did Trump care about before taking the extraordinary risk of entering the Middle East’s forever war? The timing suggests it wasn’t strategy. It was ego.
Trump pulled the trigger following two globally embarrassing events. His $45 million strongman military parade was an international joke outside of Fox News stations. Equally awful for a demagogue, Trump was roundly embarrassed at the G7 meeting while Netanyahu was enjoying extraordinary success in Iran.
In a widely under-reported story, Trump said he left the G7 early to “deal with” Israel, which apparently meant posting childish and impulsive warlock braggadocio on truth social. He beat his breast hard enough to signal Iran to move its 900 lb stash of enriched uranium, which put Israel—and us—in further danger, the outcome of which cannot yet be known.
The horrifyingly probable truth
Global press rejected Trump’s explanation for leaving the G7 early, reporting instead that he left early because the adults in the room refused to show him artificial deference. During the G7 opening press conference, Trump went on an inappropriate partisan tirade so bizarre that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney interrupted him and ended the press conference. The Italian Prime Minister was seen rolling eyes, presumably at Trump, and the world laughed at Trump’s petty insults against France’s Prime Minister Macron, of whom Trump appears to be jealous.
After all that, Trump tried to flex mob-boss strength to the press, announcing that the British Prime Minister had earned a trade framework protecting British trade because “I like them, that’s why. That’s their ultimate protection.” Those sound like words from a man who knows he's just been insulted by people he doesn’t like.
Humiliated on the global stage by both events, unwisely hidden from viewers at home by Fox News, Trump desperately needed to recast himself as a strongman for the rest of the world. Some have speculated with credible evidence that Trump resented watching Netanyahu get all the glory, especially after it became clear that Israel’s aggression against Iran had been spectacularly successful. On June 13, while Israel’s bombs were falling, Trump told New York Times reporter Helene Cooper that he still held his “America First,” ie, isolationist, perspective.
The next day, however, after a full day of watching Fox News lavish Netanyahu with praise, Trump changed his mind. Even though no new intelligence had come in, and Israel was already winning its fight, one official told Cooper that Trump’s shift in attitude started early the next morning when he woke up and watched Fox News. When he saw how Netanyahu was being praised as powerful and strategic, he wanted in on the action. Cooper noted that, “Israel was hitting all of these Iranian sites, it was taking out military commanders, nuclear scientists, and that was being presented on Fox as this huge victory. And (Trump) decided that he wanted a piece of it.”
In further support of this theory, Trump also started taking immediate credit for Israel’s successes. He claimed on June 17 in a truth social post that, “We” have taken control of Iran’s airspace,” and that a meeting with his national security advisers had cemented the decision to enter the war.
In close, this is one column in which I hope fervently to be wrong. The fallout from Trump’s unilateral and unconstitutional decision to bomb Iran may take months. It may take years.
Despite Iran agreeing to a ceasefire, only a moron would think “Death to America” Iranian mullahs will walk away and convert their 900 lbs of enriched uranium to candle wax. It’s virtually certain that they, or their terrorist proxies, will strike back when we least expect it.
If Trump visited this level of risk on Americans based on jealousy and his personal ego, we won’t survive his presidency.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
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Wake the hell up! Dems are driving me nuts by turning victory into crisis
Leave it to the Democratic Party to snatch existential crisis from the jaws of electoral victory.
The stunning success of 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, in the race for New York City mayor is causing anguish in the Democratic Party.
It’s one thing for Trump to call Mamdani “a 100% Communist Lunatic.” That’s to be expected from the vulgarian-in-chief. It’s another for Matt Bennett, co-founder of the centrist Democratic group Third Way, to warn that Mamdani’s “affiliation with the (Democratic Socialists of America) is very dangerous.”
Dangerous for whom? Bernie Sanders nearly won the Democratic primary for the 2016 presidential election after announcing he was a democratic socialist — and probably would have won had the Democratic National Committee not torpedoed him.
Lawrence Summers, treasury secretary under former Democratic President Barack Obama, says the New York City results make him “profoundly alarmed about the future of the (Democratic Party) and the country.”
Well, I’m profoundly alarmed, too — by just this kind of vacuous statement. If polls are to be believed, the current Democratic Party doesn’t have much of a future. Mamdani and other young politicians with the charisma to connect with the people and a willingness to take on corporate America and Wall Street may be the only way forward for the Democrats.
Nor has the mainstream media greeted Mamdani’s upset victory with much enthusiasm. The Associated Press writes that “the party’s more pragmatic wing cast the outcome as a serious setback in their quest to broaden Democrats’ appeal.”
Pragmatic wing? Since when has the corporate establishment of the Democratic Party distinguished itself by its pragmatism or its quest to broaden Democrats’ appeal? If it were pragmatic — in the sense of wanting to win elections and fire up the base — Democrats would not have lost the House, Senate, and presidency in 2024.
Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post editorializes that “Democrats should fear that [Mamdani] will discredit their next generation of party leaders, almost all of whom are better than this democratic socialist.”
Bezos — who controls the content of the Post’s editorial page as he sucks up to Trump and is now occupying vast swaths of Venice for his wedding with Lauren Sanchez — is not the most credible source of wisdom when it comes to the identity of the Democrats’ next generation of party leaders.
Not surprisingly, the Post criticizes Mamdani’s proposals for a 2 percent annual wealth tax on the richest 1 percent of New Yorkers and for increasing the state’s corporate tax rate from 7.25 percent to 11.5 percent: “Mamdani’s tax plans would spur a corporate exodus and drive more rich people out of town, undermining the tax base and making existing services harder to maintain.”
It’s the same argument we’ve heard for 40 years: If you raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy, you’ll drive them away — from your city, your state, your nation.
Rubbish. The reality is that if you invest in your people — in their skills, education, affordable child care, affordable elder care, and the infrastructure needed to link them together — they’ll be more productive, and their higher productivity will attract corporations (and the wealthy). A major way to afford all these things is to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy.
Mamdani is the corporate Democrat’s biggest nightmare — a young, charismatic politician winning over Democratic voters with an optimistic message centering on the cost of living. Putting together a multiethnic and multiracial coalition backed by a sprawling grassroots campaign that brings out enormous numbers of volunteers. Aiming to fund what average people need by taxing corporations and the rich.
Instead of wringing their hands over him, Democrats should follow his lead.
The largest force in American politics today is anti-establishment fury at a system rigged by big corporations and the wealthy to make them even richer and more powerful.
The corporate Democratic establishment — fat cats on Wall Street, corporate moguls in C-suites, billionaire backers of Democrats who will do their bidding, and the big-named Democrats who endorsed Andrew Cuomo — are the biggest problem for the party. They are standing in the way of it mounting a forceful response to Trump and providing a blueprint for the future.
Trump is killing the economy, fueling inflation with his tariffs, reducing the U.S. government to rubble, and destroying our relationships with our allies. He’s readying another giant tax cut for the wealthy and big corporations — this one to be financed by cuts in Medicaid, food stamps, and other things average people need, along with trillions more in national debt.
My old friend James Carville advises Democrats to “roll over and play dead.” With due respect to James, Democrats have been rolling over and playing dead too long. That’s one reason the nation is in the trouble we’re in.
If Democrats had had the guts years ago to condemn big money in politics, fight corporate welfare, and unrig a market that’s been rigged in favor of big corporations and the rich, Trump’s absurd bogeymen (the deep state, immigrants, socialists, trans people, diversity-equity-inclusion) wouldn’t have stood a chance.
My simple advice to congressional Democrats: Wake the hell up. According to polls, most Americans don’t want a Trump Republican budget that slashes Medicaid, food stamps, and child nutrition in order to make way for a giant tax cut mostly for the wealthy.
Most don’t want tariffs that drive up the prices they pay for food, gas, housing, and clothing. Most understand that tariffs are taxes paid by American consumers. Most don’t want a government of, by, and for billionaires. Most believe in democracy and the rule of law and don’t want Trump trampling on the Constitution, acts of Congress, and federal court orders.
Not only should Democrats be making noise about all this, they should stop relying on so-called “moderates” to speak for them. The nation is in clear and present danger. Democrats must stand up for American ideals at a time when the Trump regime is riding roughshod over them.
Democrats need Zohran Mamdani and other young politicians with fight in their hearts and rage in their bellies who can show that Trump is bad for working people and terrible for America and the world, and who can point the way forward.
We need a new generation of leaders who are the voices of democracy, freedom, social justice, and the rule of law. A new generation that gives meaning to the “we” in “we the people.”
Instead of fretting over Mamdani, the Democratic Party should embrace him as the future.
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/
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