Opinion
These Red Scare threats shows how low Trump will go
There are nearly 25 million naturalized citizens in the United States, accounting for 7 percent of the total population. Each and every one of them should be laser-focused on the Trump administration’s plans to denaturalize and deport as many of them as possible.
Denaturalization is the process by which the federal government revokes the citizenship of persons born outside of the country who became citizens by meeting the standards set by Congress in the Immigration and Nationality Act, which include swearing an oath of allegiance to the United States, and demonstrating “good moral character.”
Although denaturalization rates have declined over the past several decades, there is ample historical precedent for the revival U.S. President Donald Trump is planning. Between 1906 and 1967 — when the Supreme Court stepped in to tighten the legal requirements — more than 22,000 Americans were denaturalized.
Many were left-wing activists who were singled out during the two Red Scares of the 20th century. A common method to denaturalize them was to accuse them of fraud in taking their oaths of allegiance. In 1919, in perhaps the most famous case of all, the government deported Emma Goldman to Russia under the Anarchist Exclusion Act after revoking her naturalized citizenship. In the 1950s, the government tried but failed to denaturalize labor leader Harry Bridges.
On June 11, Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate wrote a memorandum that lists denaturalization as one of the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) top legal objectives to further Trump’s political goals. The memo was directed to the DOJ’s Civil Division, the department’s largest litigating component, which represents the United States and its executive agencies, members of Congress, cabinet officers, and other federal employees in thousands of legal matters each year. It instructed the division’s attorneys to “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence,” focusing on 10 broad categories of enforcement actions:
1. Cases against individuals who pose a potential danger to national security, including those with a nexus to terrorism, espionage, or the unlawful export from the United States of sensitive goods, technology, or information raising national security concerns;
2. Cases against individuals who engaged in torture, war crimes, or other human rights violations;
3. Cases against individuals who further or furthered the unlawful enterprise of criminal gangs, transnational criminal organizations, and drug cartels;
4. Cases against individuals who committed felonies that were not disclosed during the naturalization process;
5. Cases against individuals who committed human trafficking, sex offenses, or violent crimes;
6. Cases against individuals who engaged in various forms of financial fraud against the United States (including Paycheck Protection Program [“PPP”] loan fraud and Medicaid or Medicare fraud);
7. Cases against individuals who engaged in fraud against private individuals, funds, or corporations;
8. Cases against individuals who acquired naturalization through government corruption, fraud, or material misrepresentations, not otherwise addressed by another priority category;
9. Cases referred by a United States Attorney’s Office or in connection with pending criminal charges, if those charges do not fit within one of the other priorities; and
10. Any other cases referred to the Civil Division that the Division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue.
The first nine categories are generally consistent with the government’s existing powers, reflecting Trump’s penchant for exploiting the loopholes and weak links in current law whenever feasible.
The 10th category, however, is a wildcard that could expand those powers exponentially and lead to a Red Scare encore.
And as dark and dangerous as that possibility sounds, it may be perfectly legal.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 4 of the Constitution grants Congress the power to establish a “uniform Rule of Naturalization.” Pursuant to this authority, Congress passed the first naturalization act in 1790, and ratified additional acts well into the late 19th century. But it was not until the passage of the Naturalization Act of 1906 that Congress federalized naturalization procedures.
The act incorporated earlier race-based legislation that limited naturalization to white people and those with African origins. It also created the Bureau of Immigration Services, the precursor of the present-day U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency, which promulgated uniform application forms, and began the process of moving naturalization jurisdiction to the federal courts. (Prior to 1906, immigrants were able to apply for citizenship before any court of record, including state and municipal courts. In 1990, Congress shifted jurisdiction from the federal courts to the executive branch, where it remains to this day, although naturalization ceremonies are still conducted by federal district court judges.)
The Naturalization Act of 1906 was also the first federal law that provided for denaturalization, centered on individuals who had obtained citizenship by fraud, were racially ineligible, and lacked “good moral character.” The act was amended on several occasions, most notably in 1952 by the McCarthy-era McCarran-Walter Act, which added provisions for denaturalization based on activities deemed subversive or connected to communist or communist-front organizations.
Today’s denaturalization procedures are set forth in two sections of Title 8 of the U.S. Code. Section 1451 authorizes the Department of Justice to institute civil proceedings, alleging that citizenship was “illegally procured” or obtained “by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.” The section also mandates denaturalization for individuals who refuse to testify before a congressional committee concerning their alleged subversive activities in cases where they have been convicted of contempt for such refusals.
Section 1425 of Title 8 authorizes criminal prosecutions, making it a felony punishable by 25 years in prison to knowingly procure, “contrary to law, the naturalization of any person.” A conviction results in automatic denaturalization.
Once denaturalized under either section, a person returns to their immigration status before becoming a citizen, rendering them vulnerable to deportation.
It’s easy to see why Trump and his advisers have opted to emphasize civil denaturalization proceedings over criminal prosecutions. In civil cases, there is no right to a jury trial or court appointed counsel, and there is no statute of limitations. The standard of proof is also lower. According to the Supreme Court’s precedent decisions, to prevail, the government must present “clear, convincing, and unequivocal evidence” that the targeted individual obtained citizenship illegally or willfully misrepresented a material fact during the naturalization process. That is a rigorous test, but one far lower than the “beyond a reasonable” doubt standard for criminal prosecutions.
The first Trump administration attempted to make denaturalization a priority, launching an initiative dubbed “Second Look,” which built upon a similar Obama administration program called “Operation Janus” to identify alleged terrorists and fraudsters who had naturalized.
In the end, however, Trump 1.0 filed a mere 102 denaturalization cases, amounting to an annual rate higher than the 16 cases per year filed under former President Barack Obama, and eclipsing the total of 24 cases filed under former President Joe Biden, but still miniscule. This time around, Trump 2.0 is pledging to bring the resources of the entire DOJ civil division behind the effort, reviving the specter of mass denaturalization.
The Shumate memo had largely flown under the media’s radar until Trump started talking in early July about deporting former best bro Elon Musk and New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, and stripping comedian and longtime celebrity nemesis Rosie O’Donnell of her citizenship.
O’Donnell, who is seeking dual citizenship in Ireland, appears safe from Trump’s clutches as she was born in Commack, New York, and enjoys birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment. Even Trump’s January executive order attacking birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants would leave her unscathed.
Musk and Mamdani are another story, as both are naturalized citizens. Musk, born in South Africa, naturalized in 2002. Mamdani, born in Uganda to Indian parents, naturalized in 1998. Musk allegedly worked illegally in the U.S. in violation of his student visa after leaving Stanford University in 1995. Mamdani has been accused of posting comments on X quoting rap lyrics suggesting support for Hamas.
Even if Trump’s threats against O’Donnell, Musk, and Mamdani are basically performative, thousands of less affluent naturalized citizens will likely be caught up in the coming denaturalization dragnet. Millions more who are not targeted will be intimidated from exercising their First Amendment rights to free speech and full political engagement. The net result will be a society less diverse and less free for the vast majority, exactly what Donald Trump and his cohorts want.
- Bill Blum is a former California administrative law judge. As an attorney prior to becoming a judge, he was one of the state's best-known death-penalty litigators. He is also an award-winning writer and legal journalist, and the author of three popular legal thrillers published by Penguin/Putnam as well as scores of features and book reviews published in a broad array of magazines and newspapers. His non-fiction work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, ranging from Common Dreams and The Nation to the Los Angeles Times, the L.A. Weekly and Los Angeles Magazine.
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Here's why Trump can't stop the shift to electric cars
By Alan Jenn, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Davis.
The U.S. government is in full retreat from its efforts to make vehicles more fuel-efficient, which it has been waging, along with state governments, since the 1970s.
The latest move came on July 29, when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said it planned to rescind its landmark 2009 decision, known as the “endangerment finding,” that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare.
If that stands up in court and is not overruled by Congress, it would undo a key part of the long-standing effort to limit greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles.
As a scholar of how vehicle emissions contribute to climate change, I know that the science behind the endangerment finding hasn’t changed. If anything, the evidence has grown that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet and threatening people’s health and safety. Heat waves, flooding, sea-level rise and wildfires have only worsened in the decade and a half since the EPA’s ruling.
Regulations over the years have cut emissions from power generation, leaving transportation as the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.
The scientific community agrees that vehicle emissions are harmful and should be regulated. The public also agrees, and has indicated strong preferences for cars that pollute less, including both more efficient gas-burning vehicles and electric-powered ones. Consumers have also been drawn to electric vehicles thanks to other benefits such as performance, operation cost and innovative technologies.
That is why I believe the EPA’s move will not stop the public and commercial transition to electric vehicles, but it will make that shift harder, slower and more expensive for everyone.
Putting carmakers in a bind
The most recent EPA rule about vehicle emissions was finalized in 2024. It set emissions limits that can realistically only be met by a large-scale shift to electric vehicles.
Over the past decade and a half, automakers have been building up their capability to produce electric vehicles to meet these fleet requirements, and a combination of regulations such as California’s zero-emission-vehicle requirements have worked together to ensure customers can get their hands on EVs.
The zero-emission-vehicle rules require automakers to produce EVs for the California market, which in turn make it easier for the companies to meet their efficiency and emissions targets from the federal government. These collectively pressure automakers to provide a steady supply of electric vehicles to consumers.
The new EPA move would undo the 2024 EPA vehicle-emissions rule and other federal regulations that also limit emissions from vehicles, such as the heavy-duty vehicle emissions rule.
The possibility of a regulatory reversal puts automakers into a state of uncertainty. Legal challenges to the EPA’s shift are all but guaranteed, and the court process could take years.
For companies making decade-long investment decisions, regulatory stability matters more than short-term politics. Disrupting that stability undermines business planning, erodes investor confidence and sends conflicting signals to consumers and suppliers alike.
A slower roll
The Trump administration has taken other steps to make electric vehicles less attractive to carmakers and consumers.
The White House has already suspended key provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act that provided tax credits for purchasing EVs and halted a US$5 billion investment in a nationwide network of charging stations.
And Congress has retracted the federal waiver that allowed California to set its own, stricter emissions limits. In combination, these policies make it hard to buy and drive electric vehicles: Fewer, or no, financial incentives for consumers make the purchases more expensive, and fewer charging stations make travel planning more challenging.
Overturning the EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding would remove the legal basis for regulating climate pollution from vehicles altogether.
But U.S. consumer interest in electric vehicles has been growing, and automakers have already made massive investments to produce electric vehicles and their associated components in the U.S. — such as Hyundai’s EV factory in Georgia and Volkswagen’s Battery Engineering Lab in Tennessee.
Global markets, especially in Europe and China, are also moving decisively toward electrifying large proportions of the vehicles on the road. This move is helped in no small part due to aggressive regulation by their respective governments. The results speak for themselves: Sales of EVs in both the European Union and China have been growing rapidly.
But the pace of change matters. A slower rollout of clean vehicles means more cumulative emissions, more climate damage and more harm to public health.
The EPA’s proposal seeks to slow the shift to electric vehicles, removing incentives and raising costs — even though the market has shown that cleaner vehicles are viable, the public has shown interest, and the science has never been clearer. But even such a major policy change can’t stop the momentum of those trends.
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These heartless GOP cuts put my daughter's life in danger
In Minnesota and across the nation, hardworking families like mine are bracing for impact after our Republican members of Congress voted to cut spending on Medicaid by $1 trillion over the next decade.
As a result, 17 million Americans will have coverage ripped away from them, all for tax breaks whose biggest beneficiaries will be billionaires and big corporations.
The latest estimate reported by the Minnesota Reformer shows at least 140,000 Minnesotans will lose coverage. The consequences of this bill will be felt for years to come, but some of its worst provisions will take effect in a matter of months.
Families like mine rely on Medicaid to keep our children, and our loved ones, healthy.
Our family receives Medicaid for our 11 year old daughter. She has a primary immune deficiency as well as a tethered spinal cord. Her medication costs over $75,000 a year, which we could not afford on our own or with my husband’s insurance.
Medicaid helps my daughter maintain her health so she does not end up critically ill with severe infections. It also prevents hospital visits and allows her to remain in school. Medicaid also helps cover the costs to monitor her tethered spinal cord and provide her with life-changing physical therapy. Without it, she could be at risk of losing her ability to be mobile.
Medicaid has changed her life.
Starting in 2026, families in Minnesota will feel the full force of the severe health care cuts.
First, premiums and out-of-pocket costs will skyrocket for people who purchase their own health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, and many will lose coverage altogether due to miles of red tape.
Then, devastating cuts to Medicaid will begin to take effect. The savings are expected to come from pushing people off Medicaid through increasing eligibility verification. If we don’t vigilantly submit the correct paperwork, my daughter could lose her coverage.
At risk are hospitals whose patients are on Medicaid; seniors who need Medicaid for their nursing home care; and people fighting addiction or cancer.
Costs will skyrocket across the board: Minnesotans will be forced to travel further for maternity care and emergency rooms, face longer wait times due to hospital closures, and it will be harder for families to get covered and stay covered.
I fear for my daughter’s future — and for the millions of Minnesotans who rely on Medicaid to live. She did not ask for this. Nothing we did caused this. She was simply born with it. Both my husband and I are hard-working, tax-paying citizens that just happen to have a child with complex medical needs. For my daughter, this isn’t just about policy; it’s about survival. Without Medicaid, she loses access to the treatment that keeps her healthy, in school and full of life.
The damage will be felt in every corner of the country, including across Minnesota. In addition to people losing their health coverage, our local economy will suffer, with 18,000 jobs at risk in Minnesota due to these cuts.
Now that the bill is law, President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans fully own the consequences. They jammed it through despite the fact that the American people overwhelmingly disapprove of these cuts.
When our premiums spike and out-of-pocket costs soar, families like mine will remember their vote. When we have nowhere to go for treatment, we’ll remember their vote. When our coverage is ripped away, we’ll remember their vote. When the obituaries pile up because people can no longer afford the care they need to stay alive, we’ll remember their vote.
Congressional Republicans must answer for the fallout.
As a mother, I won’t “get over it” as Sen. Mitch McConnell suggests, and I beg you don’t either.
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Tweedledum and Tweedledumber: these two shameless GOP pols betray their state each day
Ohio Republican U.S. Sens. Bernie Moreno and Jon Husted both swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States and “bear true faith and allegiance to the same” before taking their seats. But their promised loyalty to the rule of law was quickly supplanted by unyielding loyalty to a twice-impeached felon with a vindictive streak.
It appears their unwavering commitment to “bear faith and allegiance” is first and foremost to Donald Trump. Obeyance without question.
They support and defend whatever he wants legislatively, regardless of consequences.
Moreno and Husted both approved massive Trump tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, businesses, and large corporations that will balloon our national debt by trillions while leaving behind or raising costs for millions of working families in Ohio and across America.
They voted for the “big beautiful” bill that overwhelmingly favors the richest 10 percent in the country while savagely gutting programs everyday families depend on from health care and food assistance to public safety programs.
The Ohio Republicans will dodge and weave about the severe ramifications of the wildly unpopular bill they enacted but rave over the “no taxes on tips” temporary program that will, in fact, result in little to no benefits for many workers.
Ohio’s GOP senators decided early on to singularly appease Donald Trump (and give lip service to constituents?) in straight party line votes on his flagship legislation (even if it cruelly defunds programs for Ohioans trying to make ends meet) and on whomever he nominates, regardless of quality or controversy.
For a minute last week, it seemed their slavish devotion would keep them in sweltering D.C. during the entire August recess. Trump demanded the Senate confirm his backlog of nominees, who “should NOT BE FORCED TO WAIT,” before adjourning.
Moreno and Husted had their blanket “yes” votes ready to go — but Senate Democrats suddenly grew a spine to thwart Trump’s ultimatum. Who knew? They conditioned approval for “historically bad nominees (who) deserve a historical level of scrutiny” on the release of congressionally appropriated funds (largely for the National Institutes of Health) illegally frozen by the White House.
Trump went into a tailspin on social media, telling Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer to “GO TO HELL.”
But the standoff went nowhere, and senators headed home without a deal and just a handful of confirmations.
Still, Moreno and Husted will always have bragging rights for their roles in confirming what is easily one of Trump’s most appalling picks for the federal judiciary. Both Ohio Republicans helped put Emil Bove, Trump’s former criminal defense attorney and so-called Justice Department “enforcer” of his retribution campaign, on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals — where Bove could conceivably review one of hundreds of lawsuits against the Trump administration. Where his impartiality would be a punchline in a bad joke.
Bove demonstrated total sycophancy to the president during his corrosive stint at the Justice Department.
Trump pardoned all the Jan. 6 insurrectionists criminally convicted for violently storming the U.S. Capitol. Bove complemented that depravity by personally firing Jan. 6 prosecutors (purely for political reasons) while echoing Trump’s assertion that their arduous case work was “a grave national injustice.”
Bove also called for the FBI agents who investigated the attack to be identified and fired. He ordered career prosecutors in New York to abruptly drop corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams in an apparent quid pro quo for Adams’s help in Trump’s immigration roundups. Stunned attorneys resigned in protest rather than “abdicate our legal and ethical obligations in favor of directions from Washington.”
Multiple whistleblowers came forward with corroborating accounts of Bove encouraging Department of Justice lawyers to defy court orders and intentionally mislead judges about administration policies. They warned Republican senators that Bove had lied during his confirmation hearing. Over 900 former DOJ prosecutors and dozens of former federal and state judges pleaded with senators to reject such a manifestly unfit nominee for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench.
Yet, instead of recoiling at all the red flags raised about Bove’s alleged misconduct, nearly every Senate Republican, including Ohio’s Tweedledee and Tweedledum, rewarded him with an appellate court judgeship.
Clearly, it was more crucial for them to be counted as unswerving Trump loyalists than to preserve the integrity of federal courts.
Federal judges must adhere to a code of ethics that requires them to “maintain and enforce high standards of conduct,” to “respect and comply with the law,” and, most importantly, to “not be swayed by partisan interests.”
A ton of evidence plainly showed Bove did not meet these minimum qualifications but Republican senators, like Moreno and Husted, pretended otherwise.
They surrendered their constitutional mandate to advise and consent and lined up behind a faithful Trump footsoldier.
By rushing to confirm Bove to a powerful circuit court — without bothering to hear from witnesses with substantiated testimony about his purported lawless behavior — every Senate Republican, save two, declared fealty to Trump over duty to protect the rule of law and an independent judiciary.
They betrayed their oath of office and those who naively expected more of their U.S. senators than to blindly execute Trump’s agenda — no questions asked.
Shame on you, Bernie Moreno and Jon Husted. Do better for your state and country.
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Trump's full-on freak out would be laughable—if it wasn't so terrifying
We watched it happen in Russia. We watched it happen in Hungary. Democracies, once imperfect but alive, were hollowed out from within by strongmen who declared emergencies, rewrote the rules, and convinced enough people that fear was freedom and corruption was strength.
We told ourselves it couldn’t happen here. That our guardrails were stronger. That our Constitution was invincible. But now, we stand where they once stood: at the jagged edge of the authoritarian cliff. The wind has picked up, the ground beneath us trembles, and the man leading us forward isn’t walking, he’s charging. Not because he wants to save America, but because he wants to rule it as an absolute autocrat.
Following his demand for investigation and prosecution of President Barack Obama, Donald Trump is now demanding the same against Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought criminal charges against him. While it’s possible this is theater to distract from Trump's involvement with Jeffrey Epstein and his underage victims, if Trump seriously follows through on either of these it’s a screaming red light that our democracy has failed.
When Trump sent active-duty Marines and federalized National Guard troops into Los Angeles last month — over the objections of California’s governor and LA’s mayor — it wasn’t because of a real emergency. It was political theater with live ammunition.
There were no riots, no mass violence, no breakdown of law enforcement. The immigration protests that had drawn thousands were peaceful. LAPD Chief Michel Moore and Gov. Gavin Newsom both made that clear.
But Trump wasn’t looking to solve a problem; he was looking to create one, and use it to justify an unconstitutional power grab. And he’s not done.
This is now the Trump formula:
- Manufacture a crisis.
- Declare an “emergency.”
- Seize powers the Constitution doesn’t grant.
- Bypass Congress.
- Bully or ignore the courts.
- Use masked, secret police and the military against your own residents.
- Send people to foreign concentration camps.
- Build concentration camps within the United States.
- Prosecute lawyers and judges.
- Assert control over universities.
- Merge corporate and state interests.
- Cow the media into silence about your corruption and crimes.
- Then call it all “law and order.”
The press largely treated the July 2025 LA deployment as a one-off. A headline here, a legal challenge there. But that wasn’t just another Trump overreach. This was a test run for a new kind of American autocracy.
And it’s not an uniquely American phenomenon. Trump is following the playbook used by Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Vladimir Putin in Russia, two men he openly admires, both of whom used fake emergencies to destroy their nations’ democracies from within.
It’s an old playbook, and yet we keep getting sucker-punched by it with every new Trump outrage.
Around the world — and now here at home — autocrats and aspiring dictators have discovered that the fastest way to consolidate power in a fragile democracy isn’t through the slow, messy process of persuasion or legislation: it’s through manufactured emergencies.
Crises that either don’t exist or are deliberately exaggerated, can be invoked to trigger “temporary” emergency powers that simply never get relinquished.
Increasingly, Americans are realizing that Putin, Orbán, and Trump are all reading from the same authoritarian script that Adolf Hitler first authored, and if we don’t recognize the pattern soon, we may find ourselves locked in Act III with no exit.
Let’s start with Putin. When he first came to power in 1999, Russia was still experimenting with post-Soviet democracy. That changed quickly. Within months, a series of apartment bombings in Russian cities — blamed on Chechen terrorists — killed hundreds and terrified the nation.
Putin used the attacks as a pretext to declare an emergency, launch a brutal war in Chechnya, and expand domestic surveillance. To this day, multiple journalists and former FSB agents, including poisoned whistleblower Alexander Litvinenko, have suggested the bombings were a false flag carried out by Russian intelligence to create a climate of fear and bolster Putin’s legitimacy.
Whether or not that’s true, the outcome is indisputable: emergency powers were invoked, independent media were crushed, and a cult of leadership emerged.
Putin never looked back. He’s since used invented and exaggerated crises — from “Nazi infiltration” in Ukraine to “foreign plots” at home — to justify censorship, surveillance, and the jailing and even murder of opposition leaders like Alexei Navalny.
Orbán in Hungary took a more methodical and less brutal — but nonetheless equally effective — approach. After returning to power in 2010, he undermined the judiciary, rewrote the constitution, and brought public broadcasting and most private media under government control. But it was the COVID-19 pandemic that gave him carte blanche.
In March 2020, Hungary’s parliament passed a law granting Orbán the “temporary” right to rule by decree without oversight. Critics and journalists who challenged his policies could be prosecuted for “spreading misinformation.” Civil society, universities, even businesses fell under tighter control.
The emergency powers were extended again and again, even after the pandemic subsided. By then, Orbán had packed the courts, gerrymandered elections, and created a self-perpetuating authoritarian regime with a democratic façade that included the absolute right for him to actually rule by decree.
And then he spoke to Republican groups at CPAC, both in Texas and when the conservative group held its meeting in Budapest, encouraging conservatives to do in America exactly what he had done in Hungary. His suggestions about seizing control of the media, shutting down universities, going after immigrants as a way of increasing political power, trashing the rights of queer people and women, and rigging election systems was greeted with a standing ovation in both cases.
Trump may lack Putin’s cunning or Orbán’s ideological discipline, but he shares their fundamental disdain for democracy and their love of unchecked power.
During his first term, Trump declared a phony “national emergency” at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2019 to redirect billions in military funding away from upgrading troop housing and toward his border wall project after Congress had refused to approve it.
This blatant abuse of the National Emergencies Act set a dangerous precedent: the president discovered he can now override Congress simply by saying the word “emergency.”
When Covid hit, Trump had an actual crisis on his hands, but he used it not to unify the country, but to divide it. He favored red states over blue ones in distributing supplies, mocked mask-wearers, and deliberately undermined Democratic governors. Worse, as reporting has shown, his inner circle believed using the virus could be “an effective political strategy” to hurt elected Democrats. Jared Kushner reportedly recommended Trump let the pandemic spread unchecked in Democratic-leaning states because, in its early days, it was “mostly affecting Black people” and largely killing “Blue-state voters.”
Now, in his second term, Trump is ramping up the authoritarian playbook. His allies have instituted reimplementation of Schedule F, a plan that has let him fire tens of thousands of career civil servants and replace them with loyalists and toadies.
He’s floated using the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against protestors, not because of any real uprising, but to suppress dissent and criminalize political opposition. Already, he’s stacked the Department of Justice with allies willing to prosecute his critics.
He’s fired or driven out independent voices at the EPA, CDC, DOD, VOA, NSA, CIA, and FBI, and there’s evidence that political litmus tests are being used for top appointments. He’s even demanding that the top generals in our military must submit to in-person interviews with him, presumably so he can see how willing they would be to turn their guns on the rest of us should he decide it’s come to that.
Trump has also continued insisting that “the 2020 and 2024 elections were rigged” despite his own win last year, a claim so bizarre it would be laughable if it weren’t so sinister. The message is clear: every election Republicans win is legitimate; every one they lose is fraudulent.
And either way, it’s an excuse to purge millions more from the voting rolls, make voting more difficult, and pass legislation to prevent millions of women from participating in our elections. This isn’t about winning or losing anymore: it’s about dismantling our democratic institutions altogether.
This is how it happens. Manufacture a crisis. Declare emergency powers. Undermine the courts, Congress, and the press. Rewrite the rules. Repeat until democracy becomes a hollow shell and the state exists solely to serve the men at the top and their billionaire supporters.
We’ve seen this story before. Putin rewrote the Russian constitution and declared himself president for life. Orbán turned Hungary into a one-party state masquerading as a democracy. And now Trump is trying to do the same thing here.
And just like in Russia and Hungary, the press is too often playing along, normalizing the abnormal, treating creeping authoritarianism as just another partisan squabble.
Which brings us to where the buck stops.
Democrats in Congress must stop dithering. They need to explicitly and loudly call out Trump’s abuse of emergency powers, and begin the work to repeal or radically reform the National Emergencies Act of 1976, which currently allows any president to rule by decree with shockingly little oversight. The Insurrection Act, last updated in 1871, must also be rewritten to limit unilateral use by the president without approval from Congress or the courts.
All that Democrats need to accomplish either one of these things is a small handful of Republicans willing to do the right thing. Perhaps this could happen with enough pressure from their Democratic colleagues and if enough of us reach out to them.
Meanwhile, the media must do its job. Stop framing this as a “Trump vs. the deep state” narrative or a clash of styles.
Today’s Republican Party under Trump’s iron-fisted rule has become an existential threat to our democratic republic. This isn’t about tax policy or tariffs; it’s about whether the president can declare himself and his party above the law, jail his opponents, and rule by fiat, all of which he is trying to do or proclaiming he will do right now.
The founders were clear-eyed about tyranny. They weren’t naïve idealists. They read Montesquieu, studied Caesar and Cromwell, and understood that the only bulwark against dictatorship is a functioning system of checks and balances. That’s why they built three co-equal branches, and gave each the power to check the other two. That’s why emergency powers were kept limited and subject to judicial review. They feared exactly the kind of consolidation of power that Trump is now pulling off.
We’re standing on the edge of the same cliff that Russia and Hungary have already fallen from. The only question left is whether our leaders — especially in the Democratic Party, but hopefully soon they’ll be joined by a few Republicans who still have some integrity — will find the courage to call this what it is, and whether our institutions will act before it’s too late.
If Congress doesn’t rein Trump in, if the courts don’t slap down his illegal deployments and other actions, if the press doesn’t wake up, we’re going to lose more than an election. We’re going to lose the Republic.
Because once a strongman fully seizes power, it never ends with just the “emergency” ending.
We’ve seen this play before, and we know how it ends. One false crisis at a time. One emergency decree after another. One judge silenced, one protest criminalized, one more power seized “for our own good.”
This is not just another news cycle. It’s not partisan noise. It is the moment when a nation decides whether to step back from the cliff or follow others into the abyss.
Russia fell. Hungary fell. Now the edge is beneath our feet. If we keep pretending not to see it, gravity will make the decision for us.
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The signs are clear: Trump's lackeys are out to destroy this key benefit
Despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s assurances that he will not touch Social Security (or Medicare or Medicaid for that matter), his war against Social Security marches on step by step.
Politico reported last week that “Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Wednesday framed the president’s new ‘Trump accounts’ as a transformative tool for long-term wealth building and a ‘backdoor for privatizing Social Security.’”
Not surprisingly, Bessent walked back his comments and Trump defenders put out statements pointing to Trump’s promises to defend Social Security.
While many are quite understandably focused on the macro level, the Trump administration is making it harder for Social Security beneficiaries to access their benefits. Last week, the Social Security Administration (SSA) announced that beneficiaries will not be able to perform simple tasks on the phone, such as change their address or check the status of their benefits. Instead, people are forced to go online to verify their identity or visit an already-overburdened Social Security field office.
All of this might seem familiar to you. Earlier this year, SSA announced similar rules only to have to back off after an uproar from Congress and advocacy groups. Guessing that this fleeting retreat offered them an opportunity, SSA put forth these similar rules in midsummer hoping that people were not paying attention.
Kathleen Romig and Devin O’Conner of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities offer some great perspective on this issue:
The Social Security Administration (SSA) is overwhelming its local offices by forcing millions more people to seek in-person service while cutting thousands of staff who provide that help. These offices, which primarily serve seniors, people with disabilities, and bereaved families, helped nearly 32 million visitors last year. But under a new policy set to take effect in August, beneficiaries will be forced to take millions of unnecessary trips to field offices, where they will face longer waits for appointments and slower processing times.
The Trump administration made no attempt to consult with members of Congress or advocacy groups. Instead, they simply put the notice in a technical note on the Office of Management and Budget website.
These proposed changes will hurt older and more vulnerable beneficiaries the hardest as they will be less likely to travel to a Social Security field office or have the internet skills and access to be able to verify their identity online. One wonders why SSA failed to send an email out to beneficiaries with these important changes, especially since the administration used email recently to tout the misleading “benefits” of the “Big Beautiful Bill.”
Like all the other changes that SSA has proposed, the rationale to limit beneficiaries’ ability to access their earned benefits is fraud. As I am sure you remember, earlier this year, the then-Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head Elon Musk proclaimed that there was widespread fraud in the Social Security System. Elaine Kamarck of the nonpartisan Brookings Institute points out that “claims of widespread fraud in Social Security were misleading, with fraud representing just 0.00625% of the annual budget, far less than what private companies like Mastercard or Visa would accept.”
Fortunately, there have been several Democrats who have spoken out in defense of Social Security.
Among them is Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, who has asked Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano “to provide data by August 11, including on the total number of calls received; details about the calls taken by an artificial intelligence tool — including the percentage of calls dropped, transferred, or ended without resolving the issue; the same details about the calls taken by a human customer service representative.”
We are only helpless if we accept Trump’s promises that he will not touch Social Security. Now is the time to turn anger into action. Speak up for Social Security. Everyone can do something. The Social Security benefits you save may be your own.
- Martin Burns was on the campaign trail for Harris-Walz in Pennsylvanian and North Carolina. He has worked as a congressional aide, journalist, and lobbyist and is a member of the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. and a member of the National Writers Union.
- Mary Liz Burns is financial education consultant and content creator focusing on personal finance topics including retirement decisions, maximizing Social Security, and managing debt. She is a certified financial behavior specialist® with an MBA specializing in financial psychology, and is based in Washington, D.C.
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Trump's all in on new rage baiting—there's just one big problem
It appears that I must have missed a memo recently from Woke‑Liberal Headquarters.
If I understand correctly, I was supposed to have melted down by now over an American Eagle ad featuring actress Sydney Sweeney. Something about my outrage over a beautiful woman with blonde hair and blue eyes making a joke about having “good jeans” — a play on “good genes.”
Now, don’t let it get out, but that strikes me as a rather clever script.
Suddenly, though, some of the Right’s great philosophers — Megyn Kelly, JD Vance, The Five and now, even the big guy — are themselves raging on the Cultural Warpath about widespread liberal hysteria over the ad.
I’m confused, but if I'm following this at all, my instructions called for a tantrum about the ad representing eugenics and sexual exploitation. I was also supposed to be scandalized over having discovered Sweeney is a registered Republican and likes to shoot guns at a range.
Those seem pretty weird things to get upset over. Worse still, I was directed to level charges that Sweeney is some kind of Nazi. That’s over the line.
Besides, Sweeney’s actual resume speaks just fine for her as a remarkably accomplished actress and film producer at 27. What’s to hate about her? I’m even straining to take offense at her appearance.
Still, the story has gotten my attention because she’s the new MAGA hero du jour. And patriots on the Right have risen up to seethe that I’m seething.
Trouble is, it’s not just me who has failed their woke duty to take up arms over Sweeney’s appearance and humor. As best as I can tell, the entire frenzy from the Left has mostly been invented — and certainly been exaggerated — by MAGA influencers so they could start a frenzy of their own.
Why would they want to do that? Oh right. They’re sick and tired of that Jeffrey Epstein scandal dogging Donald Trump every moment — and this is just their latest move to distract from it.
Got it. So while Trump kindly moved convicted sex predator Ghislaine Maxwell to a far more comfortable prison — and apparently is flirting with a pardon for her because he really might need to give her one — let’s just talk about Sydney.
This does not make me mad.
Back in reality world, I can find no evidence that any Democratic politician or serious leader has become all that triggered by Sweeney or the American Eagle ad. A professor wrote an op‑ed criticizing it and some folks on social media did as well.
It’s not that there shouldn’t be room for those voices or that they need be scorned. Academically, the subjects of race or sexuality in advertising are fair game — especially if they’re nuanced. But MAGA doesn’t do nuance.
There’s exponentially more rage reporting from the right than there was original sin, if you will, from the left. This perfect example of “cancel culture” had one defect: it was attributed to Democrats, not sourced from them.
Besides, there’s nothing organic about any of this. Consider this from AP News:
U.S. fashion retailer American Eagle Outfitters wanted to make a splash with its new advertising campaign starring 27-year-old actor Sydney Sweeney. The ad blitz included “clever, even provocative language” and was “definitely going to push buttons,” the company’s chief marketing officer told trade media outlets.
Okay, now I get it. This was designed to provoke all along. Well-played.
'So hot!' Don Jr. gushes over bizarre AI image of denim-clad dad AI -generated image of Donald Trump. (Donald Trump Jr's Instagram)
Sorry for not taking the bait, but I think this is a case of an advertising agency deserving a raise, seeing as how American Eagle just spiked. And a case of MAGA warriors deserving credit for diabolical deceit in lying about the purported outrage from liberals.
On the other hand, I still don’t want anyone thinking I’m afraid to take a bold stand on this burning issue that has caused so many tens of liberals nationally to work themselves into a tizzy. No snowflaking this one for me.
So, I will vote with my pocketbook. I’m announcing that I will not purchase any item of clothing for myself that has been modeled by Sydney Sweeney.
And if you want to think that’s because Ms. Sweeney looks quite good in everything and I look good in nothing — well, you’re just a reverse sexist pig. And an ageist.
For the record, mark me down as outraged. Just don’t ask me why.
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If Trump wins this court case it's game over for free speech
By Stephanie A. (Sam) Martin, Boise State University.
President Donald Trump is again attacking the American press – this time not with fiery rally speeches or by calling the media “the enemy of the people,” but through the courts.
Since the heat of the November 2024 election, and continuing into July, Trump has filed defamation lawsuits against 60 Minutes broadcaster CBS News and the Wall Street Journal. He has also sued the Des Moines Register for publishing a poll just before the 2024 election that Trump alleges exaggerated support for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and thus constituted election interference and fraud.
These are in addition to other lawsuits Trump filed against the news media during his first term and during his years out of office between 2021 and 2025.
At the heart of Trump’s complaints is a familiar refrain: The media is not only biased, but dishonest, corrupt and dangerous.
The president isn’t just upset about reporting on him he thinks is unfair. He wants to redefine what counts as libel and make it easier for public officials to sue for damages. A libel suit is a civil tort claim seeking damages when a person believes something false has been printed or broadcast about them and so harmed their reputation.
Redefining libel in this way would require overturning the Supreme Court’s 1964 ruling in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, one of the most important First Amendment legal rulings in American constitutional history
Trump made overturning Sullivan a talking point during his first campaign for president; his lawsuits now put that threat into action. And they raise the question: What happened in Sullivan, and why does it still matter?
What Sullivan was about
As chair of a public policy institute devoted to strengthening deliberative democracy, I have written two books about the media and the presidency, and another about media ethics. My research traces how news institutions shape civic life and why healthy democracies rely on free expression.
In 1960, the New York Times published a full-page advertisement titled “Heed Their Rising Voices”. The ad, which included an appeal for readers to send money in support of Martin Luther King Jr. and the movement against Jim Crow, described brutal and unjust treatment of Black students and protesters in Montgomery, Alabama. It also emphasized episodes of police violence against peaceful demonstrations.
The ad was not entirely accurate in its description of the behavior of either protesters or the police.
It claimed, for instance, that activists had sung “My Country ’Tis of Thee” on the steps of the state capitol during a rally, when they actually had sung the national anthem. It said that “truckloads of police armed with shotguns and tear-gas” had “ringed” a college campus, when the police had only been deployed nearby. And it asserted that King had been arrested seven times in Alabama, when the real number was four.
Though the ad did not identify any individual public officials by name, it disparaged the behavior of Montgomery police.
That’s where L.B. Sullivan came in.
As Montgomery’s police commissioner, he oversaw the police department. Sullivan claimed that because the ad maligned the conduct of law enforcement, it had implicitly defamed him. In 1960 in Alabama, a primary defense against libel was truth. But since there were mistakes in the ad, a truth defense could not be raised. Sullivan sued for damages, and an Alabama jury awarded him $500,000, equivalent to $5,450,000 in 2025.
The message to the press was clear: criticize Southern officials and risk being sued out of existence.
In fact, the Sullivan lawsuit was not an isolated incident, but part of a broader strategy. In addition to Sullivan, four other Montgomery officials filed suits against the Times.
In Birmingham, public officials filed seven libel lawsuits over Times reporter Harrison Salisbury’s trenchant reporting about racism in that city. The lawsuits helped push the Times to the edge of bankruptcy. Salisbury was even indicted for seditious libel and faced up to 21 years in prison.
Alabama officials also sued CBS, the Associated Press, the Saturday Evening Post and Ladies’ Home Journal – all for reporting on civil rights and the South’s brutal response.
Supreme Court decision
The jury’s verdict in favor of Sullivan was unanimously overturned by the Supreme Court in 1964.
Writing for the court, Justice William Brennan held that public officials cannot prevail in defamation lawsuits merely by showing that statements are false. Instead, they must prove such statements are made with “actual malice”. Actual malice means a reporter or press outlet knew their story was false or else acted with reckless disregard for the truth.
The decision set a high bar.
Before the ruling, the First Amendment’s protections for speech and the press didn’t offer much help to the press in libel cases.
After it, public officials who wanted to sue the press would have to prove “actual malice” — real, purposeful untruths that caused harm. Honest mistakes weren’t enough to prevail in such lawsuits. The court held that errors are inevitable in public debate and that protecting those mistakes is essential to keeping debate open and free.
In essence, the court ruling blocked government officials from suing for libel with ulterior motives.
King and other civil rights leaders relied on a strategy of nonviolent protest to expose injustice through public, visible actions.
When protesters were arrested, beaten or hosed in the streets, their goal was not chaos — it was clarity. They wanted the nation to see what Southern oppression looked like. For that, they needed press coverage.
If Sullivan’s lawsuit had succeeded, it could have bullied the press away from covering civil rights altogether. The Supreme Court recognized this danger.
Another key element of the court’s reasoning was its distinction between public officials and private citizens.
Elected leaders, the court said, can use mass media to defend themselves in ways ordinary people cannot.
“The public official certainly has equal if not greater access than most private citizens to media of communication,” Justice Brennan wrote in the Sullivan ruling.
Trump is a perfect example of this dynamic. He masterfully uses social media, rallies, televised interviews and impromptu remarks to push back. He doesn’t need the courts.
Giving public officials the power to sue over news stories they dislike could well create a chilling effect on the media that undermines government accountability and distorts public discourse.
“The theory of our Constitution is that every citizen may speak his mind and every newspaper express its view on matters of public concern and may not be barred from speaking or publishing because those in control of government think that what is said or written is unwise,” Brennan wrote.
“In a democratic society, one who assumes to act for the citizens in an executive, legislative, or judicial capacity must expect that his official acts will be commented upon and criticized.”
Why Sullivan still matters
The Sullivan ruling is more than a legal doctrine. It is a shared agreement about the kind of democracy Americans aspire to. It affirms a press duty to hold power to account, and a public right to hear facts and information that those in power want to suppress.
The ruling protects the right to criticize those in power and affirms that the press is not a nuisance, but an essential part of a functioning democracy. It ensures that political leaders cannot insulate themselves from scrutiny by silencing their critics through intimidation or litigation.
Trump’s lawsuits seek to undo these press protections. He presents himself as the victim of a dishonest press and hopes to use the legal system to punish those he perceives to be his detractors.
The decision in the Sullivan case reminds Americans that democracy doesn’t depend on leaders who feel comfortable. It depends on a public that is free to speak.
- Sam Martin, Ph.D. is the Frank and Bethine Church Endowed Chair of Public Affairs and Associate Professor at Boise State University. Her research focuses on political storytelling and civic identity. Martin has produced four books about American democracy including "Columns to Character: The Presidency and the Press in the Digital Age (2018) and "Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump" (2021).
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Lies, damn lies, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Texas Dems' fight against GOP cheats is just the tip of a terrifying iceberg
The Republican motto — since Nixon sabotaged LBJ‘s Vietnam peace negotiations and Reagan blew up Carter’s deal to get the Iranian hostages back — has been: “If you can’t win, cheat.”
As Republicans rush to redistrict/gerrymander Texas, if enough Dems leave town there won’t be a quorum so the redistricting can’t happen. Which is why Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was threatening to lock up Democratic lawmakers to prevent them from leaving the state.
Gov. Greg Abbott thought he had a pretty slick plan. Have Texas Republicans refuse to consider legislation funding aid to the people stricken by the recent disastrous, climate-change-fueled floods until after the state had been more severely gerrymandered. Because of massive FEMA cuts, those people are pretty desperate.
Calling his bluff on Sunday, Democrats fled the state to Illinois, where Gov. JB Pritzker offered sanctuary to the 51 Texas legislators in need of it.
Texas Democratic Caucus Chair Gene Wu said:
“Gov. Abbott has turned the victims of a historic tragedy into political hostages in his submission to Donald Trump. He is using an intentionally racist map to steal the voices of millions of Black and Latino Texans, all to execute a corrupt political deal. Apathy is complicity, and we will not be complicit in the silencing of hard-working communities who have spent decades fighting for the power that Trump wants to steal.”
But that’s just the smallest tip of the iceberg of election rigging that Trumpy Republicans are pushing all across the country. Sadly, because Democrats are not making a big deal nor being theatrical about it, the media is paying almost no attention to the number one way Republicans are rigging the next two elections.
If the Republican Party insists on invoking Abraham Lincoln’s name, they might want to pause and read something the man actually said. “The ballot is stronger than the bullet,” Lincoln famously declared a principle he fought an actual civil war to uphold. But today, the party that claims him as its founder is waging a different kind of war; not against slavery, but against democracy itself.
This time, their biggest weapon isn’t the bullet or even gerrymandering: it’s the purge.
From Georgia to New Jersey, from Congress to the courts, the GOP is in the middle of an all-out assault on the very foundation of American self-governance: the vote. And unlike Trump’s attempts to steal the 2020 election in full public view, this campaign is quieter, more technical, and far even more destructive.
In a breathtaking abuse of power, Trump’s Department of Justice — just eight days after he took the oath of office — began dismantling the legal safeguards meant to protect voters from being purged from the rolls.
Before Trump’s handpicked crony Pam Bondi — the former Florida AG who ignored Jeffrey Epstein for years — was even confirmed, Trump’s DOJ had already dropped a lawsuit challenging Virginia’s last-minute voter purge throwing massive numbers of people off the voting rolls. Then came Alabama. Then Kentucky.
This wasn’t just some small policy change; it was a purge. And these early moves were just the opening salvo.
By spring, Trump’s captive DOJ wasn’t even pretending anymore. It was openly threatening lawsuits and demanding statewide voter rolls under the flimsy pretext of “citizenship verification,” code for intimidating states into purging voters and making registration harder. At least 16 states have already been contacted, including by federal prosecutors, a deeply disturbing move, considering the DOJ has no legal role in administering elections.
The message couldn’t be clearer: this is about building the infrastructure to interfere with future elections, just as Trump demanded in 2020 before career DOJ officials stopped him.
Now, under his second regime, he’s making sure there’s no one left to say no. The hijacking of the DOJ is not just corrupt: it’s a full-scale assault on democracy, laying the legal groundwork to steal 2026 and 2028 in plain sight.
This is just one aspect of how the modern Republican Party has made voter suppression a central plank of its political strategy, and they’re counting on you not to notice until it’s too late.
To start with Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is often held up by mainstream media as the “reasonable Republican” who stood up to Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election. But scratch beneath that surface and you’ll find a man fully on board with the GOP’s long-standing war on voting rights.
This month, Raffensperger announced that his office is canceling the voter registrations of nearly 500,000 Georgians, one of the largest such purges in American history.
Half a million people, gone from the rolls with a bureaucratic keystroke in a state Trump only won by 115,100 in 2024 and lost by a bit over 11,000 in 2020.
That’s not protecting democracy. That’s blowing a hole in the side of the ship and hoping nobody notices the water pouring in.
Raffensperger claims this is about “cleaning” the voter rolls. But Greg Palast, who’s spent decades investigating voter suppression, showed years ago that this kind of mass purge disproportionately targets young people, people of color, and low-income Americans, the exact same groups that tend to vote Democratic.
In fact, in 2018, Palast uncovered that 340,134 voters were wrongly removed from Georgia’s rolls: people who hadn’t moved or died or become ineligible, but were still wiped out under the excuse of “list maintenance.” That purge likely cost Stacey Abrams the governor’s race. In 2020, it happened again and Trump may have lost anyway, but voter suppression certainly made it close.
Then BBC/Rolling Stone/Guardian reporter Greg Palast told us the truth about the 2024 election after going through the roughly 4 million voters who were purged just before that contest with the piece he wrote for this newsletter titled: “TRUMP LOST. Vote Suppression Won”:
“Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes.
“And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.”
Harris didn’t lose to Trump. She lost to the vote suppressors and the Democratic Party’s unwillingness to publicly raise a fuss about it or fight back by purging Republican voters in Blue states (a tactic that former Congressional Progressive Caucus Chairman Rep. Mark Pocan endorsed on my program last Friday).
Now, Raffensperger (pronounced “Raff-ens-purger”) wants to go even further. He wrote to Congress this month urging them to repeal the National Voter Registration Act, the 1993 “Motor Voter” law that explicitly says we have a “right to vote” and prevents states from aggressively purging voters without due process.
He wants to make it easier for Republican-controlled states to wipe voters off the rolls without having to follow even the most minimal of those pesky federal rules.
This is not an isolated case. This is part of a larger GOP strategy to quietly dismantle the machinery of voting rights under the guise of “election integrity.”
In Congress, Republicans recently held a hearing stacked with anti-voting extremists who pushed for weakening federal voting laws and expanding purges. And in New Jersey — not even a swing state — the RNC just filed a lawsuit demanding access to the state’s voter rolls and voting machine records, another front in their broader war to “find” nonexistent voter fraud and justify new crackdowns.
Why New Jersey? Because there’s a governor’s race this fall, and Republicans are desperate for a win they can spin into momentum.
This isn’t just about fraud; it’s also about fear. They know their policies are unpopular. They know the American majority doesn’t want forced birth, dirtier air, gutted Medicaid, book bans, billionaire tax breaks, the military in our streets, and an adjudicated fraudster and bribe-accepting rapist in the White House. So instead of changing their platform, they’re changing the rules of the game.
We’ve seen this playbook before. After the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, Republican-controlled states wasted no time enacting new voter ID laws, slashing polling places and drop boxes in Black neighborhoods, ending Sunday voting, and purging rolls en masse.
These weren’t reforms or even list-cleaning efforts. These were weapons, and they worked and continue to work.
The strategy is simple: create enough barriers to voting that millions of eligible Americans either don’t know they’ve been purged, or give up trying to fight their way through the red tape.
Even the Department of Justice, now fully politicized, is getting in on the act. They’ve reportedly sent letters to states demanding voter information, supposedly in search of “illegal voting.”
This is the same phony excuse used by Trump’s disbanded voter fraud commission in 2017 — which spent millions and didn’t find any voter fraud anywhere in America — and it’s just as baseless now as it was then.
But that doesn’t matter. The point is to discourage, intimidate, and overwhelm; to make voting feel difficult, risky, or futile.
Marc Elias, one of the few high-powered lawyers still fighting for democracy in the courts, put it plainly:
“Make no mistake: these efforts to make it easier to remove voters from the rolls are actively weakening our democracy.”
He’s right. We are watching, in real time, the intentional hollowing-out of our most sacred civic act that’s at the foundation of democracy: voting.
It’s not just that the GOP is unwilling to stand up for voting rights. It’s that they’re actively engineering our democracy’s collapse. Trump’s Justice Department just demanded voting information from Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Oklahoma, New Hampshire, New York, Utah, and Wisconsin.
They’re attacking our democracy itself; not openly, not with slogans, but with data files, database matching tricks, and lawsuits designed to strip you of your rights and your vote before you even realize what’s happened.
Abraham Lincoln said the ballot was stronger than the bullet. Ronald Reagan — a man I rarely quote favorably — once called voting “the crown jewel of American liberties.” But today’s Republican Party has betrayed both. They have traded Lincoln’s legacy for Trump’s lies and turned Reagan’s jewel into a cheap trinket sold off for power.
Thus, the New Civil War the GOP has declared on America is in a way reminiscent of the Old South’s Confederacy, although this time it isn’t being fought with bullets; it’s with ballots.
The 2025 elections and the 2026 midterms and beyond will be fought not just on the campaign trail, but at your county elections office, at your state legislature, and in your mailbox.
And if we don’t demand that our Democratic state officials gerrymander, purge, publicize, litigate, and employ every other legal method to counter this GOP assault on democracy, we may wake up one day soon and find that, like in Russia and Hungary, the ballot has become meaningless.
Our ancestors bled for the right to vote and have it count. Our enemies fear it. The only question left is will we — and elected Democrats — demand change loudly enough to provoke action before it’s too late?
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This massive corporate bonus reveals everything about Trump's America
Tesla announced on Monday that it’s granting additional shares to Elon Musk worth around $29 billion. Tesla’s board describes it as a “first step, ‘good faith’ payment” to Musk — even as Tesla continues to battle in court over reinstating an even bigger pay package that a Delaware judge struck down.
Why is this giant pay package necessary, you might ask, when Musk already holds 13 percent of the company, worth hundreds of billions?
It’s not as if Tesla is thriving and Musk has contributed to its profitability. In fact, Tesla’s sales and profit are falling and it’s losing market share. Tesla’s stock is now down about 20 percent for the year. The company hasn’t reported an increase in quarterly earnings since the third quarter of 2024.
Tesla’s downward profit spiral is mainly due to Musk’s involvement in right-wing politics, which has alienated many car buyers. Although Musk has officially left the Trump administration, he is still nosing around politics. He’s even talking about starting a third party.
And let’s be clear: His political power comes directly from his wealth. Tesla’s making him $29 billion wealthier arguably makes American politics $29 billion dirtier.
It’s not as if Musk needs the additional money. He’s already the world’s richest person, worth about $350 billion.
So why is Tesla’s board giving him a $29 billion raise?
Because Musk hinted last month that he wanted more shares in Tesla to prevent his ouster by “activist” shareholders. It was a “major concern,” he said on an earnings call with analysts.
But this excuse begs the question of why activist shareholders would want him ousted if he were doing such a good job at Tesla. The answer is he’s obviously not doing a good job, and he knows it.
Tesla’s directors aren’t exerting better control over Musk because the board is packed with Musk’s close friends and his brother. This is called a conflict of interest, people.
In fact, what Musk is doing to Tesla is a smaller version of what Trump is doing to America: fleecing it while running it into the ground.
And Tesla’s board’s response is a miniature version of the way congressional Republicans are responding to Trump: rubber-stamping whatever he wants.
Many Tesla shareholders, meanwhile, resemble Trump’s MAGA base. They’ve made a cult out of Musk and applaud anything that keeps him at Tesla despite his breathtakingly irresponsible performance as CEO.
Call it authoritarian capitalism.
- Robert Reich is a professor emeritus of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com
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Exclusive: A very important letter from President Donald J. Trump
Dear Undeserving Americans,
It was been many years since I have written you a Very Important Letter, but with all the good news out there right now, I thought it was important for you to hear from me again in this terrific forum of collateral damage, and disintegrating ideas.
I want to remind everybody who is new to reading my Very Important Letters that much like Presidents Jefferson, Franklin and Eisenhowzer before me, my words are terrifically eloquent, sometimes gigantic, and are best read slowly so that you can appreciate their meaning as much as I do.
So I will appreciate it in advance if you could stop doing whatever it is you are doing right now, and give me, your greatest president, all the time I deserve to read slowly on this fine morning. You will thank me for this when you’re done, so you are welcome in advance.
Before I get into all the tremendous things I have done for you since beginning my third term in office, I want to address these ergonomic and horrible job numbers that came out for no, good rotten reason Friday from a very nasty woman who used to work for the traitor, sleepy Joe Biden.
In addition to inexcusably looking like a complete dog in her dress, she has no idea what she is talking about. The economy has never been better in the entire history of America, and all the people I know have never had more money in their pockets. This is important because when all the people I know have money, that means the people they know have lots of money, too, and before you know it we all have lots of money to spend on things you are selling.
WE stimulate YOUR economy and you can thank us all — but mostly me — for that. This isn’t easy on us, and mostly me.
Why just the other day, I bought the tall kid who lives in New York with Melanie, a fancy train set. When I was told he had outgrown that kind of stuff, I bought him a strip club on Long Island.
I hear he is doing very well, and hope to see him during my next trip to the city. I will be bringing three suitcases full of two-dollar bills to stimulate the economy of the strip club. See how that works?
You are welcome in advance for me doing all that for you, for him, and for them. Oh, and let me tell ya, that kid has gotten tall. Not as tall as me yet, but still remarkably and tremendously tall.
So back to this terrible, terrible woman, who could never work in a strip club by the way, for putting out these sanctimonious job numbers yesterday. She obviously hates this country, and for as long as I am around she will never work again. And because of her horrible, disgusting numbers, I will now be the one reporting numbers like this for the foreseeable future, which will basically be a very, very long time because my eyesight is incredibly good as you can imagine, and can foresee many tremendous and not so tremendous things.
Why I’m still the only one who saw me winning the election in 2020.
You’d think I already had enough to do, but these numbers have to be just right, and I will take the time to make sure they are.
For now on, everything I say and report will be the truth, so that you don’t have to worry about it. As your overwhelming president, what is important is what I think is true, because I am really the only one who matters here or knows the truth. I know you appreciate it and worship me when I tell you things straight, whether they are true or not, so you are welcome for me being so straight with you when I could be crooked like Obama.
In addition to giving out all the terrific and sensational numbers we all like to hear, it will also streamline the government process for doing these kinds of things, and save the taxpayer, you, not me (because as you know, I don't pay taxes), lots, and lots of money. So you see I am doing this all for you, and you can thank me for that whenever you feel like it, but just as soon as possible so you don’t forget. Maybe right now.
You’re welcome.
You know, I really can’t believe nobody has thought of this terrific idea before, but I am glad it was me and I expect people will be talking about this for many years and probably centuries. It will be right up there with President Franklin discovering electricity while flying his kite on the White House lawn.
I’m still shocked he wasn’t electrocuted …
That’s a joke, you dummies. Laugh.
What isn’t a joke is all the sensational numbers I will be providing you in the future. You know these outdated elections we have in this country with all the broken down voting machines? Forgot about them. I will be presenting the numbers in the future.
If a result doesn’t sound right to me, I will give you a number that does, and it will be the only thing that really matters.
All numbers for now on will be revised to meet my incredibly high expectations.
I am hoping that if this all goes as planned, you will never have to vote again, and can take more time for yourselves and for me.
You’re welcome.
This will also make things easier for me, because sometimes I need to reward myself for all I have done for you. This isn’t fair to me, but I get it, you can’t think of me all the time, but you can never try hard enough.
I am always here for you, and for me, and plan to be for the next decade or so.
Speaking of making things easier for me, this morning I had another physical with my doctor who told me that my ankles had lost 10lbs. since the last time he checked on them.
This was obviously great news, because I’ve always had sensational ankles. I was always very proud of my ankles and thought they did a terrific job connecting my knees to my feet. Much better than average.
Anyway, after he told me my ankles had lost weight, he made kind of a sad noise.
I asked him why he was making sad noises after bringing me such joy that my ankles had lost weight, and he said, “Well, that’s the good news. The bad news is that you are still 322lbs.”
I told him that number didn’t sound right, especially after all the incredible, sensational work I had done in the state-of-the-arts gym at Mar-a-Lago, home to the fattest steaks and thinnest broads on the planet. Just the other day I walked a plank and bench-pressed my caddie.
So when my doctor insisted on telling me I weighed 322lbs., I fired him.
See how easy that is?
Just so you know, my number is 185lbs., and thanks to that, I’ve never felt better. Light as a feather, and such a weight off my broad shoulders, on which I carry the entire world like Atilla the Hun ...
Well, I’d like to stay here and keeping bringing you incredible numbers, but I have a hard-earned tee time this morning. I’ll be playing with Lindsey, who has become incredibly good at putting numbers on the scorecard that sound right to me.
But before I go, I want to say a prayer for Ghislaine Maxwell, who has been treated so, so terribly by our corrupt, lying, no-good, awful media.
This whole Epstein thing has been incredibly and terrifically hard on me as you can imagine. The guy was stealing girls from me, and now because he killed himself in prison I have to answer for all of it. I don’t know who the jackass was that was president when all this happened, but I’ll tell you what, he should hang like Mike Pence almost did.
Now they are going after Ghislaine who was babysitting all these girls that Jeffrey was stealing from me. Well, not on my watch they’re not. I expect her testimony will clear everything up. She can get a job at the tall kid’s strip joint, and I can go back to feeding everybody numbers that feel right to me.
This has all been so, so unfair to me.
Where was I? Oh yeah, a prayer …
“Dear Father in the artmost skies. Please bring they shepherds to look down on the flocks of people who walk this earth without sandals. See that their ankles don’t swell too much, and that they bring gold, crypto and mirth to thy cradle of wealth. In Moses’s name we ask that my commandments are heard, and that those who stray from the beast are struck down with lightning from the heavens. -Amen”
Sorry, if that wasn’t as powerful as my usual prayer, but I have spent more then enough time on you this morning, and you can thank me for that the very first chance you get.
You’re welcome.
May God bless the fruits on your plane.
-DONALD J. TRUMP
- (D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and in addition to finishing up this latest letter, finished 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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