Opinion
The GOP CDC assault began long before RFK's Senate car crash
By Jordan Miller, Teaching Professor of Public Health, Arizona State University.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), long considered the nation’s — if not the world’s — premier public health organization, is mired in a crisis that not only threatens Americans’ health but also its very survival as a leading public health institution.
The degree of this crisis was on full display during Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Sept. 4, 2025, testimony before the U.S. Senate.
In the hearing, Kennedy openly criticized CDC professionals’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic, saying “the people at CDC who oversaw that process, who put masks on our children, who closed our schools, are the people who will be leaving.”
Kennedy’s hearing came on the heels of a contentious week in which Kennedy fired the CDC director, Susan Monarez, spurring 12 members of the Senate Finance Committee — 11 Democrats and independent Bernie Sanders — to call on Kennedy to resign from his position.
At least four top CDC leaders resigned following Monarez’s ouster, citing pressure from Kennedy to depart from recommendations based on sound scientific evidence.
I am a teaching professor and public health professional. Like many of my colleagues, the disruption happening at the CDC in recent months has left me scrambling to find alternate credible sources of health information and feeling deeply concerned for the future of public health.
The CDC’s unraveling
These leadership shakeups come on the heels of months of targeted actions aimed at unraveling the CDC’s structure, function and leadership as it has existed for decades.
The turmoil began almost as soon as President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, when his administration enacted sweeping cuts to the CDC’s workforce that health experts broadly agree jeopardized its ability to respond to emerging health threats.
Trump used executive orders to limit CDC employees’ communication with the public and other external agencies, like the World Health Organization.
Within weeks, he ordered as much as 10 percent of the overall workforce to be cut.
Soon after, Kennedy — who was newly appointed by Trump — began undoing long-standing CDC institutions, like the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, replacing all 17 of its members in a move that was widely denounced by health experts.
Critics pointed to a lack of qualifications for the new committee members, with more than half never having published research on vaccinations and many having predetermined hostility toward vaccines.
In June, more than 20 authoritative organizations, including the National Medical Association and American Academy of Pediatrics, expressed serious concerns for the health impacts of overhauling the advisory committee.
Monarez’s removal
Public health leaders had cheered the July confirmation of Monarez as the CDC’s new director, seeing her nomination as a welcome relief to those who value evidence-based practice in public health. Monarez is an accomplished scientist and career public servant.
Many viewed her as a potential voice of scientific wisdom amid untrained officials appointed by Trump, who has a track record of policies that undermine public health and science.
In her role as acting director, to which she was appointed in January, Monarez had quietly presided over the wave of cuts to the CDC workforce and other moves that drastically reshaped the agency and weakened the country’s capacity to steward the nation’s health.
Yet Monarez had “red lines” that she would not cross: She would not fire CDC leadership, and she would not endorse vaccine policies that ran contrary to scientifically supported recommendations.
According to Monarez, Kennedy asked her to do both in an Aug. 27 meeting. When she refused, he asked her to resign.
Her lawyers pushed back, arguing that only the president had the authority to remove her, stating: “When CDC Director Susan Monarez refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts, she chose protecting the public over serving a political agenda. For that, she has been targeted.”
Ultimately, the White House made her dismissal official later that evening.
Agency in turmoil
Further exemplifying and deepening the crisis at the agency, on Aug. 8, a gunman who had expressed anger over COVID-19 vaccinations opened fire on CDC headquarters, killing a police officer.
Many health workers attributed this directly to misinformation spread by Kennedy. The shooting amplified tensions and made tangible the sense of threat under which the CDC has been operating over the tumultuous months since Trump’s second term began. One employee stated that “the CDC is crumbling.”
Public health experts, including former CDC directors, are sounding the alarm, speaking out about the precariousness of the agency’s position. Some are questioning whether the CDC can even survive.
Crisis of trust
Even before the most recent shock waves, Americans said they were losing trust and confidence in CDC guidance: In April, 44 percent of U.S. adults polled said that they will place less trust in CDC recommendations under the new leadership. This would undoubtedly undermine the U.S. response if the country faces another public health challenge requiring a rapid, coordinated response, like COVID-19.
In addition to installing new members on the vaccine advisory committee, Kennedy abruptly changed the recommendations for flu and COVID-19 vaccines without input from the CDC or the vaccine advisory committee, and contrary to data presented by CDC scientists.
Public health professionals and advocates are now warning the public that vaccine recommendations coming from the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices may not be trustworthy. They point to the lack of credibility in the review process for the new committee, the fact that members have made statements contrary to scientific evidence in the past, and failure to apply an evidence-to-recommendations framework as compromising factors. Critics of the committee even describe a lack of basic understanding of the science behind vaccines.
Health impacts are being felt in real time, with health care providers reporting confusion among parents as a result of the conflicting vaccine recommendations. Now, those who want to be vaccinated are facing barriers to access, with major retailers placing new limits on vaccine access in the face of federal pressure. This as vaccination rates were already declining, largely due to misinformation.
The end result is an environment in which the credibility of the CDC is in question because people are unsure whether recommendations made in the CDC’s name are coming from the science and scientists or from the politicians who are in charge.
Filling the gaps
Reputable organizations are working to fill the void created by the CDC’s precariousness and the fact that recommendations are now being made based on political will, rather than scientific evidence.
The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Gynecology have both released recommended vaccination schedules that, for the first time, diverge from CDC recommendations.
And medical organizations are discussing strategies that include giving more weight to their recommendations than the CDC’s and creating pathways for clinicians to obtain vaccines directly from manufacturers. These measures would create workarounds to compensate for CDC leadership voids.
Some states, including California, Oregon, Washington and New Mexico, are establishing their own guidance regarding vaccinations. Public health scientists and physicians are attempting to preserve data and surveillance systems that the Trump administration has been removing. But independent organizations may not be able to sustain this work without federal funding.
What’s at stake
As part of its crucial work in every facet of public health, the CDC oversees larger-scale operations, both nationally and globally, that cannot simply be handed off to states or individual organizations. Some public health responses — such as to infectious diseases and foodborne illnesses — must be coordinated at the national level in order to be effective, since health risks are shared across state borders.
In a health information space that is awash with misinformation, having accurate, reliable health statistics and evidence-based guidelines is essential for public health educators like me to know what information to share and how to design effective health programs. Doctors and other clinicians rely on disease tracking to know how best to approach treating patients presenting with infections. The COVID-19 pandemic made clear the importance of laboratory science, a unified emergency response and rapid distribution of effective vaccines to the public.
One of the strengths of the American system of governance is its ability to approach challenges – including public health – in a coordinated way, having a federal level of cooperation that unifies state-level efforts.
The CDC has been the nation’s preeminent public health institution for more than eight decades as a result of its vast reach and unparalleled expertise. Right now, it’s all sitting at a precarious edge.
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These new figures make it official: we're in a Trump jobs crash
This morning’s jobs report shows that Trump’s economy is experiencing a jobs crash.
When I say jobs crash, I mean that employers have essentially stopped hiring. Friday's report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the economy added only 22,000 jobs in August (relative to the normal monthly gain of 180,000 to 200,000).
The revised figures for June, based on added data, show that 13,000 jobs were lost that month. That’s the first net loss in monthly jobs since the start of the pandemic.
Trump blames Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve for not cutting interest rates sooner but that’s not the reason employers have stopped hiring.
They’ve stopped because the risk is too great.
Trump’s arbitrary, capricious, and mercurial decisions about tariffs and everything else that affects the economy have made it impossible for employers to make even modest predictions about the future. So they won’t hire.
Meanwhile, the Fed can’t cut interest rates much without risking more inflation.
Trump promised to reduce prices, but prices continue to rise. Blame Trump’s tariffs. Prices for wholesalers rose at the fastest pace in three years in July, and those wholesale prices are now being passed on to retailers and consumers.
Food prices are rising especially quickly. The prices of vegetables skyrocketed 40 percent in July. A recent Consumer Price Index report found electricity prices rising at double the rate of inflation, increasing 5.5 percent over the past year.
A jobs crash coupled with soaring prices is bad for everyone — including Republicans seeking to be reelected to Congress next year.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/
- Robert Reich's new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org.
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Trump's most maniacal sidekick is about to ruin Florida — and it's not groveling Ron
Florida announced plans this week to become the first state to end all vaccine mandates, INCLUDING FOR SCHOOLCHILDREN.
Read that again.
I had intended to write about the Epstein files today, and the incredibly brave survivors of alleged child rape, who gathered on Capitol Hill to tell their stories. They were there because it is beginning to look like our president who ran on releasing those files, instead has a starring role in them, and will do everything possible to make sure they never see the light of day.
That would generally would be a banner story. In a sane, just world, it would have the potential to end Donald Trump's presidency, and ultimately land him jail for the rest of his miserable life.
But because you hang around places like this and pay attention, you don’t need me to tell you that we are not living in a sane, just world.
Just how insane and unjust is the world? Consider that the possibility of the president being accused of sexual abusing underage women was by far only the second-biggest story of the day ...
Truth is, this vaccine news might be one of the most significant stories of the century, because of its gruesome ramifications on the future of our rattling civilization.
Bluntly: If Florida goes through with this death plan, it could potentially result in one of the largest losses of human life ever.
Look, vaccines have been a life-changing discovery, and one of mankind’s greatest achievements. The advent of vaccines has saved hundreds of millions of lives the past 100 years or so.
That we are reversing our thinking on the use of vaccines in America is almost too absurd to contemplate. The profound stupidity and danger this presents really can't be overstated.
MILLIONS of lives are at risk if Florida out-Floridas itself and actually puts this deranged plan into action.
We need only look at COVID to see this.
Despite what you’ll hear from many ghoulish, anti-life Republicans, millions of lives were saved thanks to COVID vaccines. Maybe even more startling, an estimated 317,000 lives in the United States alone would have been saved during the COVID outbreak had everybody just done their civic duty and gotten vaccinated.
If Florida goes ahead with this insane plan, just as sure as I am typing this, all kinds of otherwise preventable diseases will begin reappearing all over the place — measles and polio just to name a couple. And while our children will be most vulnerable, because Republicans never saw a kid whose life wasn’t worth jeopardizing, Florida’s huge population of retirees will also be under direct threat.
We will ALL be under threat.
Today’s gruesome news comes in the backdrop of the insane vaccine guidance being shoveled out to the American public by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., our secretary of Health and Human Services, who listens to everybody but professionals in the medical and scientists communities, ignores a century’s worth of vaccines’ positive results, and has been a vocal vaccine skeptic.
Last month, after Kennedy proudly announced the rollback of nearly $500 million in vaccine funding, I typed this:
“Instead of answers and more science and discovery to make sure we are ready for the next mass-medical emergency, Trump instead has inflicted us with this gruesome stray from the Kennedy dynasty, who is quickly becoming a one-man pandemic.”
Last week, Susan Monarez, the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was forced out by Captain Death less than one month into her job for refusing to go along with this maniac’s plans to end us.
Four other leading officials at the CDC resigned because they too had come under extreme pressure from the sickening Kennedy. One of those officials said Kennedy’s team asked him to “change studies that have been settled in the past” to fit Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views.
Yep, “change studies.” Just make stuff up. I mean, it’s only people’s lives we are talking about …
So who are the players down in the Sunset State, who are putting this latest death plan into action?
Let’s start with Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, the Florida surgeon general, who made the announcement standing beside the state’s grotesque and Trump-slobbering Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Ladapo is a COVID vaccine-denier. A quack. A nut. A complete moron.
And dangerous as hell.
He has associated with a group of whacko militants called “America’s Frontline Doctors,” which is led by Texas physician Stella Immanuel, who has put forth the theory out loud and often that sperm from alien or demon sexual visitations are responsible for much of what ails us.
With qualifications like that, there is a good chance Ladapo has the inside track to the 2028 Republican Presidential nomination …
In announcing what will henceforth be known as the “Florida Death Plan” Ladapo said this:
“Who am I to tell you what your child should put in their body?”
Who are YOU to tell us??? You are allegedly a doctor, sonny. Should we be going to an exterminator to get advice on medical issues?
Er … That actually might be advisable in Florida.
He added that the administration would be “working to end” all vaccine mandates, because “every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.”
I’m not making this up.
Not a single word about the lives vaccines have saved, just lies and conspiracy theories, because that is the Republican way in 2025.
And then, of course, there’s DeSantis himself. A dumb man’s idea of a smart person. The ultimate Florida Man. A guy, who says, “Watch this!” while playing with matches and gasoline, as is the case with this maniacal, evil vaccine plan.
While standing next to Ladapo with that beachball-sized smirk on his face, Trump’s willing punching bag announced that his wife, Casey DeSantis, will head the commission on the Florida Death Plan, because if we are going to kill hundreds of a thousands of children best we have a dreadfully unqualified ghoul doing it.
Her beaming husband, Ron, ended the press conference by bragging:
“We’ve already done a lot. I don’t think any state has come even close to what Florida has done.”
He’ll get no argument there.
- (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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This Dem bruiser punches back at Trump but only a team effort will achieve a TKO
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker isn’t pulling any punches. On Tuesday, he gave a speech calling out Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s fascist cosplay, their lies and distortions, and predicting federal troops will soon be on the streets of Chicago.
Pritzker came right out and said Trump is doing all this for his own wealth and power:
“None of this is about fighting crime or making Chicago safer. None of it. For Trump, it's about testing his power and producing a political drama to cover up for his corruption.”
Ominously, he added:
“Any rational person who has spent even the most minimal amount of time studying human history has to ask themselves one important question: Once they get the citizens of this nation comfortable with the current atrocities committed under the color of law, what comes next?”
Pretty much every time a nation tips toward authoritarianism — as America is doing today — there’s a strongman at the center of it.
The idea goes back at least to Thomas Carlyle, whose “Great Man” theory argued that history is the story of exceptional leaders whose charisma and force of will bent the times to their shape. From Napoleon to Hitler to Trump, we see the pattern over and over.
It’s no accident that Republicans have remade themselves into a cult built around one man whose sheer audacity and appetite for power dominates the news cycle and the national conversation. After all, as Malcolm X famously said, “A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything.” The GOP hasn’t stood for anything other than the interests of the morbidly rich for at least 44 years, so its base voters were sitting ducks for a demagogue with a good sales pitch.
It’s also no accident that Democrats appear, by contrast, weak and divided, a chorus without a soloist, trying to make an argument while their opponent simply shouts. In an age of television and social media this is an existential liability. If we’re going to stop today’s Trump-driven slide into fascism, Democrats must grapple directly with this reality and build an alternative form of charismatic leadership.
That does not mean mimicking Trump’s grotesque personality cult (although California Governor Gavin Newsom’s satire is spot-on and is working). The Democratic Party should not, and cannot, center itself around one authoritarian figure. But it does mean understanding that media is not neutral, that charisma matters, that the public imagination is moved more by spectacle and story than by policy papers.
If Democrats don’t field leaders who can seize the camera, hold attention, and embody a vision, then they’ll forever be fighting from behind while Trump and his enablers drown out every other sound.
Voters, after all, are human beings, not spreadsheets. They’re moved by the emotional gravity of people they trust, admire, or even fear. Republicans learned this long ago and built their machine around it. Democrats can no longer afford to pretend that calm reason, logic, and rational policies will carry the day without their own powerful messengers.
One way to answer this problem is to reject the premise that only one Great Man can command attention. Imagine instead a bench of great women and men, a shadow cabinet of governors, senators, and policy innovators who step into the spotlight issue by issue. Rather than waiting for one savior figure, Democrats could show the country that they have a team of giants ready to govern.
To show America not just one alternative to Trump but an entire government-in-waiting.
A practical way to operationalize this idea is to create a visible Democratic shadow cabinet, as I proposed back in May. In parliamentary systems, this is how opposition parties signal to the public that they are ready to govern: they line up ministers-in-waiting who mirror the actual cabinet and speak with authority on their issue areas.
Democrats could adapt this model by assigning leading governors and senators to clear portfolios and making them the public face of the fight.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren could take the economy, standing up every time Republicans peddle trickle-down nonsense. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer could own healthcare, drawing on her state's record of expanding coverage and protecting reproductive rights. Newsom could be the climate voice, touting California’s leadership on renewables and electric vehicles. Pritzker could hold the voting rights portfolio, a relentless reminder that democracy itself is under siege.
Each of these figures is already capable of commanding national attention, but the effect would multiply if the roles were coordinated and reinforced.
The press would know who to call on any issue, and Americans would see not a muddle of competing Democratic voices but a disciplined government-in-waiting.
Rapid responses, monthly press events, and consistent messaging would project competence and readiness in contrast to the chaos of Trumpism.
This is not just about communication strategy: it’s about showing the country that Democrats have the people, the policies, and the charisma to step in tomorrow if the public gives them the chance.
This idea is not unprecedented. In parliamentary systems, opposition parties have long organized “shadow cabinets” to show voters they’re ready to take power at a moment’s notice. In the UK, Labour and the Tories alike have named shadow ministers to every portfolio, each one responsible for criticizing the government and putting forward an alternative vision.
It works because it projects competence. Voters can see the depth of the bench, not just the figure at the top. In times of crisis, this has been decisive. When Winston Churchill rose to power, it was not only his charisma but the fact that the public knew there was a team of capable ministers around him that gave Britain confidence.
Democrats would do well to borrow this model and Americanize it. Instead of being a collection of individuals jostling for position, they could present themselves as a disciplined bloc with defined roles, each amplifying the other.
At the same time, Democrats must stop letting Washington gridlock define their image.
The truth is that blue states already govern some of the largest economies in the world. California, New York, Illinois, Washington, Michigan, and Massachusetts together represent a bloc of prosperity, innovation, and rights protection larger than most nations. By acting through interstate compacts and model laws, those states can prove that Democrats deliver even when Congress stalls.
Coordinated carbon markets, clean procurement policies, abortion shield laws, voting rights protections, and labor standards can all be advanced at the state level. This is how Canada built its national healthcare system, province by province until the federal government could no longer ignore it. It’s how the early American labor movement forced reforms onto the national stage.
Call it soft secession if you want, though the better term may be the Blue States Bloc. The message is simple: if Republicans sabotage governance in Washington, Democrats will show the country how it is done in the states. It’s strength, not retreat. It’s evidence, not just rhetoric.
This is where narrative judo becomes essential. Republicans — and the corporate media — paint Democrats as weak, divided, indecisive. Democrats must flip that story on its head.
They must say clearly: we lead together because we are a coalition, not a cult. They must remind Americans that our system was designed not for one man to dominate but for leaders to share power. They must repeat, over and over, that diversity is competence, that depth is resilience, that collective leadership is how democracy works.
Instead of apologizing for the absence of a single Great Man, Democrats can show that they have something better: a team of proven leaders, each charismatic in their own right, each capable of commanding attention when the issue is in their domain. This isn’t weakness; it’s the true antidote to authoritarianism.
History is filled with moments where the survival of democracy depended on whether its defenders could command attention with the same force as its enemies. In Weimar Germany, democrats ceded the stage to demagogues and paid the price. In Spain, anti-fascists failed to unify and lost to Franco.
In contrast, during the Maidan revolution in Ukraine, leaders rose from the crowd and became the visible face of resistance, embodying the movement in a way that gave courage to millions. We shouldn’t kid ourselves: Americans are living through the same sort of crisis. The question is whether Democrats can find the discipline to project strength and charisma in time.
And when the time comes to choose a presidential ticket in 2028, that choice should be the culmination of years of visible leadership, not a scramble at the last minute. A Pritzker-Newsom ticket, or some other pairing of governors who have already shown themselves as national executives-in-training, would make the case that Democrats are ready to scale up.
Their record in the states would become the national campaign platform. Jobs growth, climate leadership, healthcare expansion, protection of rights: all would be proof points. They wouldn’t have to argue in the abstract. They could simply say: “We already govern like a nation. Now we’ll do it for the whole country.”
None of this will happen by accident.
Democrats must choose to stop ceding the stage to Trump. They must stop assuming that reason alone will defeat spectacle. They must understand that media is the battlefield now, that charisma is not optional, that in an era of constant feeds and fragmented attention the messenger is as critical as the message.
And they must realize that the perception of weakness is fatal. Authoritarians thrive when their opponents look uncertain, divided, and unready. “Strongly worded letters” are fuel for them. The only way to blunt Trump’s charisma is with charisma of our own, wielded not by one savior but by a disciplined coalition that embodies both competence and passion.
Carlyle was wrong to think that history is only made by solitary Great Men. History is also made by movements, by coalitions, by generations who decide they will not be ruled by a tyrant.
But Carlyle was right about one thing: people follow leaders they can see and believe in. If Democrats want to save this republic from sliding into fascism, they must stop hiding their leaders and start elevating them, not in dribs and drabs but as a chorus of commanding voices.
Trump’s cult of personality isn’t the only way charisma can work. It can also be the charisma of democracy itself, embodied in leaders who respect the people, who work together, and who are ready to govern.
And they must begin now. Not in 2027 when the next campaign is already underway, not in 2028 when it’ll be too late, but today. Governors, senators, mayors, party leaders must convene, assign portfolios, step into the spotlight, and begin the disciplined work of shaping the public imagination.
Because if Democrats don’t seize this moment and fill the stage with our own chorus of leaders, Trump will fill it for us, and America will be left with nothing but the hollow echo of one man’s ambition.
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Trump's cult is horrific – but it contains the seeds of its own destruction
America is at risk of abandoning its founding principle of government, “by and for the people,” in favor of a system older than democracy itself: rule by one man.
Pretty much everybody understands that the United States and the old Soviet Union both had governments based on ideology or principle. The main notion of the US was expressed in the Declaration of Independence and has guided us toward what Lincoln called “a more perfect union” for 249 years:
“[T]hat all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
We call it democracy. It’s larger than any one president, any one Congress, any collection of Supreme Court justices or governors. It’s a foundational principle that’s held together by our Constitution and the laws we’ve passed over the years grounded in these core ideas.
For the Soviet Union, the idea was Marx’s, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” To accomplish this, they put together a single-party state that provided housing, medical care, food, employment, and education to every Soviet citizen; in exchange the populace was expected to work hard and never challenge the power or legitimacy of the state.
Everybody understood these basic structural differences. Both were governments being driven not by personalities but by philosophy.
Although one could argue that FDR and Stalin both had widespread support and, upon their deaths, left their nations shaken, neither was truly what you’d call a cult leader. Truman and Khruschev stepped in and each country kept humming along because both countries claimed guiding ideas larger then either of those men.
But there’s a third form of government that is rarely acknowledge in the American press or high school civics classes, except in history: rule by a popular strongman. When, on April 13, 1655, Louis XIV said, “L’état, c’est moi” (“The state is me” or “I am the state”) he summed up that perspective.
Saddam Hussein called it Ba’athism, but in reality he was the government of Iraq. Pol Pot called it communism, but in reality he was the government of Cambodia. Putin claims Russia is a democratic republic with a free-market economy, much like the US, but in reality he is the government of Russia.
From the earliest days of political science, scholars have warned of regimes where the ruler and the state become one and the same, something political scientists call a “personalist dictatorship” or “personalist rule.” (Jim Stewartson does a deeper dive into this here.)
Niccolò Machiavelli, in The Prince (1513), observed that in such systems the survival of the government was entirely bound up in the survival of the man at the top: “In a principality where the people have no share in government, if the prince is destroyed, the state is likewise ruined.” He understood that once power is concentrated in a single figure, the institutions around him become little more than ornaments.
A century later, the French jurist Jean Bodin gave this reality a new name: personalist sovereignty. In his Six Books of the Republic (1576), Bodin defined it as “the absolute and perpetual power of a republic, which is vested in a prince or in the people.” When that sovereignty was vested in a prince, the fiction of shared governance disappeared: the prince was the republic.
Modern scholars have only refined this insight. Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, in their classic Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956), argued that “the essence of the totalitarian state is that power is monopolized by a single man or a small group, and that all institutions are subordinated to this monopoly.”
Political scientist Juan Linz later described this even more bluntly:
“Personalist rule emerges when power is concentrated in the hands of one individual who dominates not only the state apparatus but also the party, the military, and the economy.”
Whether the label is Ba’athism, communism, or “sovereign democracy,” the reality is the same. When one man becomes the state, when his survival is the survival of the regime, you are no longer looking at a republic, a democracy, or even a functioning ideology. You are looking at a personalist dictatorship, a form of government as old as Machiavelli’s princes and as modern as today’s autocrats.
This is what Donald Trump is trying to turn America into, using the template Putin, Hitler, and Viktor Orbán — all personalist dictators — provided him.
This explains why he’d fire people with genuine expertise, from the State Department to the CDC to our intelligence agencies and beyond, and replace them with incompetent toadies.
Their first loyalty in a democratic republic would be to the truth, to the people, to serving a “we society” nation with their best diplomacy, science, or spycraft.
But in a personalist dictatorship, the job of every person in the government isn’t to serve the citizens who provide the “consent of the governed” but, instead, to exclusively serve Dear Leader.
This explains the mass firings, the slavish Cabinet meetings where Trump’s toadies slobber all over him, and the casual lies that are routinely told by the White House press office and senior Republican officials. It tells us why Republican members of the House and Senate only speak up for principle when they’re willing to also abandon their reelection plans.
It also explains the fragility of our current government, given Trump’s age and poor state of health.
When nations run of, by, and for Dear Leader lose that leader, the result is typically chaos and a major change in that form of government, unless the leader has first so successfully co-opted the entirety of the state systems that they’ll continue following the corrupt structures Dear Leader had put into place.
When a democracy loses a leader, in other words, the system continues. But when a personalist dictatorship loses its strongman, the system shatters.
Franco ran a personalist dictatorship in Spain right up until 1975, when he died and democracy returned to that European nation. Although defeat in war took them down, the loss of Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo all signaled political transformations in Germany, Italy, and Japan. The same was true of Hussein’s Iraq and Gaddafi’s Libya, although their removals left power vacuums that led to arguably worse forms of government as opportunists and predators stepped in to fill the void.
Understanding these dynamics should inform Democrats and the few remaining Republicans who haven’t pledged their entire loyalty to Trump and Trumpism. The only true north of his reign has been self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement, things that require cult-leader-level charisma to maintain, so if Trump suffers death or incapacity before his term is out the power vacuum will be massive.
Already, Republicans are jockeying for the position of inheritor of the MAGA crown in an effort to replicate Trump’s one-man rule. JD Vance is assuring us he’s had plenty of “on the job training.” Marco Rubio is trying to play the statesman on the international stage, although Trump keeps sabotaging his efforts, from bringing peace to Ukraine to preventing India from dumping America in favor of an alliance with China and Russia.
Other opportunists and hangers-on, from Ted Cruz to Steve Bannon to Tom Cotton, are trying to position themselves as rightwing power brokers, although given how completely the Party has sold out to America’s rightwing billionaires and Middle Eastern autocrats, the final decisions about the fate and future of the leadership of the GOP will probably be made by a handful of morbidly rich men.
Democrats, meanwhile, are learning the lesson of fighting fire with fire, in this case the need for a “big” personality to take on the massive cult following — among the Republican base and within our now-corrupted government institutions — Trump has created. This is why Gavin Newsom and JB Pritzker are getting such traction: both are punching back at the bully.
And they’re probably right about the way they’re going about it. In this era where spectacle and outrage have replace newsworthiness as driving forces propelled by social media, search site, and news site algorithms, it’s going to take a big personality to take down Trump or his successors. Somebody who can dominate the news cycle day after day while pounding a pro-democracy, anti-authoritarian message.
We’ve seen this in America before. When the GOP destroyed the economy with the Republican Great Depression, the huge personality of FDR stepped up and used the force of his own personal charisma and magnetism to put the nation back on track. Republicans squealed that FDR was “imposing socialism,” but he largely ignored them and focused on what was best for average working-class Americans, literally creating the modern middle class.
Right now, the only organizing principles held by Republicans are fealty to Trump’s whims and their own personal greed (and that of their billionaire donors). “Conservative” principles of efficiency in government, defense of democracies around the world, and fiscal responsibility at home have all been thrown overboard in favor of raw power, corruption, and a willingness to burn down the institutions of the Republic if it keeps them in charge one more election cycle.
To the extent that Democrats can forcefully point this out and strong, genuinely progressive politicians can step up into leadership, there’s a huge opportunity here to reclaim political power and put America back on the small-d democratic path. Particularly if or when Trump is no longer a factor in the GOP’s political equation, leaving his Party lost in the wilderness.
If Democrats rise to that challenge, they can lead America back toward democracy and progress. But if they hesitate — or if too many cling to the illusion that Trumpism is just another policy debate — then history will record that the oldest democracy in the modern world fell not to an ideology, but to the vanity and greed of one broken man and an opposition that failed to understand and then meet the moment.
We can’t let that happen.
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This Democratic nobody just showed Chuck Schumer how to lead
I’m going to talk about Hakeem Jeffries’ recent appearance on CNN in which he made another one of his tone-deaf remarks about evil being a distraction from what’s important to the American people.
But before you say what I know you’re going to say, let me say he’s not hopeless yet! Leaders can change. They must be pushed. They must be made to hear the roar. Anyway, if Ken Martin can do it, so can Jeffries.
As you may know, Ken Martin is the head of the Democratic National Committee. Until recently, he was a dictionary squish. In Minnesota, a close friend of his was assassinated by a man who is clearly in thrall to Donald Trump. Yet when the opportunity came to blame Trump for creating the conditions for cold-blooded murder, Martin blinked. All he could do, in so many words, was ask why we all can’t get along.
But then something happened.
Martin grew a spine!
He was asked recently whether the Democrats should shut down the government in the next funding face-off if Trump keeps doing crimes (my word) like using “the Justice Department to go after his enemies or if he keeps National Guard troops on the streets?”
Martin said yes!
“You have a fascist in the White House,” he said. “We cannot be the only ones playing by the rules with a hand tied behind our back. That old playbook, the norms that used to have guardrails on our democracy and protect all of us, that doesn’t exist anymore.
“We gotta throw that playbook out the window, because the Republicans have.
“We cannot be the only party that’s playing by the rules anymore. That’s why I said this isn’t your grandfather’s Democratic Party, where you bring a pencil to a knife fight. We are bringing a bazooka to a knife fight. Donald Trump wants a showdown. The Republicans want a showdown. We’re gonna give it to them.”
This heel turn is new. Earlier this year, during the most recent funding showdown, Chuck Schumer said a handful of Senate Democrats would vote with the GOP to keep the government running, even though they knew the president would prosecute a totalitarian agenda. In essence, Schumer had argued, it was better to bargain with evil than fight it.
Now Martin is saying: “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
And that fighting spirit is almost certainly the consequence of traveling the country and listening to Democratic voters, who are tired of the Democrats asking the Republicans for permission to get along with the Republicans.
Jeffries can do the same. But we have to push him in more ways than one. Right now, the main focus is getting him to stop using the word “distraction.” Last Sunday, he again used that formulation on CNN.
“We should continue to support local law enforcement and not simply allow Donald Trump to play games with the lives of the American people as part of his effort to manufacture a crisis and create a distraction because he is deeply unpopular. The one big ugly bill is unpopular, ripping healthcare away from millions of Americans is unpopular, enacting tax breaks for their billionaire donors is deeply unpopular, and that’s why a lot of this is taking place.”
But I think “distraction” is only part of a larger problem.
Though he accuses Trump of diverting our attention away from the fact that he’s cheating us, Jeffries still accepts as valid the president’s “reasons” for doing things — in this case, commandeering local law enforcement and replacing police departments with US military personnel to patrol major cities, like Washington and Chicago.
The president’s “reasons”? Crime is so out of control that it’s tantamount to a national emergency demanding a military response.
That’s a lie.
We are seeing historically low levels of crime, especially violent crime.
But instead of calling out the lie, presenting the facts, and accusing Trump of attempting to grab power, Jeffries implicitly concedes that there’s some truth to it. He probably figures there’s no point in arguing the point and that he’ll make more hay by dismissing Trump’s power grab as a distraction before redirecting us to things like healthcare that he believes will be convincing to voters who believe Trump’s lies.
In other words, Jeffries is doing what Schumer was doing, which is what all centrist Democrats do: accept as valid the premise of the lies in order to make themselves seem moderate (especially not the “radical left Democrats” that Trump would have everyone believe), and as such, portrays themselves as honest brokers who care about “things that really matter to the American people.”
But when you accept as valid the premise of the lie, you forfeit the opportunity to confront it. You might even find yourself looking weak and on the defensive, as Jeffries did. When asked if people in Chicago are manufacturing concerns about crime, he sputtered and bumbled through the rest of the interview, spending his time trying to prove that his party cares about crime as much as Trump does, thus deepening the false impression that he cares at all. For God’s sake, the highest-ranking Democrat in the Congress looked like he was on trial!
Trump does not care whether there are high rates of crime in American cities. If there is, so be it. If there isn’t, he’ll lie about it. He’ll accuse the local cops of faking the data. (He’ll get his congressional goons to validate the allegation by launching an investigation into it.) What’s important isn’t the substance of the allegation but whether the allegation justifies what he wants to do. If it does, he’ll send in the troops. If it doesn’t, he’ll find some other rationale for his malign goals.
Facts don’t matter to Trump, because he doesn’t care what’s true. That seems to be the conclusion that Ken Martin finally came to. There is no point in searching for good faith in a president who has none. There is no point in compromising with a criminal when all a criminal sees in compromise is more reason to commit more crimes.
Go ahead, Martin seemed to say. Shut down the government.
But stay focused.
Because “playing by the rules” is the biggest distraction of them all.
Jeffries could prove hopeless, but not yet! As I said, if Ken Martin can make the journey from bargaining with evil to fighting it, he can too.
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Here's how blue states can devastate Trump's Confederacy
Don’t despair as authoritarianism marches around us. There is a thing that comes next. And it may come soon, as the realization spreads that blue states contribute the lion’s share of resources funding Trump’s mad theater of destruction.
As Democratic leaders consider how best to respond to a president’s unprecedented and unconstitutional efforts to harm them, they hold more cards than their attacker realizes.
Truth behind the ruse
By now everyone knows that Donald Trump is planning to deploy tanks and armed troops to occupy Democratic-controlled cities under one of two party lines: to “fight crime,” or to round up “illegals.”
But what some analysts have warned about since January is becoming clearer by the day: these reasons are pretextual. As ICEv rounds up migrant farm workers, food delivery men, and people who run stop signs, those arrests are building the scaffolding to let Trump stay in power and out of prison beyond 2028.
Governors in Tennessee, Texas, Ohio, Missouri and other red states are dispatching their own National Guard troops to support Trump's “crackdown on crime” outside their own borders, despite these states governing cities with murder rates twice as high as that of D.C. Given that they govern the worst per capita violent crime rates in the country, these self-proclaimed “states rights” champions obviously don’t give a damn as they prepare to invade their sovereign neighbors.
Trump, JD Vance and Stephen Miller are now explicitly threatening domestic political opponents — Democratic-run states and cities — with military occupation.
That is the real reason behind the “Big Beautiful Bill” that funded the world’s largest police state.
That is the real purpose behind $45 billion to build new concentration camps, and a 265% increase in ICE’s detention budget.
Miller just admitted as much on Fox News, saying, “The Democrat [sic] Party…is an entity devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gangbangers and illegal alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat [sic] Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.”
So there we have it. Democrats have been Trump’s true “enemy within” all along. Democrats are the intended targets of illegal occupying forces, concentration camps, and tank-mounted rifles in the streets.
If this doesn’t sound like a red declaration of civil war against half the nation, nothing does.
Trump now has a domestic military force funded with a budget 62 percent larger than the entire federal prison system, where 155,933 inmates are currently incarcerated, some of them for life. Trump is now spending more on ICE than most nations spend on their entire military budgets.
When the concentration camps are built, it’s not hard to piece out who will fill them.
Stop paying for incompetent cruelty
Democratic leaders are responding to an unprecedented situation, where a US president is literally attacking them for partisan reasons.
Acting outside the scope of his Article II powers, Trump is also withholding billions of dollars in previously appropriated funding for services and programs blue states have paid into and rely on. He’s also trying to dictate state law by withholding federal funding from states with policies he disagrees with, like DEI, climate programs, and “sanctuary” policies for undocumented but otherwise law abiding immigrants. Although several funding freezes have been halted by federal courts, a Trump-packed high court has reversed most of those rulings.
The good news is that blue states hold far more resources than red states. If they decide to give Trump a taste of his own unconstitutional medicine by withholding, escrowing, or otherwise diverting federal tax dollars, fighting fire with fire, Trump’s vindictive plans could backfire.
The concept of blue states as federal donor states and red states as federal welfare states is gaining traction.
In a brilliant essay, “It’s Time for Americans to Start Talking About Soft Secession,” the analyst Chris Armitage writes:
“Currently, Massachusetts sends $4,846 more per capita to the federal government than it gets back. New Jersey and Washington are in the same position, bleeding thousands per person annually. Over five years, New York alone contributed $142.6 billion more than it received. Meanwhile, red states pocket $1.24 for every dollar they send to Washington. Blue states are essentially paying red states to undermine democracy.”
Awareness of this funding disparity is spreading like fossil-fueled wildfires. Democratic-led states have already introduced legislation to allow states to withhold federal taxes if the federal government unconstitutionally refuses to fund them. Connecticut, Maryland, New York, and Wisconsin have introduced bills. California and Washington are not far behind.
Democratic leaders could also pass legislation and ordinances instructing state and municipal employees to alter their federal withholding forms to cut off federal revenue. They could encourage residents statewide to withhold federal taxes, or put them into escrow.
As Trump’s unconstitutional power grabs expand, comptroller creativity will spread.
Soft secession?
Congress controls the purse under the 16th Amendment. Under the Supremacy Clause, any state law designed to obstruct federal tax collection likely would be unconstitutional.
But consider that Trump and his supporters have already lit the Constitution on fire by withholding hundreds of billions of dollars Congress previously appropriated for education, health, climate, foreign aid, medical research and social services.
Consider that Trump’s unilateral passage of tariffs is also unconstitutional.
Ditto the deployment of armed forces against unarmed citizens.
Why should blue states stand on constitutional ceremony when the Trump-packed Supreme Court refuses to?
This essay is not written lightly. It’s a dramatic paradigm shift reflecting a house divided, and with it long-held assumptions about federalism, including taxation. Democrats pay disproportionate taxes because we assume it will promote the greater good. But when our resources are used not to help the common man, but to maim him, we must examine those assumptions.
The University of Toronto, former Yale historian Tim Snyder writes, poignantly:
“It is one thing to believe that federal taxes are worthwhile because they are being spent to redress inequalities in health care or education. It is another to watch the federal government spread disease and ignorance. It is one thing to pay taxes every year, in the knowledge that eventually the power in the White House will change every four or eight. It is another to be confronted with a president who talks about third terms. It is one thing to believe that the Constitution will ultimately preserve the country. It is another to recognize that those in power scorn it.”
A new kind of civil war is here, but Democrats did not invite it. When our backs are against the wall, facing the firing squad of a rogue president, complicit party, and corrupt high court determined to destroy us, we must act in our own self-interest. Freedom and our nation’s survival depend on it.
- 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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This shock move has shown how regular folks can cripple Trump
It’s a well-worn cliche in the legal world that prosecutors have so much clout in the grand jury room that they could indict a ham sandwich. The currency of this quote only soared in value when the man who first uttered it, a New York State top judge named Sol Wachtler, was subsequently indicted himself.
And maybe the US Justice Department still could indict a ham sandwich. But a salami hoagie from Subway is apparently a bridge too far.
I am talking, of course, about the now notorious Washington, DC case against the man commonly known as “Sandwich Guy”—a now-former Justice Department paralegal (yes, the irony) named Sean Dunn whose anger at the federal surge of law-enforcement officers backed by National Guard troops in the nation’s capital boiled over last month. Dunn verbally quarreled with agents and called them “fascists” before hurling that infamous hoagie at a Customs and Border Protection officer and then getting chased down, with all of it captured on video.
To many in DC and around the country who think the Trump regime’s ostensibly crime-fighting military operation in Washington is a dictatorial overreach, “Sandwich Guy” quickly became a resistance icon, his action celebrated in pop-up posters plastered around Washington.
To Trump’s Justice Department, Dunn’s sub attack and its disrespect for the authority of an authoritarian regime demanded the full hammer of the law. Federal prosecutors went before the DC grand jury seeking a felony indictment against their ex-coworker—a stiff penalty for an attack with a soft roll.
But then something remarkable—or it least it used to be remarkable before January or so—took place. The DC grand jury returned “no bill,” meaning that a majority of the panel (typically between 16 and 23 people) who listened to the Justice Department’s case against Dunn voted against indicting him. Prosecutors later conceded the defeat and said they are instead charging Dunn with a misdemeanor.
We don’t know why the grand jurors rejected a felony charge against Dunn, but we do know that this kind of stand by a grand jury wasn’t an isolated incident. Days earlier, the Justice Department had sought felony charges against a DC woman named Sidney Lori Reid, accused with interfering with federal agents’ arrest of two alleged gang members. Prosecutors claimed Reid, while filming the bust, got in the way of agents and then fought back aggressively when an immigration agent pushed her against a wall, and that a/; Federal Bureau of Investigation agent suffered a hand bruise in the ensuing scuffle.
In this case, prosecutors tried not once but three separate times to secure a felony indictment of Reid—each time rebuffed by the grand jury—before finally settling on a misdemeanor charge instead. “The US attorney can try to concoct crimes to quiet the people, but in our criminal justice system, the citizens have the last word,” Reid’s two lawyers said in a statement.
We should be inspired by these grand jurors in DC and Los Angeles to get more creative in our own daily lives in resisting American autocracy.
OK, you can blame the “woke,” left-leaning citizens of DC—US President Donald Trump got just 6.5% of the vote there in 2024—except that something similar reportedly happened some 3,000 miles away in Los Angeles earlier this year. There, the US Attorney’s office initially sought felony charges against 38 people related to unrest over stepped-up federal immigration raids, but the Los Angeles Times reported that only seven of the criminal complaints resulted in indictments, with the rest ending in dismissals or misdemeanors. The paper said the US attorney, Bill Essayli, was caught screaming at his subordinates after one felony case collapsed.
To borrow what Stephen Stills wrote after youth riots on LA’s Sunset Strip in 1966, there’s something happening here...
But what it is, ain’t exactly clear. Grand jury proceedings are secret—so much so that even Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at the height of their Watergate glory days struggled to lift that veil. In some of these cases, it’s possible—perhaps likely, given the inflated nature of some of the government’s allegations—that the jurors simply felt that the feds lacked evidence to make their case.
Or, it’s also possible that these everyday citizens engaged in a highly unique form of protest that a law professor might call “jury nullification.” This is essentially when a jury elects to clear a defendant not because of a lack of evidence that they did what the government accused them of doing, but because they believed the underlying law is unjust, or that the entire system is thoroughly corrupted.
As Paul Butler, Georgetown University law professor and now frequent MSNBC commentator, argued in a 2016 Washington Post op-ed, the notion of a jury nullification in America carries a rich history that includes the American Revolution, the Fugitive Slave Act, and the movement for LGBTQ rights. Citing aggressive prosecutions of Black Americans for minor offenses, Butler wrote then: “I encourage any juror who thinks the police or prosecutors have crossed the line in a particular case to refuse to convict.”
Nine years later, in jurisdictions that voted heavily against Trump in 2024—and which face armed troops and masked, unbadged federal agents in 2025—jurors seems to be engaged in a quiet, behind-closed-doors revolution against the regime.
Think about this. The right to justice by a jury of your peers—everyday citizens from your own community—is in essence the foundational building block of what over centuries would slowly become democracy. Britain’s Magna Carta—written in 1215 (!)—codified this notion as a defense against its overbearing lords more than 800 years ago, and the idea proved so powerful it has managed to survive the creation of our large institutions that provide Big Government but too often seem removed from the people.
The Trump regime’s push for an authoritarian United States might be the biggest story right now, but rivaling that is the growing gap between our cowardly and failing big institutions—Congress, the Supreme Court, Big Media, university administrations, etc., etc.—and the wisdom of regular folks.
For sure, there’s an unshakable cult of Trump supporters, but one of the many underreported stories of 2025 is the lingering faith in democratic ideals, fairness, equity, and diversity that still holds with the majority of the American people—despite everything that’s happened. We’ve seen it in Trump’s sky-high disapproval rating, and the public rejection of individual policies, and in protests like June’s “No Kings” event that brought a record-setting 5 million folks into the streets.
Yet feckless opposition from Beltway Democrats and an increasingly compromised news media also has the masses realizing they are on their own, still in search of workable outlets to challenge an increasingly repressive regime. Protests can be ignored or put down, while economic boycotts are promising but hard to organize. It’s the jury system, with eight centuries of tradition behind it, that has given the American people a last-chance outlet to say “no” to fascism.
We should be inspired by these grand jurors in DC and Los Angeles to get more creative in our own daily lives in resisting American autocracy. That would be a modern-day miracle, turning a loaf and some salami slices into a feast of democratic resistance.
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Trump's attacks on his liberal nemesis are projections of his own guilt
In between President Donald Trump’s attempted firing of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook and the successful termination of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the vengeful and retributive Commander-in-Chief and his team of lawless fascists have had a busy and chaotic time, harming the collective interests and well-being of the American people.
The Trump administration placed more than 30 Federal Emergency Management Agency employees on paid leave, in addition to 140 the month before, all because of an open letter they signed criticizing leaders for taking the agency back to the pre-Hurricane Katrina era.
Similarly, the Department of Homeland Security barred states and volunteer groups who receive federal funds, such as the Salvation Army and Red Cross, from providing services to undocumented immigrants.
Disaster aid groups warned that new contracts for awards and grants “would make it harder for nonprofits to help the most vulnerable Americans in the aftermath of a disaster.” No matter.
Last Friday, the White House Office of Management and Budget said Trump would cancel $4.9 billion in international aid already approved by Congress, under a little-tested theory called the “pocket recission,” without approval from lawmakers.
Trump is trying to wrest spending power from Congress, which enhances the likelihood that unless Democratic senators chicken out, there will be a government shutdown this month.
The OMB also said Trump was using his authority under the Impoundment Control Act to cancel billions of dollars “in woke and weaponized foreign aid money that violates the President’s America First priorities.”
Amid all this, I want to turn our attention to the lawless president’s repetitive use of the rule of law as a tool of intimidation against actual and fantasized enemies. I do so to capture one of Trump’s favored forms of victimizing others, as part of his modus operandi: retribution and normative abuse of power.
I use one of Trump’s long-time fantasized targets for slander to illustrate what George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four called the “up is down and down is up” reality of Big Brother totalitarianism. I’m referring to one of the world’s foremost philanthropists, now the subject of Trump’s fake threats to bring “serious charges against billionaire liberal donor George Soros and his ‘wonderful Radical Left son,” accusing them of wrongdoing without evidence.
I do so because of our need to appreciate, if not understand, Trump’s psychic need to defend himself from his life course of lawlessness and associated harms, such as those he is currently causing millions to suffer, both domestically and globally.
It is this mental condition from which Trump suffers that calls out for a therapeutic intervention — like using the 25th amendment to stop him conducting political-legal affairs in the way in which the “pot calls the kettle black.” That is to say, by psychologically projecting onto others that which he has already done or will do, with or without the help from his loyal Gestapo-like fascists.
‘Outrageous’ threats
Soros has been a long-time financial supporter of Democrats and liberal causes. He has been a vocal critic of Trump, saying during his first administration that the president “would like to establish a mafia state.”
Last Wednesday, 27 Aug., in a social media post, Trump contended that Soros and his son Alexander “should both be charged with RICO because of their support of Violent Protests, and much more, all throughout the United States of America.”
Remember, before returning to office this year, Trump and 18 co-conspirators – of whom three pled guilty — were indicted for RICO violations, for participating in efforts to steal the 2020 election from Joe Biden, culminating in the attack on Congress on January 6, 2021.
Like most of Trump’s lies, he was making up things to intimidate others who have a whole lot less money and power than Soros or his son.
Trump continued: “We’re not going to allow these lunatics to rip apart America anymore, never giving it so much as a chance to ‘BREATHE,’ and be FREE. Soros, and his group of psychopaths, have caused great damage to our Country!”
In his rambling and usually disconnected way Trump added, “That includes his Crazy, West Coast friends. Be careful, we’re watching you! Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Soros is a 95-year-old Holocaust survivor. He and his offspring would never back down or capitulate to Trump’s autocratic desires or schemes.
In response, the Open Society Foundations, the nonprofit funded by the Soros family, posted: “Threats against our founder and chair are outrageous. Our mission [has always been about advancing] human rights, justice, and democratic principles in the United States and around the world.”
Who is George Soros?
This alleged “radical,” a frequent target of far-right ire, who Trump has for years publicly defamed, was born in Budapest to a non-observant Jewish family in 1930. Surviving the Nazi occupation of Hungary, in 1947 he moved to England, where he received BSc and Master of Science degrees in philosophy from the London School of Economics.
Billionaire investor George Soros attends the Schumpeter Award in Vienna, Austria June 21, 2019. REUTERS/Lisi Niesner
An investor, hedge fund manager, author, and philanthropist, Soros is best known for founding Soros Fund management, the Open Society Foundations, and the Central European University, and in the late 1980s and early 90s influencing the fall of communism in Eastern Europe.
In the world of banking and finance, Soros formulated the general theory of reflexivity for capital markets, providing insights into asset bubbles and the market values of securities, as well as value discrepancies used for shorting and swapping stocks. Not surprisingly, he did quite well (or badly, depending on one’s financial standpoint), netting himself $1 billion as a result of his short sale of $10 billion of pounds sterling during the 1992 Black Wednesday currency crisis .
In 2025, Soros’s net worth is $7.5 billion, according to Forbes, even after giving away more than $32 billion to charitable causes, according to the International Business Times.
In the first quarter of the 21st century, no other individual has invested as much in criminal justice research, reform, and policy change. Key initiatives include:
- In 2014, the New York Times reported a combined investment of roughly $175 million in criminal justice and drug policy changes since 2004, plus another $62.5 million for marijuana legalization.
- In 2020, the Open Society Foundations pledged $220 million for racial justice, including funding for criminal justice reform and civic engagement opportunities.
- Soros has contributed to the campaigns of progressive prosecutors, such as $1.7 million provided for Larry Krasner's first campaign for Philadelphia district attorney.
- The Foundations have supported initiatives like the Campaign for Black Male Achievement, investing nearly $20 million in programs aimed at improving life outcomes for Black men and boys.
Who is Donald Trump?
According to Bloomberg, in 2017, when he first became president, Trump’s net worth was $2.3 billion: less than he received and/or inherited from his father, Fred, Sr., between 1949 and 1999. In a lifetime as a real-estate entrepreneur and businessman, Trump lost more than he made.
However, notwithstanding numerous emolument violations, including refusing to place the Trump Organization into a blind trust, by his return to power in 2025 he had more than doubled his net worth to $5.1 billion, primarily by way of investments in crypto currency and his Truth Social media company.
Unlike Soros’s founding of the well-respected, not-for-profit Central European University, which after 34 years is thriving in Austria, with students from more than 100 countries, Trump operated from 2005 to 2010 his for-profit, fraudulent Trump University. After the 2016 election, Trump agreed to pay $25 million to defrauded students who had paid up to $35,000 to enroll in sham programs.
Trump also founded the philanthropic Trump Foundation — which was forced to shut down in 2018, after public exposure of its “egregious pattern of illegality.’” Trump had to pay $2 million over misuse of funds. The foundation’s remaining $1.5 million was distributed to charitable organizations.
As previously mentioned, via initiatives such as the Campaign for Black Male Achievement, Soros has championed philanthropic giving to improve the lot of some of the most disadvantaged sectors of U.S. society, and thereby tackle some causes of crime.
In office, supposedly responsible for the administration of criminal justice, and criminal policy reform, Trump has claimed to defend “law and order,” while becoming the greatest de-funder of law enforcement in U.S. history.
For example, in April the Trump administration terminated 373 multi-year grants from the Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs, amounting to about $500 million and affecting 221 organizations in red and blue states and urban, suburban, and rural areas alike.
Sixty percent of these cuts had nothing to do with programs to encourage diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), the cited reason for such harsh action. Forty percent of the cuts had to do with reducing civil rights abuses by law enforcement: ending federal oversight of local policing, cancelling consent decrees meant to curb police violence against Black people in more than 20 cities.
These terminated grants represent a terrible setback in crime prevention, as they provided federal support for violence reduction, policing and prosecution; victims’ services; juvenile justice and child protection; substance use and mental health treatment; corrections and reentry; justice system enhancements; research and evaluation; and other state and local public safety functions.
Lose-lose
As Trump’s autocratic and anti-democratic coup pushes dangerously forward, the agent of chaos and destruction himself continues to be driven in part by his antisocial personality disorders and desire for power, in part by a fetishized indifference to data, facts, rights, ethics, and injustices.
This Trumpian dystopia is already having dreadfully adverse and debilitating impacts. These include but are not limited to the national debt, domestic and international politics, micro- and macroeconomics, ecological and environmental sustainability, education and research, health care and human services, and market regulation and social control.
The result is clearly a lose-lose situation for everyone in the United States except for the malignant narcissist-in-chief, his sordid billionaire buddies, and those AI technocrats whose momentary bubble is likely to burst by 2029 — as the mortgage bubble did in 2008 and the dot.com bubble did before that.
As even Adam Smith and Karl Marx agreed, that is just the way financial capital works. George Soros is one billionaire who has sought, in some way, to mitigate the damage such disasters wreak. If this comparison between Soros and his would-be persecutor tells us anything, it is that Donald Trump is perfectly willing to make things worse for most everyone else, so long as it makes him richer.
- Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy (2024). The third book in this Trump trilogy, Regime Change, Authoritarian Treason, and the Outlaw-in-Chief: President Donald Trump’s Struggle to Kill U.S. Democracy & Realign American Global Power, will be published after the 2026 midterm elections
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Trump: Maybe 'Sleepy Joe' was onto something
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
This Republican may blow up her life's work — just to please Trump
As many of you know, I ran last year for Congress against Rep. Ann Wagner (R-MO), and lost. I have no plans to run again.
As regular readers know, I’ve hardly mentioned her since starting this Soapbox almost four months ago. She’s largely irrelevant.
But the upcoming bombshell decision facing the U.S. House of Representatives about whether to release the Jeffrey Epstein files is a test of Wagner’s fundamental integrity unlike any other she has faced in her years in Congress. And it is upon us.
Wagner has had one signature issue in her career — standing up, she claims, for the plight of women who are victims of sex trafficking. When I say it’s her one signature issue, let me add: whatever comes in second place isn’t even close.
The issue didn’t come up when I ran against her, because there was nothing to argue about. For years, she has spoken loudly and repeatedly and elegantly on behalf of the need to have better protection for sex-abuse victims, and particularly for those who have been trafficked.
Good for her. I never questioned her righteousness nor her sincerity on this point and there were plenty of other issues for me to campaign on, none of which needs to be rehashed here.
But the Jeffrey Epstein scandal is the definitive sex-trafficking story of our time, and maybe of all time. What this pervert did, who he did it with, how, when and why — and the ongoing coverup of his trail of evidence by Donald Trump — is about as major as news stories get.
As best as I can tell, Wagner, the self-proclaimed champion of trafficked women, has never once spoken Epstein’s name publicly — despite the fact that he used his power and privilege to traffic and abuse hundreds, if not thousands, of young girls.
Wagner faces a vote that is tough for her fellow Republicans — but should be a slam-dunk for her — which is whether to require the Justice Department “to release all the files related to Epstein’s case, including information related to his clients and close circle,” as reported today at The Hill.
The Trump White House, dropping any pretense of true innocence, has gone full-authoritarian with its own Republican Party on this one.
“A White House official commented on the discharge petition Tuesday night, saying that supporting it would be viewed as ‘a hostile act,’” NBC News reported.
Really? Releasing all the Epstein files — in accordance with Trump’s repeated pledges on the campaign trail to do just that — is now a hostile act. Those are pretty strong words.
Wagner’s vote, whenever it happens, will present a rare binary choice. So would her refusal to follow the leads of fellow Republican Reps. Thomas Massie (the disclosure bill’s co-sponsor), Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace and Lauren Boebert in the event Trump’s lapdog House Speaker Mike Johnson manages to kill it.
Here’s the choice:
- Wagner votes “yes” for full disclosure of the Epstein files, proving she is a woman of integrity and cares about sex-trafficking victims, as she has claimed for at least a decade
- Wagner votes “no” or even fails to vote “yes” as a participant in Trump’s coverup, in which “integrity” and “Ann Wagner” should never be mentioned in the same sentence again.
You didn’t hear me talk like that during the campaign, because nothing had occurred in her record for me to question her personal character. This would be it.
If Wagner fails to stand with Epstein’s sex-trafficking victims — and with the basic principle of accountability for sex traffickers — then she at least should do the world a favor and renounce the following that she either sponsored or cosponsored:
- FOSTA – Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act
Bill: H.R. 1865 (115th Congress)
Role: Primary sponsor (authored)
Summary: Amended Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to remove immunity protections for websites that knowingly facilitate sex trafficking, enabling civil and criminal liability. Passed the House 388–25 (Feb 2018), Senate 97–2 (Mar 2018), and signed into law April 11, 2018 as part of the broader FOSTA‑SESTA package.
- SAVE Act – Stop Advertising Victims of Exploitation Act
Bill: H.R. 4225 (113th Congress, 2014) & H.R. 285 (114th Congress, 2015)
Role: Primary sponsor
Summary: Made it a federal crime to knowingly advertise commercial sex acts involving trafficking victims, particularly minors or coerced adults. Passed the House 392–19; ultimately incorporated into the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act (JVTA) of 2015. - Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act (JVTA)
Bill: S. 178 (114th Congress, 2015)
Role: Key House co-sponsor and advocate; included Wagner’s SAVE Act provisions
Summary: A wide-ranging bipartisan anti-trafficking law that enhanced law enforcement tools, increased restitution, funded services for survivors, and strengthened training across federal agencies. Incorporates multiple bills, including the SAVE Act, and was signed into law on May 29, 2015. - Trafficking Survivors Relief Act
Bills: Multiple versions — H.R. 6292 (114th), H.R. 459 (115th), H.R. 3627 (116th), H.R. 8672 (117th), H.R. 7137 (118th Congress, 2024), and reintroduced in H.R. 1379 (119th Congress, 2025)
Role: Original sponsor or cosponsor in multiple sessions
Summary: Provides post-conviction relief—such as vacating convictions, expunging arrests, sentencing mitigation, and affirmative defenses—for survivors of human trafficking who committed non-violent crimes as a direct result of their victimization. Versions reported in the House and supported across party lines.
For cynics who might think Wagner believes Trump is entitled to some special exemption on the subject of sexual exploitation of women, I would direct them to her public comments on October 9, 2016 — in the wake of the release of the infamous Access Hollywood Tapes — in which she most clearly stated he was not. In fact, she felt so passionately about sexual exploitation of women, that she made this public statement:
"I have committed my short time in Congress to fighting for the most vulnerable in our society. As a strong and vocal advocate for victims of sex trafficking and assault, I must be true to those survivors and myself and condemn the predatory and reprehensible comments of Donald Trump. I withdraw my endorsement and call for Governor [Mike] Pence to take the lead so we can defeat Hillary Clinton."
It took Wagner less than three weeks in 2016 to decide that Trump wasn’t such a bad predator, after all. Or maybe that she didn’t need to be that true to victims of sex trafficking and assault.
Today, the “strong and vocal advocate for victims of sex trafficking and assault” has another opportunity to show that she means what she has been saying all these years.
What’s it going to be, Ann Wagner, when it comes to your chance to stand up and make a politically difficult statement on behalf of those victims? Even at the risk of seeming “very hostile” to Trump?
It is her moment of truth.
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How Trump's long con shatters your American dream
The president of the United States is cheating.
His tariffs are pushing up the price of everything, which means inflation remains high, which means interest rates remain high.
But instead of rethinking the wisdom of a ruinous national sales tax, which is what tariffs are, he’s bullying those who set interest rates.
Last night, Donald Trump claimed to have fired one of them. It was his first real attempt at taking control of the independent Federal Reserve.
He doesn’t have the authority to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook. (She says she won’t resign. Her attorney says she will sue.) But the US Supreme Court could give it to him.
Then what? Trump will set interest rates more or less at random. The last time a strongman did that was in Turkey. Inflation soared. This time next year, you could be remembering $7 eggs with nostalgia.
And then, after it’s clear that Donald Trump is the cause of the biggest inflationary spike in American history, wiping out entire sectors of the economy, what will he do? Find someone else to blame for his terrible, stupid, malicious decisions. As he did with Lisa Cook, he’ll make up out of whole cloth the flimsiest of pretexts for doing what he wants to do.
He will cheat again to cover up his cheating.
And when I say “malicious,” I mean it. In Trump’s hands, tariffs were never a tool for achieving a policy goal, like bringing manufacturing back to America. They were and are tools for committing high crimes.
Everyone gets taxed, but there are exceptions – paid for by very obscenely rich corporate leaders who do not see the bribery of a president as treasonous but merely the cost of doing business.
The malice goes deeper. It’s not enough to make himself richer than he is. He has to take something away from you. With the national sales tax, cuts to government services, his toxic legislative agenda and more, he’s taking your money, your health care, your security and your hope. They must complement their wealth with a dollop of suffering, which is to say, yours. Watching you struggle is fun! The only thing better is watching their own supporters volunteer to struggle. Funner!
Feeling resentful yet?
You were told all your life that if you educate yourself, work hard and act honorably, you can succeed. That was the deal. You understood and accepted the terms. So you planned, you organized and you invested, accordingly, with the reasonable expectation of living up to your end of the bargain, thus making the American dream come true.
Trump, however, never met a bargaining partner he did not betray in the end. In his eyes, square deals are for suckers. There are winners. There are losers. And he’s always the winner, because he always cheats. The trick is hiding his intentions, getting you to buy into the idea and committing yourself. Then he’s got you. You have to live by the terms of his contract on you. But Trump?
Cheat, cheat ,cheat.
A normal president would see falling poll numbers and change course quick to get right with the American people. Not Trump. He sees falling poll numbers as reason to cheat harder. He’s squeezing more Republicans out of red states (gerrymandering) and creating conditions to scare voters away from voting next year with armed military personnel patrolling the streets of major American cities.
First, he picks our pockets. Then, he obstructs justice.
The perfect crime.
Here’s what I want you to do: Think about what it means for a criminal president to be the primary source of economic instability, disorder and chaos while, at the same time you, a normal law-abiding person, are doing everything you possibly can to get ahead or just get by.
Think about the fact that you’re falling farther behind, despite working hard and despite obeying the rules. Think about the feeling you have when you hear Trump say, as he did today, that he has “the right to do anything I want to do. I'm the president of the United States."
Is that feeling resentment? It should be.
Liberals don’t usually talk about resentment. We think that’s what Trump and his people do. We think nothing good can come of it.
But there’s resentment based on bigotry and prejudice, and there’s resentment based on actual material harms done to you and your family by a president who breaks the terms of the social contract, with impunity, all while falsely claiming that the dream is coming true.
Liberals tend to think resentment is irrational. But there’s nothing irrational about getting angry at the sight of a president who cheats to cover up his cheating, and who could, in the coming months, take over the Federal Reserve, spike inflation, and vaporize lives and fortunes.
It would be irrational if you didn’t feel resentment.
In the years ahead, resentment is almost certainly going to be a major feature of American politics, if not the feature, as it will drive the resistance against Trump while forcing him to crack down on that opposition by whatever means are befitting of a criminal president.
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