At last – a fitting monument to Trump
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
We were warned Trump would sell out key allies. A year later, here we go
Exactly one year ago last night, Vice President Kamala Harris confidently walked up to Donald Trump, looked him in his bloodshot eyes, offered her hand, and then proceeded to spend the next 90 minutes dragging him all over the stage of Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center in their one-and-only 2024 presidential debate.
Harris was prepared, disciplined, and clearly demonstrated her keen understanding of both domestic and foreign policy issues. She wasted no time stating her key plans for her administration, and effortlessly illustrated a command of the Constitution. She made it clear that she, not her opponent, who was a convicted felon, had spent an entire professional career upholding our nation’s laws, not violating them.
She even predicted how the debate would go down telling the world that Trump would haul out “the same old, tired playbook,” and warning he would resort to “a bunch of lies, grievances and name-calling.”
While Harris strongly defended a woman’s right to choose, Trump stammered and lied saying, “As far as the abortion ban, no, I’m not in favor of an abortion ban. But it doesn’t matter because this issue has now been taken over by the states.”
Then he weirdly said, “I have been a leader on fertilization.”
With an incredulous look, Harris stared at him and then the camera, and said without speaking, “I have no idea what the hell he is talking about, either.”
This was repeated several more times, as Trump used the shovel Harris casually tossed him to bury himself.
When she wasn’t relentlessly fact-checking and battering the haggard Trump with the facts, she was nonchalantly casting a line and patiently waiting for the two-ton sucker fish to hit it, before setting the hook, and reeling him in.
By the time she was done, the orange, flapping fish was bleeding out all over the stage, and screaming, “They’re eating the dogs! They’re eating the cats!”
Harris also effortlessly dog-walked Trump into the very racist trap that he set weeks earlier when he questioned Harris’s “Blackness.”
“All I can say is, I read where she was not Black, that she put out. And I’ll say that, and then I read that she was Black. And that’s OK. Either one was OK with me. That’s up to her. That’s up to her.”
That’s up to her … How kind.
Harris again looked at the camera, with a “you decide” look.
When the ass-kicking was finally over, Harris had masterfully humiliated Trump. She had proven she had the capacity to be one damn fine president, and knew how to stand up to fascist bullies, not roll out the red carpet for them.
So badly was Trump beaten, he actually flat turned down an offer from Republican state media at Fox TV to host a second debate, saying “there will be no rematch.”
It’s fitting then, that on the one-year anniversary of Harris’s knockout of Trump on that Philadelphia stage, we are getting news of Russia President Vladimir Putin’s incursion into Polish airspace today. High-ranking Polish military officials are decrying an “unprecedented violation” as a “huge number” of Russian drones were shot down by Polish and NATO forces over that country.
This is the first time in the history of NATO that alliance fighters have engaged enemy targets in allied airspace.
Read that again.
As I type this, Poland’s government has invoke Article 4 of the NATO treaty, that states alliance members “will consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the parties is threatened.”
Without invoking Article 4, there cannot be Article 5, which could entail military action.
From reporting in The New York Times this afternoon:
Since NATO’s founding in 1949, Article 4 has been invoked eight times. Before Wednesday, the last was on Feb. 24, 2022, the day Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
What we know for sure right now is that the world is less safe today than it was yesterday, and certainly one year ago. We still don’t have a clue what Trump has to say about any of it, except what he posted on his social media account:
"What’s with Russia violating Poland’s airspace with drones? Here we go!"
Here we go? Good God.
This is the terrifying stuff of world wars, but of course, Harris was on top of this issue, too, during that debate, because unlike Trump, she read her national security briefings, and could tell our friends from our enemies.
At one point, Harris turned to Trump and said this:
“Why don’t you tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up for the sake of favor, and what you think is a friendship with a known dictator (Putin) who would eat you for lunch?”
She wasn’t done:
“If Ukraine loses, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe, starting with Poland.”
Holy hell …
And let me remind you that Trump promised to end Russia’s war with Ukraine on Day One of his presidency. Of course, anybody who was paying attention, and/or really loves this country, knew that like so much of the heated bilge that pours out of his lying mouth, it was all complete bulls–––.
Instead, just last month he surrendered to Putin on American soil by giving the murdering dictator the red-carpet treatment Harris had predicted.
But if we are really being accurate here, all of this was forecasted on another debate stage in 2016, when Trump was dragged around by another smart, tough, unflappable woman.
When Hillary Clinton went after Trump’s bromance with Putin, the man who would violently attack America only four years later said this:
“He (Putin) said nice things about me. He has no respect for her (Clinton), he has no respect for our president (Obama). I’ll tell you what, we’re in very serious trouble.”
Clinton responded this way:
“Well that's because he'd rather have a puppet as president of the United States.”
Truer words have never been spoken.
Both of these patriotic women were right about everything, and we should all be reminded of that every single day.
- 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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The Art of Criminality — and other ways Trump might make amends
Perhaps the wisdom of Trump voters has been greatly overlooked. What better way to fight crime in America than to put a convicted criminal in the White House? No one understands the criminal mind better than our current president, after all.
Donald Trump knows what lurks in the minds of his fellow felons. He understands their disdain for acting within the law and for refusing to live within the accepted norms of right and wrong on which our justice system is based.
Found by a civil jury to be liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll, Trump understands exploiters who forcefully take what they want — in his case, also including classified government material — without concern for those they harm.
He understands criminals who feel no guilt or remorse for their despicable acts and are stopped only when caught and prosecuted. He also, as the Carroll case shows, has direct experience of defamation and its perils.
Found civilly liable for massive bank fraud, and convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, Trump understands the minds of white-collar criminals whose moral turpitude and monumental greed lead them to commit acts of fraud, embezzlement, money laundering, tax evasion, and bribery.
Trump resides in a world where white-collar crime often goes undetected. With a lifetime's knowledge, he could educate banks, other corporations, and the Internal Revenue Service on how to detect the most common types of white-collar criminal activity.
Trump understands how violence in the criminally oriented can be triggered. He knew which buttons to push to unleash his most violent supporters on the Capitol on Jan. 6 2021, knowing that assaulting the undermanned Capitol police was necessary to breach the building.
Trump understands how potentially violent criminals can be goaded to action, whether by an MS-13 gang leader, a Mafia don, or a losing presidential candidate.
Trump understands political crime — the illegal schemes that destroyers of democracy employ to put themselves in power by ousting a country’s elected leaders — better than anyone. Trump knows everything political criminals will try to achieve their goal: violence, coercion, false claims of rigged elections, and enlisting corruptible federal and state officials to carry out their schemes. No one is in a better position than Trump to sniff out illegal, anti-democratic plots.
If Trump used his criminality for the good, he could help atone for his own crimes and rehabilitate his blackened image. Trump could become the law-and-order president he brazenly proclaims to be.
Up to now, though, Trump has personally contributed more to crime than he has to bringing it down. His forays into law and order have been chilling shows of authoritarian power.
He called out the National Guard in Los Angeles, unlawfully according to a federal judge, to quell predominantly peaceful protests. He called out the Guard in Washington, D.C., where the violent crime rate had dropped 35 percent, to its lowest level in 30 years.
In addition, it’s never a good look for a law-and-order president to pardon violent criminals convicted of assaulting police officers at the Capitol; to pardon husband-and-wife reality show stars convicted of massive bank fraud; and to refuse to rule out pardoning sexual predator Ghislaine Maxwell, who despicably lured young women into the evil clutches of Jeffrey Epstein, to whom the nature of the president’s connection remains undetermined.
But people can change, and plenty of terrible criminals have turned around their lives and contributed to society.
As Trump gets ever closer to meeting his maker, he may undergo a religious epiphany. A greater inducement, however, may be the lure of financial gain: The Art of Criminality, a sequel to The Art of the Deal, would be a potential bestseller that could also benefit the government, law-enforcement agencies, businesses, communities, and individual citizens.
Frank Abagnale, one of the greatest conmen and forgers of all time, was ultimately caught by the FBI and given the option of prison or working with his captors. Abagnale chose the FBI, examining suspicious checks and showing banks across the country how to spot forgeries. Working for the FBI for 36 years, the erstwhile criminal helped to catch thousands of forgers and saved banks hundreds of millions of dollars.
Donald Trump has the opportunity to be another Frank Abagnale, possessing a motherlode of knowledge that could help bring criminals to justice. Like Abagnale, Trump could reinvent himself by using his personal expertise to help make America a safer place. No people love a redemption story more than Americans. Trump’s would rank among the greatest.
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Thanks to Trump and the GOP, this industry does more to screw us than any other
Which is the worst industry in America? If you’re thinking crypto or Big Finance, you’re getting close. But the winner for the most disreputable industry is Big Oil.
Bad enough it’s despoiling our planet — making life miserable for hundreds of millions of people and literally threatening human life as we know it.
It’s also corrupting our democracy — using its profits to bribe people in high places, such as you-know-who.
It’s at the center of an ecological and political doom loop.
Every time you go to the gas pump or heat your home, you’re effectively being charged twice. First, you pay for the actual cost of the fuel itself — a cost that has risen 46 percent since 2019.
Second, as a taxpayer, you’re also footing the bill for the billions of dollars Big Oil gets through special subsidies and tax breaks — which are ballooning under Trump.
These handouts don’t go toward lowering prices for us. They help boost oil and gas companies’ profits — at the expense of your wallet and our planet.
All told, Big Oil already extracts about $35 billion a year from the federal budget in direct industry-specific tax breaks and subsidies.
Trump promised Big Oil even more in return for supporting his 2024 election bid.
In their big ugly tax bill, Trump and Republicans handed Big Oil an additional $18 billion in giveaways over the next 10 years. That includes the ability of oil and gas corporations to escape or limit the 15 percent minimum tax all corporations are required to pay.
Big Oil also gets to drill on more public lands and pay less in royalties to the U.S. for doing so.
Fossil fuel giants also gain from the rollback of clean energy tax credits and investments. These had been lowering your energy costs, creating thousands of good-paying jobs, reducing our dependence on oil and gas, and limiting climate change. But, hey, Big Oil wanted them gone, and — presto — they’re gone.
And what does Big Oil do with its big profits?
It spends billions juicing its own stock prices with stock buybacks to further enrich its major shareholders and top executives. And spends millions more paying off politicians in Congress to do its bidding. In the last election cycle, Big Oil spent $445 million.
That flood of money — including contributions to Trump’s campaign — is responsible for the latest round of Big Oil’s special tax breaks and subsidies, despite voters overwhelmingly wanting to end them.
While we continue to pay through the nose at the pump and on our home energy bills, the climate crisis is accelerating and our planet is being polluted — with weather disasters costing the U.S. over $180 billion in 2024 alone.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Big Oil’s agenda is not popular.
It’s also not inevitable. We can fight back.
The first step is spreading the truth about our giveaways to Big Oil. That’s why my talented young associates and I made this video — to give you a powerful visual version of what I’m writing about that you can share widely:
- YouTube www.youtube.com
We need to keep fighting to get big money out of politics so we can reduce Big Oil’s influence on our democracy.
And we need to advocate for our taxpayer dollars to be spent on programs that actually deliver for people — like investing in clean energy that reduces our energy bills and protects the environment.
This is the future we deserve. When (and if) we’re back in power, Big Oil will pay the price.
- 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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This senator just put the GOP's racist plan on plain display
Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) took the stage at the National Conservatism Conference and declared that America is “a nation and a people.” With those five words he threw aside the pluralism that has defined this country since before its founding and embraced an ideology rooted in blood and soil, in exclusion and hierarchy. He put it in context:
“That’s what set Donald Trump apart from the old conservatism and the old liberalism alike: He knows that America is not just an abstract ‘proposition,’ but a nation and a people, with its own distinct history and heritage and interests…
“When they tear down our statues and monuments, mock our history, and insult our traditions, they’re attacking our future as well as our past. By changing the stories we tell about ourselves, they believe they can build a new America — with the new myths of a new people. But America does not belong to them. It belongs to us.”
It’s not new to hear Republicans peddling this kind of racialized “us versus them” rhetoric, but it’s still shocking to see a sitting United States senator parrot phrases that would be more at home in the speeches of European fascists or Confederates in the years leading up to the Civil War than in the halls of Congress today.
Schmitt offered no acknowledgment of the millions of enslaved Africans whose stolen labor helped build this country, no recognition of the generations of immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and Africa who contributed to our prosperity, no admission of the bloody sacrifices of those who fought for civil rights, equality, and inclusion.
Instead he spoke only of a singular people and a singular nation, implicitly white, implicitly Christian, and implicitly obedient to his party’s authoritarian vision.
This is not some isolated gaffe: it’s part of a pattern. At the same moment Schmitt was narrowing the definition of who counts as American, he’d chosen as his spokesman Nathan Hochman, who was forced out of Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign after circulating a promotional video featuring Nazi imagery.
That a man with such a stain on his record can walk comfortably into the Republican fold today says everything about the party’s trajectory. It’s no accident, no oversight, no slip. The GOP is nakedly embracing white supremacy and the Confederate neofascist ethos.
They’re not ashamed of it, either, as previous generations would have been, speaking in Nixonesque “law and order” code. Today, they flaunt it. They want to redefine America itself, not as a democracy where all people are “created equal,” but as a fortress where some people’s bloodlines, wealth, and religions entitle them to power while others are cast aside or erased from memory.
This assault is not simply rhetorical. The Trump administration has already shown us the template they’re using to deconstruct a democratic America and replace it with a whites-only neofascist ethnostate.
Their racist attacks on the Smithsonian and other national museums weren’t about efficiency or budgets — they’re about rewriting history, about stripping slavery, segregation, and genocide from the story of America, and replacing it with sanitized myths that glorify the Confederate ethos and erase the Confederacy’s victims.
They want future generations to walk through America’s most important cultural institutions and see nothing of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Sitting Bull, César Chávez, or Bayard Rustin. They want a nation of children raised on the lie that America was always a white, Christian ethnostate, that pluralism and democracy were well-intentioned but impractical mistakes to be corrected.
This is how authoritarian regimes always consolidate power: as George Orwell wrote in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which the GOP has apparently adopted as an instruction manual, control the narrative of the past and you control reality of the future.
But history refuses to be erased. The graves of the people who fought and died to end slavery and grant civil rights to nonwhite people and women are still here.
The gravestones of Black soldiers who charged Confederate lines at Fort Wagner, who bled and died under the Union flag, are still here. The blood of abolitionists lynched by mobs is still in our soil. The memories of those who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and were beaten nearly to death by racist sheriffs are still vivid.
The soldiers of my father’s generation who fell on Omaha Beach didn’t die so that a senator from Missouri could try to turn our country into a singular “nation and a people.” They died for liberty, for equality, for a world where democracy could flourish instead of fascism. To erase their sacrifices by redefining America as a white nation is to spit on their graves.
Where are the Republicans who once called themselves the Party of Lincoln? The ones who agreed with President Ronald Reagan when he famously said:
“You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American. …
“This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America's greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation.
“While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier.
“This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”
Abraham Lincoln himself declared at Gettysburg that this was a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. He didn’t say “all white men.” He didn’t say “all Christians.” He said all men, a word that at the time encompassed all people. He understood that America’s strength was not in its uniformity but in its aspiration to universality.
Have they all been purged from the GOP? Has the last Republican who believes in a multiracial democracy been driven into silence or retirement?
Watching today’s party leaders it seems so. The few who whisper their discomfort are drowned out by the roar of those who openly embrace bigotry, authoritarianism, and historical revisionism. The Party of Lincoln has become the Party of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, right down to Trump renaming military bases after traitorous Confederate generals and Klan leaders.
This is not a mere political dispute: it’s a struggle for the soul of America.
Our choice is between the pluralistic democracy that generations of Americans fought and died to protect, or an authoritarian nationalism that dehumanizes millions and threatens to dismantle our most cherished institutions.
When Schmitt stands before a crowd and offers them a vision of America as a singular people, he’s calling for the death of the American experiment itself. When Republicans bring men like Hochman into their fold, they’re saying right out loud that Nazi imagery and Confederate ideology are no longer disqualifying, but are welcome.
When Trump and his administration try to rewrite history in the Smithsonian, they’re declaring war on truth itself. And on the concepts and ideals that made America a great nation.
The outrage is justified because the stakes are existential. A party that embraces white supremacy and fascist ethos cannot coexist with democracy. A nation that allows its museums, its textbooks, its speeches, and its laws to be purged of pluralism cannot endure as a democracy.
America has faced down this poison before. We lost 700,000 people fighting a Civil War to crush it. We passed civil rights laws to dismantle its legal scaffolding. We buried tens of thousands of soldiers in Europe who died fighting against fascism abroad.
To let it rise again here at home, wrapped in the flag of one of our two great political parties, is the ultimate betrayal.
And to put a massive punctuation mark on it, on Monday Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a shadow docket opinion for his five corrupt Republican colleagues on the Supreme Court saying that it’s now perfectly legal for ICE and other federal, state, and local police authorities to engage in racial profiling.
Protesting Republicans bringing us fully into a “your papers please“ type of race-based fascism, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that because of the Republicans on the Supreme Court:
“The Government, and now the concurrence, has all but declared that all Latinos, U.S. citizens or not, who work low-wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction.”
The question now is whether we’ll rise to the moment. Will we allow a senator’s words to pass unchallenged, a party’s racism to be normalized, a nation’s history to be rewritten? Or will we push back with the force of truth, with the weight of history, with the unyielding conviction that America belongs to all its people, not just those deemed acceptable by the far right?
Silence is complicity, both on the part of our media and our politicians of both parties. Pretending this is normal politics is complicity. It’s time for every American who still believes in the Constitution, in equality, in pluralism, in democracy itself to speak out in favor of an inclusive America.
This is not about left versus right. This is about democracy versus fascism, inclusion versus exclusion, truth versus lies.
Eric Schmitt and those like him want us to forget who we are. They want us to forget the Declaration’s promise, Lincoln’s dedication, King’s dream, and the sacrifices of millions of ordinary Americans who fought for liberty and justice. They want us to forget the very idea of America as a pluralistic nation.
We must not forget. We must not be silent. We must not surrender America’s future to those who would drag us back into the darkest chapters of America’s past.
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Trump's extrajudicial killings point to something even more chilling
The Uniform Code of Military Justice prohibits military troops from committing unlawful killings, defined at 10 USC et. seq. Troops can kill enemy combatants on sight, but only when engaged in armed conflict, or when there is an imminent threat. Even when we are at war, it is a war crime for troops to deliberately kill civilians unless it’s an act of self-defense in response to imminent danger.
On September 2, in international waters, on suspicion that a small boat off the coast of Venezuela was carrying drugs to Trinidad, President Donald Trump ordered a strike. The boat was carrying 11 people, all of whom were killed.
There were no efforts to speak to, arrest or interdict the traffickers. There was no sharing of intelligence, no imminent threat, and no diplomacy. Instead, Trump, unencumbered by constraints of law, ordered the boat blown out of the water.
The next day, the New York Times reported that “Pentagon officials were still working… on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters.”
Reckless violence
After the strike, Trump posted, “Earlier this morning, on My Orders, U.S. Military Forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility. Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America. BEWARE!”
Pete Hegseth, the U.S. “Secretary of War,” took his own victory lap with, “We're going to go on the offense, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” His Neanderthalic bleating tracks similar talk from ICE and DHS as theyglorify militarism and violence to recruit new agents, for whom a criminal background is not an automatic disqualification.
Hegseth, a former Fox News host, has consistently defended war criminals, dismissing military law as an inconvenient intrusion onto combat authority. If his disdain for “tepid legality” in favor of maximum “lethality” in killing 11 people was not an admission of guilt — meaning he knew the order was illegal but didn’t care — nothing is.
Equally chilling, when Brian Krassenstein, a social influencer, noted online that “killing citizens of another nation who are civilians, without any due process, is called a war crime,” Vice President JD Vance wrote back, “I don’t give a s--- what you call it.”
Extrajudicial killings
When testosterone highs from the strike finally dissipated, military analysts began questioning the maneuver. They questioned, in particular, its legality.
Administration officials explained that narcotics on the boat posed an “imminent national security threat.”
But that claim doesn’t hold up, given that the boat was headed for Trinidad, even if drugs were on board. Worse, unlike typical drug interdictions by the U.S. Coast Guard, this strike was carried out without warning shots. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said simply that, “Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders they blew it up,” and promised more violence in the near future.
Whether drugs were on the ship or not, drug runners are criminal civilians, not enemy combatants. The closest thing I’ve seen to a law-adjacent defense is the administration’s bootstrapping claim that Trump could order a strike on Tren de Aragua because Trump has designated it a terrorist organization. But that’s like claiming the right to kill civilians by association. Experts appear to agree:
- Frank Kendall, former secretary of the Air Force, said the kill targets, “weren’t engaged in anything like a direct attack on the United States” and weren’t afforded a trial to determine their guilt. He added: “Frankly, I can’t see how this can be considered anything other than a nonjudicial killing outside the boundaries of domestic and international law.”
- Geoffrey Corn, a retired lieutenant colonel and former Army senior adviser on the law of war, said, “I don’t think there is any way to legitimately characterize a drug ship heading from Venezuela, arguably to Trinidad, as an actual or imminent armed attack against the United States, justifying this military response.”
- Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer, agreed that even the designation of drug cartels as terrorist groups doesn’t translate into authority to use military force against them. Such designation enables the U.S. to levy sanctions and pursue criminal prosecutions, not to just open fire and kill them.
American lives at risk
The Venezuelan government is now legitimately accusing the U.S. of extrajudicial murder, and preparing for escalating violence. In response to Trump’s attack, President Nicolás Maduro ordered the deployment of 25,000 soldiers to Venezuela’s coastal regions, more than doubling the country’s military presence in those areas.
Maduro has said that he suspects Trump is really threatening regime change with the strike and the buildup of U.S. naval forces in the area, because Venezuela holds the world's largest proven oil reserves.
Others believe Trump’s escalating use of military force is an attempt to divert public attention away from the Epstein files, corruption and tanking economy.
Still others say Trump is dangerously unhinged, projecting imagery of power to mask his administration’s widespread ineptitude. While these motivations are not mutually exclusive, Venezuela’s long term allies, China and Russia, are watching closely.
Whatever his true reason, if Trump has the authority to unilaterally redefine civilian suspects as “combatants” even though they pose no imminent threat, he can redefine any group as a terrorist organization, and order them killed.
That may present a tidy solution to Trump’s stubborn due process problem, but it is the stuff of Nazis. Even though today’s victims are brown and Black, trapped in poverty, and therefore disposable to men like Trump, killing them extrajudicially is murder.
I don’t give a s--- what the administration calls 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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The GOP's answer to our gathering health crisis? A eugenicist without the slightest clue
If the Republicans cared about the public’s wellbeing, they wouldn’t have confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the US Department of Health and Human Services. He had no business there, but that didn’t matter. Their top concern has been the wellbeing of Donald Trump.
Kennedy is now giving the Republicans a headache with insane talk of vaccines causing autism and how he had no choice but to fire the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director because, he said, she told him she was not trustworthy. But that headache isn’t borne of caring about people. It’s borne of concern that people might figure out the Republicans don’t care about them.
The secretary was under pressure before he fell to pieces last week during testimony before a Senate committee. More than a thousand former HHS workers had signed a petition calling on him to resign. The pressure only increased afterward. Kennedy’s sister and her son, a former congressman from Massachusetts, added their voices.
Here’s the New York Daily News reporting on it:
“‘Robert Kennedy Jr. is a threat to the health and well-being of every American,’ Joe Kennedy wrote on X the day after the hearing. As a purveyor of misinformation and sower of confusion, RFK is not adequately ‘protecting the public health of our country and its people,’ the secretary’s nephew said. “At yesterday’s hearing, he chose to do the opposite: to dismiss science, mislead the public, sideline experts and sow confusion.’
The Daily News report added: “The essential values of ‘moral clarity, scientific expertise, and leadership rooted in fact’ required of anyone taking on current challenges to public health in the US are simply ‘not present in the Secretary’s office,’ Joe Kennedy said. ‘He must resign.’”
But even if he resigned today, the fact remains that the Republicans who confirmed him still don’t care about public health. In addition to taking away Medicaid benefits from millions of people over the next decade, there’s the immediate emergency facing anyone who buys their health insurance through state exchanges (aka “Obamacare”).
If the congressional Republicans do nothing, and no one expects them to do anything, there are about 20 million enrollees in the Affordable Care Act marketplaces who will see their monthly premiums jump by an average of 75 percent, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
And that’s if they’re lucky.
Charles Gaba, a health policy expert and founder of ACAsignups.net, told me in an interview last week (see below) that some people who are currently getting expanded federal subsidies could see their monthly premiums jump by “100 percent, 200 percent, 300 percent or more.”
Charles explained “there are two main reasons for this: congressional Republicans allowing the improved tax credits which have been in place since 2021 to expire, and the Trump administration changing the underlying ACA tax credit formula to make it even less generous yet.”
The Obamacare crisis won’t happen gradually over 10 years, like the Medicaid crisis will. It will happen over the next four months if congressional Republicans do not act by the end of this month.
Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, are trying to ramp up the pressure on their Republican colleagues by getting insurance providers to inform enrollees in September what’s going to happen.
In a letter, Democratic senators including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told insurers “individuals and families need clear, direct information from their health plans as soon as possible about their rising premiums and cost-sharing requirements, and worsening coverage.” They said the info should be sent "as early and directly as possible … Under these dire circumstances, annual premium notices set to be released in October will not come soon enough."
Axios said some Republicans are open to extensions “but they're also worried about the projected $335 billion cost over 10 years.”
That, my friend, is the tell.
The Republicans took one trillion dollars away from Medicaid and food stamps to cut taxes for rich people who will never notice their taxes were cut. Before that, the Republicans confirmed a conspiracy theorist, crank and weirdo as secretary of health and human services.
Do you think they’re really concerned about the public’s concern?
“There's still a small chance of Congress extending the tax credits this month, but it's unlikely,” Gaba told me, “and even if they do, I expect them to either weaken them, include a poison pill provision so they can blame a failure to extend them on Democrats, or both.”
JS: Lots of people still don't know they are going to be facing an enormous spike in their premiums. How bad is it going to be?
CG: Very, very bad.
As you know, I've spent the past several months shouting from the rooftops that tens of millions of Americans (around 23 million, give or take) enrolled in individual market health insurance policies are facing massive net premium increases starting January 1, 2026.
The increases will range widely depending on a variety of factors, of course, including where they live, what their household income is, how old they are and what policy they're currently enrolled in.
Overall, I estimate gross premium hikes (for those not currently receiving subsidies) will average around 23 percent, while the healthcare policy analysts at KFF estimate that net increases – that is, what the enrollees actually pay after federal tax credits are applied – will increase by an average of 75 percent nationally.
There's about 1.8 million unsubsidized enrollees on-exchange and 1-2 million off-exchange, who will be hit with the 23 percent average.
Meanwhile, there's around 21 million currently subsidized enrollees who will face the 75 percent average … and again, in many cases it will be much more than that: 100 percent, 200 percent, 300 percent or more for the same policy they're currently enrolled in.
There are two main reasons for this: congressional Republicans allowing the improved tax credits, which have been in place since 2021, to expire, and the Trump administration changing the underlying ACA tax credit formula to make it even less generous yet.
There's still a small chance of the Congress extending the tax credits this month, but it's unlikely, and even if they do, I expect them to either weaken them, include a poison pill provision so they can blame a failure to extend them on Democrats, or both.
Again, this will be happening well before the midterms, starting Jan. 1, 2026 – less than four months from now. And yes, my own family is among those facing this, as are you, as I understand it.
Kennedy testified last week. If you were a Senate Democrat, what would you have asked him about exploding insurance premiums?
To resign.
Seriously.
I thought about another long-winded answer, but there's no longer any point in arguing or debating his justifications for what he's done.
He's a eugenicist without the slightest clue about protecting the public from legitimate health crises and who, in fact, has caused and is causing more of them to happen daily. He needs to resign. Now.
He's going to try phasing out the COVID vaccine. I don't know what better evidence there is that it worked than the fact that we're still alive. Yet here we are, giving this man the benefit of the doubt.
Absolutely. During the depths of the COVID pandemic, conspiracy theorists were making all sorts of absurd claims that they were being "magnetized," that Bill Gates was using the vaccine to implant microchips into our bloodstreams (which is not only insane but ironic, given that Elon Musk is literally installing microchips into people's brains now via Neurolink), that it was supposedly causing Parkinson's-like shaking, etc, etc. All of this was complete garbage.
The boldest claim I heard was that everyone who took the COVID vaccine would shortly be dead, and in the months and years that followed, any time a public figure passed away from any cause (old age, hit by a car, whatever), somehow that "proved" their claim, which is absurd. Over 270 million Americans have received at least one COVID vaccine. Yet the vast majority of us are doing fine four years later.
It's absolute lunacy, doubly so when you consider that Operation Warp Speed — the public-private partnership by the first Trump administration to accelerate the development of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines — was a massive, legitimate success, which the Trump administration can sincerely claim bragging rights for. Yet somehow, his own base has decided that the very product of that success is some sort of liberal/Democratic conspiracy. Absolute madness.
The press corps can't be let off the hook. I can't count how many times I have read the phrase "vaccine skeptic," as if Kennedy is considerate and thoughtful, rather than liars and scammers. I don't know how to get truth-tellers to privilege facts over lies. Do you?
One of the reasons I've gained whatever respect I have for my healthcare data wonkery over the past decade-plus is that I do my best to use reliable sources. I cite those sources and when I make a mistake (which does happen from time to time), I do my best to own up to it, correct it and explain how I got it wrong.
While there are exceptions, a large portion of the press corps has allowed themselves to become bothsides stenographers who mindlessly repeat whatever drivel comes out of the mouths of Trump, Kennedy, Mehmet Oz and other charlatans in this administration. In many cases they're continuing to do this even as the Trump administration defunds, bullies and extorts their own organizations.
Unfortunately, I don't know how to get them to change their behavior; all I can control is my own, including doing the best I can to get my own data analysis and reporting right.
The erosion of science (vaccines), the erosion of health care (Obamacare), the erosion of the safety net (Medicaid). It's like the Republicans don't care about public health at all unless it affects them personally, and perhaps not even then (in the case of mass shootings). If people die, they die. Thoughts and prayers. Yet they enjoy a reputation for caring about people. How did this happen?
I don't think it was any one thing; racism and misogyny have played a major role, of course, along with decades of attacks on public education and on education in general. Regardless of what got the ball rolling, though, that it gained momentum makes perfect sense to me.
When the Republican Party started to become a slave to its most extreme elements, it started scaring away its genuinely sane, decent members, which, in turn, made those who remain more extreme and awful on average, which scares off more moderates, turning those who remain more extreme yet, and so on.
If this was the only part of the equation, it would be a recipe for the death of the party. However, the other factor is that as it's scaring off more and more moderate voices, it's also attracting more extreme members who had previously been shunned by both major parties.
Once Donald Trump came along, the floodgates were opened – he welcomed in and praised the most awful, racist, bat---- members of society. So here we are — with a Republican Party that seems to consist of almost nothing but the worst dregs of society.
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This Republican ghoul should look both ways before crossing angry Floridians further
No doubt Gov. Ron DeSantis expects Floridians to be grateful for saving us from yet another woke attack on decency, probity, and speeding motorists.
I refer, of course, to colorful crosswalks.
Just as he has fought to expel books by Black and gay authors from our schools, the governor has ordered the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) to paint over the flowers, the sunbursts, the fish, the musical notes, and the rainbows — especially the rainbows.
We want guns in our streets, not rainbows.
Speaking of guns, one of the first crosswalks to be destroyed was the one outside the Pulse Memorial.
You may recall that in 2016 a gunman murdered 49 people at an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Orlando.
The rainbow crosswalk was intended to honor them.
DeSantis, however, views it as some sort of personal insult.
His political future looks distinctly unpromising AND his wife’s gubernatorial campaign lies in ruins after the Hope Florida scandal. Environmental activists won a temporary shutdown of his Everglades gulag, though an appeals court is allowing it to stay open for now.
I mean, nobody likes the guy, but, by God, he can still teach crosswalks a sharp lesson.
“We will not allow our state roads to be commandeered for political purposes,” he said.
Except the crosswalks were not “commandeered.” Like most painted crosswalks in Florida, the Pulse rainbow was supported by the city government and the citizens.
FDOT itself had approved it.
But in late August, FDOT turned up in the dead of night and ground it off the road.
But this kind of pointless vandalism is happening across the state.
At least a dozen schools in Tampa will see their “Crosswalks to Classrooms” school crossings destroyed, including one painted to look like a shelf of books.
Florida’s government is particularly scared of books.
‘Political ideologies’
Hearts commemorating a young girl who died of a heart condition in Port St. Lucie; checkerboards in Daytona near the raceway; “Back the Blue” in Hillsborough County; bike lanes in Orange County, painted by kids who won an FDOT art contest to design them — all either already gone or about to be.
Florida Transportation Secretary Jared Perdue vows to “keep our transportation facilities free and clear of political ideologies.”
As if violating free expression in cities and towns across the state is not the product of a “political ideology.”
DeSantis says painted crosswalks promote “social, political, or ideological messages” and must be obliterated.
That’s one of his excuses. He’s got more.
The governor claims he has no choice but to enforce a new law — a law he signed — allowing FDOT to withhold funds for road projects and “traffic control” if cities and counties don’t follow orders.
Thing is, FDOT always had the power to forbid street art. That’s why communities wanting to paint a crosswalk sought and received permission — from FDOT.
Now, you could argue that the wrong kind of paint could create a slippery surface.
Crosswalk painters know this and generally use acrylic or other paints that bond to the asphalt.
You could argue brightly colored crosswalks give people trying to cross the street a false sense of security, leading them to just hop out into the road without looking to see what maniac in an F-150 is barreling toward them.
Except the data do not support that contention.
You could argue drivers encountering images of sunflowers or fish or “Black Lives Matter” on the road will be so discombobulated trying to read and interpret the art, they’ll become reckless.
Remember, FDOT said yes to those cheery, often clever, crosswalks.
Distracted drivers?
The crosswalks only got dangerous this spring.
Now, as the law says, “Non-standard surface markings, signage and signals that do not contribute directly to traffic safety or control can lead to distraction or misunderstandings, jeopardizing both driver and pedestrian safety.”
The state’s assumption that drivers aren’t already distracted is demonstrably false, as every human who has ever operated a car in this state knows.
Whether they’re behind the wheel of a beat-up Kia or 4,000-pound Mercedes SUV, people frequently struggle to heed FDOT’s “standard surface markings and signage,” including the scarlet octagon that says “STOP.”
Nevertheless, research indicates they are unlikely to lose control of the vehicle contemplating a pink, blue, and green-stiped crosswalk.
What they might do is slow the hell down. A national study shows street art has contributed to a 50% reduction in crashes involving vehicles and pedestrians.
In Leon County, the Knight Creative Communities Institute worked with Florida State University and local government to determine whether brightly painted crosswalks might get people to drive the speed limit near schools.
Sure enough, brightly painted crosswalks did indeed cause Tallahassee drivers — not noted for their adherence to posted speed limits — to ease up on the accelerator.
Unless you just moved to Florida from Inner Mongolia, you know what’s actually going on here.
Bike lanes and walkways designed and painted by school kids, and crosswalks celebrating a city’s history or its natural beauty or demonstrating its commitment to inclusivity, somehow threaten DeSantis’ commitment to Beijing-style state control.
Children must not grow up in the Free State Florida feeling free to create or express themselves or engage in their community.
‘Conform’
Asked during a press conference what he’d tell Florida children now watching grown people destroying their art, DeSantis said, “We have a representative system of government. People elect their representatives. They’re able to enact the legislation with the governor’s signature and then when that happens, obviously, people will conform their conduct accordingly.”
Hear that, kids? “Conform” your conduct and chant the mandated Pledge of Allegiance every morning.
DeSantis means to bully the people of this state from Perdido Bay to the Dry Tortugas: Expressions of dissent, assertions, of common humanity, civic pride, beauty, and joy will not be tolerated.
The people of Pensacola have been told the large “Black Lives Matter” painting on A Street, the words spelled out with flags of nations that have contributed to Florida culture, is verboten.
God forbid Black people think their lives matter.
This is not a popular decision: The mayor says Pensacola will comply, but city resources are stretched pretty thin, so if the state really wants to rid the place of a “Black Lives Matter” painting, FDOT might have to handle it themselves.
As for LGBTQ+ folks and their aggressive use of the color wheel, state policy is to erase both the pigmentation and the people.
Remove “gay” books from the library, pull courses out of college catalogs, and scrub rainbows off the streets.
Remember the great essay “The Cruelty is the Point” by Adam Serwer?
The Atlantic published it in the early days of Donald Trump’s first term, but it’s just as relevant now: insulting, attacking, undermining, performative hatred — this how the regimes in both Washington and Tallahassee rule us.
Resistance
Authoritarians want to control every aspect of our culture, no matter how seemingly inconsequential.
No shot is too cheap, no attack too petty: FDOT has just ripped out road signs on Longboat Key.
The road signs identified Longboat Key’s main drag as “Gulf of Mexico Drive,” its name since 1957.
The regime wants it changed.
The entire world calls the body of water along Florida’s west coast the Gulf of Mexico.
However, I’m happy to report, not all Floridians acquiesce in this name-changing nonsense.
Some elderly residents of Tallahassee’s Westminster Oaks faced down a county road crew as it was scraping the paint off the yellow and green crosswalk by their retirement community.
Children at the nearby W.T. Moore Elementary School had painted it.
Around 30 seniors arrived on golf carts and walkers. An 85-year old lady lay down on the crosswalk and the road crew retreated.
But only temporarily.
Delray Beach and Key West are vigorously resisting DeSantis’ attempt to destroy their rainbow crosswalks, as is Fort Lauderdale, which is demanding an FDOT hearing.
Fort Lauderdale’s mayor declared, “We must stand our ground. We cannot allow us to be bullied into submission and to allow others to dictate what we should do in our own communities.”
In Orlando, the resistance grows louder and more determined.
After the state wrecked the Pulse rainbow crosswalk, hundreds of protesters re-colored the rainbow.
FDOT painted the new rainbow black.
Protesters colored it in again.
FDOT put up signs saying, “No Impeding Traffic,” and, “Defacing Roadway Prohibited,” and called in city cops and the Highway Patrol.
You’d think they’d be lurking in a Home Depot parking lot rounding up Brown people. At least four people have been arrested.
They were armed — with water-soluble chalk.
Babysitters
I’d be willing to bet these law enforcement officers signed up to fight crime, bust bad guys, and keep communities safe, not protect a 10-foot wide hunk of road.
One man, a survivor of the Pulse nightclub massacre, observed on social media: “More officers babysitting the crosswalk than there were security guards watching the front door of Pulse the night 49 people were murdered. By a lot.”
Our tax dollars at work.
I have news for Ron DeSantis and the dead-eyed myrmidons who carry out his narrow-minded whims: You can’t pray the gay away, nor can you paint over it.
You can’t quash children’s creativity.
You can’t surgically remove people of color from our history.
You can’t outlaw rainbows.
Just as FSU’s football team was putting the finishing flourishes on its win over the Alabama Crimson Tide, the sun came out. To the west, a glorious rainbow arced across the Tallahassee sky.
I’m waiting for DeSantis to declare the heavens “woke.”
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If the US government is a neofascist regime run by a sociopath, should we shut it down?
The U.S. government runs out of money Sept. 30.
Under ordinary circumstances, I would see that as a huge problem. I was Secretary of Labor when the government closed down, and I vowed then that I’d do everything possible to avoid a similar calamity in the future.
Under ordinary circumstances, people like you and me — who believe that government is essential for the common good — would fight like hell to keep the government funded beyond Sept. 30.
But we are not in ordinary circumstances. The U.S. government has become a neofascist regime run by a sociopath.
That sociopath is using the government to punish his enemies. He’s using the government to rake in billions of dollars for himself and his family.
He’s using the government to force the leaders of every institution in our society — universities, media companies, law firms, even museums — to become fawning supplicants: pleading with him, praising him, and silencing criticism of him.
He is using the government to disappear people from our streets without due process. He is using the government to occupy our cities, overriding the wishes of mayors and governors.
He is using the government to impose arbitrary and capricious import taxes — tariffs — on American consumers. He is using the government to worsen climate change. He is using government to reject our traditional global allies and strengthen some of the worst monsters around the globe.
Keeping the U.S. government funded now is to participate in the most atrocious misuse of the power of the United States in modern times.
So I for one have decided that the best route is to shut the whole f------ thing down.
Morally, Democrats must not enable what is now occurring. Politically, they cannot remain silent in the face of such mayhem.
To keep the government funded, Senate Republicans need seven Democratic senators to join them.
Last March, when the government was about to run out of money, Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Senate Democrats, voted to join Republicans and keep the government going. Schumer got enough of his Democratic colleagues to follow him that the funding bill passed.
As New York Times columnist Ezra Klein has argued, even if you supported Schumer’s decision then, this time feels different.
By now, Trump has become full fascist.
Congressional Republicans are cowed, spineless, deferential, unwilling to make even a small effort to retain Congress’s constitutional powers.
The public is losing faith that the Democratic Party has the capacity to stand up to Trump — largely because it is in the minority in both chambers of Congress.
But this doesn’t mean Democrats must remain silent.
If they refuse to vote to join Republicans in keeping the government open, that act itself will make them louder and more articulate than they’ve been in eight months.
It will give them an opportunity to explain that they cannot in good conscience participate in what is occurring. They will have a chance to show America that they have chosen to become conscientious objectors to a government that is no longer functioning for the people of the United States but for one man.
They will be able to point out the devastating realities of Trump’s regime: its lawlessness, its corruption, its cruelty, its brutality.
They will be able argue that voting to fund this government would violate their oaths to uphold the Constitution of the United States.
Then what?
They can then use their newfound leverage — the only leverage they’ve mustered in eight months — to demand, in return for their votes to restart the government, that their Republican compatriots give them reason to believe that the government they restart will be responsible.
It is time for Democrats to stand up to Trump. This is the time. This is their clearest opportunity.
- 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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The clear signs that a Democrat fightback has begun
During a summer when the popularity of Donald Trump fell to abysmal lows -- and strong disapproval of his presidency achieved record highs -- those dire warnings were mostly brushed aside. What received far more intense and sustained attention were the awful numbers registered by the Democratic Party, with analysts bemoaning its "historically" weak condition.
The occasion for all the funereal commentary was the release in late July of a Wall Street Journal poll that any honest Democrat had to find alarming. According to that survey, 63 percent of voters said they hold an unfavorable opinion of the party, while only 33 percent said their view of the party is favorable, the lowest rating ever for Democrats in a Journal survey. The party's net unfavorable was 19 points worse than the Republican Party, an unprecedented gap.
Such troubling findings can't be dismissed or waved away, even though the Journal poll was much worse than recent polls by other media outlets, which showed a mere 10-point ratings advantage for Republicans. Before we start putting up black crepe around the Democratic headquarters and drafting documents of surrender, however, there are some numbers that deserve our attention as well. For although the Democrats currently languish under a burden of public disfavor, those sour feelings may have almost no impact on their ability to defeat Republicans and achieve power again.
How can that possibly be? The real question in upcoming elections is not whether voters like the Democratic brand (or the GOP brand) but rather which party's candidate they will choose when marking their ballots. So far this year, despite the bad branding suffered by Democrats, the party is overperforming in dozens of special elections across the country and appears almost certain to win the two major statewide elections this November in New Jersey and Virginia. Polls in Virginia have showed Democratic gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger beating her Republican opponent by double digits, and her New Jersey counterpart Mikie Sherrill is ahead of the Republican by nearly as much in some polls.
Special elections are not necessarily predictive of a general election outcome, as we learned last year. Yet the results in many races this year have been startling, dating back to Wisconsin's state supreme court contest last April, when Elon Musk and right-wing organizations spent nearly $40 million to defeat liberal Democrat Susan Crawford. The Tesla zillionaire made news not only with his brazen attempt to buy the election but by declaring its outcome decisive "for the future of Western civilization."
All that money and publicity drove unusually high turnout for an off-year judicial election — which Crawford won by 10 points, a landslide humiliation for Musk and a repudiation for the Republican far right (including Trump).
The trend kicked off by Crawford's victory continued across the country over the ensuing months, including races and places considerably less hospitable to Democrats than the purplish Badger State. In Iowa, for instance, the Democrats have picked up not one but two state senate seats in specials this year — the first in January, when Democrat Mike Zimmer won in a district that Trump had carried by 20 points only two months earlier, and the second in June, when Democrat Catelin Drey won by 11 points in a district that Trump took by an equal margin last fall — a turnaround of 22 points in less than a year.
Such encouraging results for Democrats have been commonplace across the country in 2025. According to The Downballot, a website that compiles and analyzes election results across all non-presidential races, Democratic candidates in 34 special elections this year have run about 16 points on average better than 2024 presidential nominee Kamala Harris in the same districts.
Does that mean Democrats will win next year's midterms? It is far too early to make any such happy prediction.
But even the grim Journal poll demands a deeper look before anyone descends into gloom. As pollster G. Elliot Morris, formerly of FiveThirtyEight, explains on his Substack, it is very possible for voters to say they disapprove of the Democratic Party — and then cast their votes for Democratic candidates. That same poll found Democrats ahead in the generic ballot for 2026, measuring which party voters plan to support in the midterm, by three percentage points.
"That's a six-point swing from their last poll in 2024," notes Morris, "and would be large enough for the Democrats to win somewhere around 230-235 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives."
Depending on specific circumstances in the states, it might even mean a change in control of the U.S. Senate.
The negative atmosphere surrounding the Democratic Party and its public image arises from dissatisfaction and even anger among the voters in its own base, furious over the feckless leadership that led to the 2024 debacle and the hesitant response to Trump's first months in office. Their reaction is understandable and predictable after a national defeat — but their more recent victories are a signal of hope on the horizon.
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Trump is using this appalling meme to trigger a terrifying new catastrophe
Last week, Donald Trump posted a stolen valor war meme on his failing, Nazi-infested social media site, with the bonespurs-draft-dodger wearing a US Army Cavalry hat and the slogan, paraphrased from the movie Apocalypse Now:
“’I love the smell of deportations in the morning…’ Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of War.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker replied on BlueSky:
“The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal. Donald Trump isn't a strongman, he's a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.”
So, how could this play out? It’s important to begin the conversation — and planning — for what appears to be the Civil War 2.0 that Trump’s apparently trying to incite.
First, there’s precedent for the federal government to send federal troops into a state to enforce the law as ordered by a court.
JFK did it in the 1962 Ole Miss crisis, to enforce the Supreme Court’s Brown v Board decision, mobilizing up to 31,000 federal troops, including the 503rd Military Police Battalion, the 108th Armored Cavalry Regiment, and soldiers from the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. Kennedy also sent federal troops and readied thousands near Birmingham, Alabama, during violent resistance to those same federally mandated desegregation efforts.
To accomplish this, Kennedy invoked the Insurrection Act of 1807, which is actually a series of laws passed over a two-decade period, that constitute a virtual blank check for presidential power.
Particularly problematic is Section 253 of the law that allows the president to use troops to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” in a state that “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.”
As the Brennan Center for Justice explains:
“This provision is so bafflingly broad that it cannot possibly mean what it says, or else it authorizes the president to use the military against any two people conspiring to break federal law.”
Adding to Trump’s potential power, in 1827 the Supreme Court ruled that “the authority to decide whether [a crisis requiring the militia to be called out] has arisen belongs exclusively to the President, and . . . his decision is conclusive upon all other persons.”
Both JB Pritzker and California Governor Gavin Newsom have explicitly said that they believe much of this is Trump preparing to use troops for voter suppression in Blue areas of the country during the 2026 elections to prevent Democrats from taking Congress.
Pritzker said voters “should understand that he [Trump] has other aims, other than fighting crime” and that this is part of a plan to “stop the elections in 2026 or, frankly, take control of those elections.”
Newsom pointed out, “Interestingly, we still have federalized National Guard assigned through Election Day. Is that a coincidence? Through Election Day?!”
Additionally, the governors of 19 Blue states issued a statement saying:
“Instead of actually addressing crime, President Trump cut federal funding for law enforcement that states rely on and continues to politicize our military by trying to undermine the executive authority of governors as commanders in chief of their state’s National Guard …
“Whether it’s Illinois, Maryland and New York or another state tomorrow, the president’s threats and efforts to deploy a state’s National Guard without the request and consent of that state’s governor is an alarming abuse of power, ineffective, and undermines the mission of our service members. This chaotic federal interference in our states’ National Guard must come to an end.”
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner went a step further, saying he was willing to actually arrest federal agents who exceed or break the law:
“Let’s be clear: if the National Guard comes to Philadelphia and commits crimes, they will be prosecuted locally and Donald Trump cannot pardon them.”
So, how does this play out?
Trump is already reportedly positioning Texas National Guard troops and other federal officers at the Naval Station Great Lakes, just north of Chicago, presumably preparing for an invasion of that city as soon as this week.
The vision of former Confederate-state troops seizing control of the largest city in a former Union state is explosive and may well provide Trump with the violence he’d hoped for but didn’t get in LA and DC. Violence he could use to justify invoking the Insurrection Act like Kennedy did, and then using that to lock down the 2026 elections.
If this happens, will Pritzker follow Krasner’s model and begin arresting federal agents and Texas National Guard members if they’re found breaking Illinois or Chicago law? Or will he sue at federal court the way Newsom did? Or both?
If he does the former, it could literally kick off a second American Civil War. If he does the latter, Trump may win Civil War 2.0 without a shot fired, particularly if the six corrupt on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court overrule the lower courts and endorse Trump’s actions.
And if Pritzker and Newsom are right, all of this is being done — along with extreme gerrymandering — as part of the widespread Republican effort to rig the 2026 election so Democrats can’t take back the House and begin subpoena-based investigations of Trump’s crimes from the Epstein era to his recent murder of 11 immigrants in a boat off the coast of Venezuela.
Meanwhile, as Trump pits Americans against each other, dismantles our federal government, ensures future epidemics, and grifts billions in cybercurrencies, China and Russia are pulling the rest of the world together against America. It’s almost as if Vladimir Putin was giving Trump weekly directions, a dystopian Manchurian Candidate notion that seems more credible with every passing day.
He’s systematically weakening America while boosting Putin. By shutting down Voice of America, dismantling defenses against Russian election interference, ignoring Ukraine, and bungling diplomacy with tariffs and summits that drive allies toward Moscow, he’s handed Putin victories that come at the direct expense of U.S. power and security.
In the face of this, Trump is doing everything he can to ramp up tensions and provoke people in Blue cities to violence which he can then exploit to increase his power and further crack down on elections, particularly next year.
All, apparently, in-service of converting America from a historic liberal democracy into a one-man personality-driven dictatorship that’s increasingly aligned with — and following the model of — other tyrants around the world.
As a result, now is the critical time for all Americans to get educated about what’s going on and prepare for the eventuality of a totally locked-down police state being imposed on multiple Blue cities, particularly in states where not counting the urban vote can flip the entire state Red (which is most Blue states).
Trump is trying to take down American democracy for good. This is not a drill. Organize, educate, call your representatives, and prepare to show up in the streets.
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MAGA's 'real America' begs for help as Trump drives it to ruin
The numbers were bad. There were just 22,000 new jobs added to the economy. Here’s how the Washington Post summarized things:
“The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported fewer jobs in downward revisions to June job creation, in a warning sign about President Donald Trump’s tougher tariffs and immigration enforcement. In August, the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.3 percent.”
Fox Business is interested in shielding Trump from the consequences of his terrible choices. So morning host Stuart Varney asked the US secretary of labor if Trump’s tariffs “have anything to do with this slowing job market?”
Unsurprisingly, Lori Chavez-DeRemer lied.
“Tariffs are working … How do I know this? Because companies are reinvesting in the American workforce. We’re seeing the consumer confidence up. We’re seeing real wages up. Blue-collar boom? I talk about it. It seems like something that is rhetoric but it’s not because that’s what we’re seeing on the ground blue-collar wages are up 1.4 percent. Unemployment is still holding steady. Statistically, it’s nonexistent. That’s the key to the American people is that we’re leaning in. We’re doing everything we can for this workforce and now this is one more thing that the Fed can do. And [Federal Reserve Chairman] Jerome Powell hasn’t done his job and .. that’s why [Trump has] been so vocal about this. We need those interest rates down.
As I said, Chavez-DeRemer lied, but she lied a lot.
Wages are not up, blue-collar or otherwise. Companies are not “reinvesting in the American workforce.” They are bribing Trump to be the exception to his import tax. Unemployment is not “nonexistent,” statistically or otherwise. It literally increased to its highest level since October 2021, when America was still in the throes of the pandemic.
If “tariffs are working,” they’re not working for men.
They were supposed to restore the former glory of the American working man by bringing back factory jobs. But “men have lost 56,000 jobs over the past four months, with women gaining 76 percent of the jobs in 2025 (compared to around 50 percent normally),” economist Mike Konczal said.
“Trump's effort to bring back men jobs with tariffs has backfired spectacularly, causing those industries to shrink.”
But of course the biggest lie is the one out in the open. Could tariffs possibly have something to do with a slowing job market? Yes! In fact, that’s exactly what everyone expected would happen after Trump imposed — without Congress and without law — a massive national sales tax. They would eat into profits and bring hiring to a crawl.
And since the president is the main cause of the slowdown, his administration has the incentive to hide that fact, especially to find someone else to blame for it. That’s why Chavez-DeRemer spends so much of her Fox time accusing Powell of dropping the ball.
Powell has already said an interest rate cut is likely. He said that before today’s job report. And he said a rate cut was needed because of the “downside risks to employment,” which I take to be bureaucratese for “Trump’s tariffs are killing off jobs so we gotta juice the economy.”
Point is that Powell was already signalling to do what the president has been demanding, but that’s inconvenient timing for Chavez-DeRemer, who was tasked with finding a scapegoat in order to hide from Trump’s supporters that he, and he alone, is the cause of the problem.
And because protecting Trump from the consequences of his terrible choices is the goal of his administration, no one is going to say boo after it’s clear a rate cut had practically no effect on jobs. Mike Konczal also said today that employers have been pricing a cut into their planning. By the time it happens, it may not make a lick of difference.
Our second item is a local news report by KATV reporter Andrew Mobley on the reason why Arkansas farmers are facing catastrophe.
The reason is Trump, but no one blames him. Here’s Mobley:
“Almost everything that could go wrong for Arkansas farmers did go wrong this year and it’s so bad that many are facing bankruptcy or even the closure of farms that have been passed down for generations.
“A dismal global market, and plunging commodity prices, mean there’s little to no hope of breaking even for many farmers, even as sky high input cost rise, because of inflation and now tariffs” (my bolding).
“Though President Trump’s big beautiful bill provided them much-needed update to safety-net subsidies for farmers, they won’t see those federal dollars until late next year, by which time some have projected that as many as one-fourth or even one-third of Arkansas farmers will face bankruptcy or be forced to leave the business.”
Mobley’s report covers a meeting between farmers and their US representatives. Not one of the farmers states the obvious: that they are facing the wall because Trump put them against it, and he put them against it because they supported him, and they supported him despite knowing that his tariffs would put them against the wall.
And now, because Arkansas farmers cannot implicate the president, or the Republicans in the Congress, without also implicating themselves, they are reduced to pleading with them for some sort of federal bailout, which is to say, begging their kidnappers to pay ransom.
That said, it’s not often you see the most salient feature of American politics — whiteness — stand out so perfectly formed in the wild.
“Real Americans” (ie, white farmers “who put food on your table”) are transparently asking to be rescued from the dire consequences of their terrible choices by their savior, but instead of being held accountable for them, as anyone who is not white most certainly would be, they are portrayed as victims of circumstances to be pitied, not condemned.
“Until the federal government steps in to save them, they have had no one to turn to but God,” reporter Mobley said. “It’s hard not to be moved by the cries of the people who put food on your table.”
Actually, it’s not that hard.
And finally, and once again, Robert F Kennedy Jr.
I have talked about him a lot, but I wanted to end on this note: During three hours of testimony Thursday, before a Senate committee, that man fell to pieces under the slightest pressure.
This is not a small concern. Kennedy is the top public health official in the country. Boil down everything and the most important thing about him is that the public trusts him to act in everyone’s best interest.
Most people don’t know much about medicine, about science and about policy, but everyone can size up a man as trustworthy or not. And I don’t know how Kennedy didn’t fail that assessment in every way.
Kennedy could not be corrected on matters of fact, forget about matters of public health, without becoming defensive, petulant and emotional. He grunted. He groaned. He wiggled nervously in his chair. He rolled his eyes. He scowled at United States senators. I could go on.
Watch the clip between Kennedy and US Senator Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico. Pay attention to Lujan’s face.
Do you see a man who can be trusted?
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Washington's warning about America's doom is finally coming true
By Robert A. Strong, Washington and Lee University and University of Virginia.
The United States will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the country’s founding document, in 2026. Twenty years later, America will celebrate the 250th anniversary of President George Washington’s Farewell Address, which was published on Sept. 19, 1796.
The two documents are the bookends of the American Revolution. That revolution began with the inspirational language of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote much of the Declaration of Independence; it ended with somber warnings from Washington, the nation’s first president.
After chairing the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and serving eight years as president, Washington announced in a newspaper essay that he would not seek another term and would return to his home in Mount Vernon. The essay was later known as the “Farewell Address.”
Washington began his essay by observing that “choice and prudence invite me to quit the political scene” while “patriotism does not forbid it.” The new nation would be fine without his continued service.
But Washington’s confidence in the general health of the union was tempered by his worries about dangers that lay ahead — worries that seem startlingly contemporary and relevant 229 years later.
Focus on the domestic
Washington’s Farewell Address is famous for the admonitions “to steer clear of permanent alliances” and to resist the temptation to “entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition.”
Important as those warnings are, they are not the main topic of Washington’s message.
During the four decades that I have taught the Farewell Address in classes on American government, I have urged my students to set aside the familiar issues of foreign policy and isolationism and to read the address for what it says about the domestic challenges confronting America.
Those challenges included partisanship, parochialism, excessive public debt, ambitious leaders who could come to power playing off our differences, and a poorly informed public who might sacrifice their own liberties to find relief from divisive politics.
Washington’s address lacks Jefferson’s idealism about equality and inalienable rights. Instead, it offers the realistic assessment that Americans are sometimes foolish and make costly political mistakes.
Rule by ‘ambitious, and unprincipled men’
Partisanship is the primary problem for the American republic, according to Washington.
“It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration,” he wrote. Partisanship “agitates the community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection” and can open “the door to foreign influence and corruption.”
Though political parties, Washington observes, “may now and then answer popular ends,” they can also become “potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
Washington’s fear that partisanship could lead to destruction of the Constitution and to the rule of “ambitious, and unprincipled men” was so important to him that he felt compelled to repeat the warning more than once in the Farewell Address.
Politicians’ ‘elevation on the ruins of public liberty’
The second time Washington takes it up, he says that “the disorders and miseries” of partisanship may “gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual.”
Sooner or later, he writes, “the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty.”
So why not outlaw parties and rein in the dangers of partisanship?
Washington observes that this is not possible. The spirit of party “is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind.”
Americans naturally collect themselves into groups, factions, interests and parties because that’s what human beings do. It’s easier to be connected to local communities, states or regions of the country than to a large and diverse nation; even though that large and diverse nation is, by Washington’s assessment, essential to the security and success of all.
The central problem in American politics is not a matter of devious leaders, foreign intrigue or sectional rivalries — things that will always exist.
The problem, Washington warned, lies with the people.
Excesses of partisanship
By their nature, people divide themselves into groups and then, if not careful, find those divisions used and abused by individual leaders, foreign interests and “artful and enterprising” minorities.
Political parties are dangerous, but can’t be eliminated. According to some people, Washington observes, the competition between parties might serve as a check on the powers of government.
“Within certain limits,” Washington acknowledges, “this is probably true.” But even if the battles between political parties sometimes have a useful purpose, Washington worried about the excesses of partisanship.
Partisanship is like “a fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest instead of warming it should consume.”
Where is America today? Warmed by the fires of partisanship or consumed by the bursting of flames? George Washington suggested that provocative question more than two centuries ago on Sept. 19, 1796. It’s still worth asking.
- Robert A. Strong is an Emeritus Professor of Politics at Washington and Lee University and is a Senior Fellow at the Miller Institute. He has published work in American foreign policy, national security issues and the presidency, including books on Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter and modern American foreign policy decisions. He has published articles and op-eds on a variety of contemporary political and international topics.
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