Tragedy unfolds: another school shooting
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
These men's fitness groups are hives of white supremacist rage
By Art Jipson, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Dayton.
Small local organizations called Active Clubs have spread widely across the U.S. and internationally, using fitness as a cover for a much more alarming mission. These groups are a new and harder-to-detect form of white supremacist organizing that merges extremist ideology with fitness and combat sports culture.
Active Clubs frame themselves as innocuous workout groups on digital platforms and decentralized networks to recruit, radicalize and prepare members for racist violence. The clubs commonly use encrypted messaging apps such as Telegram, Wire and Matrix to coordinate internally.
For broader propaganda and outreach they rely on alternative social media platforms such as Gab, Odysee, VK and sometimes BitChute. They also selectively use mainstream sites such as Instagram, Facebook, X and TikTok, until those sites ban the clubs.
Active Club members have been implicated in orchestrating and distributing neo-Nazi recruitment videos and manifestos. In late 2023, for instance, two Ontario men, Kristoffer Nippak and Matthew Althorpe, were arrested and charged with distributing materials for the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division and the transnational terrorist group Terrorgram.
Following their arrests, Active Club Canada’s public network went dark, Telegram pages were deleted or rebranded, and the club went virtually silent. Nippak was granted bail under strict conditions, while Althorpe remains in custody.
As a sociologist studying extremism and white supremacy since 1993, I have watched the movement shift from formal organizations to small, decentralized cells — a change embodied most clearly by Active Clubs.
White nationalism 3.0
According to private analysts who track far-right extremist activities, the Active Club network has a core membership of 400 to 1,200 white men globally, plus sympathizers, online supporters and passive members. The clubs mainly target young white men in their late teens and twenties.
Since 2020, Active Clubs have expanded rapidly across the United States, Canada and Europe, including the U.K., France, Sweden and Finland. Precise numbers are hard to verify, but the clubs appear to be spreading, according to The Counter Extremism Project, the Anti-Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center and my own research.
The clubs reportedly operate in at least 25 U.S. states, and potentially as many as 34. Active U.S. chapters reportedly increased from 49 in 2023 to 78 in 2025.
The clubs’ rise reflects a broader shift in white supremacist strategy, away from formal organizations and social movements. In 2020, American neo-Nazi Robert Rundo introduced the concept of “White Nationalism 3.0” — a decentralized, branded and fitness-based approach to extremist organizing.
Rundo previously founded the Rise Above Movement, which was a violent, far-right extremist group in the U.S. known for promoting white nationalist ideology, organizing street fights and coordinating through social media. The organization carried out attacks at protests and rallies from 2016 through 2018.
Active Clubs embed their ideology within apolitical activities such as martial arts and weightlifting. This model allows them to blend in with mainstream fitness communities. However, their deeper purpose is to prepare members for racial conflict.
'You need to learn how to fight’
Active Club messaging glorifies discipline, masculinity and strength — a “warrior identity” designed to attract young men.
“The active club is not so much a structural organization as it is a lifestyle for those willing to work, risk and sweat to embody our ideals for themselves and to promote them to others,” Rundo explained via his Telegram channel.
“They never were like, ‘You need to learn how to fight so you can beat up people of color.’ It was like, ‘You need to learn how to fight because people want to kill you in the future,’” a former Active Club member told Vice News in 2023.
These cells are deliberately small — often under a dozen members — and self-contained, which gives them greater operational security and flexibility. Each club operates semi-autonomously while remaining connected to the broader ideology and digital network.
Expanding globally and deepening ties
Active Clubs maintain strategic and ideological connections with formal white supremacist groups, including Patriot Front, a white nationalist and neofascist group founded in 2017 by Thomas Rousseau after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Active Clubs share extremist beliefs with these organizations, including racial hierarchy and the “Great Replacement” theory, which claims white populations are being deliberately replaced by nonwhite immigrants. While publicly presenting as fitness groups, they may collaborate with white supremacist groups on recruitment, training, propaganda or public events.
Figures connected to accelerationist groups — organizations that seek to create social chaos and societal collapse that they believe will lead to a race war and the destruction of liberal democracy — played a role in founding the Active Club network. Along with the Rise Above Movement, they include Atomwaffen Division and another neo-Nazi group, The Base — organizations that repackage violent fascism to appeal to disaffected young white men in the U.S.
Brotherhood as a cover
By downplaying explicit hate symbols and emphasizing strength and preparedness, Active Clubs appeal to a new generation of recruits who may not initially identify with overt racism but are drawn to a culture of hypermasculinity and self-improvement.
Anyone can start a local Active Club chapter with minimal oversight. This autonomy makes it hard for law enforcement agencies to monitor the groups and helps the network grow rapidly.
Shared branding and digital propaganda maintain ideological consistency. Through this approach, Active Clubs have built a transnational network of echo chambers, recruitment pipelines and paramilitary-style training in parks and gyms.
Club members engage in activities such as combat sports training, propaganda dissemination and ideological conditioning. Fight sessions are often recorded and shared online as recruitment tools.
Members distribute flyers, stickers and online content to spread white supremacist messages. Active Clubs embed themselves in local communities by hosting events, promoting physical fitness, staging public actions and sharing propaganda.
Potential members first see propaganda on encrypted apps such as Telegram or on social media. The clubs recruit in person at gyms, protests and local events, vetting new members to ensure they share the group’s beliefs and can be trusted to maintain secrecy.
From fringe to functioning network
Based on current information from the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, there are 187 active chapters within the Active Club Network across 27 countries — a 25 percent increase from late 2023. The Crowd Counting Consortium documented 27 protest events involving Active Clubs in 2022-23.
However, precise membership numbers remain difficult to ascertain. Some groups call themselves “youth clubs” but share similar ideas and aesthetics and engage in similar activities.
Active Club members view themselves as defenders of Western civilization and masculine virtue. From their perspective, their activities represent noble resistance rather than hate. Members are encouraged to stay secretive, prepare for societal collapse and build a network of committed, fit men ready to act through infiltration, activism or violence.
Hiding in plain sight
Law enforcement agencies, researchers and civil society now face a new kind of domestic threat that wears workout clothes instead of uniforms.
Active Clubs work across international borders, bound by shared ideas and tactics and a common purpose. This is the new white nationalism: decentralized, modernized, more agile and disguised as self-improvement. What appears to be a harmless workout group may be a gateway to violent extremism, one pushup at a time.
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This Stalinesque Trump tactic should scare you into action
I’m not just worried; I’m enraged. We’re watching our system of government being systematically, step-by-step refashioned into a surveillance-fueled engine of political vengeance.
Even worse, the same chilling logic that ruled Stalin’s courts — “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime” — has become this administration’s sinister operating principle. It retrofits guilt to the target, not justice to evidence.
That phrase isn’t hyperbole. It’s rooted in dark history. It was popularized in the Soviet Union, attributed to figures like Soviet jurist Andrey Vyshinsky or the notorious secret police chief (and Vladimir Putin’s hero) Lavrentiy Beria. The sentiment is unmistakable: Arrest or investigate the person first, cook up the criminal case later.
History proves the simple fact that nobody’s invulnerable to this. Everybody has made some sort of error, a typo or mistake on a tax or mortgage form, possession of federally-criminal marijuana, a protest post on social media that could be spun as a “threat.”
With a thorough enough investigation — like what they’re doing to John Bolton right now — most any of us could be hauled before a court on trumped-up charges. Particularly now that various forms of speech (like criticizing Benjamin Netanyahu or calling for boycotting Israel) are being functionally criminalized.
One 1940 Soviet transcript even has Molotov telling Juozas Urbšys that suspects should be “arrested and brought before the court, and the articles will be found,” a precise blueprint for manufacturing guilt.
Before that, 18th-century Scottish jurist Lord Braxfield said, “Let them bring me prisoners, and I will find them law,” and Russian proverbs like “if there’s a neck, there’s a collar” delivered the same moral decay: justice shaped by authority, not truth. This isn’t ancient lore; it’s the root of state-constructed guilt.
Now that ancient horror is pulsing through our institutions at the insistence of Donald Trump and his lickspittles in the DOJ and DHS.
Case in point: Kilmar Abrego García — a father and husband of an American citizen, living in Maryland, protected by law, with three young U.S. citizen children and official permission to remain in the United States — was illegally deported to El Salvador.
The administration called it a simple “clerical error” in March 2025, but public outcry and legal filings revealed something far more grotesque: Garcia was imprisoned in a dictator’s notorious “no exit” concentration camp famous for its harrowing conditions, was tortured, and then — so Trump’s people could save face — re-arrested when he returned successfully.
He now faces human smuggling charges from 2022, based on testimony from a convicted criminal who was offered leniency in exchange for it, only after he challenged the deportation. Worse, ICE is plotting to send Garcia not to Costa Rica — where he might be safe — but to Uganda, a country he has no ties to and where few speak Spanish.
His lawyers paint it as vindictive prosecution, as, apparently, did a federal judge yesterday — a punishment for daring to fight back.
This is not legal enforcement. It’s political vengeance masquerading as justice: identify the man first, find or define the crime later.
Look at Bolton. Months after any plausible need for urgency, the FBI raided his home, dredging up classified material cases that were long dormant.
The kickoff? He ended up on the 60-plus-names enemies list now-FBI Director Kash Patel wrote in his book “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy.”
That’s “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime” in its most classic form.
But this malignant logic is no longer confined to political elites or contested legal cases; it’s sweeping across everyday dissent. Post the wrong meme on Facebook or X, show up at a rally with your face captured on camera — even once — and you can be flagged just like in China, Hungary, and Russia.
Big Brother is now AI, drones, and facial recognition systems feeding centralized dossiers and giant data companies working with government police agencies.
Law enforcement and federal agents are actively using surveillance cameras, social media mining, facial recognition, and geolocation tools to identify demonstrators, and — when Trump tries to steal an election or some other outrage and people pour into the streets — that power can be turned on anyone who dares to dissent.
Take StingRays, those cellphone spoofing devices. These bogus cell towers trick your phone into thinking you’re connected to a real cell tower (they pass through calls and data) but once connected they can read pretty much everything useful to the police that’s on your phone without your knowledge.
They’re now routinely used at protests and public events to harvest data on everyone nearby, not just criminal suspects. In one recent anti-ICE protest, researchers noticed anomalies in signal patterns, evidence of IMSI-catcher StingRay deployment. Yet law enforcement usually refuses to comment, denies their use, or hides behind national security secrecy, even as thousands of these devices have now been deployed to police and federal agencies across the country.
Imagine: you’re at a peaceful protest, you post a live stream or an update to Facebook or X. A drone snags your face, surveillance cameras tag you on the edges of the crowd, your phone pings to a StingRay, or your social media post is scraped and now you’re “the man.” The system is primed to “discover” the crime once it has your name.
Fed into the federal or state machines, that record becomes a justification for visa revocation, job termination, or even criminal charges, all not because you committed a crime, but because you dared challenge Dear Leader’s growing police state. Because you exercised your First Amendment right to protest.
As I wrote in “The Hidden History of Big Brother in America: How the Death of Privacy and the Rise of Surveillance Threaten Us and Our Democracy,” this is 21st century authoritarianism with digital tools: identity becomes guilt, data becomes indictment, dissent becomes criminal. This is authoritarian policing in the digital age: “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”
And it’s happening all across the country. ICE used AI-generated lists — scraped from sites like the shadowy pro-Netanyahu Canary Mission — to target student protesters. Visas have been revoked and people deported over minor infractions like speeding tickets and “trespassing” on university or city property.
One student was detained on campus and imprisoned for weeks with no warrant ever shown. Another, a green card holder, had their status threatened because of political views in clear violation of the Bill of Rights. Others lost their scholarships or were thrown out of universities.
And it’s not just the students or protestors; they’re now going after institutions they see as not sufficiently compliant with their fascist agenda. In an echo of Hungary and Russia shutting down or cowing independent universities, Harvard had its $2.3 billion funding frozen because it wouldn’t capitulate to political demands.
All anchored in the same twisted logic: identify the person, then dig deep into their past to find something, anything, they may have done wrong.
“Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”
Another example are how the Trump police state is going after California Senator Adam Schiff, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Fed Governor Lisa Cook for checking the wrong box on mortgage applications. All are now looking at years in prison because Trump labeled them enemies and his toadies “found the crime.”
You could be next. Or your neighbor or best friend.
This is not speculation or hyperbole. Our institutions are bending to politics in ways that echo the way Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Lukashenko, Putin, and Orbán successfully crushed dissent. Neutral, professional civil servants were replaced with loyalists, their versions of the Department of Justice independence were gutted, universities were cowed, airwaves surveilled, and, like here, their phones are “read” when they show up at a demonstration. Democracy is unraveling under the weight of fear and retribution.
If this doesn’t spur us into action, nothing will.
Democratic leaders must not treat this as partisan theater; it is existentially dangerous. We must:
- Demand full transparency on surveillance tools and facial recognition programs.
- Ban law enforcement’s use of StingRays and IMSI-catchers without warrants and full public reporting.
- Prohibit facial recognition against legal demonstrators.
- Require social media privacy and end secret algorithms and back-door deals with federal police when it comes to demonstrators and protestors.
- Restore DOJ and civil service independence from the White House.
- Safeguard visa rights and immigrant protections.
- Elevate Abrego García’s and John Bolton’s cases to national moral action, making them impossible to ignore.
- Hold hearings, issue subpoenas, defund institutions that weaponize law against dissent, and highlight this threat in every forum from state and federal House and Senate chambers to the streets.
We cannot allow the old Soviet (and modern Russian) slogan —“Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime” — to become the default of American governance.
What’s happening to Bolton, James Clapper, James Comey, Cook, James, Schiff, Miles Taylor, et al — and student protestors across the country — is a crime against our Constitution and traditional American values. To go along with it is to accept Trump’s assertion that protest is culpability, dissent is danger, and democracy is a relic.
We must fight now, or what’s left of our democracy will slip into permanent chains.
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This disorder explains the full horror of Trump
Unlike those people gathering together at either end of the anti-MAGA and MAGA continuum to engage in conflict over what looks like an emerging authoritarian, dystopian, back-to-the-future America, there are still some 40 percent of the electorate who are going about their lives undisturbed, as though nothing unusual was happening.
This trichotomous reaction to the sadomasochistic world of Donald Trump has much to do with his lifelong and chronic condition. We can blame most of the avarice and self-aggrandizement by Trump 2.0’s complot on his unacknowledged antisocial personality disorder (ASPD).
In this commentary, I do not focus on the mental states of those MAGA folks who are attracted to and support Trump, or on those anti-MAGA folks who are repelled by and resist him, or on the largest group of people who for whatever reasons choose to ignore him.
Instead, my attention is focused on delineating Trump’s instances of ASPD as a means for better understanding the president’s behavioral motivations and transactional reactions in relation to his political and policymaking decisions.
ASPD is key to explaining why Trump is perpetually breaking institutional norms to save his own ass or to go after somebody else’s — as in the weaponized Justice Department’s selective releasing of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Meanwhile, the president’s corrupt FBI Director, Kash Patel, along with Vice President JD Vance and crooked Attorney General Pam Bondi each inappropriately tweeted about searches of John Bolton’s home and office, seeking classified records.
This type of public disclosure had always been a DOJ no-no. But this performative display of anti-constitutional power on behalf of a vengeful Trump occurred so he could inflict pain upon Bolton, intimidate other critics, and derive pleasure for himself.
Whatever harm may come to Bolton, Trump’s former national security advisor, is due to his having written a negative book about the president’s first term, and having become one of Trump’s most credible and formidable critics.
ASPD has also been critically central to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law on July 4, which could not have been any uglier and less supported by the American people.
This examination of Trump’s ASPD helps reveal many other quandaries in which the president finds himself, in particular when it comes to his alleged dealmaking and peacemaking skills. Say, like diddling around for eight months without coming close to ending wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
Earliest and latest signs
Before I turn to Trump’s racist policies on crime control, his antihuman executive orders, and his counterproductive tariffs, as derivative and illustrative of his ASPD, it is incumbent to lay out the very dangerous and unfortunately ignored dynamics of Trump’s condition.
Trump’s ASPD first publicly appeared when six-year old Donnie got up from his desk, walked over to his male teacher and in front of the whole class hit him upside the head — because the first-grader did not care for the teacher’s taste in music.
Trump’s parents would send him to a military academy for “straightening out.” It obviously failed. Then, some 66 years after Trump was sent to military school — and about 57 years after he dodged the Vietnam draft by way of his bone spurs — a very different intervention occurred.
This was when President Volodymyr Zelensky showed up at the White House on August 18, 2025. Six months after Trump and company’s earlier brutal attack on Zelensky, and a few days after Trump’s suck-up meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska, the Ukrainian president brought with him seven of Europe’s top leaders, all for the purposes of appeasing the president.
With the cameras rolling, the world witnessed a political intervention to stop a superpower leader spouting “old pro-Moscow talking points that even the Kremlin doesn’t bother with anymore.”
More important than merely correcting Trump’s ignorance of history, this intervention stopped him doing something really stupid like negotiating a resolution to the war that would have been harmful to the U.S. and its Ukrainian and NATO allies while benefiting Putin.
Just three days earlier, Trump had rolled out the red carpet for the dictator who invaded Ukraine — the subject of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, for war crimes including the kidnapping and re-educating of more than 19,000 Ukrainian children.
Psychopathy and sociopathy
As used by the National Library of Sciences, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders characterizes those with ASPD as having “a pervasive and enduring pattern of disregarding and violating the rights of others, typically emerging in childhood or early adolescence and persisting” throughout their lives.
Lacking empathy and seldom feeling any remorse, these individuals tend to manipulate others, usually for personal gain. Those suffering from ASPD may regularly engage in lawless behavior and “struggle to learn from the negative consequences of their actions.”
Besides failing to conform to societal norms, other common symptoms or tendencies characteristic of those diagnosed with ASPD include aggressiveness, deceitfulness, egocentrism, entitlement, impulsivity, irritability, irresponsibility, narcissism, recklessness, revengefulness, self-aggrandizement, and superiority.
While “psychopaths” and “sociopaths” are two of the more common names for sufferers from ASPD, these diagnoses are not interchangeable. However, doing so in the case of Trump may not actually be wrong, because the 47th president does exhibit a mixture of both forms of ASPD.
Clinically, these two groups of ASPD sufferers are distinguishable by origins, traits, and behavioral patterns.
Psychopathy is typically attributed as having to do with genetics or early brain development issues affecting areas of the mind related to emotions and impulse control.
Sociopathy is typically attributed to environmental experiences such as early childhood trauma, neglect, or abuse.
As Mary L. Trump, a psychologist and niece of the president, detailed in her first book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man (2020), Trump’s ASPD has been an etiological mixture of these two illnesses.
As for behavioral actions and social interactions, psychopaths tend to be more controlling, calculating, and manipulating than sociopaths. Psychopaths expend much energy planning their lawlessness and they also employ manipulative actions to avoid detection. Psychopaths can be very charming and blend into society.
Sociopaths are less adept at concealing their antisocial tendencies. They are more impulsive and erratic. Sociopaths are prone to emotional outbursts, anger, and aggression.
As for violence, lawlessness, and crime, both high-functioning (HF) psychopaths and sociopaths like Trump are less likely than low-functioning (LF) psychopaths and sociopaths to engage in personal violence such as murder or felonious assault.
Deviating a bit from these patterns, the president has an extensive record of allegations of sexual assault and was found liable for the sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll by a jury of his peers.
Psychopaths are viewed as more dangerous than sociopaths because of their acute lack of empathy and overly calculated actions. HF psychopaths are more likely than HF sociopaths to engage in serial offenses, such as financial fraud and corporate exploitation.
Finally, because of a greater impulsivity and propensity for recklessness, sociopaths engage in more violent outbursts or poorly executed coverups of lawlessness or corruption than do psychopaths. On the other hand, sociopaths prefer not relying on violence, rather preferring lying, extortion, and intimidation.
Whatever benefits or inflates and animates Trump’s egomania or detracts from his sense of self-worth shapes, if not determines, his cruelly irresponsible actions.
Not to be overly reductive or to oversimplify Trump’s decision or policymaking production, but these have little to do with advisers — “the last person that the president talked with” — or anything to do with whether a piece of legislation or a judicial verdict is “good “ or “bad” for the nation, the rule of law, representative democracy, or even the interests of Trump’s constituents, billionaires excepted, including the MAGA base.
I contend that Trump’s actions or decisions are purely a matter of what in any given moment he perceives to be the most beneficial and least detrimental to him.
For example, here is what the president had to say in praise of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2017, when he toured the museum, led by Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch and with his daughter Ivanka Trump, U.S. Senator Tim Scott, Alveda King, and the then Secretary of Housing, Ben Carson:
“It’s amazing to see. I could stay here for a lot longer. Believe me, it’s really incredible … I’m deeply proud that we now have a museum that honors the millions of African American men and women who built our national heritage…”
This May, Trump reversed course. Six years after Bunch, the first African American and first historian to lead the Smithsonian, was hired, Trump tried to fire him, against the wishes of the Board of Regents.
No longer were anti-racists and racists alike both “good guys,” to paraphrase Trump’s comments during his first administration about the killing in Virginia of an anti-racist protester by Nazi demonstrators, some of whom shouted “Jews will not replace us.”
Just the other day, in a Truth Social post, the president showed his deep contempt for the coverage of slavery in museums:
“The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’ Like the Smithsonian museum, they are all OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was.”
As New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote, Abraham Lincoln “urged Americans to move past the Civil War ‘with malice toward none, with charity for all,’ unlike Trump who “has malice for all, charity toward none.”
Fascistic in nature
As a general rule, correlation should not be confused with causation. However, as an integrative criminologist with a decades-old clinical background in counseling adolescent and adult offenders and nonoffenders, I would more than suggest that Trump’s racist, sexist, and xenophobic agendas are the consequences of his ASPD intertwined with his family history and socialization and the wider processes of cultural assimilation.
Trump’s biosocial or cultural conflict encounters predate “wokeism” and the undoing of 60 years of civil rights reform, diversity, equity, inclusion, and multiculturalism that may turn out to be his ugliest legacy. Trump’s pre-coming-of-age experiences were subject to and reflective of an age of gender polarization and of ethnic exclusion and racial segregation.
As I argued in a recent commentary on the militarization of policing in DC and the emergence of Trump’s police state, the Outlaw-in-Chief “could care less about whether crime is getting worse or better and whether or not people are safe and secure.” Similarly, the deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles “had absolutely nothing to do with curbing civil unrest or political violence.”
Most everything else Trump is doing in the name of “law and order” or “crushing crime” has been fascistic in nature and antidemocratic in practice. These norm-breaking actions of militarism, as well as illegal plays by ICE agents, are simply about consolidating Trump’s executive power and desire to nationalize local and state law enforcement, as in the upcoming deployment of the National Guard and most likely active duty troops to Chicago.
All of this normative or institutional deviancy is consistent with Trump’s framework of doing away with the post-Nixon Department of Justice as well as the post-Hoover FBI, and replacing them with a Department of Retribution and Star Chamber-like “Federal Bureau of Inquiry.”
As for Trump’s antihuman executive orders to eliminate “nearly $4 billion for USAID to spend on global health programs and more than $6 billion for HIV and AIDS programs,” they could leave millions of people, mostly children, dead.
And since Trump’s tariffs will only result in what economists agree will be higher costs, slower economic growth and investment, global trade disruption and retaliation, as well as sectoral harm to U.S. manufacturing and agriculture, inquiring minds might want to know what could possibly motivate the president to pursue such a disastrous and counterproductive course of action?
Turns out it has little to do with Trump’s iconoclastic love of tariffs and much more to do with the psychologically complex interplay of dominance, personality traits, negotiation tactics, narrative construction, and cognitive biases rooted in his ASPD.
These defensive psychological projections in combination propel Trump through his destructiveness and cruelty, allowing him to transcend the pain these tariffs cause everybody. At the same time, they are not enough to prevent Trump from having to lie about the tariffs’ effects.
Other than losing the Congressional elections in 2026, the egocentric Trump could care less about the Nineteen Eighty-Four-like American dystopia he is fabricating with assistance from ICE, the National Guard, and the military.
One might even consider that the psychopathic side of the Commander-in-Chief is indeed looking for a fight, and an excuse to replace the civilian government with martial law. In all likelihood, the Boss and his gang of sycophants are already planning for it.
- 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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This Trump tactic is a dire warning of something awful
In April, Jesús Escalona Mújicas, a 48-year-old construction worker near Bryan, Texas, was grabbed, detained, and ultimately deported in shackles to Venezuela under false charges that he was a member of the Tren de Aragua gang.
His story was detailed last week by the Texas Observer. He’d worked for the same employer, a Venezuelan Pepsi affiliate, for nearly two decades, and had no criminal history or record of gang activity. The arresting officers claimed his Air Jordans — a brand 24 percent of sneaker wearers in the U.S. reportedly own — were a symbol of gang membership.
Federal agents in President Donald Trump’s high-profile military occupation of Washington, D.C. are zeroing in on food delivery drivers, many of them on mopeds, making them easy targets for abduction, the Washington Post reports.
Gabriel Ravelo Torrealba, 22, needed hospital treatment for hand and leg injuries inflicted in his arrest.
Christian Carías Torres, shot with a stun gun during his arrest, was branded a “suspected gang member,” an allegation, the Post noted, “the Trump administration has repeatedly used without providing evidence.”
Those rounded up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal policing agencies are far from the “worst of the worst” boasted by Trump in his campaign mass deportation pledge. ICE’s own data shows 72 percent of those detained “have no known criminal convictions or pending criminal charges,” as Fortune magazine reported in July.
To meet his arbitrary quota of seizures, deportation fanatic Stephen Miller scuttled any emphasis on the “worst” by racially profiling ordinary working people at Home Deport parking lots, farms, other work sites, and outside court hearings they’d attended to meet legal obligations. Numerous legal immigrants and even citizens continue to be grabbed.
“The President does not want to see Haitians, Nicaraguans, Cubans, or Venezuelans here,” Escalona Mújicas said one of his arresting agents told him.
Similarly, in the D.C. operation, ICE and other federal agents are avoiding “the city’s high-crime areas,” New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote.
“There are soldiers patrolling the National Mall; armored vehicles parked at Union Station; and ICE agents manning checkpoints on U Street, an area known for its bars, restaurants, and nightlife. They’re not there for safety, but for show.”
“If Trump is genuinely concerned about the safety of D.C. residents, I would see National Guard in my neighborhood. I’m not seeing it, and I don’t expect to see it,” one resident of D.C.’s Congress Heights neighborhood told Times reporter Clyde McGrady.
“I don’t think Trump is bringing in the National Guard to protect Black babies in Southeast.”
Corollary consequences for the Gestapo-style raids and domestic military campaigns extend to the distortion of federal budget priorities. The D.C. occupation alone is costing $1 million a day, according to an analysis by Hanna Homestead of the National Priorities Project.
One less publicized provision of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” was the gift of $75 billion in extra funding for ICE, “making it by far the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the federal government,” CBS News reported.
National Nurses United researchers found far more useful ways to allocate that funding rather than on terrorizing immigrant families and communities.
For the same $75 billion, we could eradicate all medical debt accrued by 31 million people, cover over two years of universal pre-K for all 3- and 4-year-olds, pay for nearly all tuition and fees for students in public universities across the U.S., and substantially reduce the costs of child poverty in the nation or most of the homeless crisis in California. The same amount could also end both extreme and chronic hunger around the world for two years.
The militarization has a deeper, malevolent purpose, wrote Monica Potts in The New Republic.
“Trump isn’t actually worried about crime. He’s not trying to make the district safer for its residents, and he’s certainly not weighing the data and evidence when he calls on governors to send guardsmen. Parading troops through an American city is a brazen authoritarian power grab.”
"There is not a crime crisis in D.C.," former D.C. Metropolitan reserve police officer Rosa Brooks who now teaches at Georgetown Law School told NPR, which reiterated Justice Department data that crime in Washington has plummeted with violence reaching a 30-year low last year.
"This is police state territory, banana republic police state territory," Brooks said.
Potts notes: “This is what it means to learn to live in an authoritarian police state, and people are using the only tools they have: cell phones and sandwiches. The longer ICE raids and military takeovers go on, the more they will inspire protests around the country, which may be the only excuse Trump is waiting for to claim that cities are full of disorder and then crack down even harder.”
Trump says he is targeting Chicago and New York next for his next Democratic majority-city occupations. He may also have in mind “an intimidation tactic to try to suppress voters in cities ahead of the 2026 midterm,” Potts observes.
“It’s definitely part of Trump’s only true and unwavering project: consolidating power (Italics added). Even as he’s posting on Truth Social about crime in D.C., he’s cheering efforts in Texas to redraw district maps to elect more Republicans to the House next year and launching an effort to get rid of mail-in ballots.”
As with Trump’s march to autocratic power, the parallels with Hitler and Nazi Germany are unmistakable and should be chilling to everyone. Within two months of being handed power by the conservative old guard Weimar Republic in January 1933, Hitler made two major moves, as Peter Fritzsche describes in Hitler’s First Hundred Days.
First, he persuaded his conservative coalition partners to call for new elections by early March.
Then, the Nazis engineered or at least exploited a fire in the Reichstag in late February, Germany’s Capitol building, to invoke emergency decrees. They served, Fritzsche notes, to “suspend civil liberties, expand protective custody” and other authoritarian powers that “symbolized the death of representative government and the rule of law.”
It also gave the Nazis the opening to complete a takeover of German policing to engage in arrests, detention, and violent assaults on all political opposition.
Coupled with the election, in which the Nazis increased their political power through domination of the media, mobilization of state resources, demonization of their version of “enemies from within” (mainly Jews and Communists), and the traumatizing impact of an increased militarization, Hitler and the Nazis had the means to manufacture mass consent, silence dissent, and cement fascist rule.
Potts is unimpressed with much of the Democratic leadership response. She cites Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s dismissal of Trump’s takeover of D.C. as a “political ploy” and an “attempted distraction” from problems like the tariffs and Epstein files. But, she emphasizes, “the federal agents and troops are not the distraction. They are the whole point — quite literally the spear in Trump’s increasingly fascist assault on American democracy.”
Democratic leaders, Potts added on the Daily Blast podcast with Greg Sargent, “should start calling things like they see them and they should say, you’re not coming to our cities, you’re not coming to our towns with the military, you’re not going to turn this country into a dictatorship. The idea that there’s still time is really critical. And voters like it when elected leaders fight for them.”
That is the immediate challenge we face with Trump and Trumpism today.
- Chuck Idelson, retired, is the former Communications Senior Strategist for National Nurses United, the nation's largest union and professional organization of registered nurses with 225,00 members
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This Yale professor is so wrong about how to stand up to Trump
Yale professor Evan Morris argues that it’s time to “unyoke the sciences from the humanities,” by which he means that faculties of science should split off from the humanities and form science-only universities to avoid the wrath of Donald Trump.
Scientists at Columbia and Harvard lost grants because Trump falsely accused their administrators of indulging antisemitism on the part of their students.
It was a flimsy pretext to bring the Ivy League to heel, but instead of blaming Trump, Morris incongruously blames humanities professors.
“The humanities are going down and taking the rest of us — grant-funded scientists who focus on medical research or the physical sciences — with them,” he laments.
Morris’ take is shockingly naive.
Trump is at war with all independent sources of knowledge, from unbiased government statisticians to the free press. Any expert who can tell Trump he’s wrong about climate change, vaccines, public health, or sex differences is a direct threat to his power.
Science, therefore, is squarely in his crosshairs.
Let’s review a small part of what Trump has already done.
Trump’s racist crackdown on international students is an existential threat to American science. International grad students do much of the day-to-day work of science in this country. Foreign students are also a major source of revenue for their universities because they pay full tuition. For years, universities have recruited international students to offset dwindling state funding. An all-science university would suffer just as much, if not more than, a regular university from a collapse of international student enrollment because STEM programs draw more students from overseas.
To make matters worse, Trump is trying to cap indirect research funding for the medical and physical sciences. The cap is a direct threat to grant-getting research scientists. This is the money that keeps the lights on in their labs.
It gets worse.
Trump’s handpicked acting US Attorney for Washington, D.C., even tried to launch a frivolous criminal prosecution of green energy grantees. He admitted he had no probable cause to show that any of these people had committed crimes, but he still wanted to claw the grant money out of their bank accounts for the crime of working on green energy. The effort fizzled, but this fiasco should serve as a warning. Trump and his allies aren’t done trying to prosecute scientists for inconvenient truths.
Morris wants to ditch the social scientists, but they warned us that populists like Trump demonize intellectuals and experts of all stripes, scientists included.
Any scientist who’s doing work on epidemiology, vaccines, climate, evolution, or sex differences could find themselves in conflict with the White House and its MAGA allies.
And it’s not just scientists in controversial fields who are at risk. International collaboration is the lifeblood of science but congressional Republicans are already trying to label collaborations with Chinese scientists as a national security threat.
What about theoretical mathematicians? Surely that’s apolitical.
There’s still no escape.
If your work has no obvious applications to weapons, artificial intelligence, or crypto, MAGA will label you a decadent parasite and demand that your job be eliminated to pay for tax cuts.
We don’t need to guess how they feel. Vice president JD Vance once gave a talk entitled “The Universities are the Enemy.”
“So much of what we want to do in this movement and in this country, I think, are fundamentally dependent on going through a set of very hostile institutions, specifically the universities, which control the knowledge in our society, which control what we call truth and what we call falsity, that provides research that gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in our country,” Vance told his audience.
“If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country, and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”
Universities are a threat to the MAGA agenda because they produce knowledge that contradicts Trump’s lies.
Splitting science from the arts and humanities will shortchange students without protecting the sciences.
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Here's what will take Trump down in the end
I’m old enough to remember when American politics was divided between those who wanted less government (they were called “conservatives,” or the Right) and those who wanted more social safety nets (called “progressives,” or the Left).
It’s hard to find Right or Left these days. Instead we have something no one has ever seen in America — a personal takeover of nearly all the institutions of government and, increasingly, the private sector, by a would-be dictator.
Trump is on the way to occupying Democratic-led cities with the Army, National Guard, and ICE — in what appears to be a dress rehearsal for the 2026 midterms.
He is telling Republican states to super-gerrymander in order to squeeze out more Republican seats in Congress, to help retain Republican control of the House after the 2026 midterm elections.
He is trying to silence criticism from universities, museums, law firms, and the media. And targeting critics for prosecution, such as Adam Schiff and John Bolton.
But that’s hardly all of it.
At the same time, Trump is taking personal control of the U.S. economy.
He’s trying to control the Federal Reserve Board, threatening Jerome Powell with unflattering stories about his expenditures on the Fed’s building and Fed governor Lisa Cook with stories about her home loan.
He’s imposing his will on key industries, from semi-conductors to steel.
He’s given the chip giants Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices export licenses to sell their semiconductors to China on condition that they pay the U.S. government 15 percent of what they make on those sales. (Not incidentally, Trump has reported substantial personal holdings in Nvidia.)
He’s converting nearly $11 billion of grants that the government had given Intel (part of the Biden administration’s CHIPS and Science Act) into a 10 percent stake in the company, worth $8.9 billion, held by the government. Presumably, this would let Trump decide on its CEO.
His White House has even created a scorecard that rates American corporations on how loyal they are to Trump. Corporations with “strong” ratings (among them, Uber, DoorDash, United, Delta, AT&T, and Cisco) are to be rewarded with tax and regulatory benefits, while “low” rated corporations could face retribution ranging from Justice Department and regulatory lawsuits to damaging executive orders, harsh regulations, and unbridled scorn from Trump.
Before they poured money into Trump’s initiatives and PACs, many Big Tech corporations were facing federal investigations and enforcement lawsuits. Those investigations and lawsuits are now being dropped.
Trump’s import taxes (tariffs) are the results of individual deals between Trump and particular countries, as well as between Trump and big American corporations. So far, America’s trading partners have agreed to invest over $1 trillion in the American economy. Who will oversee such investments? Trump.
In sum, an increasing part of our economy is no longer being determined by supply and demand but by the deals Trump is striking.
Authoritarians rely on vast bureaucracies to control industry, as does China’s Xi Jinping.
But the new order being imposed on American industry doesn’t come from a vast authoritarian bureaucracy. It’s personal and arbitrary. A single so-called “strongman” is beginning to control everything.
I don’t know the proper term for this. State capitalism? Fascist capitalism?
Whatever we call it, it will be Trump’s downfall because his arbitrary and mercurial decisions are making the private sector nervous about investing in the U.S. economy, causing global lenders to demand a higher risk premium for lending to the U.S., and pushing the economy toward both inflation and recession — so-called “stagflation.”
If nothing else brings him down, the economy surely will.
***
Just a reminder that my 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.
- Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/
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This Dem attempt to look anti-woke is just plain dumb
I was not planning to write about Cracker Barrel’s new logo. Neither was I planning to write about the voluminous rightwing backlash against it. The redesign, which does away with the old man sitting on a chair leaning against a barrel, doesn’t look “woke” to me. But change is hard for some, especially right-wingers who see dangers everywhere.
I feel compelled to talk about the logo change because the official Twitter account for the Democratic Party decided to talk about it. Not only that, but the account, in a post viewed nearly 14 million times, decided to agree with the rightwing freakout.
“We think the Cracker Barrel rebrand sucks, too,” the post says, over Norman Rockwell’s painting of a man voicing an unpopular opinion.
I don’t want to make too much of this, but this is a microcosm of a macro problem within the Democrats, in particular that faction of the party that has most of the money and most of the influence over the press corps.
In short, the problem is rooted in the belief among elite Democrats that they can compromise with bad actors who in turn are motivated by compromise to be worse. Even shorter, if you accept as true the lies told by the fascists, you have two enemies: them and you.
If I must guess, I’d say the Democrats’ point is showing at least some portion of the people who are freaking out about Cracker Barrel’s redesign that the Democrats played no role in the “wokification” they see. The point might even be some sort of solidarity, as if to say the Democrats dislike “radicals” and “cancel culture” as much as you do.
To this dominant faction of the Democratic Party, I would imagine this move is reasonable, perhaps politically strategic, as it seems to create a middle ground between partisan poles. (Some wonks might call this by its old name, “triangulation.”) If that doesn’t appeal to right-wingers, per se, it might appeal to indie voters who value more than anything their reputations for being nonpartisan. I might even concede to its effectiveness if the rightwing freakout were based on something true.
There’s your problem.
It isn’t based on anything. The total substance of the allegations against Cracker Barrel is the impact of the allegations themselves. That is to say, if the allegations “work” as intended, the allegations are real.
Those allegations are themselves the consequence of a reaction to change and the search for the presumably malicious causes of it. Because these are fascists and rightwing authoritarians, those causes are always the result of some kind of conspiracy by their perceived enemies. And because perceived enemies are always seeking to destroy them, change is always some sign of imminent destruction.
From their view, Cracker Barrel’s rebrand is a declaration of war.
That’s why, from the rightwing perspective, Christopher Rufo did not sound delusional when he said “we must break the Barrel.”
He went on: “It's not about this particular restaurant chain — who cares — but about creating massive pressure against companies that are considering any move that might appear to be ‘wokification.’ The implicit promise: Go woke, watch your stock price drop 20 percent, which is exactly what is happening now. … The Barrel must be broken.”
Objectively speaking, it is delusional, and no one is entitled to a public hearing of their delusions, no matter how stentorian they may seem.
As Tommy Vietor said, in reaction to Rufo: “This idiotic bull---- might have been good politics at one point, but I’m confident the pendulum has swung back and people now see these guys as insufferable little tyrants. No one cares about Cracker Barrel, you annoying dork.”
I think Vietor was on to something, briefly. After all, there’s some truth in claiming that “this idiotic bull----” has lost its populist appeal and that, as a result, the pendulum has begun swinging back so that people can now see men like Rufo as the “insufferable little tyrants” they are.
But then an official organ of the Democratic Party decided to get in the way of that pendulum swing by agreeing, and the most immediate implication is that the Democrats themselves are not nearly as liberal or democratic as they seem to be, nor are the “insufferable little tyrants” nearly as insufferable, little or tyrannical as they seem to be.
With that post, the Democrats conceded the fascists have a point.
And the Democrats should never concede anything to fascists.
Before that moment, as Vietor’s comment suggested, there was a bright moral line between the sane and the insane. There was no need to take seriously the delusions that haunt the hobgoblins of the right, and it was clear and obvious that Rufo isn’t interested in the substance of his allegations (whether they are true; whether they are based on something real), only in whether they bring him closer to his goals. And as long as liberals saw this bright moral line, there was no point in searching for good faith in the hobgoblins who have none.
As Tommy Vietor said, “No one cares about Cracker Barrel, you annoying dork.”
But then the official Twitter account of the Democratic Party stepped in. It decided to see good faith where there is none. It decided to give the benefit of the doubt to malicious actors who would never give it in return. And worst of all, that decision took a simple and rational discussion, in which it was clear which side was the sane side, and made it insane. And now, instead of dismissing the hobgoblins, here I am, in today’s edition of the Editorial Board, taking them seriously.
The pattern is everywhere.
The president makes some insane allegation (crime is out of control in Washington, DC!) to advance his fascist agenda under false pretenses (the National Guard commandeered local cops in the name of public safety, despite crime rates being at historic lows).
In response, a centrist Democrat who values his reputation more than his liberty decides to accept as real the insanity (well, crime really is a problem and cancel-culture can’t cancel that!), making himself complicit in advancing a fascist agenda ("Chicago is next and then we'll help with New York,” Donald Trump said), and making everyone insane.
And I don’t see this pattern changing any time soon, not until the dominant faction of the Democratic Party, the one with most of the money and most of the influence on the Washington press corps, understands the party’s majority, that faction without the money and without the influence, is no longer going to tolerate the belief among elite Democrats that it’s better to bargain with evil than to fight it.
To me, this is the true fault line – between those Democrats who look at the president and the Republicans and believe what they see, and those Democrats who look at them both and see what they want to see, because it suits their interests. The rightwing mind is not the only host of hobgoblins. The defenders of “the center” host them, too.
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This shocking Trump assault on democracy is no conspiracy theory
Donald Trump is now raiding the homes and launching investigations into political insiders who’ve publicly criticized him. Other former Trump administration officials are clamming up. We’ve entered the phase of this transition to fascism where objections to his actions are “chilled.”
Remember Jade Helm in 2015? The Obama administration was running a “joint realistic military training (RMT)” exercise led by the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), coordinated across several branches including Army Special Forces (Green Berets), Navy SEALs, Air Force Special Ops, Marine Corps forces, the 82nd Airborne, and other interagency partners.
It was conducted across seven states — primarily in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado — and overseen from Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. The objective was to train special forces in maneuvering through civilian populations and operating in varied terrain to simulate overseas combat environments like in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And it made rightwingers absolutely hysterical, with wall-to-wall coverage on Fox “News” and across the nation’s 1,500 hate-radio stations. As Nina Burleigh wrote for Newsweek three months before the 2016 elections:
“According to them, President Barack Obama soon will institute martial law and cancel or nullify the election in November, after which his Federal Emergency Management Agency will disarm and herd all the anti-abortion, religious-right, gun-owning, home-schooling folks into secret ‘FEMA camps’ that his administration has spent years preparing.”
And it wasn’t just the Alex Jones crowd that was spinning out over Jade Helm. As Burleigh noted, Texas Governor Greg Abbott claimed Obama’s “Department of Defense was preparing to invade his state during a training exercise called Jade Helm.”
Fast forward to today. The federal government has created a masked secret police force and is building concentration camps at a breakneck pace. They’re suing, investigating, and in some cases arresting and even deporting people based on things they’ve said, in clear violation of the First Amendment.
Republicans across the country seem not only to have forgotten their earlier fear of federal tyranny — they’re now cheering it on.
As Lev Parnas wrote in his excellent Substack newsletter Lev Remembers, calling the raid on Bolton and Blanche’s interview of Maxwell “chilling,” he warned us:
“This week, what we witnessed was not just news — it was a setting. A preview of what’s to come: full takeover, full dictatorship. Up until now, we’ve been watching theatrics, a carefully choreographed script between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. But this week, the theatrics ended, and reality set in.”
Parnas isn’t some wild-eyed liberal. He was one of Trump’s closest guys during his first term and when running for office in 2016. He was also one of Trump’s pipelines to Ukraine and Putin. As he puts it:
“I am not a journalist. I am not a pundit. I am not giving you theories. I was one of them. I was inside the cult. I was in Trump’s shadow diplomacy. I was sent to Eastern Europe to deliver his first quid pro quo to Zelensky. I know these people. I know the inner circle. And I know exactly how far they’re willing to go.”
Parnas added today that he fully expects Trump to screw Ukraine and normalize relations with Russia over the next month so he can invite his dear friend and mentor Vladimir Putin here for the FIFA World Cup.
Scholars of fascism like Jason Stanley and Timothy Snyder have left America for Canada. They know that once a fascist takes over an elected government, it’s damn hard to dislodge them — just ask Russians, Hungarians, Turks, Indians, North Koreans, Peruvians, Venezuelans, Brazilians, Chileans, or Egyptians.
Meanwhile, Trump is deploying troops into American cities, cowing the press and defunding NPR and PBS, rewriting history in our museums, arresting Democratic legislators and judges, going after high-profile Democrats from Adam Schiff to Letitia James, threatening to seize voting machines in next year’s elections, intimidating major law firms and universities, and sucking up to Putin and other dictators as if they, and not western Europe, are America’s allies.
It’s increasingly clear that we’re no longer at risk of “he’s going to turn America fascist” — we’re already fully in the midst of it as I write in my new book, “The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink.”
The economic side of this authoritarian project is also unmistakable. Trump is forcing companies to give the federal government a share of their revenue or even their stock as part of his transition to National Socialism. This month it was 10 percent of Intel.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t nationalization for the public good, as when FDR or Obama stepped in to save vital industries and preserve jobs. This is, instead, classic crony fascism, where private enterprise is bent to serve the state and its strongman leader.
When Barack Obama helped the auto industry weather the Bush Crash of 2008-09, Republicans screamed “socialism,” with Newt Gingrich calling it “just wrong,” predicting it would fail and make matters worse. Today, those same voices are silent as Trump embraces the very thing they once warned against, this time not to stabilize an economy, but to centralize his power.
Knowing that much of what they’re doing is outright illegal — and that Trump can’t be prosecuted (although he could be impeached) because six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court have given him king-like immunity and powers — his lieutenants are moving fast.
They remember how Richard Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, went to prison for conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury, and how dozens of Nixon’s cronies ended up indicted or jailed. Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Kash Patel, and the rest are working furiously to ensure accountability never reaches them.
The media landscape is being transformed before our eyes.
CBS is inserting a “monitor” into newsrooms, presumably to avoid stories that might anger Trump. PBS and NPR have been defunded. ABC paid millions to settle a bogus Trump lawsuit. NBC is preparing to spin off MSNBC, and if it ends up in the hands of a rightwing billionaire, America’s news will look like Hungary’s or Russia’s: one-note state propaganda.
This is how it always begins.
Even protest is being stifled. Student demonstrations against Gaza or Trump’s corruption are largely gone, not because students don’t care but because they’re shackled by massive debt and terrified of losing their futures. And those who do protest increasingly face expulsion, police, and even military repression.
Trump has already violated the Posse Comitatus Act by putting soldiers into Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., to conduct policing operations; he says New York and Chicago are next. When he seizes voting machines and Republicans “win” the 2026 election, will those soldiers be standing by with live ammunition to ensure there’s no resistance? Is preventing protesters from pouring into the streets the reason why the rush to build more “FEMA camps”?
Thankfully, a small handful of Democrats like Gavin Newsom and JB Pritzker are stepping up. But stopping America’s slide into fascism must be Job One for the entire Democratic Party, both legislators and constituents. And hopefully a few Republicans will find their consciences, their historic oppostition to tyranny, and their voices.
Which brings us back to us, you and me. History shows that public opinion is the only force strong enough to backstop antifascist officials. That means each of us must act as an amplifier and avatar of resistance.
Share this and other progressive messages far and wide. Get active on social media. Talk with friends, neighbors, and co-workers. Call on former presidents Bill Clinton, George W Bush, and Obama to show real leadership. Show up at your local Democratic Party’s meetings and become a precinct committeeperson (or any other role) to shape its direction. Call your members of Congress at 202-224-3121 and demand they fight for freedom and democracy.
The window for action is closing as the chill spreads across Washington, the media, and now into the states. As Trump continues down this road, the time will come — sooner rather than later — when we can no longer protest, when our private actions lead to arrests, lawsuits, harassment or worse, and our public protests are met with armed troops. Viktor Orbán and Putin have shown exactly how dissent is crushed, and Trump appears to be following their script.
As Thomas Paine wrote in 1776, words George Washington ordered read to his troops:
“THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered…”
The same applies today. The right once screamed that Jade Helm was a prelude to tyranny. They were wrong then, but today, their silence in the face of actual tyranny tells you everything.
This time, the danger is real. Tag, we’re it.
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Trump just discovered an awful secret weapon
With the raid on John Bolton‘s home, it looks like we may have reached that stage when fascist governments begin to turn against their critics, weaponizing the tools of a police state.
Richard Nixon went after his enemies, too, and once said, in the depths of the Watergate scandal, that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” He discovered the hard way that wasn’t true, at least back in the 1970s. More than 40 people connected to his White House and campaign were indicted, and many went to prison.
Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, Domestic Policy Advisor John Ehrlichman, White House Counsel John Dean, Attorney General John Mitchell, and Special Counsel Charles Colson all did time. So did several members of Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President, better known as CREEP, for their crimes of burglary, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy. Nixon escaped accountability only because Gerald Ford pardoned him.
That experience left a permanent scar on America’s political consciousness, but it also left a roadmap that Trump and his inner circle are determined not to follow. They have no intention of being, like Nixon and his people, crooks who lost their grip on power. They’re apparently making plans to guarantee it never happens to them.
That’s the context for Trump’s recent announcement that he intends to issue an executive order directing states to defer to him in “counting and tabulating votes.” He’s laying the groundwork to seize control of the elections in 2026 and 2028, turning them into stage-managed rituals rather than contests.
This isn’t bluster on Trump’s part. It’s the natural progression of what Republicans have already been doing with their gerrymandering binge, redrawing district lines to ensure that even if they lose the majority of votes, they can still control the House of Representatives. The game is to rig the system so thoroughly that the people’s will can no longer threaten their grip on power, that Democrats in Congress will never be able to investigate their abuse of our system like they did with Nixon.
What Nixon tried to do in secret with plumbers, burglars, and hush money, Trump is doing in the open, loudly, and with the full backing of the Republican Party and its billionaire benefactors.
The danger of this moment is that history shows how difficult it is to remove authoritarian leaders once they’ve succeeded in consolidating control.
Fascists are not like ordinary politicians. They don’t lose gracefully. They don’t respect rules, laws, or constitutions except insofar as they can be bent to entrench their power. As Chris Armitage writes, once in, they’re damn hard to get out.
Mussolini stayed in power for more than two decades until the Second World War turned against him. Franco held Spain in his iron grip for almost 40 years (and they’re still finding bodies). Hitler’s regime collapsed only after catastrophic defeat and the near destruction of Germany.
These men understood that once you have bent the legal system to your will, crushed independent journalism, cowed the opposition, and taught the public to accept corruption as normal, there’s no easy way for citizens to push you out.
And yet authoritarian regimes do fall.
Sometimes it happens through elite defections, like the Italian monarchy finally turning against Mussolini in 1943. Sometimes it happens through the pressure of outside forces, as with Vichy France collapsing under the weight of Allied liberation.
More often, though, it happens when the people themselves rise up in massive, sustained, nonviolent resistance.
The Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2014 showed what it looks like when citizens refuse to accept a corrupt authoritarian order. Hundreds of thousands filled the streets of Kyiv through a freezing winter, enduring beatings, arrests, and even killings. Yet they would not leave until Ukraine’s then-President (and Putin toady) Viktor Yanukovych fled the country.
The lesson was stark: even the most entrenched regime can crumble when confronted with organized, courageous defiance.
History is filled with similar examples, from the Solidarity movement in Poland to the fall of dictators across Eastern Europe in 1989. More recently, mass movements in South Korea forced the removal of President Park Geun-hye in 2017 despite her control over the levers of power, and again last year when President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law.
The thread running through all of these cases is that once fascists or would-be dictators gain the upper hand, it isn’t enough to hope they’ll obey laws or lose elections. By design, they manipulate the system to make losing impossible. It’s the one thing that’s so common among them that it’s predictable.
Trump understands this better than anyone, as I lay out in my new book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink. That’s why he is not just talking about seizing control of vote counting but is also working with Republican-controlled states to purge voter rolls, limit ballot access, and criminalize voter registration drives.
It’s why Republican governors are signing laws that let them override election boards and install partisan hacks in their place.
It’s why the neofascist right is pouring money into think tanks and dark-money operations that map out every legal loophole that can be weaponized against democracy.
Their strategy is to make resistance look futile by presenting their power as inevitable.
We must not let them succeed in that psychological warfare.
Resistance is not futile, but it does require seriousness, preparation, and courage. Trump and the GOP aren’t hiding their goals. They’re trying to seize control not just of elections but of the press, with constant attacks on independent media and regulatory approval of growing consolidation of news outlets into the hands of friendly oligarchs.
They’re targeting the legal profession, purging government of independent lawyers and bureaucrats, stacking the courts with partisans, and threatening judges and law firms who resist them.
They’re even drawing up lists of corporations deemed “friendly” or “unfriendly” to the administration, a tactic straight out of Putin’s authoritarian playbook. And with the Bolton raid, it appears they’re imitating Putin’s purges of “disloyal” former aides.
If you reward the loyal and punish the defiant, you create a political landscape and an economy that bend themselves to political power rather than to the rule of law, and it appears that is their explicit goal.
This is how democracies typically collapse, not with a single dramatic coup but through a steady tightening of control by elected officials until ordinary people feel they have no voice left.
The warning lights are flashing. Trump is telling us openly what he intends to do. The Republican Party is showing us in every state where it holds power what the model will look like.
Their gerrymanders, their purges, their threats to the media and the courts, their talk of “friendly” corporations: it’s all of a piece. They learned from Nixon that getting caught is dangerous. They intend to make sure they never get caught because they’ll write the rules themselves so they’re never out of power.
The only counterweight is we, the people. History shows that nonviolent resistance, when massive and sustained, is more effective than violence at bringing down tyrannies. But it requires solidarity, discipline, and an unshakable commitment to the idea that no one man is above the law.
We must be preparing now for the possibility that the 2026 and 2028 elections will not be free and fair. It’s time to build networks, coalitions, and organizations capable of bringing millions into the streets, of challenging illegitimate actions in courts, of protecting the few independent institutions that remain.
We must be telling the truth, loudly and constantly, about what is happening, so that average Americans don’t wake up one morning to find that democracy has been stolen while they slept.
This is not alarmism. It’s the plain reading of Trump’s own words and the GOP’s own actions.
The lesson of Nixon is that corrupt men in power will always push as far as they can get away with.
The lesson of Trump is that he has no intention of ever being forced into exile, prison, or disgrace.
The lesson of history is that once fascists take control, they will never leave voluntarily.
The lesson of the Maidan, and of countless other people’s movements, is that fascists like Trump and his ass-kissing cabinet can be defeated if enough of us are willing to stand up together.
The hour is late, but it’s not yet too late. If we take seriously what Trump and the Republican Party are telling us, if we organize and resist, if we insist on truth, solidarity, and democracy, then the future can still be America’s to win, reclaiming the vision of our founders and the freedom that generations of Americans have fought and died to keep.
If we don’t, we’ll live under the iron rule of men who have studied Nixon’s downfall and resolved never to repeat his mistakes even as they double down on his corruption of government to persecute his enemies and consolidate power. The choice is ours, and the time to make it is now.
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The rise of Trump's ‘Republican National Guard’
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
This JD Vance stupidity is most damaging of all
The vice president was on the TV recently, and said something that was not only stupid but a bald-faced lie made more disgusting by the fact of its stupidity.
“As we've kicked illegal aliens out of our country,” JD Vance said, “you actually see housing costs start to level off."
Though the regime is snatching more immigrants from our streets, housing costs are not leveling off here in Connecticut. Someone like me, who makes a modest living, cannot find a modest house for under $350,000. Rents are worse, and they keep going up. Mine did. And none of this is due to the presence, or absence, of “illegal aliens.”
Vance is lying but he’s also asking us to be stupid. Are we supposed to blame the most vulnerable people for a policy problem? That’s what the housing crisis is.
For one thing, there’s not enough of it. (State and local laws inhibit new construction.) For another, bad actors are gaming the system (private-equity groups gobble up properties and use AI to gin up rents.)
One more thing: much of the blame for the housing crisis can be laid at the feet of the president. And JD Vance knows it.
High inflation leads to higher interest rates, which means people are not selling, because there are not enough buyers who want to buy at higher rates, which reduces an already-reduced housing supply. Meanwhile, people like me, who cannot afford to buy, must compete for apartments, which drives up rents. And lying beneath all that is something the vice president would prefer you did not think about.
Tariffs.
Donald Trump’s illegal national sales tax is keeping inflation high, because it pushes prices higher. The Federal Reserve won’t cut interest rates with inflation as high as it is, which means borrowing is more expensive, which means people are not buying, which means people are not selling, which means the housing supply keeps getting smaller.
In theory, I suppose you could say, as Vance does, that a solution to the housing crisis is just getting rid of “illegal aliens” so there are fewer people competing for housing.
But that’s stupid. A better solution is to stop taxing the essentials of life so inflation can ease, so interest rates can fall, so people can start putting their houses up for sale again. But it’s not just stupid. It’s disgusting. Getting rid of people should not be the solution to a policy problem. What we need is better policy.
To hear the vice president tell it, the Trump regime isn’t to blame for these problems, only a Democratic Party that allegedly puts “the rights of foreigners over the interests of American citizens.” And while they search for scapegoats for the problems they create, the problems they create continue to impoverish people like me. And that makes me mad.
Let me put it this way.
In the coming months, my health insurance premium is going to spike. By how much? I don’t know exactly, but it will be more than double. I buy coverage through Connecticut’s insurance exchange (Obamacare). In Trump's “big, beautiful bill,” the Republicans in effect repealed the federal subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act. They are set to expire at year’s end, at which point I will face a kind of Sophie’s choice: Either I pay impossible rates every month or I just go without health insurance.
I won’t be alone.
“Nearly all of the roughly 24 million Americans enrolled in healthcare coverage via the ACA exchanges will face massive premium hikes – in many cases, three and four times higher than what they’re paying right now,” Charles Gaba told me recently.
“Millions will be priced out of being able to afford coverage at all,” Charles said, “while most of the rest will have to either eat the higher premiums, downgrade to a lower-quality plan with higher deductibles, higher copays, a worse provider network or all of the above. Or they’ll have to move to non-ACA coverage via so-called ‘junk plans,’ which have few if any of the patient protections required by ACA plans.”
Millions will be priced out. That almost certainly includes me.
The vice president would have us believe that whatever problems the people of this country face, the solution is getting rid of “illegals.”
Let me tell you something: no immigrant ever taxed me, illegally. No immigrant raised my rent. No immigrant made it prohibitive to buy a house. No immigrant made choices that resulted in my grocery and electric bills going up and up. No immigrant forced me to give up my health insurance. No immigrant lied about the injuries he caused.
And no immigrant tried to silence me.
The regime has established checkpoints in Washington, DC, to demand that residents prove who they are. It’s a model that could be replicated nationally at next year’s midterm elections.
“This will not start and end in DC,” said Attorneys General Kathy Jennings of Delaware and Kwame Raoul of Illinois in a statement. “The president has made his intentions very clear that he wants to abuse his powers to take over other cities, using these troops as a tool to advance his political agenda.”
If voter intimidation and harassment don’t work, there’s always cheating. Texas passed legislation that would redraw its congressional maps, giving the president five more House seats. Other red states are following suit. The governor of Texas has said he will sue in federal court to prevent blue state leaders from counterattacking.
In a democracy, we are supposed to be able to complain when our leaders and their policies do us harm. But Trump is creating conditions that are tantamount to those of rape, so he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, and all the rest of us can do is shut up and take it.
As you can imagine, I’m not in the mood for Democratic leaders to be equivocal about the injuries that are being committed by this regime.
I’m not receptive to Hakeem Jeffries, for instance, for saying New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s rent-controlled apartment is a “legitimate” subject of public concern, not when my own extortionate rent is very much a burden to me for the fact of it being out of control.
I’m not warm to Democrats accepting as true the total falsehood that Americans actually like the military occupation of Washington, DC.
And I’m not open to Democrats who pretend to believe the lies told by their enemies about virtually anything – whether the subject is crime or immigrants or other Democrats – not when inflation would be down, interest rates would be lower, housing would be more affordable and I would still have healthcare coverage had Kamala Harris been elected.
I am, however, interested in resentment, which is to say, I’m interested in any Democrat who can tell the difference between resentment based on nothing (the kind the vice president panders to) and resentment based on something (like mine).
I’m interested in any Democrat who has the spine to come to his own conclusions for the purpose of putting all that energy to good use. And I’m interested in any Democrat who is willing to speak the whole truth, saying that no immigrant has hurt Americans the way this president is hurting us.
No immigrant told me lies.
And unlike JD Vance, no immigrant asked me to be stupid.
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How a single memo gave us the disaster that is President Donald Trump
Last week marked the start of the slide that ended in the catastrophe of Trump.
On August 23, 1971, less than two months before he was nominated to serve as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote a memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
It was titled “Attack On American Free Enterprise System” and it outlined ways in which corporate America should defend and counter attack against “disquieting voices” — environmentalists, consumer advocates, and labor unions. Powell warned that their voices were growing louder and their influence was gaining in the halls of Congress.
I remember the time very well. The nation was witnessing a flowering of reform. Just as the “muckrakers” of the first years of the 20th century had spawned the Progressive Era in response to the wide inequalities and corruption of the first Gilded Age and its “robber barons,” the reformers of the 1960s were on the verge of spawning another progressive era that would rebalance the American economy in favor of all its stakeholders.
Louis Powell thought so, too, but he was deeply alarmed by it. He told corporate America that businesses must pour money into political campaigns, public relations campaigns, and litigation all aimed at putting an end to this wave of reform.
Corporate America duly followed Powell’s advice. An entire corporate-political complex was born, including tens of thousands of lobbyists, lawyers, political operatives, and public relations flacks.
Within a few decades, big corporations became the largest political force in Washington and in most state capitals. The number of corporate political action committees (PACs) mushroomed from under 300 in 1976 to more than 1,200 four years later. Between the late 1970s and the late 1980s, corporate PACs increased their expenditures on congressional races nearly fivefold. Labor union PAC spending rose only about half as fast.
I saw Washington change. When I arrived there in 1974 to work in the Ford administration, it was a rather seedy town. By the time I returned as secretary of labor in 1993, it had been transformed into a glittering center of corporate America — replete with elegant office buildings, fancy restaurants, pricy bistros, five-star hotels, major conference centers, beautiful townhouses, and a booming real estate market that pushed Washington’s poor, most of whom were Black, out of the increasingly upscale Northwest portion of the city and made two of Washington’s adjoining counties among the wealthiest in the nation.
By that time, corporations employed some 61,000 people to lobby for them, including registered lobbyists and lawyers. That came to more than a hundred lobbyists for each member of Congress.
That tsunami of big money from giant corporations and their CEOs, top executives, and major investors was engulfing American politics. It not only sank reform; it began to rig the entire system in favor of the moneyed interests and against average working people.
In subsequent years, the Supreme Court opened the floodgates, ruling absurdly that money was speech under the First Amendment and corporations were people.
And America is in a second Gilded Age of near-record inequality and corruption, featuring robber barons like Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and the biggest robber of them all, Trump.
What’s the answer? No easy one, of course, but we have to get big money out of politics. Start with campaign finance reform — public funds matching small-donor contributions to candidates who agree to limit their campaign spending.
Here’s a video my talented team and I created about all this:
- YouTubeyoutu.be
Should you wish for more detail — and to understand how the Powell memo fit into subsequent decades of widening inequality and mounting corruption and what we must do to reverse course — you might want to read my new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America. You can support local bookstores by ordering it at bookshop.org.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/
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