Trump makes America's appalling past 'better!'
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
A truly terrifying plot lies hidden in this empty Trump threat
After his Friday meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, U.S. President Donald Trump bragged that the dictator had backed one of his conspiracy theories. According to Trump, Putin said, “You can’t have an honest election with mail-in voting.” (You don’t need to be a former KGB agent to know how to woo our chief executive.)
Then on Monday, perhaps emboldened by his encounter with a real-life autocrat, Trump announced a major effort to seize control of American elections.
In a Truth Social post, he declared that he would sign “an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections” and “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS.”
We’ve all grown used to the president’s wild claims about elections. We might be tempted to roll our eyes now, but we shouldn’t. It’s appalling.
If we do not act against these threats, free and fair elections in 2026 could be at stake. So, what can be done?
The order would likely purport to ban or seriously limit mail voting, a focus of Trump’s since 2020. To be clear, mail voting is a widely popular and long-standing practice used by about a third of citizens. Every state has well-tested security measures in place to ensure that the process is safe and secure.
Trump claimed in his post that we are the only country in the world that uses mail voting. Putin, whom he called a “smart guy,” allegedly told him that, but it is blatantly false. Dozens of countries use mail voting, including Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom. (And of course, Trump himself regularly votes by mail in Florida.)
The order could also target voting machines. “While we’re at it,” he said in the post, we should get rid of “Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES.” That’s nutty. Machines with a paper record (used by 98% of voters) are far more accurate and secure than, say, counting ballots by hand. Ironically, Trump’s blast came the same day that Newsmax paid $67 million to a voting machine company in a defamation suit arising from the last round of false claims about the 2020 election.
Attempting to implement any of these policies via executive order would be flagrantly illegal and flatly unconstitutional—a power grab. Already, earlier this year, Trump tried to seize control of elections with an executive order requiring Americans to produce a passport or another citizenship document to register to vote using the federal form. The Brennan Center and others sued, and judges blocked the worst part of that move. The new threatened executive order, too, could turn out to be vapor, essentially a malevolent press release.
But Trump’s post contained a chilling claim: “Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”
This statement plainly repudiates the Constitution—the Elections Clause gives states and Congress the power to run elections. Presidents have no authority to rewrite election rules. In a democracy, the states are not personal agents of the president.
If successful, this executive order would be nothing short of an authoritarian takeover of our election system. Imagine the man who demanded that a state election official “find” him 11,780 votes in charge of “counting and tabulating the votes.”
This threat comes as federalized troops and masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents patrol the streets of Washington, DC. Last week, ICE agents massed outside a Democratic event on redistricting in California.
Again, Trump’s threatened executive order would be blatantly illegal and blocked by a court. But it’s still important to listen to what he’s saying. He’s making his goal—a federal takeover of elections—explicit. And while this particular tactic won’t work, it’s just one piece of the administration’s emerging, unmistakable campaign to undermine our elections, a drive that ranges from defunding election security programs to trying to gain access to state voter rolls.
Voters must have the final say in a democracy. If we do not act against these threats, free and fair elections in 2026 could be at stake. So, what can be done?
The courts must uphold the Constitution when it comes to elections, as they did with Trump’s earlier executive order.
State leaders and election officials must also fight back. They must stand firm in their right to oversee elections, continue to provide voters with options such as mail and early voting, resist illegal orders, and keep control over voting machines. The Brennan Center has published information about how to respond to requests to access sensitive data and machinery.
Ultimately, the integrity of the next election will be up to voters. We must all speak out against these moves to meddle with the vote. It’s harder to take over an election when everyone is watching.
Think again about Trump’s claim that states are his “agents” in tabulating the votes. Vladimir Putin’s great hero had something to say about that: “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how,” Joseph Stalin said, “but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how.”
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The 6 damn words that won't let me stop fighting
I’d just voted for Hillary Clinton, and after watching her swat away the hulking schlub who stalked her on the debate stage three different times, was confident enough she’d win.
The final dreaded poll in the battleground state of Wisconsin had her outside the margin of error at a comfortable +6, or right about how Barack Obama had fared twice up here.
In only hours, the racist loudmouth was FINALLY going to be sent packing. Oh sure, he would never go away for good, but it was going to be a real win-win for everybody. Trump would raise his profile, cash in, and begin crawling out of his massive debt, and we’d have another president who understood the nuances of governing, and treated little things like liberty and justice for all with the urgency they demanded.
By 10 o’clock that evening, America was fully engulfed in a five-alarm fire. He could actually win …
By midnight, and around the time Wisconsin was officially called for the vulgar pig, our nation had fallen, and the President of the United States had devolved from a prince into a pumpkin.
That’s when I went into a state of shock, turned off the TV, poured another drink, and repeated these six words over and over: “Nothing will ever be the same.”
By 3 a.m., and three drinks later, I was mumbling six more words to myself: “Nobody will be safe ever again.”
I picked up my phone and called my daughter in the UK, who was just waking up to the news. I said two more words: “I’m sorry.”
You will have your own story to tell about the night the blast hit, and how you processed it ...
Nine years later, it has been far worse than I thought it would be. After valiantly fighting back from the shock of that ice-cold night, and restoring some order and safeguards to our democracy, a majority of Americans doubled down this past November, and decided to give their vote to the loathsome man, who by now had added “America-attacker” and “convicted felon” to a résumé that began and ended with “White Nationalist.”
Nothing in my life has gone the way I thought it would on the afternoon of Nov. 8, 2016. That damn election changed everything. If we were capable of doing THAT, we were capable of doing anything.
As a journalist who mostly viewed politics with disdain, I turned on a dime and became very damn political. As a man who did most of his work as an observer from the outside, I jumped inside the fray. I began writing earnestly, ended up with a book, became a general nuisance, knocked on doors, burned old friendships, kindled new ones, and ended up protesting on the Square here in Madison so many times I was given a reserved parking spot for my skinny ass.
I became an accidental activist. My journalism career morphed from news to commentary, because it was time to say what needed saying.
Writing is my salvation, which is the only thing that isn’t new in my life. My marriage with the written word started more than 50 years ago, and has been the most dependable thing in what really has been a hard and mostly wonderful life.
Lately, I’ve hung a shingle on Substack alongside hundreds of other earnest typists, who put heart to paper. Some of my work appears pretty regularly in other places on the Web, but most dependably at Raw Story, which is staffed by a feisty group of underdog journalists who keep their eye on the ball, our nation’s declining condition, and aren’t afraid to punch down hard on fascism.
Far too many in the working press I once revered failed miserably to do the only thing they had to do: their damn jobs, by reporting on and warning people about the most dangerous time in America since the Civil War.
My anger and heartache over their negligence and incompetence will never subside.
They didn't meet the moment. Worse, some cashed in on it.
Around here, paid subscribers come and go, but lucky for me, I’m not doing this to get rich. Truth is, there’s no money in journalism. Never has been. And a tip: Never trust a journalist who says they are in it for the money, because they will sell you down the nearest river, and leave you soaking wet.
When people go, I politely ask for feedback, because one thing’s for sure: I can always do better. Here is what they are overwhelmingly telling me these days:
“I’m tired.”
And you just sighed with sympathetic understanding …
It’s the price we pay for having the decency and love of country to pay attention.
We are being asked to process a helluva lot, good people. Walk away from it all for even a few hours, and you come back to find our museums under attack, troops in OUR streets, and public servants working to protect things like our benefits, our personal information, and our air and water on the firing line.
As I type this, Trump is accommodating the murdering Vladimir Putin by surrendering to him on American soil.
This is what a nation under siege looks like.
There’s not been a lot of blood — not yet — but sure as I’m typing this, that’s coming, too. Trump and his Republican Orcs are bringing plenty of hurt, and they aim to end America as we both know, and knew, it.
They do this by making us all sick and tired ... They do this because they hate America.
To those of you who need a break, go. Get the rest you need. You deserve it. I think I speak for everybody when I say, “Thank you for your support and all your efforts. We’ll be here waiting if you decide to return. We will no doubt be in need of reinforcements, and a sturdy shoulder to lean on.”
To those who stay, thank you.
It’s the only way through this.
We can stand and fight, or retreat. We can dare to care, or just say the hell with it. We can die on this hill, or we can conquer it.
We’re all tired.
Me? I’ll sleep when I’m dead.
- (D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.)
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This is the only way to destroy Trump's homegrown Taliban
In his novel 1984, George Orwell warned, “Those who control the present control the past, and those who control the past control the future.” Today, Donald Trump and the GOP have weaponized that prophecy, twisting it into the foundation of their crusade to Make America White Again.
What they are building is not a political movement but a parallel nation — a MAGAstan — where loyalty oaths replace truth, history is scrubbed clean of slavery and racism, and authoritarian obedience is demanded in the name of patriotism.
This is America’s homegrown Taliban, and they’re no longer pretending to hide their intentions.
When the Oklahoma Department of Education rolled out its new “America First” MAGA certification exam for teachers, designed with the help of a rightwing propaganda outlet, it wasn’t about improving education. It was about making sure that any teacher who dares to acknowledge the realities of race, gender, or American history is shut out of the profession.
Applicants from California or New York now must take a test that appears to demand perfect answers on questions about civics, chromosomes, religion, and so-called gender ideology. It’s not an exam, it’s a political loyalty test, and it fits neatly into the larger pattern we are seeing in Republican politics today. They aren’t hiding their racism or misogyny anymore. They’re reveling in it.
That reality was underscored by Trump’s latest tantrum against the Smithsonian and other museums. On his Nazi-infested social media platform, Trump complained that our museums are “out of control” because they talk about “how bad slavery was,” racism, and the struggles of the downtrodden. He whined that there is “nothing about success, nothing about brightness, nothing about the future”
What he really means is that America should stop teaching about slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, and ongoing systemic racism and instead return to a whitewashed myth of national greatness that erases Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized voices.
His words are a plain translation of the GOP’s broader war on what they call “woke.” Being “anti-woke” is just a thinly veiled way of saying, “We’re okay with racism and misogyny.”
And Trump is the perfect avatar for this reinvention of the Confederacy, as I detail in my newest book The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink.
Trump’s and his GOP’s pro-racism neofascist purges go far beyond education and museums; they’ve also gone after the federal workforce with a vengeance. They canceled the government’s annual employee survey, gutted DEI programs across every agency, and are mass-firing federal workers, particularly in agencies that employ large numbers of Black women.
The so-called Department of Government Efficiency — run by a Nazi-saluting white South African immigrant — put more than a quarter of a million jobs on the chopping block, devastating communities where civil service has long been the pathway into the middle class.
Black Americans, particularly Black women, have disproportionately relied on those jobs for stability and upward mobility. Taking them away isn’t about saving taxpayer money: it’s a targeted attack, designed to roll back decades of progress.
At the same time, groups aligned with Trump are publishing watchlists of federal workers they call “subversives,” lists overwhelmingly filled with women and people of color. Those people are now being hounded, relocated, or forced out altogether.
Senior women and Black leaders in the military are being fired or pushed into retirement. Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield, NATO’s only woman on its military committee, was removed. Army Lt. Gen. Telita Crosland, who had led military healthcare, was forced to resign after 32 years of service.
These purges are political, not professional. They’re designed to restore the military to a largely all-white, all-male leadership structure. And at the same time, Trump and his enablers are working to rename bases after Confederate generals and restore monuments dedicated to traitors who fought against democracy to preserve slavery.
And now Trump is claiming — against the statistics — that crime in Washington, DC is “out of control.” This is Nixon’s Southern Strategy — blame crime on Black people while turning the country into a police state — on steroids.
Racism is the thread that ties all of this together.
When five Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, Republicans wasted no time enacting voter suppression laws that disproportionately disenfranchised Black voters. When Republicans on the Court blessed partisan gerrymandering in Rucho v. Common Cause, Republican-controlled states immediately redrew maps to diminish the power of Black communities.
This is about keeping power in the hands of white conservatives, no matter the cost to democracy.
And the cruelty isn’t limited to our own citizens. The Trump administration has begun deporting Afghan translators who risked their lives working alongside American troops, even as they continue to apply for legal protection through Special Immigrant Visa programs. ICE agents recently detained one such interpreter — someone who had helped U.S. soldiers survive the war — because the new GOP priority is to get as many brown people out of the country as possible.
This is not patriotism. It’s ethnic cleansing by bureaucracy.
I used to believe that maybe 20 percent of white Americans were openly racist. That was based on my experience growing up and on the way racism was often hidden behind polite code.
But looking at today’s voting patterns, at the cheering crowds for Trump’s open bigotry, it seems more like 55 to 60 percent. When a majority of white voters willingly support a party that strips voting rights from Black citizens, erases slavery from classrooms and museums, fires Black leaders from government, and deports brown allies, that’s not a fringe problem. That’s a national crisis.
This kind of “othering” of racial and gender minorities is a classic hallmark of fascism. It’s what we saw in Germany in the 1930s and what Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin are doing in Hungary and Russia today. You dehumanize groups of people, define them as enemies of the state, and then strip away their rights until they no longer have the power to resist.
Trump and the GOP are running this playbook right out in the open. And far too many in the media are still treating “anti-woke” rhetoric as a culture-war issue instead of what it really is: a naked declaration of racism, misogyny, and authoritarian intent.
Democrats and people of good conscience cannot let this language go unchallenged.
Every time Republicans sneer about “woke,” it should be called what it is: they’re defending racism and misogyny. They’re trying to drag us back into a world where straight white men hold all the power and everyone else is erased. This is not just an ideological disagreement. It is an attack on the very idea of equality and democracy.
Woke people must stop playing defense and start organizing. We need mass mobilizations — marches, protests, and direct action — to show that Americans will not tolerate a return to white supremacy dressed up as patriotism.
We need to pressure Democrats to go on offense, to stop using mealy-mouthed language and start telling the truth: the GOP is running on racism, period.
And we need to demand that the media stop laundering Republican talking points and call out this agenda for what it is: a fascist project to make racism great again.
The stakes are nothing less than the future of American democracy. If we fail to rise to this challenge, they won’t just win the next election; they’ll win the power to define who counts as an American, whose stories matter, and who has a right to belong.
This is the GOP’s vision of MAGAstan: a land where truth is outlawed, history is erased, dissent is punished, and democracy is reduced to a hollow slogan.
It’s not conservatism. It’s not patriotism. It is the same naked pursuit of power through racism, misogyny, and authoritarian rule that we’ve seen in one country after another throughout history.
And here’s the brutal truth: they’re telling us exactly who they are and exactly what kind of dictatorship they want.
The only question left is whether the rest of us will stand by in silence while America is dragged into its darkest chapter or whether we will rise up, speak out, and refuse to let our country become the authoritarian nightmare Trump and the GOP are building in plain sight.
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New Trump henchman's disastrous record would make a North Korean general blush
Andrew Bailey, Missouri hardly knew ye.
But what we saw of ye was plenty more than enough.
One of the most nakedly partisan attorneys general in Missouri history, Bailey has been tapped by President Donald Trump to become his quasi–number two man at the FBI. Bailey snagged his career vault solely by politicizing the power of his state law-enforcement office in Trump’s name.
Meanwhile, Governor Mike Kehoe announced today that former GOP House Speaker Catherine Hanaway — the only woman to hold that post — is his choice to replace Bailey as attorney general. That’s unlikely to sit well with many in MAGA world, a subject for later in this space.
For now, as I documented here, Bailey served a constituency of one and it paid off handsomely — one adoring, taxpayer-funded Trump press release at a time. Bailey didn’t limit himself to following the MAGA playbook like others at his craft; his degree of obsequiousness to Trump was enough to make a North Korean general blush.
Bailey’s rise is a cautionary tale. He succeeded not only because he advanced Trump’s agenda, but because of how he went about the task.
His was not a triumph of right-wing ideology. It was of style points, groveling, ruthless ambition, and a willingness to get down and dirty.
Bailey took a back seat to no one as a toady for Trump during the 2024 election campaign. That meant paying homage in a big way to the Big Lie that Trump was somehow robbed in 2020.
“The left stole that election by changing the rules of the game at the 11th hour. They’re going to try to steal this one by silencing our voices on big tech social media platforms, by stifling us in the mainstream media and by packing the polling places with criminal illegal aliens that shouldn’t be here in the first place.” — Bailey, May 14, 2024 debate in Springfield, MO
Most Republicans survived by nodding their heads at the falsehood needed to soothe Trump’s mental trauma over losing to President Joe Biden in 2020. Not Bailey. He went all in on the lie — and I suppose garnered some style points with that whole “packing the polling places with criminal aliens” sequel, which you didn’t hear every day.
Holding fast to the Big Lie wasn’t unusual. Doubling down with zeal four years later was quite another thing.
But Bailey goes big, just the way Trump likes it. When he attacked trans people as attorney general, he didn’t just check off a box — he went all in with the declaration that virtually all trans care was “an unfair, deceptive, fraudulent, or otherwise unlawful practice” for “any person or health organization” to perpetrate.
Bailey didn’t even limit that dripping bigotry to kids. He tried to include adults as well — not for any decent reason, but to get himself lambasted by the nationally respected Human Rights Campaign. Think Trump doesn’t go for that sort of thing?
It’s the pattern that Bailey followed throughout his tenure in office. He wasn’t satisfied to use the power of his office to attack DEI wherever he could detect it as some horrible virus.
Instead, Bailey would do things like falsely blame the Hazelwood School District’s DEI program for the off-campus assault of a student. When proven wrong, Bailey must have been smiling broadly to become the focus of a formal complaint about the behavior of his office.
He recused himself from a gambling lawsuit filed against the Missouri State Highway Patrol after PACs connected to the lobbyist of the companies suing the state wrote thousands in checks to the committee supporting his campaign, the Missouri Independent reported. Trump likes that sort of thing.
It was not his only brush with campaign violations. And Bailey was blasted by Clay County Judge Karen Krauser, who ordered Bailey to sit for a deposition after it was discovered he and a deputy met with a member of the Jackson County Legislature without the knowledge of the county’s attorneys. The county was a defendant.
Do you think Trump minds that he crossed the line with a judge?
Bailey has resisted releasing individuals whose convictions were overturned, even when new evidence supported their innocence. In the case of Sandra Hemme, a judge threatened to hold Bailey in contempt for instructing prison officials not to release a woman whose conviction had been overturned after she served 43 years.
If there’s any mitigating circumstance to Bailey’s tenure as attorney general, it’s that he’s not a good lawyer. In one of his first and most important cases, Bailey attempted to thwart the will of the people to keep off the ballot the 2024 constitutional amendment that eventually reinstated women’s right to an abortion.
That wasn’t remarkable. Bailey was expected by Republicans to fight the measure. They might not have expected his 6-0 thrashing before a moderately conservative Missouri Supreme Court.
Legal observers point to the astonishing number of losses he’s piled up. From mask mandates to social media censorship to his toxic emergency order declaring gender-affirming care as “experimental,” the list goes on.
But the point for Bailey was never about winning cases. It was about winning attention from the MAGA base and, above all else, Trump himself.
Just because a guy isn’t good at trying cases doesn’t mean he can’t be good at that.
Besides, Bailey is off to a new job as one of the very top officials of the FBI, the most important law-enforcement agency in the world. There, he won’t need to worry about trying cases — or losing them.
In fact, how he did in his previous work won’t matter at all. Although he had a fine career in military service, Bailey comes to the FBI with zero experience at the FBI or any police agency like it.
Zero. Unlike all the 38,000 men and women who serve today at the FBI. What could go wrong with any of that?
Nothing, apparently, if Andrew Bailey does what he does best.
Which is to keep Donald Trump happy.
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This groveling surrender to Trump might be the worst of all
Let’s start here today: Our legacy media is dead.
For some, this pronouncement is long overdue, and might be best labeled “old news.” For people like me, who spent their professional life in a newsroom as part of a team that turned around timely content called “real news” to their readers, while also calling power into account, this declaration officially wipes out everything I once believed in and held dear.
Watching our old, tired legacy media like The New York Times and The Washington Post cover this Russia charade, mislabeled a “summit,” and Trump's meeting with European leaders in Washington this week has completely knocked me over the edge. I’ll let you tell me how badly the gushing toothies on TV are botching this up, because I quit watching their 24/7 screeching with any regularity years ago.
We have reached the point where these incompetents can’t even get the nut of the story right. It’s no longer news that the nuclear-powered narcissist, Donald Trump, is posturing to get every spotlight turned in his direction no matter how big or small a story. Yet the media comes running with their hair on fire every time he beckons.
However … It IS news — URGENT NEWS — when European prime ministers and presidents drop everything they are doing and fly into the United States with their hair on fire to oppose the actions of its unstable, authoritarian leader, and back the man who is fighting for his life and his country’s democracy, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
It’s news because THAT HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE.
Yet, in their breathless play-by-play coverage you never saw it reported that way. Instead, here is what we got all day Monday and into Tuesday as these incompetent morons, who dare to call themselves “journalists” were led around by their noses, which are always in the general vicinity of Trump’s two-ton ass:
"Trump just said this!"
"Now Trump said that!"
“Trump is doing this!”
“And now Trump is doing that!”
"What will Trump do next????”
There was literally no fact-checking, nor important context. They just repeated his endless bullshit that was all designed to go absolutely nowhere, because the most important person in these negotiations wasn’t even on location. And why should he have been? Russian President Vladimir Putin had already emasculated the President of the United States after getting red-carpet treatment in Alaska on Friday, and had gone home to Russia to resume bombing the bejesus out of Ukraine.
So Trump did what he does best, and spoke on behalf of Putin, while arguing against everybody else.
It was appalling.
But there was our legacy media, who somehow thought reporting all that bullshit in real time was some sort of journalistic feat, when in reality they just come off like a bunch of drunken parrots.
Things are no better than they were on Thursday, when it comes to Russia’s inhumane, illegal attack on Ukraine, they are miles worse. Because God only knows what the two most dangerous leaders in the world talked about while the cameras were mercifully shut off during their dangerous, private meetings the past five days.
I can guess it sounded something like this:
PUTIN: “Never forget who put you in office, Donald.”
TRUMP: “No worries there, sir. I got everybody, but mostly the idiots in the media, eating out of my hand.”
Here is the vitally important context I didn’t read ONCE in all the legacy media’s atrocious coverage of this sh–– show the past 24 hours:
“Putin, who Trump actually asked for help in the 2016 campaign …”
Or
“Putin, who Trump has repeatedly fawned over, even calling the murderous dictator among other things ‘a genius' …’”
Or
“Putin, who Trump surrendered to in Helsinki in 2018, when pressed if there was Russia interference into the 2016 election, when his own Republican Party had determined there was …”
Or
“Putin, who after winning the 2007 Time Magazine Man of the Year Award, received a letter from Trump that gushed: “As you probably have heard, I’m a big fan of yours!”
Or
“Putin, who allowed Trump to host his Miss Universe beauty pageant in Moscow in 2013, and received yet another note from Trump which read: “Will you become my new best friend?”
I could go on and on here, but you get the point, even if the dangerous dummies in our legacy media don’t: Any relationship Trump has with his BFF Putin is at best suspect, but most likely is completely compromised.
Shouldn’t readers and viewers be aware of this right off the top and reminded of it repeatedly?
And what of the 50-plus times Trump said on the 2024 campaign trail that he would end Russia's attack on Ukraine during his first 24 hours in office. I read scores of stories in the legacy media Monday, and this was never reported even ONCE. Further, he was not asked about this even ONCE in those weird sit-downs with the press in that grotesque, golden room, where his tie drags on the floor and he does that weird accordion thing with his hands.
They aren't even bothering to try to hold this lying SOB accountable anymore.
And what about that lying? Because it is all this blabbering loudmouth does.
In just the last 10 days he’s told preposterous lies about Russia, the 2020 election, Jeffrey Epstein, jobs, crime, inflation, Project 2025, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and mail-in voting.
Add this to the tens of thousands of times he has lied in his professional life about all things big and small, and you’d think he would have lost ALL benefit of the doubt 10 years ago.
Instead, our legacy media still hangs on his every word.
It is ABSURD.
They don’t even make lying a small feature of the story, when in fact all his lying IS THE DAMN STORY.
There is not one report or story about about Trump that should make it past the third paragraph without this being inserted for context:
“Trump, who has a long history of lying about <insert subject> …”
WHY isn’t this being done?
Here is the thing that should keep us all awake at night: If Trump, a convicted felon, can wipe out the truth — and he is well on his way — he can wipe out everything this country was founded on, and begin working to wipe us out, and everything we once stood for.
This is exactly what Putin, and every other fascist leader on earth wants.
It can never stop being headline news that Trump is the most notorious liar in the history of the United States.
It should have never become headline news that our legacy media decided to quit reporting that.
But here we are, and neither one should ever be trusted again.
- (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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We're watching the largest and most dangerous 'cult' in American history
I was dying…It was just a matter of time. Lying behind the wheel of the airplane, bleeding out of the right side of my devastated body, I waited for the rapid shooting to stop.
—Former Representative Jackie Speier in her memoir "Undaunted: Surviving Jonestown, Summoning Courage, and Fighting Back" recounting her experience after being shot five times during an ambush during her fact-finding visit to Jonestown, Guyana, where Jim Jones and his cult, Peoples Temple, had built a compound.
It, combined with everything else that was going on, made it difficult to breathe…Being crushed by the shield and the people behind it … leaving me defenseless, injured.
—Metropolitan police officer, Daniel Hodges, describing being crushed in a doorway during the January 6, 2021, attack by Trump supporters on the U.S. Capitol
In both of the examples above, the individual speaking was the victim of extreme violence perpetrated by followers of a single person whose influence had spread to hundreds of people (in the January 6th case, thousands of people). In fact, Speier’s experience with the Jim Jones followers was part of the single greatest loss of American life (918 people) prior to 9/11/2001. These followings have been given an umbrella name — cult — and have involved what has been traditionally called “brainwashing.” The cult leader receives seemingly undying support as the Dear Leader or Savior. However, the term brainwashing suggests that indoctrinated members are robots without free will – behavioral scientists argue that this is not the case. It’s an oversimplification.
Rather than being seen as passive victims to an irresistible force, psychiatrist Robert Lifton argues that there is “voluntary self-surrender” in one’s entrance into a cult. Further, the decision to give up control as part of the cult process may actually be part of the reason why people join. Research and experience tell us that those who are “cult vulnerable” may have a sense of confusion or separation from society or seek the same sort of highly controlled environment that was part of their childhood. It has also been suggested that those who are at risk for cult membership feel an enormous lack of control in the face of uncertainty (i.e., economic, occupational, academic, social, familial) and will gravitate more towards a cult as their distress increases. I would argue that many of these factors are at play when we see the ongoing support of Trumpism and MAGA “theology.”
Psychologist Leon Festinger described the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance in which there is a disconnect between one’s feelings, beliefs, and convictions and their observable actions. This dissonance is distressing and, in order to relieve the anxiety, people may become more invested in the cult or belief system that goes against who they are individually. As such, cult members become more “dug-in” and will cling to thoughts and beliefs that contradict available evidence. In other words, they are no longer able to find a middle ground or compromise.
How does this apply to today’s politics?
There was a time when the two major political parties in America could exhibit bipartisanship by moving across the aisle to compromise on the issues on which they were legislating. Tried and true Republicans who favored small government, lower taxes, and national security could find a middle ground with Democrats who pushed for things like universal healthcare, higher minimum wages, and progressive tax reform. The abortion issue in America has been an area of debate between the parties as they debated elements like when life begins, is a heartbeat a heartbeat, and what to do about post-birth abortions (which is murder and not actually a thing). There were largely two sides of the issue and some areas for compromise.
This is no longer possible in today’s sociopolitical climate. Although members of the GOP still refer to themselves as a political party with principled stances, the reality is they have now morphed into a domestic terror organization and, to use the umbrella term, a cult – the largest and most dangerous cult in American history.
Cult thinking includes ardent adherence to group thinking such as – clinically speaking, in the face of distorted thinking we ask about one’s strength of conviction by querying, ”Can you think of other ways of seeing this?” Sadly, what we are seeing publicly is ‘No’ from those who still subscribe to Trumpism/MAGA.
Here are a few examples in today’s sociopolitical environment in which cultism has contributed to a lack of middle ground.
There is no middle ground on treasonous, conspiratorial, fraudulent behavior – these are crimes and, arguably, the worst crimes one could commit against their own country.
There is no middle ground on slavery.
There is no middle ground on allowing Americans to die through inaction in response to natural disasters and global health crises.
There is no middle ground on gunning down school children or wearing an AR-15 rifle pin and throwing away a pin to remember a Uvalde victim.
There is no middle ground on jeopardizing national security and retaining and sharing classified documents.
There is no middle ground on breaking campaign finance (i.e., hush money schemes) laws.
There should be no middle ground on tolerance of crime, period.
And so many know this. Tim Scott, Jim Jordan, and Marco Rubio (the last two having gone to law school), all know this and are smarter than they are acting – which takes us back to cult dynamics – if you are a dyed-in-the-wool cultist or pretending to be a cultist – but the outcome is the same – harm to the Country and its people – there is no difference. Whether you actually have a personality disorder or are pretending to be a sociopathically or psychopathically disordered person – if the result is the same – harm to your constituents and your country – what’s the difference? As noted in the opening paragraphs, there is a voluntary submission to cultism – Rubio, for example, identified all of the reasons why the 45th President was not qualified when he himself was running for President in 2016. However, perhaps due to his own intolerance of uncertainties in his life, volunteered for Trumpism.
What can be done?
There are exit strategies for people ensnared in a cult. One factor is accountability or repeatedly seeing the adverse consequences of the group’s behavior (e.g., indictment, incarceration, job loss) which we started to see even more of this week.
But until one party and its ardent followers can admit they are in a domestic terrorist cult and as Rep. Eric Swalwell said are “unserious” people, there is no hope of unification on the horizon. The first step is getting through to people who can’t or won’t see the truth.
About the Author:
Seth D. Norrholm, PhD (Threads: neuropsychophd; X, artist formerly known as Twitter: @SethN12) is a neuropsychologist and independent socio political columnist. Dr. Norrholm has spent 20 years studying trauma-, stressor-, anxiety-, depressive-, and substance use-related disorders and has published over 135 peer-reviewed research articles and book chapters. The primary objective of his work is to develop “bench-to-bedside” clinical research methods to inform therapeutic interventions for fear and anxiety-related disorders and how they relate to human factors such as personality, genetics, and environmental influences. Dr. Norrholm has been featured on NBC, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC’s Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, Politico.com, The New York Times, The New York Daily News, USA Today, WebMD, The Atlantic, The History Channel, Scientific American, Salon.com, The Huffington Post, and Yahoo.com.
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With this Putin-inspired attack, Trump crossed a line no president ever dared touch
On Monday, Donald Trump crossed another line that no president in our history has ever dared to touch. With the echo of Vladimir Putin’s whisper in his ear, in front of President Volodymyr Zelensky and seven other European leaders, Trump announced he’s preparing an executive order to ban mail-in ballots and even outlaw voting machines across America ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
Sitting in front of the Chancellor of Germany and the Prime Minister of Great Britain — both nations that allow and even encourage mail-in voting — Trump said:
“Mail-in ballots are corrupt mail-in ballots. You can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots, and we as a Republican Party are gonna do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in ballots. We're gonna start with an executive order that’s being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they’re corrupt. And, you know that we’re the only country in the world, I believe, I may be wrong, but just about the only country in the world that uses it because of what’s happened.”
This is not just a partisan maneuver. It’s an open assault on the Constitution, a grotesque power grab, and a direct threat to the foundation of democracy itself. And it’s happening in real time, in broad daylight, with a criminally compliant Republican Party cheering him on.
Republicans hate mail-in voting for multiple reasons.
- First, for people who’re paid by the hour, mail-in voting increases participation because they can fill out their ballots at the kitchen table after work. Republicans don’t want people to vote, and have introduced more than 400 pieces of legislation in the past three years nationwide to make voting more difficult.
- Second, mail-in voting makes voters better informed and less vulnerable to sound-byte TV ads because, while perusing that ballot at the kitchen table, they can look up candidates on their laptops and get more detail and information. Republicans hate informed voters and rely heavily on often-dishonest advertisements to swing voters.
- Third, mail-in ballots — because they arrive in the mail weeks before the election — give voters an early chance to discover if they’ve been the victim of Republican voter-roll purges, one of their favorite tactics to pre-rig elections.
- Fourth, mail-in ballots end the GOP trick of understaffing and under-resourcing polling places in minority neighborhoods, leading to hours-long lines. Hispanic voters generally wait 150 percent longer than white voters, and Black voters must endure a 200 percent longer wait; mail-in ballots put an end to this favorite of the GOP’s voter suppression efforts.
Trump, knowing all this, couldn’t help himself yesterday, finally blurting out his real reason for wanting to end mail-in voting in America:
“We got to stop mail-in voting, and the Republicans have to lead the charge. The Democrats want it because they have horrible policy. If you [don’t] have mail-in voting, you’re not gonna have many Democrats get elected. That’s bigger than anything having to do with redistricting, believe me.”
Once again, Trump is ignoring the law and the Constitution, which explicitly delegates the administration of elections to the states and Congress, not presidential executive orders.
That’s not some vague norm or debatable tradition: it’s written into the very DNA of our system of government. States set the rules, unless Congress — not the president — overrides them. States decide how their citizens vote, as the Constitution’s Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 dictates:
“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”
Yet here we have a president declaring that he alone will dictate the terms of elections nationwide, in direct violation of two centuries of law and precedent. This is not only unconstitutional, it’s tyrannical.
When a president asserts powers he does not have, with the full knowledge that they aren’t his to wield, he’s announcing to the country that the rule of law no longer constrains him. That’s the definition of dictatorship.
And what makes this even more obscene is the source of Trump’s inspiration. According to multiple reports, Trump’s sudden rant on mail-in ballots followed a private conversation with Putin, who reportedly told Trump that mail-in voting was the reason he lost in 2020.
The man occupying the Oval Office is now taking advice about how to rig American elections from the very dictator who has spent his career poisoning journalists, jailing opponents, and staging sham referendums to annex entire countries.
It’s bad enough that Trump has always been Putin’s toady, but now we see the Kremlin effectively writing U.S. election law. If Jefferson, Madison, or Lincoln were alive to hear this, they would spit.
Mail-in voting is not a scam. It’s not a trick. It’s how tens of millions of Americans — Republicans, Democrats, independents — exercise their right to vote.
Seniors rely on it. People with disabilities rely on it. Military service members overseas rely on it. Hourly workers who can’t take a day off rely on it. Parents with young children rely on it. Rural voters, who often live miles from polling places, rely on it.
And every study, every audit, every bipartisan commission has found mail-in voting to be secure, safe, and reliable. Five states do it exclusively; we’ve had it more than two decades here in Oregon with nary a single scandal or problem. To call it fraudulent is a lie. To ban it is voter suppression on a scale this country has never seen.
And voting machines? Trump is openly declaring that he’ll return us to mind-numbingly slow hand-counting of ballots, a tactic straight from the authoritarian playbook designed to create chaos, delays, and endless opportunities to dispute the results in 2026 and 2028.
I’ve had concerns about voting machines and Windows-based tabulators for decades, but my solution isn’t to end them. Instead, we should use machines owned by the government itself, generating paper ballots and operating transparently on open-source software with every election subject to sample audits.
Instead of trying to make elections more secure, Trump’s laying the groundwork for election theft in plain sight. This isn’t subtle: it’s the loud declaration of a man preparing to overturn the will of the voters, with the blessing of a foreign adversary, and with a Republican Party too craven to object.
If Trump succeeds in outlawing mail-in ballots and voting machines, millions of Americans will simply not be able to vote. Seniors in nursing homes, service members abroad, people with disabilities, single parents, rural citizens: they will all be disenfranchised overnight. And make no mistake: that’s the point.
This is not about integrity. This is not about security. This is about shrinking the electorate to a size that Republicans believe will guarantee them victory forever.
Republicans know they can’t win free and fair elections in much of America. They know their policies are unpopular. They know their agenda is toxic.
So they cheat. They gerrymander districts into grotesque shapes that make a mockery of representative government. They purge voters from the rolls. They criminalize voter registration drives. They intimidate voters at the polls.
And now, at Trump’s command and Putin’s urging, they want to ban the very methods by which millions of Americans vote. This is not politics as usual. This is the slow-motion strangulation of democracy.
Every American who believes in self-government must rise up against this. Governors must prepare to defy such an executive order in court and in practice. State legislatures must assert their constitutional authority.
Attorneys general must be ready to sue. And ordinary citizens must take to the streets, the phones, the ballot box, and every civic space available to declare that this will not stand. Because if it does, we’ll have surrendered the very essence of the American experiment.
We’ve been here before in spirit if not in form.
Ronald Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with the Iranian Ayatollahs to hang onto the hostages until after the election. Richard Nixon tried to sabotage our democracy by killing Lyndon Johnson's peace negotiations with Vietnam and followed-up with burglaries and cover-ups when he thought Democrats were onto him. He was forced to resign. George W. Bush and the GOP stopped the counting of votes in Florida and handed the presidency to themselves. That assault has scarred our politics for decades.
But never — not once in 250 years — has a president openly declared that he will strip states of their constitutional right to run elections, end mail-in voting, and ban voting machines altogether. This is unprecedented, authoritarian, and it must be stopped.
It’s also just one in a broad spectrum of attacks Republicans have launched against your right to vote, with the SAVE Act — which will prevent women from voting if their birth certificate and drivers’ license have different names on them and they’ve never had an official change-of-name in the courts — teed up in the US Senate. All while millions are being purged from the voting rolls as you read these words.
This is the moment when the American people must decide whether they still believe in democracy. If we shrug, if we accept this as just more noise from a corrupt and broken con man, we will lose it. If we wait for someone else to act, we will lose it. If we tell ourselves the courts will save us, we may be bitterly disappointed.
The survival of democracy has never been guaranteed. It has always required vigilance, courage, and action. Now it requires all three from each of us.
Trump’s promised executive order is not just a legal maneuver. It’s a declaration of war against the American people. It’s the dream of every tyrant: to control who votes and who does not, to dictate the rules of elections so that the outcome is predetermined.
What Putin and Trump are proposing is not democracy. It’s not freedom. It’s not America.
And the Republicans who are enabling this treachery are as guilty as Trump himself. They’re betraying their oaths, their constituents, and our country. History will remember them not as conservatives or patriots, but as the gravediggers of our Republic.
This is the line. This is the moment. We cannot let Trump and his cronies bulldoze democracy into the ground at Putin’s command. Every patriot, every progressive, every independent, every honest conservative who still believes in the Constitution must join together and say no.
No to dictatorship. No to disenfranchisement. No to treason.
If we fail now, there may not be another chance.
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Trump exposed this startling truth — and it got America steamrolled
I don’t know why, but few are saying what’s plainly obvious about the president’s “summit” with his Russian counterpart. He’s afraid of him.
Donald Trump made all kinds of noise about “severe consequences” that Vladimir Putin would face if he did not agree to a ceasefire with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the war in Ukraine.
Trump created conditions, however feeble they may have seemed, in which he appeared to negotiate from a position of strength. “I’ve solved six wars in the last six months,” he said before the trip — all lies.
Then, when the moment came, nothing. Trump got nothing.
Not so for Putin.
“The extraordinary meeting at Anchorage’s Elmendorf Air Force base has ended Putin’s pariah status and brought Washington’s stance on the war closer to Moscow’s,” the Financial Times reported.
“And Putin did not need to budge an inch.”
Liberals and Democrats tend to think Trump gets along with Putin due to them being birds of a feather. Putin is a strongman. Trump is a strongman. Both love power. Both hate liberal democracy. While true, that doesn’t explain the president’s dramatic heel-turn.
But fear does.
The White House clearly believed it was important, not only for the meeting but for the president’s image at home, for him to look strong beforehand. Professor Heather Cox Richardson has the context:
“US envoy Steve Witkoff had been visiting Moscow for months to talk about a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine when he heard through a back channel that Putin might be willing to talk to Trump in person to offer a deal. On August 6, after a meeting in Moscow, Witkoff announced that Russia was ready to retreat from some of the land it occupies in Ukraine. This apparent concession came just two days before the August 8 deadline Trump had set for severe sanctions against Russia unless it agreed to a ceasefire.”
But then, Putin said “Not gonna happen.” Moreover, Putin said Trump really got a raw deal with the 2020 election. He totally won. So unfair! And with that combo of flex and flattery, Putin “got what he wanted — to play for time and press his military advantage over Ukraine,” exiled Russian political scientist Ilya Matveyev told the Financial Times.
Here’s how it looked to Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich: “The way that it felt in the room was not good. It did not seem like things went well. And it seemed like Putin came in and steamrolled, got right into what he wanted to say and got his photo next to the president and then left.”
She went on:
“Of course, that is only the piece of the picture we have right now and certainly President Trump, who is the host and who is the president, would not want to enable something that would make him look weak.”
Too late.
Now the president can be “safely ignored,” Anne Applebaum wrote.
“If the US is not willing to use any economic, military, or political tools to help Ukraine, if Trump will not put any diplomatic pressure on Putin or any new sanctions on Russian resources, then the US president’s fond wish to be seen as a peacemaker can be safely ignored,” she said.
She even enumerated the moments of disgrace.
“It was embarrassing for Americans to welcome a notorious wanted war criminal on their territory. It was humiliating to watch an American president act like a happy puppy upon encountering the dictator of a much poorer, much less important state, treating him as a superior. It’s excruciating to imagine how badly Trump’s diplomatic envoy … misunderstood his last meeting with Putin in Moscow if he thought that the Alaska summit was going to be successful.”
I don’t know if Putin has something on the president (kompromat). I don’t know if Trump is in Putin’s pocket. I can speculate, but I don’t know. What I do know is Trump talked a good game and choked. I know he humiliated himself and America. And I know something else.
All this is rooted in cowardice. It’s safe to attack friends, because they won’t fight back, because they’re friends, but it’s not safe to attack enemies, because they will fight back, and because they are enemies.
Trump’s MO has always been to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, to whomever he wants, safe in the knowledge that no one has the will to stop him. That holds up as long as the “no one” in question is American or an American ally. Actual enemies, though? Nuh-uh.
A few months ago, Trump was “very tough” with Zelensky in the Oval Office. He was less “tough” with him on Monday, but Trump knows Zelensky will never fight back, as Zelensky needs America’s support to defeat an even more malicious opponent.
But Putin?
He gets smiles, handshakes, the red-carpet treatment. He gets photos of himself riding in “The Beast” with the United States president and of American troops seeming to kneel in front of his plane, all of which is for the purpose of make-believing back home that Russia is once again America’s equal and that the glory days of empire are soon to return.
All because Trump is scared.
It’s a pattern we’ve seen so often Robert Armstrong came up with an acronym to memorialize it: TACO or “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
Trump “does not have a very high tolerance for market and economic pressure, and will be quick to back off when tariffs cause pain,” Armstrong said.
Same thing with foreign affairs. According to one analysis, Trump has threatened “severe consequences” 22 times against adversaries, but pulled the trigger just twice. He has chickened out even in the face of America’s weakest foes. For instance, the Taliban conceded absolutely nothing in exchange for American troops leaving the country in 2021.
Liberals and Democrats spend a lot of time thinking about the unseen. Is Trump compromised? Is he in Russian pay? And so on. But we don’t spend enough time on the seen, which is damning enough all by itself.
Trump is the biggest chicken on the planet.
Putin knows it.
If only the Democrats would come around.
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Here's the script for ending Trump’s grotesque reality show
Will a Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections free American democracy from the rapacious grasp of an authoritarian president bent on destroying it?
Will Americans finally be free of the helpless, gnawing dread that fills our waking days?
Will decency, goodness, and light prevail over the wickedness, corruption, and darkness that has infested the country?
To find out, tune in for every new episode of TV’s most exasperating reality show, It Can’t Get Any Worse, Can It?
If only we were living in a Truman Show fake reality that we could just turn off or not take seriously. Today’s real America has all of the trappings of bad TV: a president who lies so outrageously that he has turned orange; TV talking heads masquerading as cabinet members; all female appointees played by the same woman with lustrous hair and pouty lips; the National Guard showing up in the streets like the Royal Soldiers of Oz.
We are living in an upside-down America. We have a president who loves evil dictators and disdains democratic leaders; a Republican Party whose second-favorite politician is Victor Orbán, the autocratic leader of Hungary; a country where diversity, equity and inclusion are dirty words; where classic books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Catcher in the Rye have been banned in school districts; where voter suppression is lauded as election reform; where the Supreme Court says it’s okay with them if the president breaks the law; and where the Constitution is being torn asunder rather than revered.
All of these terrible things are happening that we feel powerless to stop. We are gaining a little understanding of how it must feel to live under a dictatorship where the government does whatever the hell it wants, public opinion be damned.
People living under the weight of autocratic repression can begin to feel that their reality is inescapable and try hard to make the best of it. Is this fatalistic resignation already beginning to creep in with some Americans as we watch helplessly while the pillars of democratic governance are being smashed before our eyes?
When people in a democracy begin to feel powerless to affect change, they can lose hope, particularly when the cruel tyrant in the White House has another three-and-a-half years to amass power and hack away at constitutional constraints and the rule of law.
The 2026 midterm elections may seem a lifetime away, a light at the end of the tunnel too dim and distant to inspire hope.
But it’s what we have.
If we can elect a Democratic majority in the House (and the Senate if the stars align), we have struck a critical blow for democracy.
First, we will have provided a referendum on Trump’s first two years in the White House, sending the message that the majority of Americans oppose his anti-democratic, radical-right agenda.
Second, we would now have at least one legislative body committed to rebuilding our democracy by asserting critical checks and balances, playing a role in halting executive overreach. In addition, the impeachment of Trump would certainly be justified, a wealth of evidence to support it.
Third, the House could block all onerous legislation that Trump could have signed into law including measures to suppress voting rights, increase gun proliferation, increase global warming, weaken the judiciary branch, weaken or eliminate essential safety-net programs, and make the executive the towering, predominant branch of government.
The future of America truly hangs in the balance, and it could go one of two wildly disparate ways.
Will we go the way of Russia and Hungary by becoming a faux democracy with the legislative and judicial branches subservient to an authoritarian president and voter-suppression laws reducing the US to a virtual one-party system?
Or will we reclaim our democracy, restore the health of the three equal, independent branches of government, keep our two-party democratic system intact, and ensure that every US citizen is provided the greatest unfettered access to vote?
Stay tuned for every episode of It Can’t Get Any Worse, Can It?, shown 24/7 across the country. We have it in our power to help craft a terrific ending where American democracy is saved and strengthened, the actors are unceremoniously hustled off the set, and the show is mercifully cancelled. Forever.
- Tom Tyner is a freelance editorialist, satirist, political analyst, blogger, author and retired English instructor.
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That roar you hear is the GOP’s biggest hypocrisy breaking apart
The president is doing what he can to demonstrate his sincere belief that he’s the God-Emperor of the United States. But to hear some tell it, it’s still an open question as to whether Donald Trump is “extreme.”
There is no question, however, when it comes to a figure like Zohran Mamdani. A veritable consensus exists in which it’s uncontroversial — indeed, it’s simple common knowledge — that the New York City Democrat would be, if elected, the most left-leaning mayor in America.
The double standard is perhaps most evident in questions reporters ask, and don’t ask, according to historian Larry Glickman. No one hesitates to ask if Mamdani is a “communist.” (They ask so often he sounds guilty in his denials.) But there is immense hesitance to ask if Trump is a totalitarian, even as he prosecutes a totalitarian agenda.
Just last week, he implied that a dictatorship is fine as long it’s “fighting crime.”
“Already they're saying, 'He's a dictator!" The place is going to hell and we got to stop it,” he said. “So instead of saying 'he's a dictator,' they should say 'we're going to join him in making Washington safe.' They say 'he's a dictator!' and then they end up getting mugged.”
Is this not, you know, an extreme thing to say?
No one’s asking.
This double standard is why liberal Democrats are at a disadvantage every time they propose making things more equitable and more just. They can’t call for tax hikes on the rich without facing the “simple common knowledge” that puts reformers like Mamdani in the position of proving they’re innocent of the allegations made by their enemies.
Indeed, for decades, Republicans (as well as the Democrats who fear them) argued that raising taxes on the rich is an act of class war and cutting them is an act of liberation. And during those years, the argument became so commonplace as to become indisputably true.
It wasn’t true, but let’s focus on how maintaining the facade required Republicans (as well as the Democrats who fear them) to cut taxes for the rich but leave more or less untouched programs associated with the New Deal and Great Society: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, weather service, medical research, science, and so on.
As long as inflation was in check, as long as employment was steady, normal people did not notice the one-sided class war against them.
I can’t help thinking something’s changed when I see footage like this.
It’s from a town hall held by Republican Congressman Doug LaMalfa of California. Unlike his House colleague, Nebraska’s Mike Flood, LaMalfa acts like he’s in trouble, but his humility doesn’t matter, as the crowd booed and jeered with disapproval over his support for an unpopular president and his unpopular agenda. I mean, just listen to that roar.
Here’s CNN: “LaMalfa was pressed over how Trump’s agenda, which includes historic cuts to federal support for the social safety net, would affect rural hospitals, particularly those in his district.
“Other attendees asked questions about transparency around the so-called Jeffrey Epstein files. At the morning event, LaMalfa called it a ‘bad look’ to have Epstein-related information continue to be ‘suppressed.’ Still other attendees warned the president’s tariffs would harm farmers in California and attacked the congressman’s credibility.
“‘If you’re not here to either announce your resignation, why aren’t you here to apologize to the farmers of the north state because of your support for the Trump tariffs?’” one audience member said in Chico.
The Congressional Budget Office released an analysis Monday of the GOP’s “Big Beautiful Bill” (BBB). The law will make the rich richer and the poor poorer.
“The top 10 percent of earners in the country will see an average boost of $13,600 per year over the next decade as a direct result of provisions in the law, while the bottom 10 percent will see an average annual decrease of $1,200,” according to a report by The Hill.
Pennsylvania Congressman Brendan Boyle, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said: “Trump is enriching his billionaire friends at the expense of American families.”
The BBB “is the largest transfer of wealth from working Americans to the ultra-rich in history.”
That’s a polite, technocratic way of saying it.
When put in context, another word comes to mind.
That context is this: Trump and the Republicans are taking the safety net out from beneath Americans, like Medicaid, food stamps and Obamacare. They are removing critical services that make a middle class life possible, like banking regulation, food inspection and vaccine research. And despite their talk of liberating us from the tyranny of taxation, there’s a tax they love, a national sales tax called “tariffs” — the most immiserating force any of us has faced in five decades.
Indeed, a Federal Reserve official said today that Trump’s tariffs are “a stagflationary shock” that could echo a time when wages kept falling but prices kept rising, while the cost of borrowing soared, making the 1970s first time the American middle class shrank since World War II.
When put altogether, it doesn’t sound like something benign, like “a transfer of wealth.” It sounds like theft. It sounds like a crime.
I’m reminded of what comedian Trae Crowder said: “The worst part is that the amount of wealth the rich are going to gain from [the BBB] is negligible to them, relatively speaking. This bill effectively takes a few thousand dollars out of the pocket of a regular American per year and puts a few million dollars into the pocket of an American billionaire per year.
“Well, if a billionaire was walking down the street and a few million dollars fell out of his ass, he wouldn’t debase himself by bending over to pick it up. But if you take three grand away from an Iowa school teacher, her whole life is ruined.”
Crowder went on: “This bill is the equivalent of taking a life preserver from someone who’s barely treading water and chucking into the incinerator of a super yacht owned by a guy who invented a drone strike app, or whatever. And that guy don’t need it. He just doesn’t want you to have it.
“It pleases him to take it away from you.
“The way you flail makes him giggle.”
It’s early yet. Perhaps normal people will never fully figure out that billionaires have been waging class war against them. And many may be content with suffering as long as perceived enemies suffer more.
But at this rate, the president will need to cheat to prevent the voting public from trying to hold him responsible for the ongoing debilitation of their lives and fortunes. (That’s what he and the Republicans are trying to do with the redrawing of congressional maps in Texas and other red states.) Or he will have to turn everything into a “national emergency” to justify the continuing prosecution of his totalitarian agenda. Escaping accountability will require silencing the people.
Today, the “emergency” is crime. Tomorrow, it could be voting.
A class war could turn into a real one.
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Trump took the White House by mastering this GOP trick — now it could destroy him
Donald Trump represents the most recent — and destructive — iteration of the American right.
The old Confederacy was built on rightwing oligarchy and racism; since the Democratic Party abandoned the Klan and the Lost Cause in the 1960s, the Republicans picked up that mantle. And Trump, a lifelong racist, was ideally suited to lead the new GOP movement.
Trump exclusively serves whoever pays the biggest bribes, either in cash, 747s, or votes, who today are mostly big, monopolistic businesses, the morbidly rich, foreign dictators, so-called “Christian” hustlers, and the Republican base of male white supremacist racists.
Lyndon Johnson famously said of Richard Nixon’s “Law and Order” racism campaign:
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
This has been the GOP’s mantra for over 50 years and Trump has turned it into an art form. While the party’s tax and anti-union policies have transferred at least $50 trillion from the middle class into the money bins of the morbidly rich just since Reagan’s inauguration, Trump has a extracted several billion dollars for himself and his family by exploiting the presidency.
Trump-loving white racists continue to vote for the party because he’s working so hard to disempower women and Black people while pushing brown people out of the country or throwing them into concentration camps.
In the meantime, in the service of their rich donors, Trump and his Republican toadies have:
- Fired over 8,000 Social Security workers, throwing the agency into chaos so people’s experience working with them will be frustrating (so they’ll accept privatization).
- Forced people, starting two months after the 2026 midterm elections, to re-qualify for Medicaid every six months; most people wouldn’t even maintain a driver’s license if every six months they had to go back to the DMV to requalify.
- Destroyed unions across America (most recently, Trump stripped union representation from hundreds of thousands of federal workers) leading to a collapse in wages and benefits.
- Stripped our public schools of funding, reallocating resources to whites-only and religious academies.
- Left America so awash in guns that we’re the only country in the world (other than Gaza) where the leading cause of the death of children is bullets.
- Killed off research into mRNA vaccines that were showing great promise to prevent and even cure cancer, among other diseases.
- Ended free and inexpensive college education, making America the only country in the world with over $1.5 trillion in student debt crushing an entire generation.
- Ruined America’s “soft power” around the world by shutting down USAID, leading to the deaths of millions, mostly in Africa, while China and Russia pick up our former allies.
- Betrayed our democratic ally Ukraine by withholding new weapons for eight months now while sucking up to Putin and now openly taking the dictator’s side.
- Embraced autocratic and dictatorial regimes around the world while dissing our democratic allies in Europe, India, Australia, Asia, and South and Central America.
- Politicized our military, something George Washington warned loudly against and every president since Jefferson has done his best to avoid.
- Corrupted our courts and prosecutors by appointing unqualified Fox “News” stars and others, including people credibly accused of sexual assault, taking bribes, and engaging in a coup attempt.
- Established new standards for criminality and self-dealing in office.
- Ignored due process requirements in US law and the Constitution when it comes to brown-skinned immigrants.
- Corrupted America’s reputation as a beacon of democracy for the rest of the world.
- Intimidated media, law firms, and corporate leaders into going along with creeping fascism while demanding from them bribes and tribute to the Trump Crime Family.
- Frozen money appropriated by Congress for green energy projects that would ameliorate climate change and cancer-causing pollution.
- Pitted Americans against each other while whipping up hysteria around race and religion.
- Betrayed Jesus and the founders of the rest of the world’s major religions by embracing corrupt preachers and politicizing churches.
- Put masked, armed thugs on the streets of America to terrorize people and turn our country into a police state.
All in the service of the richest among us and to the detriment of working class Americans who keep “emptying their pockets” for Trump, the GOP, and the billionaire social media moguls.
What’s it going to take for average people to wake up to how badly they’ve been screwed by Trump and his bizarre crew of lickspittles?
History suggests the major turning points are economic; every 80 or so years America experiences a massive crash, followed by a severe war and a progressive renewal. The Crash of 1771 followed by the American Revolution; the Panic of 1856 followed by the Civil War; the Republican Great Depression followed by World War II. And this year it’s been exactly 80 years since the end of that war.
Trump’s incoherent — and clearly unconstitutional — proclamation of a phony “economic emergency” to commandeer from Congress the power to impose tariffs is already slowing our economy, increasing unemployment, and jacking up inflation. And his ICE raids have led to produce rotting in the fields, giving us a 38% increase in wholesale vegetable costs over the past month, compared to last year.
Combine this very real probability that he’s driving us into a recession or even a depression with his dangerous, anti-democratic foreign policy — that seems to be entirely rooted in embracing whatever country gives him the largest bribes via jet planes and real estate projects, or doing whatever Vladimir Putin demands of him — and we may well be on the verge of a 1930s/1940s style crash and world war scenario.
The world order shakes, markets and banks collapse, Putin takes the rest of Ukraine, China takes Taiwan, India goes to war with Pakistan, Israel attacks Iran, Trump dithers and impotently threatens, and the world could well be in a major crisis far quicker than most Americans think possible.
Will that be enough to wake up the average voter the way the Republican Great Depression did in the 1930s, stripping the GOP of political power for the next 40 years? Will it bring about a new progressive renewal, like the ones that followed the crash/war cycles of the 1780s, 1860s, and 1940s?
Or will Trump, Putin, and Orbán finally succeed in taking America down the Russia/Hungary road from oligarchy to outright authoritarian fascism before the 2028 presidential election?
To the extent we still can speak out, participate in our political system, and are willing to fight for a return to the egalitarian democracy of the New Deal and Great Society, our future is still largely in our own hands.
Tag, we’re it!
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This Trump kryptonite just snuck up on him — and it packs a punch
Over an astonishingly short period, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California has transformed himself from a competent but uninspired "California liberal" to a piercing voice cutting through the MAGA music and crypto techno otherwise drowning out this summer.
In so doing, Newsom has become our most necessary American, the country's ego to President Donald Trump's id.
Reasonable people can differ in pegging the precise point at which the California governor turned a corner. Some might say the spark first ignited during Trump's visit to Los Angeles after the fires, when Newsom set an uncompromising and unflinching non-political tone.
Others may nod to the objection and subsequent litigation over National Guard troops roaming those same LA streets. Perhaps it took right up until he said, "No more," and promised to redistrict California in response to Trump's Texas power play.
While people quibble, all can agree that Newsom is now meeting the moment, whether it is a press conference on the new California initiative, the now nearly inevitable political showdown going forward, or the elegant all-cap trolling on Xitter, tweets with a familiar syncopation and beguiling iteration, matching Trump word for incoherent word. Newsom has this.
He is now the post-MAGA "GCN," and only starting to roar. But it took a president on the prowl of democracy to put him in the hunt.
The single most remarkable thing about Trump 2.0 is not the pace at which he is tearing down our hopes for the republic's health; that project was in the works and has been campaigned on since 2021.
No, the most shocking development has been the Democrats' mealy-mouthed retreat from center ground, the humiliating hole in space presumed to be covered by our Congressional representation. Whether it was Chuck Schumer's cave on the debt ceiling or Hakeem Jeffries's lukewarm resistance, the voiceless opposition has never been so muted.
Enter Newsom.
A year ago, all of this would have seemed laughable. On the national scene, Newsom — however competent and likable — was seen at best to be a placeholder for a nation too immature and insufficiently desperate to call on Pete Buttigieg to restore sanity as a 2008 redux, "rainbow version."
Newsom was, after all, a "California liberal," the death knell for any part of the country east of the Sierras. Moreover, Gavin may as well be a "Clinton," having been on the political scene for decades with nary a memorable noise at a Democratic convention, primary, or campaign. That was then.
It took Trump morphing into "New Trump" to bring out the fight in Gavin Newsom. And fight he has.
Right.
Democrats and Independents need this. Even saintly Joe Biden, circa 2020, failed to really capture an all-things-anti-Trump national zeitgeist. Scan the coast-to-coast "room" and point to Trump's most formidable foe right now. There is only one person rising to today's demand.
One is tempted to consider whether anyone else even wants to speak up. Wouldn't it be wonderful if it were hard to point to Trump's primary opposition? If we had governors east-west-up-down and a Congress full of energy and offense? We don't, but we do have Gavin. And just perhaps he is enough, especially if he unifies.
Not a moment too soon, it was Newsom who picked Democrats' lower lips from the floor after Texas announced its Trump-mandated redistricting plan with a "fight fire with fire" hot response, one that stunned Republicans used to Democrats only pouting about the travesty of it all while holding to an ideal of which, at least right now, is not an option. Newsom knows this all too well and perhaps stunned just as many Democrats in his abrupt, unexpected shot — finally.
No, no one should anoint Newsom as positioned as anything heading toward 2028; the first order is saving a meaningful vote at all. But he is "our" candidate for 2025 and '26, anointed or self-appointed, and in whom our support is best placed.
He has the strength to back up any plan. Grok puts California's $4.5 trillion GDP as the fourth biggest in the world. Trump and MAGA badly need that economy to flourish to keep the nation afloat, especially amidst glum economic news and tariffs hanging over us, particularly in the Midwest. The governor can cause misery for Trump through any number of moves. Unlike others, he has the necessary leverage.
Newsom needs to expand his national footprint. Fortunately, he can best protect his state by enveloping that other nation, the red-white-and-blue middle to the blood-letting red right. Take the moment into next week, next month, and definitely next year.
He needs to highlight his national super-PAC, "Campaign for Democracy," but brand it with his name, the one that matters, and buff it out, build the meme in the moment. Find his own billionaires, sic "Bernie-bros" at the cryptos, rally women — the most discerning Dems, go on Meidas and Rogan, pocket money while unleashing opposition, and for God's sake, keep up with the masterful social media. Fund all things opposition on a national scale.
We need someone, and it appears to be him. Good.
It is hard to "come from nowhere" when coming from California. Yet, weirdly, it feels as though he has. Perhaps it is because the bar has been set so low. Which is not to say that Newsom isn't rising. In a nation dominated by fear flowing from those outside of Trump's domination, he seems to revel in it. Amazingly, where he came from couldn't matter less, only that he came at all.
Someone finally grasped the reins. It behooves all of us to meet him in this moment and throughout this county. He is the leader the nation most needs, the now all-too-necessary American.
- Jason Miciak is an American attorney, past Associate Editor of Occupy Democrats, author, and can also be found on Politizoom.
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