MAGA family values, locked and loaded
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
Tyrant Trump always says, 'This is only the beginning.' Believe him
The huge Labor Day banner outside the Labor Department building with Trump’s picture and the words “American Workers First” depicts one of Donald’s most disgusting lies.
With multiple factual examples, Steve Greenhouse, former labor reporter for the New York Times, provides proof that Trump is the most brazenly “anti-worker” president in U.S. history. With his Big Vicious and Ugly Bill, barely passed by his fawning GOP in Congress, and dozens of illegal executive orders, he is smashing the American Worker beyond the avarice of the cruelest Plutocrat.
Quoting liberally from Greenhouse's Labor Day article in the Guardian, I urge labor union leaders and rank-and-file union members to absorb its contents. This article could make American labor angry enough to mount an unstoppable movement to tell Trump, “You’re Fired,” and fire up enough convinced or electorally scared lawmakers in Congress to impeach and remove Trump from office.
The aggregated madness from this failed gambling czar, wholly devoid of empathy, compassion, truth, while betraying his own voters and his oath of office, follows:
- Trump put corporate interests first by “often cutting [workers’] pay or making their jobs more dangerous.” This includes gutting regulations that protect miners from a debilitating, often deadly lung disease. He fired the chair of the top labor watchdog – the National Labor Relations Board, whose now stalled mission is to “protect workers from corporations’ illegal anti-union tactics.” Then “Trump stripped one million federal workers of their right to bargain collectively and tore up their union contracts.”
- “Trump has hurt construction workers by shutting down major wind turbine projects and ending Biden-era subsidies that encourage construction of factories that make renewable-energy products.”
- Trump is pressing to end “minimum wage and overtime protections for 3.7 million home-care and domestic workers,” and has already ended a “Biden plan to prevent employers from paying disabled workers less than the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage.” Trump adamantly opposes raising this frozen minimum wage for 25 million workers who would benefit from a $15 federal minimum wage. He ended a “requirement that federal contractors pay their workers at least $17.75 an hour.”
- Tariffs and reckless, wholesale deportations are “pushing up prices and slowing economic growth.” His big tax cut for the super-rich is being paid for by “millions of working families by cutting food assistance and causing many to lose health coverage” (from Medicaid). As for deportation, it is “undermining their employers’ businesses,” and I might add closing down some of them and impairing farmers from harvesting their crops.
- “In her annual State of the Unions address, AFL-CIO president [Liz] Schuler said: ‘We want cheaper groceries, and we get tanks on our streets. We want more affordable healthcare, and we get 16 million Americans about to be kicked off their coverage.’”
- Trump is swinging an axe to end worker safety protections, cutting OSHA staff and pushing those still working at OSHA to weaken all kinds of essential safety and health protections, ranging from coal miners to workers under extreme heat, to reducing fines for violating safety rules, and much more. He “froze enforcement of a Biden-era regulation that protects miners from silicosis, a serious lung disease.” “…a major killer among coal miners.”
- The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) “forecasts that Trump’s effort to deport 1 million immigrants a year will result in 5.9 million lost jobs after four years: 3.3 million fewer employed immigrants and 2.6 million fewer employed US-born workers. ‘If you don’t have immigrant roofers and framers, you’re not building houses, and that means electricians and plumbers lose their jobs.’ ‘Plus, you lose the consumer spending from those workers,’” and tens of billions of withheld tax revenues annually, one might add.
The list of anti-worker cruelty goes on. Tyrant Trump always says, “This is only the beginning.” He acts like an imperious dictator because that is what he is, imposing burdens and pain on the American people — in red and blue states alike. The six rogue Supreme Court Injustices, who thus far know no limits, are enabling the madman in the White House. Before his sleazy conversion, JD Vance called Trump “America’s Hitler.”
UNFORTUNATELY, THE WORST IS YET TO COME, MUCH WORSE!
The flip side of Trump’s feverish repression of worker rights, remedies, and existing protections is that there is no chance of reforming anti-union laws, such as the notorious Taft-Hartley Law of 1947, with Trump and his congressional cronies in power.Readers may well ask why all these attacks on workers didn’t lead unions and their allies to launch a COMPACT FOR AMERICAN WORKERS and insist that the feeble, corporate-conflicted Democratic Party adopt it authentically and replace their stagnant leadership with new, vigorous leaders.
That is what they should have done right after their disastrous loss to Trump, the serial law violator, abuser of women, corrupter, daily, delusionary falsehood teller, shredder of the Constitution, greedy, egomaniacal, and seriously dangerous personalityThere is still one Labor Day before the 2026 midterm elections. Can Unions and the Democratic Party save our Republic from the rampaging daily Trump outlawry and viciousness (he is now invading American cities while wrecking our country)? It should be easy, just based on his failed record.
As the economy worsens amidst the chaos, consumer prices rise, unemployment rises, and Trump behaves more like Captain Queeg (the fictional, cruel, and crazy skipper in the film, The Caine Mutiny), voters for Trump are starting to ask, “Did We Vote for This?” Non-voters, in turn, should resolve to head for the polls and reject what Trump is doing. The people who are the sovereign in our Constitution must start acting like they have power.
- Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate and the author of "The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future" (2012). His latest book is, "Wrecking America: How Trump's Lies and Lawbreaking Betray All" (2020, co-authored with Mark Green).
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One man has done more to destroy our democracy than Donald Trump
Chief Justice John Roberts is smart and skilled. He will be remembered, however, as a historic failure.
This is not a claim to make lightly, but his record compels it, because Roberts’ legacy will be defined by two catastrophic roles he played.
First, Roberts has played the lead role in destroying indispensable rules of our democracy.
Second, Roberts has played the lead judicial role in serving as the handmaiden to President Trump’s efforts to turn our democracy into an autocracy. This historic failure will be detailed next week in Part II.
Destroying essential rules of democracy
Roberts has taken the lead in writing a series of opinions that have destroyed essential rules governing our democracy. They deal with:
- The sacred right of every eligible citizen to vote.
- The integrity and honesty of the political system.
- The right of citizens to have an unrigged opportunity to choose their representatives.
- The idea that public officials should not be allowed to sell influence with their office.
- The foundational principle that no person is above the law.
The following opinions, written by Roberts and joined in all but one case only by the Republican-appointed majority on the Court, have done unprecedented harm to our democracy.
Roberts wrote the majority opinion for a 5–4 decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013). It declared key sections of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, the most consequential voting rights law ever enacted, to be unconstitutional. The Act was reenacted periodically over decades until the Shelby County decision.
The Roberts opinion unleashed a wave of regressive and discriminatory voting changes by states and local jurisdictions that disadvantaged minority voters and impeded their voting rights and their ability to fully participate in the democratic process.
Roberts wrote the majority opinion for a 5–4 decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission (2014) which struck down the aggregate limit on all contributions by a donor in an election cycle, a provision previously held constitutional by the Supreme Court in Buckley v. Valeo in 1976.
In Buckley, the Supreme Court had found that unlimited contributions given to support candidates were inherently corrupt. The McCutcheon decision, however, eviscerated the limits on individual contributions to candidates by unleashing billionaires, millionaires, and other big money donors to give unlimited, often huge, contributions to Super PACs to benefit specific candidates.
Roberts wrote the majority opinion for a 5–4 Court decision in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), in which the Court decided that it could not act on challenges to partisan redistricting plans. The decision claimed that the Court is incapable of establishing standards for determining when partisan maps become unconstitutional, no matter how extreme.
The Rucho decision means that there are no constitutional restrictions on partisan gerrymandering, no matter how rigged the plans are. The result is that politicians get to choose their voters rather than voters choosing their representatives.
Roberts wrote the unanimous opinion in McDonnell v. United States, (2016), which vacated the conviction of former Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell for honest services fraud and extortion. In his opinion, Roberts said that McDonnell’s actions did not constitute “official acts” under the applicable laws, including the bribery law.
In its decision, the Court adopted a narrow, unrealistic construction of the term “official act” to exclude various acts of an officeholder that should be covered, even when those acts are done in direct exchange for gifts or other benefits. For all practical purposes, the Court has left the country without effective bribery laws to prevent public officials from selling their office for financial benefits.
Roberts wrote the opinion for a 6–3 majority in Trump v. United States (2024), which gave Trump presidential criminal immunity.
The decision violated a guiding principle of our Founders that no person is above the law. The Roberts opinion placing Trump above the law and also giving him personal control of the Justice Department and FBI can be seen in such outrageous Trump pronouncements as the statement that he has “The right to do anything I want to. I’m the president of the United States,” and “I run the country and the world.”
It is unlikely that any Chief Justice in history played more of a role in destroying more of our nation’s democracy rules than Roberts. And that is how he will be remembered.
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Here's what not to say about the murder of Charlie Kirk
You don’t have to say nice things
You don't have to say nice things about Charlie Kirk just because he’s dead. You can condemn political violence in all its forms — and you should. You can wish his family well. You can express your sincere condolences to all families of all victims of all political violence. You can even overlook, if you believe it’s worth it, the fact that he spent nearly all of his young adult life selling for profit the hatred of racial and sexual minorities, liberalism and the Democrats generally.
You can choose to do these things in full confidence that you have lived up to your obligation as a decent human being. But otherwise, you don’t have to say nice things in order to prove to someone — whoever that is — that you are not glad he’s dead. You don’t have to prove anything.
Live by the sword …
It would be appropriate to suggest that Kirk could be a victim of the kind of politics that he sold, just as it was appropriate to suggest that the Marlboro Men were victims of the kind of products that they sold. (All five men died of smoking-related diseases).
Kirk embraced political violence as a “remedy.” He bussed his followers to the J6 insurrection. He once said: “We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor.”
It is in no way an endorsement of political violence to suggest that Kirk saw the consequences of his choices, just as it was not an endorsement of, say, lung cancer to suggest that the Marlboro Men saw the consequences of theirs.
In 2023, Kirk famously said annual gun deaths are a “rational” price for our society to pay in exchange for its liberties.
“We should not have a utopian view [of gun violence],” he said. “We will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death. That is nonsense. That’s drivel. But I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth it to have the cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”
So it’s not only appropriate to suggest that Charlie Kirk died by the sword that he lived by, it’s deeply moral, as it affirms the belief that no one but the individual can be held responsible for the choices of that individual. (The shooter, it should go without saying, will be held responsible for his.) I would even say it’s deeply conservative to say so.
I took that to be Matthew Dowd’s intention when he said, in reaction to news of Kirk’s death, that “hateful thoughts lead to hateful words which then lead to hateful actions.”
Dowd’s comments were downright bland to those who know Kirk’s work, as historian Seth Cotlar does. He noted this week that “when a conservative gun enthusiast tried to assassinate Trump, Kirk immediately tried to fan the flames of division by blaming it on ‘them,’ by which he meant … everything on ‘the left.’”
Though bland by conservative standards, Dowd's words were too much for MSNBC. The network sacked him before saying that he “made comments that were inappropriate, insensitive, and unacceptable. There is no place for violence in America, political or otherwise,” as if he were endorsing violence.
By contrast, consider this moment during a recent Fox broadcast in which the cohost suggests “involuntary lethal injection” as a remedy for homelessness.
“Just kill them,” said Brian Kilmeade.
On 'assassination'
This week, the Associated Press said Kirk was “assassinated.” That characterization, however, is not neutral.
It conveys the president’s preferred view of his death, as an example of America becoming a “killing field” that requires the remedies of a strongman, like murdering the homeless, per Trump’s fave TV show.
But Kirk was not assassinated. He was murdered.
Yes, he was a prominent figure. Yes, he was very important to the Republican Party. But he wasn’t running for high office, he wasn’t leading a mass movement and he was not democratically elected. If anything, he had a high perch because billionaires gave it to him.
Melissa Hortman was assassinated, however. She was a Democratic legislator and the former speaker of the state House who led the enactment of sweeping progressive reforms in Minnesota. In June, she was assassinated by an anti-vaccine terrorist named Vance Boelter.
Boelter shot three others, also killing Hortman’s husband. But he was not assassinated. He was murdered. Hortman was a former speaker. For that reason, her murder rises to the level of assassination.
This is not just semantics.
By elevating Kirk’s murder to the level of an assassination, he’s turned into a moral figure who appears to transcend politics, such that we are forced to either praise him — or at least say nice things about him — or remain silent for fear of being seen as endorsing political violence.
That is, of course, one of the goals of authoritarian politics — to censor, silence and suppress the opposition by any means. Kirk was key to that. He presented himself and his organization as champions of free speech on college campuses while also keeping lists, complete with pictures, of professors and students who said and wrote things he didn’t like in order to encourage people to monitor and harass them.
Kirk’s bad faith wouldn’t have been so bad for freedom and democracy if highly visible liberals had not also accepted as true the lies he told. Sadly, that continues to be the case, even in death. This week, the New York Times’ Erza Klein wrote that Kirk practiced politics “the right way” by “showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.”
Yes, demagogues can be very persuasive, and you’d think a liberal like Klein would have said so plainly – if he were not more smitten with his reputation for reasonableness than he is focused on actual politics. For that, we must turn to a rightwing writer, Richard Hanania, who explained how “rightists justify calls for repression and violence.” In doing so, he explained the very tactic Kirk worked hard to perfect:
1) Go to social media and find the most obscure people celebrating violence. Say that this is "the left."
2) Say "the left" wants you dead, blaming the entire Democratic Party.
Literally, not a single Democrat is celebrating the Kirk assassination. It's complete wishcasting on the right. They're radicalizing their followers based on an inaccurate view of their opponents that fits with a victimization narrative.
Meanwhile, the most prominent people on their side started indulging in conspiracy theories and gleefully sharing memes after Nancy Pelosi's husband is attacked … The hypocrisy is overwhelming. They get off on the idea of “civil war” and collapse and invent the reality they want to see. They imagine Democrats are like themselves when they're not.
Under these conditions, the president and his goon squad are almost certainly going to try targeting all of “the left,” as Kirk defined it. The regime is already arresting people for the “crime” of their race, with the Supreme Court’s blessing. If they can criminalize your identity, they can criminalize your speech — or at least force you into silence, for insufficiently praising a “free speech champion” like Charle Kirk.
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Trump is about to launch phase two of a truly terrible plan
We are now witnessing the start of what might be seen as Phase 2 of Trump’s efforts to eradicate political opposition.
Phase 1 has centered on silencing criticism. It has featured retribution toward people Trump deemed personal “enemies” — not just Democrats who had led the criticisms and prosecutions of him in his first term but also Republicans and his own first-term appointees who subsequently criticized him, such as John Bolton.
Phase 1 also entailed an assault on universities that utilize so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” harbor faculty members and students who speak out critically against Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocide in Palestine, or offer classes critical of the United States’s history toward Black people and Native Americans.
Finally, Phase 1 has gone after media that criticized Trump by withdrawing funding for public radio and television and relying on the billionaire owners of The Washington Post, ABC, CBS, and X to suppress criticism of Trump on their media platforms.
Phase 2, it appears, will entail a more direct attack on all Trump’s political opponents, including the entire Democratic Party.
Trump has vowed to order troops into cities run by Democrats — Washington, D.C., Chicago, Memphis, and New Orleans.
He posted a video last week assailing Democratic mayors on crime, although crime rates have fallen sharply in recent years. “For far too long, Americans have been forced to put up with Democrat-run cities that set loose savage, bloodthirsty criminals to prey on innocent people,” he says in the video.
Meanwhile, he’s sending disaster relief to states run by Republicans and that he won in 2024, most recently announcing $32 million in aid for North Carolina, “which I WON BIG all six times, including Primaries,” suggesting that states run by Democrats will not receive such relief.
He has taken off the gloves with Democratic states and their representatives in Congress, virtually ordering the governors of Texas, Missouri, Indiana, and Ohio to redistrict in order to come up with more Republican seats.
Another aspect of Phase 2 is his willingness to describe Democrats as “evil.” In a Fox News interview last week in which he complained about so-called “excesses” by the left, he referred to Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist and front-runner for mayor of New York, as a “communist.”
In calling the entire Democratic Party the “radical left,” Trump seems eager to use the murder of Charlie Kirk to go after Democrats and liberals. Within hours of the murder, he declared that “we just have to beat the hell” out of “radical left lunatics,” and he has hammered Democrats and liberals as “vicious and … horrible.”
Trump’s Phase 2 thinking can be seen most vividly in the remarks of his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, who is turning Kirk’s murder into a political cause. As Miller wrote on Saturday:
“In recent days we have learned just how many Americans in positions of authority — child services, law clerks, hospital nurses, teachers, gov’t workers, even DOD employees — have been deeply and violently radicalized,” calling them “the consequence of a vast, organized ecosystem of indoctrination.”
Miller continued:
“There is an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved. It is an ideology at war with family and nature. It is envious, malicious, and soulless. It is an ideology that looks upon the perfect family with bitter rage while embracing the serial criminal with tender warmth.
Its adherents organize constantly to tear down and destroy every mark of grace and beauty while lifting up everything monstrous and foul. It is an ideology that leads, always, inevitably and willfully, to violence—violence against those [who] uphold order, who uphold faith, who uphold family, who uphold all that is noble and virtuous in this world. It is an ideology whose one unifying thread is the insatiable thirst for destruction.”
Miller has vowed to use the power of the government against MAGA’s political enemies, calling his political opponents “domestic terrorists” and warning:
“[T]he power of law enforcement under President Trump’s leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and, if you’ve broken the law, to take away your freedom.”
Phase 2 must be understood against the backdrop of Trump’s rapidly declining popularity. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, from Sept. 9, shows that only 32 percent of Americans support Trump’s deploying armed troops to large cities.
His economic policies are similarly unpopular. Only 36 percent approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, 30 percent approve of his handling of cost of living, and 16 percent support Trump’s having the power to set interest rates or tell companies where to manufacture products.
Other polls show similar declines in support for Trump.
Trump’s Phase 2 aims to overcome these declining poll numbers by demonizing the Democratic Party, liberals, and all other political opponents in an effort to divide the nation into those who are with Trump and those who are against him.
The overall goal is to make loyalty to Trump a litmus test of American patriotism.
I believe he will fail. Americans won’t fall for it. To the contrary: Trump’s Phase 2 will reveal the depths of his anti-democratic authoritarianism, from which even more Americans will recoil.
***
By the way, please plan on demonstrating Oct. 18 in the second and largest No Kings Day protests across the nation. Information can be found here.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/
- Robert Reich's new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org.
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I kid you not — this Republican just called the Constitution's foundation 'woke'
Missouri’s three most recent former attorneys general — all of whom claim to be “constitutional conservatives” — tripped over themselves to out-racism each other while auditioning for Trump.
This has not been good for Missouri. But it has worked out for the former AGs who have successfully used the office to get the hell out of Missouri and into federal office without having to pretend to do the work of being attorney general for too long (It’s a four-year term, but we’ve had four in six years).
When I wrote about the hateful and wasteful anti-diversity crusade of former-as-of-last-week Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, I wondered if I wasn’t whitewashing his efforts by avoiding using the more apt synonym for “anti-diversity,” which is “white supremacist.”
When U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley gave a speech last year in which he proudly proclaimed to be a “Christian Nationalist,” I thought the white supremacist dogwhistles couldn’t get any louder.
But Missouri’s junior senator and second most recent AG-for-a-minute, Eric Schmitt, yeeted the dogwhistles in a speech telling us exactly what he and the MAGA movement he has pledged allegiance to stand for: rewriting history to justify the dominance of white, purportedly Christian men.
Schmitt’s speech at the National Conservatism Conference followed one speaker who argued at length that America’s biggest problem is white guilt and another who insisted the U.S. is in a crisis that can only be resolved by becoming a Christian nation.
Schmitt went full blood and soil.
In the speech, titled “What Is an American,” he proclaimed that America is not “a proposition” or a shared set of values, rather it is a country for white people descended from European settlers, whose accomplishments should not be diminished by acknowledging the people that some of them enslaved, the Native Americans they killed, or anyone else denied equal rights at the founding.
Real Americans, in his view, can trace their ancestry to settlers. He frames his German ancestors as real Americans. He doesn’t call them “immigrants,” of course, instead contrasting them with other immigrants, Native Americans, and the enslaved people who long pre-dated his ancestors’ arrival. That requires either astounding ignorance or deliberate obfuscation of the fact that neither Germans nor Catholics were initially considered white or American.
Schmitt dismissed Americans’ outrage at the death of George Floyd and valorized Confederate generals.
Schmitt mocked the idea that “a poem on the Statute of Liberty” or “five words in the Declaration of Independence” define who is an American.
The five words he finds overemphasized and a tool of the woke: “all men are created equal.”
I kid you not. Read the speech.
Schmitt is peddling a perverse and revisionist originalism in which only the founders who won the debates of the time matter. He calls us back to when the Constitution was first signed — when it counted enslaved people as 3/5ths of a person to appease slaveowners.
He is rejecting the Constitution that the people of the U.S. amended with the 14th, 15th and 19th Amendments to include those of us who are not male or white.
Schmitt made repeated allusions to the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. This is the increasingly widespread conspiracy theory that Jews are bringing non-white people into this country to replace its rightful white owners. That’s what the “good people on both sides” as Trump put it, who chanted “Jews will not replace us!” in Charlottesville were referring to.
Schmitt hired a staffer who was fired by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign for making a video containing Neo-Nazi imagery and has too many ties to white supremacists for me to detail here.
Schmitt’s proposition that certain people are entitled to rule based on ancestry or power, rather than required to convince voters of varying backgrounds to vote for them, is not just a horrifying thing to say outloud. It’s an ideology that underlies so many real world illegal power grabs — from Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election to Governor Mike Kehoe and Republican legislators’ effort to redistrict away Kansas City area citizens’ voting power.
Nevertheless, I take solace in the fact that — though truly horrific words came out of the mouth of our sitting senator — the video shows his speech was sparsely attended and everyone looked bored.
There are more of us than there are of them. Schmitt can try to rewrite our history and claim this country isn’t “based on a proposition,” but Lincoln was right. This nation was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
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Charlie Kirk was killed. We are in danger of letting our most valuable ideals die with him
On Aug. 9, 2016, Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, stood on his steel-enforced soapbox in Wilmington, North Carolina, and said this through a smirk about his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton:
"Hillary wants to abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. But the Second Amendment people … maybe there is, I don't know."
This was Trump at his absolute worst, which makes it as bad as it gets, or anyone can be, with his veiled suggestion that his supporters exercise their gun rights to stop Clinton from abolishing the Second Amendment.
Like so many toxic statements Trump made on his campaign trail of fears that year, it should have ended his candidacy on the spot. No presidential candidate in the history of our country had openly hinted at a call to arms against an opponent. And for the record, Clinton never once said she wanted to incinerate the Second Amendment.
Many Republicans called it simply a “joke gone bad” at the time because they had all heard those horrible words and the context in which he delivered them. Trump later denied he was advocating an assassination attempt, and instead was simply trying to coalesce a political movement.
I know how I felt when I heard his disgusting comments, and have no doubt what the odious Trump was implying with his sick “joke.”
Just four years later, Trump left no doubt about his violent intentions when he tried to overturn an election by instigating the worst attack on our Capitol since the War of 1812. Law enforcement officers were beaten with American and rebel flags. His vice president was threatened with hanging, and his thugs whom he later told us that he “loved” roamed the halls hunting down Speaker Nancy Pelosi, among others.
I remind you of these terrible things, because much of our broken-down legacy media refuses to in the wake of the murder of right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk.
I remind you of this, because any reporting that doesn’t mention Trump as the root cause of the Republican hate speech and political violence across this country, isn’t worth the screen it is printed on.
I remind you of this because any reporting that doesn’t mention Kirk’s overt racism and misogyny as the catalyst for his popularity on the right is fooling itself, but worse, trying to fool you.
This is incredibly dangerous, because by treating the death of Kirk as some “political assassination” instead of yet another preventable gun death among tens of thousands in this country, our media is providing fuel to a fire that Republicans would like to burn to the point of out of control.
I am not celebrating Kirk’s death, but I am lamenting the demise of truth in this country.
So here is the truth:
Trump is a hardcore racist, and Kirk was one too. I could fill 14 columns using only their racist words to buttress this fact.
He was not as New York Times columnist Ezra Klein typed Thursday, presumably with a blindfold on: “Practicing politics the right way.”
Klein’s column defied belief, because up until the moment he wrote those idiotic, dangerous words, I had a fair amount of respect for a guy who generally takes a reasoned approach to these unreasonable times we live in.
Here’s the column. I’ll guess it’s paywalled, but assure you it’s not worth a dime or a single minute of your time. Klein was slammed by NYT readers in the comments section, before they had to close the one-way discourse down. I’ll hope he read them. If he’s not embarrassed, and rethinking his shoddy, tone-deaf take on Kirk’s killing, he’s not human. Worse, he’s never to be trusted again, which would be a damn shame, because he generally is a voice of reason, whether you agree with him not.
I am not here to exclusively batter Klein, but I am saying he is one of the leaders of the chorus in our broken media, whose mishandling of the Republican attack on our Democracy has helped lead us to this terrible place.
The man who violently attacked our country, now has troops in our streets.
The man who tried to overturn our 2020 election, is now relentlessly attacking our election process.
The man who lied on the camping trail that “I have nothing to do with Project 2025,” is now implementing it almost to the letter in an effort to make sure we never recognize our government or our country ever again.
I have not seen ONE story in our legacy media calling him a fascist, even if he is the definition of one.
The same way I did not hear anybody in our legacy media call him a liar when in fact, he told a documented 30,573 lies or mistruths during his first, disastrous term.
The same way, I am not seeing the legacy media calling him a racist even now …
I want to remind you of something else I typed on Thursday, that is keeping me up at night:
DO NOT LET THE CORPORATE MEDIA FRAME THIS MOMENT.
As a lifetime journalist, that isn’t easy to type, but I was taught to report the truth, and that accuracy breeds credibility.
Without truth, accuracy, or credibility you are finished in the news business.
We all must gravitate toward the truth-tellers in our society right now, and become truth-tellers ourselves, if we are going to survive this rightwing onslaught on our Democracy.
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One dangerous agent of Trumpist chaos is creating a tragedy to last decades
Donald Trump’s appointee as secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has set out to dismantle an Atlanta-based institution, attempting to transform the Centers for Disease Control, the planet’s pre-eminent public-health agency, into the Centers for Deluded Conspiracy, an official purveyor of pseudo-science and quackery.
And those with the power to stop Kennedy’s assault on the CDC lack the courage and wisdom to do so, while those who do have the courage to act lack the power to intervene. As a result, we are witnessing a tragedy play out before our eyes that will have consequences for decades.
If that sounds alarmist, let’s review who we’re dealing with in Kennedy.
In the not-too-distant past, he has suggested that the COVID-19 pandemic was a “plandemic,” created by the pharmaceutical industry to drum up business for itself, with the CDC serving as the industry’s enforcer.
It’s a familiar line of thinking for Kennedy, an echo of his earlier conspiracy theory that the attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and 2001 may have plotted by the U.S. defense industry so it could keep selling arms and munitions.
Kennedy has said that there is no such thing as a safe and effective vaccine. He has said that the polio vaccine has killed more people than it has saved. He has suggested that COVID-19 was “targeted” to kill certain ethnic groups, such as white and Black people, while making Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese immune. He also insists that vaccines and Tylenol cause autism, theories that are utterly without scientific basis.
Trump himself, the man who suggested that we could fight COVID by injecting bleach into our veins or letting the sun shine into places in our body where God did not intend the sun to shine, posted a vaccine-related meme this week on his Truth Social account claiming: “They’re ALL poison. Every. Single. One.”
Given their unquestioning faith in their leader, a lot of Trump supporters will probably be even more reluctant now to be vaccinated, or to allow their children to do so, and that will have consequences for them. But again, when powerful national leaders make health care policy based on such nonsense, even those of us who know better will pay a heavy price.
Living and working in Atlanta, I’ve met a lot of CDC employees. They are smart, they are honest, they are dedicated to science and to the mission of public health. Many have sacrificed more lucrative career paths because they wanted to be at the CDC, where so much important work was being done.
Imagine being someone like that and you’re told that to keep your job you have to pretend that vaccines do more damage than good, and other such nonsense. For a lot of CDC employees, they don’t have to imagine that scenario because they are living it.
In recent testimony to the U.S. Senate, Kennedy was asked why he had just fired Susan Monarez as CDC director, after just four weeks in the job.
“I told her that she had to resign because when I asked her whether she was a trustworthy person, and she said no,” Kennedy told the senators.
Somehow, I doubt that’s how the conversation actually went down. It seems far more likely that Kennedy asked Monarez whether she could be trusted to spew the pseudo-science that Kennedy demanded. When she refused, as integrity demanded, she was fired.
Monarez holds a doctorate in immunology and microbiology, with a long career of research into infectious diseases and other public-health issues. Her replacement as acting director of the CDC, Jim O’Neill, has a master’s degree in the humanities, but apparently Kennedy considers him “trustworthy.”
It’s easy to see why. Like Kennedy, O’Neill champions the use of ivermectin, a horse dewormer, to treat COVID. He believes that the government should allow the sale of unproved drugs and other treatments so that people can experiment on their own to find out if they work or not. Yeah, they may die unnecessarily, but it’s not the government’s job to protect them from such choices.
There have always been people who prefer to live in an alternate reality of their own design, as Kennedy, O’Neill and others do. We saw that at the peak of the pandemic, when some individuals stubbornly rejected the vaccine and medical science in favor of quack remedies such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
It was their choice, and many died as a result.
But now, in our era of national madness, we have surrendered control of major agencies of the federal government to such people, not just at the CDC but at the Pentagon, the Department of State, the Department of Commerce and the Department of Justice.
Now all of us are living in their alternate reality. Now all of us are at risk when actual reality reasserts itself, as it always does eventually. We can’t know what form that challenge will take, but we do know it will come, and the charlatans and conspiracy fools that we now have in charge will prove spectacularly unfit to meet it.
- Jay Bookman covered Georgia and national politics for nearly 30 years for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, earning numerous national, regional and state journalism awards. He has been awarded the National Headliner Award and the Walker Stone Award for outstanding editorial writing, and is the only two-time winner of the Pulliam Fellowship granted by the Society of Professional Journalists. He is also the author of "Caught in the Current," published by St. Martin's Press.
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This abject media cowardice only makes violent GOP rhetoric worse
As a guy who regularly gets death threats because of my media presence, I shouldn’t have to say that killing people — or even threatening them — for their politics is wrong. But here it is, for the record: nobody in America should die for their politics.
That said, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination — the guy who downplayed slavery, demonized Black and brown people, promoted the racist antisemitic Great Replacement Theory, attacked queer people, made degrading comments about women, said gun deaths were fine because that’s the price we must pay for the Second Amendment — the media is afraid to say anything about the state of our politics other than “we need to stop violence-provoking political rhetoric on both sides.”
As if there were two sides here.
Here’s the hard truth that the bullshit-embracing “both sides” punditry won’t say out loud: calling for Democrats to “tone it down” has become a permission slip for Republicans to keep stoking hate, flirting with violence, and treating fellow Americans as enemies rather than opponents.
If you actually look at the political science and the public record, the escalation didn’t start with Democrats, and it doesn’t continue because Democrats use accurate words to describe what we’re facing. The political research is clear.
As Rachel Bitecofer points out, Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein said the quiet part our loud when they wrote that the modern GOP had become “ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition” in their 2012 Washington Post essay and book-length work on asymmetric polarization.
And this isn’t new: the rhetoric that got us here wasn’t even invented on social media. Lee Atwater explained Nixon’s Southern Strategy out loud in 1981, describing how race-baiting messages were laundered into “abstract” appeals that produced the same results without resorting to the N-word.
Ronald Reagan elevated the “welfare queen” trope into a national morality play that exploited poverty and race for partisan gain. The Willie Horton ad and “Revolving Door” spot baked fear-first politics into a Republican presidential campaign’s core strategy.
Pat Buchanan then said the quiet part with a bullhorn in his 1992 convention speech, declaring a “culture war” against Democrats and anyone who didn’t fit his vision of a Christian white America. Newt Gingrich operationalized it with his GOPAC training memo, a how-to guide that told Republican candidates to brand Democrats with words like “corrupt,” “sick,” and “traitors” while reserving terms like “freedom” and “strength” for themselves.
This wasn’t an internet rumor, it was the Republican party’s official training literature.
When the National Rifle Association mailed a fundraising letter in 1995 calling federal agents “jack-booted thugs,” former President George H. W. Bush resigned from their board in protest, which tells you how far the mainstream right still had to travel to normalize incendiary attacks on law enforcement when it suited their politics.
Fast forward to the past decade and the escalation didn’t slow.
Republicans have long normalized calling Democrats “socialists” or “communists” as a baseline insult rather than an argument. This isn’t a fringe habit, it’s a standard applause line for Republican leaders and conservative media outlets.
The “Second Amendment” wink-and-nod-endorsing-violence politics isn’t new either. Sharron Angle campaigned on “Second Amendment remedies” in 2010 and Donald Trump suggested in 2016 that the “Second Amendment people” might have to step up to stop Hillary Clinton.
With Trump’s 2016 campaign, the glorification of violence moved from innuendo to stagecraft. He urged rallygoers to “knock the crap out of” protesters, then later told police “please don’t be too nice” to suspects during a Long Island speech.
Armed rightwing extremists swarmed the Michigan Capitol in April 2020, a preview of how “we the people” could be recast as a threat display when public health or election results didn’t go the way Republicans wanted.
Republican Congressman Paul Gosar posted an anime video that depicted violence against AOC and President Joe Biden, which isn’t normal in an advanced democracy. Nonetheless, all but two Republicans refused to vote for his censure.
The GOP’s information pipeline supercharged moral panics about identity and belonging; the old birther lie about Barack Obama’s citizenship migrated from fringe to Fox to Trump’s core brand.
Then the “Great Replacement” narrative went from white supremacist fever dream to a standard talking point on the country’s most-watched rightwing channel, and then into the manifestos of mass murderers in El Paso and Buffalo, and into the antisemitic rantings of the Tree of Life shooter who blamed Jews for “bringing invaders” here.
After Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, the “groomer” slur against queer people exploded by more than 400 percent because political entrepreneurs like Kirk realized how quickly a smear can mobilize fear and clicks in the current media economy.
Republican officials and aligned media also popularized the false frame that gender-affirming care equals “genital mutilation,” a homophobic slur Kirk kept using that’s been rejected on the record by federal judges examining the facts in these cases.
This is the ecosystem that produced a presidential debate moment in which Trump told the racist Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” and a January 6 rally where he urged supporters to “fight like hell.” The Republican National Committee later tried to rebrand the attack as “legitimate political discourse,” which was an explicit signal to their base that political violence is just fine with the GOP.
The Department of Justice charged more than 1,500 people in connection with the attack on the Capitol, including hundreds for assaulting police officers (three of whom died): Trump then pardoned them all, explaining again by his action (and the failure of any Republicans to condemn it) that political violence is just fine with today’s GOP.
Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two election workers falsely smeared by Trump’s lawyer, won a landmark defamation verdict because Republican threats to public servants are real, not rhetorical flourishes.
When critics talk about authoritarian drift, they aren’t making it up for cable hits. Trump created “Schedule F” by executive order in 2020 to strip job protections from large categories of civil servants. President Biden revoked it but now it’s back, leading to a dangerous politicization of the federal bureaucracy that’s now hunting and purging “lefties” the way slave patrolers once tracked down escapees.
Alongside that, Trump has publicly urged defunding or punishing the FBI and DOJ when they investigate him, and even floated “terminating” parts of the Constitution, which is rhetoric that would have ended careers a generation ago and now earns a shrug from most of his party’s elected officials.
And, as Jessica Valenti points out:
“[W]hen a pregnant woman dies of sepsis in a hospital that could have helped her but is legally prevented from doing so, that’s political violence. It’s political violence when a child is shot in their classroom because lawmakers refuse to take action on guns. An abortion provider being assassinated after years of conservatives calling them ‘baby-killers’ is political violence, as is the death of a person who had their medical claim denied by companies more interested in their bottom line than people’s lives.”
And now, in the wake of Kirk’s murder, Republicans are again amping up the violent rhetoric.
Laura Loomer posted, “More people will be murdered if the Left isn’t crushed with the power of the state.” Trump referenced “radical left political violence” as if that’s the only source of it. Sean Davis, the CEO of The Federalist, wrote: “When Democrats lose elections they couldn’t steal, they murder the people they were unable to defeat.” Fox host Jesse Waters said, “Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us.”
Mother Jones compiled a more comprehensive list of Republican calls for violence against Democrats.
Trump made jokes about Paul Pelosi’s near-murder, and laughed when a thuggish congressional candidate assaulted a reporter for asking him a question about health care policy. That thug is now governor of Montana.
And let’s not forget Charlie Kirk’s hero, Kyle Rittenhouse, who murdered two people and blew most of the arm off a third. Trump invited him to Mar-a-Largo to congratulate him.
Violence is their brand.
And in the wake of all this, Trump pulls the Secret Service security detail from Kamala Harris just as she begins her book tour.
Now put that record next to what Democrats have done.
I realize it makes them sound like wimps, but instead of vilifying their opposition Democrats in Congress have been working across the aisle for the average person, passing healthcare legislation, trying to strengthen voting rights, reduce student debt, clean up the environment, rebuild our infrastructure and kick-start chip manufacturing, and hold corporate criminals to account.
After Democratic Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered by a rightwinger with a list of almost 50 other Democrats he planned to kill, and a state senator and his wife were wounded, Trump refused to even call Governor Tim Walz, much less lower flags to half-staff. Democrats, who’d lost a genuine hero, universally called for toning down political rhetoric instead of vengeance or retributive violence.
While the GOP’s brand is “We’re victims!!!,” Democrats are more interested in getting things done for the people. And when they do call out the authoritarianism of this administration, they’re pointing to actual policies like masked secret police, military in the streets, Trump grifting billions in crypto, using the FBI to go after his political opponents, and Republicans on the Supreme Court giving Trump immunity from prosecution for actual crimes.
On top of passing legislation, Democratic leaders have consistently condemned political violence without caveat, from Biden’s 2020 speech spelling out that “rioting is not protesting” to repeated condemnations after attacks on public officials and public servants.
So when commentators ask both parties to “lower the temperature,” we should be honest about what that means in practice.
Too often, it’s a request for Democrats to stop calling out the very real way the modern right has mainstreamed eliminationist rhetoric, moral-panic politics, and procedural hardball.
It is a call to pretend that saying “you’re child-abusing communists who hate America” versus “you’re undermining democracy and endangering people with lies” are mirror images.
They are not.
One is a smear that licenses political violence. The other is a description of a documented pattern of behavior with decades of receipts.
None of that means Democrats are perfect. It means Democrats are operating inside the reality-based world where deals must be made, bills must be passed, and violence is condemned when it appears on your own side.
Former Republican George Conway warns that the GOP is on the verge of turning Kirk into Horst Wessel, the Nazi streetfighter who Hitler made into a martyr when he was killed. Conway posted:
“They may not want to hear it, and it may incense them, but the parallels between what the Nazis did then, and what Trump and MAGA are doing today, are striking, chilling — and as any expert on authoritarianism will tell you, straight out of the same toxic, but dog-eared, playbook.”
Jim Stewartson suggests Kirk’s killing could be used by Trump the way Hitler used the Reichstag Fire to change German law and give himself unlimited power.
These are indeed very, very dangerous times. And the political rhetoric coming out of 1500 rightwing hate-radio stations, Republican politicians, and billionaire-funded hard-right-biased-social-media-algorithms is at the center of the crisis.
If Republicans want the volume to come down, the path is simple.
- Stop labeling mainstream opponents as “communists” and “groomers.”
- Stop flirting with “Second Amendment remedies.”
- Stop normalizing threats against election workers.
- Stop trying to bend the machinery of government to punish critics and shield allies.
When that happens, Democrats will meet them in the middle, because Democrats already live there when they write bipartisan infrastructure bills, subsidize domestic chip manufacturing, narrow gun loopholes, and harden the legal process for counting electoral votes.
Until then, asking Democrats to “watch their tone” is not a plan for peace: it’s a plan for unilateral disarmament in a fight the other side first chose.
Our media must call the problem what it is, or we’ll never fix it. The people who lit this fire keep tossing gasoline on it. The only way to put it out is to stop pretending the arsonists and the firefighters are the same.
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The suspect is not the stuff of rabid MAGA dreams. Thank God for that
This cannot be what President Donald Trump had in mind.
Authorities made an arrest in connection with the heinous assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The suspect is Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old white, male Utah State University student, the son of registered Republican voters from the southwest of the state.
Robinson’s appearance — just a regular-looking white kid in college — could not be further from what the MAGA’s mind’s eye would have loved to see. At least superficially, he doesn’t fit the mold of their preferred villains.
In a decent time, this of course would not matter. We should all as Americans deplore Kirk's murder, without qualification. It’s a moment that could bring us all together in revulsion, across the great political divide.
But that’s not happening because Trump would never stand for that. As you probably know, Trump didn’t even wait for the existence of a suspect to blame it on fictional “lunatics on the Left.”
On Wednesday night, Trump delivered the most vile and unpresidential statement ever uttered at a moment of national grief.
Here’s the transcript of Trump’s most significant comments:
“It is long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible.
For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today and it must stop right now.
My administration will find each and every one who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials and every one who brings order to our country.
From the attack on my life in Butler, PA last year which killed a husband and father to the attacks on ICE agents to the vicious murder of a healthcare executive in the streets of New York to the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and three others, radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.”
I think we can let it speak for itself that Trump indignantly called out “demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible.”
The same can be said for Trump’s choices for examples of political violence in America. And, more importantly, his omissions.
But the key point — and it’s undeniable — is that all Trump cares about going forward is to exploit the Kirk tragedy to fit his own ends.
Just imagine what Trump and his MAGA acolytes would have done to exploit the Kirk tragedy had Tyler Robinson turned out to be a trans person. Or an undocumented migrant. Or a Black person. Or a Muslim.
So anxious was MAGA world to distort the murder for its narrative that someone leaked to the Wall Street Journal — well before Robinson’s arrest — that inscriptions found on shell casings related to the shooting contained messages of “trans ideology.”
It was confirmed on Friday that was empirically false.
So yes, Trump must have been apoplectic to learn that Kirk’s suspected assassin was just some white guy who grew up in a Republican household in deep-red Utah.
In dramatic contrast, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, did himself proud in the news conference announcing Robinson’s arrest.
“We can return violence with violence, we can return hate with hate, and that’s the problem with political violence — is it metastasizes. Because we can always point the finger at the other side. And at some point, we have to find an off-ramp, or it’s going to get much, much worse.
History will dictate if this is a turning point for our country. But every single one of us gets to choose right now if this is a turning point for us. There is one person responsible for what happened here, and that person is now in custody and will be charged soon and will be held accountable. And yet, all of us have an opportunity right now to do something different.”
Those off-the-cuff words from Cox came straight from the heart. The Republican Party needs more leaders like Cox, and so does the nation.
There’s a better path forward if we choose it, Donald Trump and his hatred notwithstanding.
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This sinister rightwing group won — totalitarian rule is here
I had the opportunity to engage the author of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Paul Dans, last Saturday on BBC World News Radio. The essential question was whether Project 2025 was a document of totalitarian rule.
Dans, who was fired from the Heritage Foundation during the presidential campaign for linking Donald Trump to the fascist playbook, has returned in full force as a MAGA Senate candidate in South Carolina. He is a conservative committed to attacking democratic institutions, although he would claim that Project 2025 centers on returning the federal government to the hands of the people.
According to various trackers, the Project 2025 agenda has been nearly 50 percent completed. The assault on the federal system is well in hand. But is this totalitarianism?
Yes, it is.
I have written earlier about totalitarianism in the science policy of the White House. The totalitarian model extends further, up and down from the White House to the reactionary Supreme Court and especially to MAGAlytes in Congress. MAGA is devotion to a single-party system, a charismatic leader, closed political culture, and war on civic society.
First, recall that Project 2025 is a 900-page cornucopia of conservative delights.
It calls for the replacement of merit-based federal civil service workers with people loyal to Trump and for taking partisan control of such critical law-enforcement agencies as the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). It promotes the closing of the Department of Education and the restructuring of museums, foundations, and even private universities to challenge fact-based institutions in their primary missions.
In the economy, Project 2025 institutionalizes trickle-down economics: It reduces taxes on corporations, cuts social welfare and medical programs, draws financial and communications firms into the totalitarian fold, and rewards wealthy collaborators and industrialists as Hitler did in Nazi Germany with access to the halls of power.
It promotes anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination; it ends Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs. In fact, Project 2025 does not rein in the administrative state, its major stated goal, but gives additional tools to weaponize the corrupt Trump presidency.
Hence, Project 2025 reflects totalitarian political culture, in particular the persistence of a one-party system with an authoritarian leader who uses extra-legislative means to achieve his goals.
For example, Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to root out “inefficiency” in government, but he in fact directed the faux department to emasculate agencies he and Project 2025 adherents disliked. In subservience to the president, MAGA Republicans in Congress allowed DOGE to usurp their oversight. Further, while railing against executive orders (EOs) of past presidents, Trump has used them in fact to replace policy making. Trump averaged 55 EOs annually his first term; by mid-2025 he was averaging 330 per year with the goal to drown the courts and Congress in executive branch power.
Like in Hitler or Stalin who created a cult of personality, Trump has bullied MAGA to ensure allegiance to him as the all-powerful leader. This leader is the promoter of disorder, the arbitrator of conflict, the omniscient problem solver, the stager of domestic military sweeps and other Jeffrey Epstein flyovers to distract the populace, the organizer of state dinners and cabinet meetings in which his MAGAlytes sickeningly faun for him. He is the Department of War lobbyist for the Nobel Peace Prize and the UFC organizer for a wrestling event on the White House Lawn. One senses he is jealous that Russian President Vladimir Putin miraculously scored eight goals in a charity hockey exhibition game (no one checked him, strangely). He is certainly angry that Kim Jong-Il shot a 38 will 11 holes-in-one, while the president must cheat at his golf game at his courses to win trophies.
Totalitarian governments bathe the public sphere with propaganda; the Soviets were masters at misinformation. Putin has reestablished state control of all media. For his totalitarian push, Trump promotes branded presidential newspeak on his own channel, Truth Social. Such loyal media outlets as Fox help him spread false claims. Indeed, totalitarians want to control the medium and the message, not educate the public; destroy expert independence in government agencies, not encourage it; and in general to sully data, not analyze them. The complete weaponization of government comes in the selective assault of academic and intellectual freedom in the Trump administration attack on universities, law firms, and other private businesses.
The totalitarian state embraces the veneer of legality, but engages extrajudicial confiscation of power. Like the Stalin Constitution of 1936 or Nazi laws of the 1930s, MAGAlytes treat the US Constitution as vaguely important when its language fits their plans. Otherwise, they rely on executive branch overreach and on specious interpretation of congressional laws (the Enemy Aliens Act 1798; Posse Comitatus Act of 1878) to end due process and deploy military troops in blue states.
Partnering with such mega-MAGA-communications magnates as Peter Thiel, they deploy AI to create a surveillance state. DOGE sought personal information of US citizens to build a surveillance regime.
A signal action of totalitarian regimes is the identification of external and internal enemies, heavily colored with homophobia and xenophobia. AG Pam Bondi and FBI Director Patel are aggressively prosecuting people who crossed the president: former adviser John Bolton, prosecutors, judges, and even congresspeople.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other unidentified government police, their faces covered, their uniforms obscured, their racism barely concealed, resemble Stalin’s NKVD in their black overcoats as they round up, subdue, and cart enemies away to secret facilities. The major enemies are undocumented immigrants, which the Supreme Court has now okayed to arrest on the basis of skin color alone. Recall that so fearful are the Trumpisti of immigrants that they have separated children from their parents to secret them out of the country; Putin, another authoritarian ruler, approves the kidnapping of Ukrainian children.
Project 2025 harps on the fear of internal enemies over alleged supposed additional rights given to individuals based on gender and color (“DEI”). In fact, like the Nazi prosecution of homosexuals or the Putinite illegalization of LGBTQ+ public existence, so the Trump administration has set forth a litany of enemies to be deprived of rights. They include Venezuelan gangs, lesbians, gays, people of color, Democrats, and trans individuals, the last who may be denied the Second Amendment right to bear arms by a finding that they are insane (“mentally ill”).
Totalitarian states claim to give individual rights priority, but they seek control over private morality. Women’s rights are anathema to the conservatives of Project 2025 who mention abortion over 200 times in the 900-page document. They claim to be pro-life and pro-family, but they pursue regressive natalism and forced pregnancy such as that imposed on women in socialist Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu. More and more gerrymandered states are following the examples of Texas and Florida to criminalize women and their personal physicians for not carrying fetuses full term — no matter the circumstances (rape, insist, mortal risk to the mother).
It's all there in Program 2025. And it’s all there in the White House.
- Paul Josephson is professor emeritus of history at Colby College and the author of 15 books, with 40 years of experience working in archives in Russia, Europe, and the U.S. on the political history of modern science.
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In this terrible moment, one decent Republican showed us the depth of Trump's depravity
A president who calls his opponents “scum” and “the enemy within,” who ordered the murder of 11 people in a boat headed for Trinidad then posted snuff photos of the hit, and who has repeatedly encouraged political violence in his name, is trying to catapult Charlie Kirk’s murder into a push for maximum state power. Deliberately stoking outrage on the right, Trump is riding Kirk’s death hard, using it to declare a crackdown against people who don’t support Trump politically.
Trump is specifically vowing to silence progressive voices who are critical of Kirk’s pro-gun, pro-violence, anti-diversity message, while he celebrates Kirk as an icon of free speech.
Setting aside the thick irony of celebrating Kirk’s free speech by shutting down voices against him, it is well settled legal precedent that government attempts to silence opposing political views violate the First Amendment. Although the six Trump-aligned justices on the Supreme Court have bent over backward to rule in Trump’s favor on the shadow docket, where legal analysis is conveniently optional, it would be nearly impossible — even for them — to contrive a free speech carve-out just for Trump.
SCOTUS allowing Trump to prohibit, regulate, repress, or punish anti-Kirk political speech would be a tacit admission that all six Republicans on the bench are in on Trump’s overthrow of the Constitution — an admission all but Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito would be loathe to make.
Trump loves to hate
Although the alleged shooter is now in custody, before his identity was known, Trump politicized the murder.
In a televised statement from the Oval Office, Trump told the nation his own political opponents were responsible for Kirk’s death, claiming:
“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and other political violence.”
Anyone outside the Fox News bubble knows that Trump himself is the Inciter-in-Chief, having encouraged violence against his perceived political “enemies” for years. He not only organized a violent physical attack against his own government on January 6, he pardoned everyone who committed violence on his behalf that day, including people convicted of other heinous crimes who violently attacked the police.
Whipping up his gun-toting base instead of urging healing, Trump is agitating about “radical left political violence,” to encourage his militant followers, including pardoned J6 rioters, to target them.
Trump claimed without evidence that Kirk was assassinated by “the radical left.” Again blind to his own rhetoric, Trump expounded, "It’s long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree” — without acknowledging how he personally leads the effort to demonize anyone who doesn’t support him.
Trump, unlike any president before him, literally calls Democrats “the enemy within,” as he threatens to deploy the military against Democratic-run cities.
Unfit to serve
Trump’s Oval Office address deserves further reading. After praising pro-gun, anti-gay, anti-minority Kirk as the “ideal American,” Trump’s speech turned dangerously divisive. He said:
“This is a dark moment for America. On campuses nationwide, he championed his ideas with courage, logic, humor, and grace. It’s long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible.
“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.
“My Administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country. From the attack on my life in Butler, Pennsylvania last year, which killed a husband and father, to the attacks on ICE agents, to the vicious murder of a healthcare executive in the streets of New York, to the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and three others, radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives. Tonight, I ask all Americans to commit themselves to the American values for which Charlie Kirk lived and died: the values of free speech, citizenship, the rule of law, and the patriotic devotion and love of God.
“Charlie was the best of America, and the monster who attacked him was attacking our whole country…”
Trump did not mention Melissa and Mark Hortman, the Minnesota legislator and her husband who were murdered only two months ago.
He did not mention how in 2022 U.S. Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, was beaten with a hammer, nor Donald Trump Jr.’s sickening mockery of the attack.
He did not mention the 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan’s Governor Gretchen Witmer, any school shootings, the violence he encouraged on J6, nor any political violence executed on his behalf since he began encouraging political violence during his 2016 campaign rallies.
He failed to mention that last summer's assassination attempt against his own person was committed by a registered Republican.
Adult in the room
In direct contrast to Trump, Utah Governor Spencer Cox, the adult Republican in the room, is making a full-throated appeal for national healing.
Calling for forgiveness and national unity, Cox is doing what a responsible statesman does: trying to lower the political temperature in a deeply fraught moment.
Governor Cox said:
“We can return violence with violence, we can return hate with hate, and that’s the problem with political violence — it metastasizes. Because we can always point the finger at the other side. And at some point, we have to find an off-ramp, or it’s going to get much, much worse.”
Cox’s plea for calm and healing is a welcome balm to Trump’s bombast, which he continued to deliver on Fox News on Friday morning.
Still trying to rachet up the division, even after the shooter, who comes from a pro-Trump MAGA family, was caught, Trump said: “The radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy.”
A Fox panelist pushed back, telling Trump: “We have radicals on the right as well. How do we fix this country?”
Trump said: “I'll tell you something that's gonna get me in trouble but I couldn't care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don't want to see crime. The radicals on the left are the problem.”
Governor Cox, in contrast, put the blame on one person: The shooter.
No democracy can survive when political differences become death sentences. Even if Trump doesn’t understand this, his immediate advisers do. By directly encouraging right-wing online agitators to attack people on the left, Trump is supporting something, but it’s not democracy.
Blaming Democrats, Trump hopes to trigger retaliation against them. The demonization Trump encourages, which culminated in Kirk’s horrific murder, is pure trickle-down hatred. The spigot of bigotry is his own mouth, and he’s keeping it open to serve his own interests over the best interests of the country.
- Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
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Charlie Kirk's terrible murder should shed light on this national sickness
Too much of the media coverage and reaction I am seeing to the shooting of right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk is completely absurd and very, very dangerous.
At a time when truth and context are absolutely vital, I am seeing too damn little of both.
There would be less angst and our country would be far safer if only we accepted people for who they want to be instead of who the judgmental right and people like Kirk think they should be.
Kirk’s death might have been preventable if only he had advocated against putting more weaponry in the hands of civilians, instead of fighting for it.
The right wing’s intentional bastardization of our 2nd Amendment has been perhaps this country’s greatest tragedy, and has led to countless, senseless deaths.
Thousands of people — many of them children — would have been saved if only America got out of its own way, and got a damn grip on a gun problem that has spun way out of control.
There are more than 400 million guns in America. If that doesn’t chill you to the bone, congratulations, you are part of the problem.
For too long we have been gaslit by the gun lobby and the Republican Party into believing that more guns mean less violence. This is absolutely preposterous, and it would be my fervent hope that Kirk’s death would lead to the necessary dialogue and changes we need to end this grotesque, wrong-headed thinking.
I will not hold my breath.
Instead, the fire-breathers on the right led by the odious Donald Trump are using this killing to pour gasoline on a fire that warms their cold hearts.
They aren’t calling for calm, they are calling for more revolution.
The people who say and do nothing after our children are slaughtered in our schools, except ask for thoughts and prayers, are everywhere right now fanning the flames of hate.
The same so-called president who just three months ago said he wouldn’t “waste time” calling the governor of Minnesota after the political assassination of Minnesota House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Horton, and wounding of state Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvonne Hoffman, had plenty to say after Kirk was killed.
Including this:
"For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now."
This is the convicted felon who told the violent people who tried to overthrow our government and stomped law enforcement officers into the pavement on January 6, 2021 that he loved them, before going on to pardon them for their terrible crimes.
The numbers of times Trump has used hate speech to rally his base could fill several books. He is not a man to listen to. Nor can he be ignored ...
By whitewashing who Kirk really was, too many in our our media, too many of these damn “influencers,” and too many politicians on both sides of the aisle are insulting the sensibilities and fears of tens of millions Americans, who have been warning about gun violence for decades, as well as the dangers of the overt racism and hate that poured from the mouths of people like Trump and Kirk.
DO NOT LET THEM FRAME THIS MOMENT.
Until Republicans and our media start treating the countless deaths of our children with the same regard they are showing Charlie Kirk, I encourage you to remain peaceful and ever vigilant.
As a veteran, peacenik, anti-gun nut, and proud liberal, I do not advocate violence of any kind.
Kirk used his politics as a weapon, and aimed to hurt innocent people. My God, his final words were cloaked in the hate he spent his life peddling.
I am not celebrating his death, but I am lamenting the demise of truth in this country.
- (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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