Opinion
Must we choose between saving democracy and saving the Earth?
Some people tell me that I should be talking more about the climate crisis than the crisis of democracy.
But you know something? We can’t deal with the climate crisis unless our democracy is saved.
Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), just announced that the Trump administration will revoke the scientific determination that underpins the government’s legal authority to combat climate change — the “endangerment finding” of 2009, which concluded that planet-warming greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health.
That simple finding has allowed administration after administration to set strict limits on greenhouse gas emissions from cars, power plants, and other industrial sources of pollution.
Without it, the EPA will have no authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate the greenhouse gas emissions that are accumulating in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, leading to rising seas, fiercer storms, more deadly heat waves, and other extreme weather events.
What the hell are they doing?
I’m old enough to remember Rachel Carson’s 1962 classic Silent Spring and her riveting story about the widespread pesticide poisoning of man and nature. Her book fueled public demands for direct government action to protect the environment — not for its future exploitation, but for its own innate value.
Environmentalism became a political movement that sought not only to preserve the Earth but to regulate and punish those who polluted it.
Sensing the groundswell, Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson added the environment to their speeches and legislative programs. In his 1964 and 1965 messages to Congress, Johnson spoke forcefully about safeguarding wilderness and repairing damaged environments.
The environmental movement continued to grow, boosted by a public increasingly concerned about the quality of air and water.
Richard Nixon invoked the environment during the bitter presidential election of 1968. Then, as president in 1969 and 1970, he directed a succession of sweeping measures that vastly expanded the federal regulatory protections afforded the environment, including the creation of the EPA.
Why, then, are we heading backward — precisely at a time when greenhouse gases have begun to cause environmental disaster?
Because our democracy has been captured by large corporations, including the oil and gas industries, intent on turning back the clock on environmental protection. They poured money into the campaigns of politicians — like Donald Trump — who promised to gut it. He openly promised Big Oil and gas he’d get rid of all environmental regulations if they supported him in the 2024 election.
We cannot deal with the climate crisis unless our democracy is strengthened to reflect the will of the people rather than the profits of giant corporations.
Democracy and the environment are not two separate issues, of which we must choose one. They are in many respects the same. But democracy is the foundation for all else. If we lose it — as we are in the process of doing — we can’t do anything, because there’s no “we.”
- Robert Reich is a professor emeritus of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com
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These appalling cruelties reveal the true aim of Trumpism
Early this month, ICE agents detained a 6‑year‑old Honduran boy battling leukemia as he left an immigration court in Los Angeles with his mother and sister.
A child fighting for his life was ripped from his fragile medical routine and locked away for over a month, interrupting his treatment, crying himself to sleep night after night in a concrete cell instead of a hospital bed.
This wasn’t a mistake. It was cruelty by design: an intentional act of terror by a government that now treats compassion as weakness and suffering as a political weapon.
On Thursday, ProPublica published a report titled “Bloodied faces, sobbing children: Immigration officers smash car windows to speed up arrests,” documenting massive use of physical violence, including over 50 occasions where car windows were smashed and examples of people who were beaten up by masked, anonymous ICE thugs. The reporters call this level of police brutality “unprecedented,” pointing out that no police agency had ever behaved like this prior to the Trump administration.
The Guardian, meanwhile, reports in an article titled “Georgia detainee with prosthetic legs who objected to flooded cell sent to solitary”:
“A Liberian-born man detained by ICE in Georgia was put in solitary confinement after complaining about flooding in his cell that he said was potentially dangerous for his electronic prosthetic legs … Since then, his challenges in detention have included the screws coming out of his prosthetic legs, causing him to fall and injure his hand, and being unable to obtain new, fitted legs …
“Taylor was brought to the US from Liberia by his mother on a medical visa when he was a small child. He went through 16 operations. He has two fingers on his right hand. Now 46, he has lived in the US nearly his entire life, works as a barber, is active in promoting cancer awareness in his community and got engaged only 10 days before ICE detained him in January. Despite having a pending application for US residence — commonly known as a ‘green card’ – ICE detained and locked up Taylor in January…”
When Donald Trump descended that golden escalator ten years ago and called Mexicans rapists and murderers, we should have known what was coming. What many mistook for bombast or political performance art in 2015 has since revealed itself to be something much darker: cruelty as a political strategy, an ideology, and a governing philosophy.
Here on the last day of July 2025, after six months of Trump’s second term and with a fully compliant GOP marching behind him, it’s undeniable: this is not incompetence or accidental malice. It is deliberate. Strategic. Authoritarianism.
Cruelty is not a bug in Trumpism; it is the central operating system. And it has become the organizing principle of today’s Republican Party as you can see from the glee with which Republican members of Congress strip rights and supports from vulnerable people, and rightwing media stars brag about ICE’s brutal tactics.
This administration’s cruelty isn’t just directed at migrants or protestors or the poor: it’s aimed at democracy itself.
When they normalize suffering, when they use state power to punish the vulnerable and reward the cruel, they erode everything that holds a pluralistic democracy together: the rule of law, institutional checks and balances, civic trust, and the belief at the foundation of every functional and successful society that, “We’re all in this together.”
For example, look at the “Big Beautiful Bill” that Trump, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, and House Speaker Mike Johnson rammed through Congress last month with much fanfare and zero Democratic support.
They called it “patriotic” and “pro-growth.” In reality, it’s one of the most draconian pieces of legislation ever passed in modern American history. It strips healthcare from over 23 million Americans by gutting the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, throws up roadblocks to staying on Medicaid, and cuts subsidies to working families.
It raises taxes on middle- and lower-income households by removing credits and deductions that working people rely on, even as it slashes corporate, income, and estate taxes for the morbidly rich. It slashes funding for Medicaid, food stamps, school lunches, Pell Grants, Head Start, and housing assistance. It cuts Medicare and accelerates the GOP’s long-sought privatization of Medicare and Social Security.
And then it turns around and hands over $4 trillion in tax cuts to the very billionaires who fund Trump’s brutal machine.
Trump and the billionaire boys’ club who got him elected and are in his cabinet — including the same crew that reprogrammed their social media algorithms to favor the far right and suppress independent and progressive media — are now openly celebrating policies that will kill poor people. That isn’t hyperbole; it’s the core of their political project made possible by the corrupt Citizens United Supreme Court decision.
It’s a project built on fear, exclusion, and the weaponization of difference. What began with chants of “Build the Wall” has metastasized into a state-run deportation machine that operates like a fascist police force. ICE, now expanded and unaccountable, no longer just terrorizes undocumented immigrants; it raids sanctuary cities, surveils citizens who participate in protests, and detains people without charges in the name of “national security.”
Under Trump’s second term, ICE has become America’s gestapo — the word literally means “secret police” — just as it was in Germany. And like their 20th-century predecessors, they operate by inspiring fear: in our case with black vans, anonymous uniforms, hidden faces and badges, unrestrained violence, and warrantless searches. They are Trump’s domestic terror squad, designed not to protect but to intimidate, and answerable only to him.
This isn’t just authoritarianism: it’s moral rot.
Trump’s cruelty is designed not only to consolidate power but to distort our collective sense of right and wrong. For today’s Republicans, empathy is now considered weakness. Kindness is called “wokeness.” Helping your neighbor is labeled “socialism.”
Faith has been turned into a weapon for the powerful rather than a refuge for the weary. Jesus wept — and not metaphorically — when he saw the temple turned into a marketplace. What would He say now about supposedly Christian pastors praising a man who brags about sexual assault, pardons rapists and cop-killers, and surrounds himself with grifters and predators?
And let’s not forget Jeffrey Epstein and the ongoing coverup of the elites in his orbit. The man died in federal custody under suspicious circumstances. The list of powerful men who flew on his plane, visited his island, and knew of his crimes continues to grow, yet the institutional GOP, which claims to be the party of morality, is silent. Worse than silent, they deflect, deny, or defend; they even shut down Congress to avoid having to vote on releasing the Epstein papers and videos.
This is exactly what Jesus warned against in the Sermon on the Mount: the hypocrites who pray loudly in public but are ravening wolves in secret. What morality is this?
The GOP today wraps itself in the language of faith and family, but what they practice is cruelty, racism, misogyny, and hierarchy. They criminalize compassion, turning public school teachers, judges, social workers, and librarians into targets for harassment. They encourage neighbors to report each other. They celebrate vigilantism. They ban books, persecute trans kids, and militarize the police, all while calling it “freedom.”
And it’s not just Trump. The entire Republican Party has reinvented itself in his image. From JD Vance, who once warned about Trump’s destructiveness and now echoes his every word, to state governors outlawing drag shows while doing nothing about gun violence in their own schools, the cruelty, violence, and even the deaths of our schoolchildren are the feature.
This political movement and the economic inequality it’s caused through 44 years of Reaganism, gutting our middle class while making a handful of billionaires richer than any pharaoh or king in history, is corroding our social fabric.
Families are being torn apart by deportation, addiction, and poverty. Communities are afraid to speak up or organize. Schools are underfunded, teachers frightened, parents angry and divided. Faith institutions are splintered, some radicalized into political cults, others silenced by fear of retribution.
And through it all, the GOP blames the victims — poor people, immigrants, Black activists, women seeking reproductive healthcare — for the problems Republicans themselves have created.
Trump’s America today is in decline, but it’s not because we’ve become too compassionate. It’s because we’ve allowed the morbidly rich to hoard wealth, the powerful to dodge responsibility, and the cruel to dominate the public square.
And yet history tells us there’s another way. Compassion is not weakness; it’s the glue of civilization and has been throughout human history.
FDR built the New Deal on compassion. LBJ built the Great Society on the moral imperative to lift up the least among us. Democrats fought — against fierce Republican opposition — for every major social advance of the last century: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, the minimum wage, voting rights, civil rights, safe food, women’s rights, union rights, gay marriage, student loans, public education, free college.
And the American people — time and again — chose compassion. Until the GOP figured out how to gerrymander, suppress, and lie their way into power. Reagan called poor people “welfare queens.” Newt Gingrich told Americans to hate our own government. Trump put the knife in the back of democracy itself.
But it doesn’t have to end this way.
We need a return to morality: not the fake, punitive “morality” of the Christian right, but the genuine morality of justice, equality, and care that Jesus talked about. Of feeding the hungry and welcoming the stranger. Of binding up the brokenhearted and lifting the fallen.
That is not “radical leftism”: it’s the moral center of every faith, every humanist tradition, and the glue that holds together every decent society.
Government is the only force large enough to address systemic injustice, and it should be used to heal, not harm. We must reclaim our government as the instrument of public good. We must reject the outrage politics of the GOP — the hate, the lies, the violence and bigotry — and recommit ourselves to the American promise of liberty and justice for all.
Only 26% of eligible voters made Trump president in 2024. That means three out of four Americans either didn’t vote or voted against him. We are the majority. But we must act like it.
Double-check your voter registration — every month — especially if you live in a Red state, where Republican-led purges are removing people from the rolls by the hundreds of thousands as you’re reading these words.
They are afraid of your voice. They are afraid of your compassion. They are afraid that if you show up, their cruelty will lose.
We are better than this complete repudiation of the ideals, aspirations, and founding visions of America. And now, more than ever, we must prove it. Not with hashtags or thoughts and prayers but with votes, with organizing, with moral clarity, and with the unshakable belief that in America, cruelty should never again become policy.
Let’s bring compassion and morality back to the center of American life, and demand that our elected representatives and those running for office do the same. Before it’s too late.
Pass it along.
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This decadent Roman emperor's fall holds lessons for Trump
By Kirk Freudenburg, Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Classics, Yale University.
President Donald Trump’s first term saw a record-high rate of turnover among his cabinet members and chief advisers. Trump’s second term has, to date, seen far fewer cabinet departures.
But some political commentators have observed that the president this time around has primarily appointed loyal advisers who will not challenge him.
As Thomas Friedman pointed out in The New York Times on June 3, “In Trump I, the president surrounded himself with some people of weight who could act as buffers. In Trump II, he has surrounded himself only with sycophants who act like amplifiers.”
As a scholar of Greco-Roman antiquity, I have spent many years studying the demise of truth-telling in periods of political upheaval. Spanning the period from 27 B.C.E. to 476 C.E., the Roman Empire still offers insights into what happens to political leaders when they interpret possibly helpful advice as dissent.
Particularly telling is the case of Nero, Rome’s emperor from 54 to 68 C.E., who responded to a disastrous fire in 64 with extreme cruelty and self-worship that did nothing to help desperate citizens.
Suppressing honest advice
Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, established a handpicked circle of advisers — called the consilium principis in Latin, meaning emperor’s council — to give a republican look to his autocratic regime. Augustus became emperor in 27 B.C.E. and ruled over the empire, which stretched from Europe and North Africa to the Middle East at its peak, until his death in 14 C.E.
Augustus wanted to hear what others thought about the empire’s needs and his policies. At least some of Augustus’ advisers were bold enough to assert themselves and risk incurring his displeasure. Some, such as Cornelius Gallus, paid for their boldness with their lives, while others, such as Cilnius Maecenas, managed to push their political agendas in softer ways that allowed them to maintain their influence.
But the Roman emperors who came after Augustus were either less skilled at maintaining a republican facade, or less interested in doing so.
Nero was the last of the emperors from the noble Julio-Claudian dynasty in ancient Rome at its peak of power. Historians who describe Nero’s rise and fall from power describe the first five years of his reign, or the quinquennium neronis in Latin, as a period of relative calm and prosperity.
Because Nero was just 16 years old when he acceded to power, he was assigned advisers to guide his policies. Their opinions carried significant weight.
But five years into his reign, chafing at their continued oversight, Nero began to purge these advisers from his life, via execution, forced suicide and exile.
Nero instead collected a small cadre of self-interested enablers who derived power for themselves by encouraging their leader’s delusions, such as his desire to project himself as the incarnation of the sun god, Apollo.
The single most unspeakably corrupt and nefarious of these preferred advisers was Ofonius Tigellinus. Tigellinus had caught Nero’s eye early in 62 by urging the senate to convict a Roman magistrate of treason for having composed poems that he deemed insulting to the emperor. Later that year, Tigellinus was appointed the head of the emperor’s personal army.
As praetorian prefect, Tigellinus was charged not only with protecting Nero from physical harm, but also with crafting and guarding the leader’s public image. Tigellinus urged Nero to stage an ongoing series of public spectacles — like theatrical performances and athletic competitions — that featured him as a divine ruler and a god on Earth.
Up in flames
It was likely at Tigellinus’ urging that, in the aftermath of the great fire of 64 that raged for six days in Rome, Nero staged an exorbitant garden party where Christians were soaked in flammable oils and lit as human torches to illuminate a decadent late-night feast.
But, try as he might, Nero couldn’t outrun the fire and its aftermath by indulging in clever cruelties. Huge swathes of the city had been razed by the fire. Thousands of citizens lacked clothing. They were hungry, displaced and homeless.
For answers, the fire’s countless victims looked to Nero, their earthly Apollo, for help. But they did not encounter a sympathetic leader sweeping in to address their needs. Instead, they found a man desperate to place blame on others — in this case, foreigners from the east.
In order to squelch rumors that Nero had lit the fire, Tigellinus’ army unit rounded up Christians, falsely blamed them for starting the fire and executed them.
But this move just showcased Nero’s failure to focus on the dire needs of the poor, the very people who worshipped him. Instead, he sought to rise above the ashes by doubling down on his divine pretensions.
Once the rubble left by the fire was cleared away, Nero built a magnificent new home for himself. This palace, called the domus aurea in Latin, meaning house of gold, covered more than 120 acres in the heart of Rome. It featured spectacular water fountains, elaborate works of art and, standing tall in the entryway, a 120-foot bronze statue of Nero as the sun god, Apollo.
No truth-teller was there to tell Nero that maybe he shouldn’t rub his people’s noses in their suffering.
Nero’s delusional response to the fire did not put an end to his career, but it did much to hasten its end.
Less than four years later, with armies bearing down on the city, Nero committed suicide. Rome tumbled into civil war.
Self-worship
Trump has long expressed a desire to have his face carved on Mount Rushmore, a national memorial in South Dakota that features the likenesses of legendary American presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt.
This dream became a bit closer to reality when Tennessee Representative Andy Ogles in July 2025 urged the Department of the Interior to explore adding Trump’s image to Mount Rushmore — even though such an addition might not be possible because of geological issues.
Trump’s critics have long noted the president’s propensity to focus on himself and his own greatness and power, rather than the needs of citizens.
As far away as the Roman Empire might seem, Nero’s rise and fall offers a lesson in what can happen when honest criticism of a political leader is sidelined in favor of idolatry.
Instead of honest solutions to real problems, what Romans got was a colossal statue that portrayed their leader as a god on Earth.
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They torpedoed Medicaid already. Is this precious program next?
Medicare turned 60 years old on Wednesday. Former U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law on July 30, 1965, giving seniors a guarantee of health coverage that never existed before. Prior to Medicare's enactment, it was nearly impossible for older people to obtain health insurance, as they were considered a "bad risk."
Medicare provides universal coverage to Americans over 65 years of age. The law created Medicare Part A as a national hospital insurance program. Part B is a voluntary program for doctor visits and other medical services. Medicare Part C is another name for the privatized, for-profit version of the program called "Medicare Advantage." And Part D is the prescription drug program enacted in 2003.
The Hospital Insurance portion is funded through workers' payroll contributions. At the signing ceremony in Independence, Missouri, LBJ said, "Through this new law, every citizen will be able, in their productive years when they are earning, to insure themselves against the ravages of illness in his old age."
Johnson paid tribute to former President Harry S. Truman, presenting him with the very first Medicare card. It was Truman who, 20 years earlier, had proposed a form of universal medical coverage for the American people.
LBJ quoted Truman's remarks from the 1940s:
Millions of our citizens do not now have a full measure of opportunity to achieve and to enjoy good health. Millions do not now have protection or security against the economic effects of sickness. And the time has now arrived for action to help them attain that opportunity and to help them get that protection.
It turned out that the time had not yet arrived. Truman's proposal failed to gain traction during a time of retrenchment from the expansions of the New Deal, and a Republican majority on Capitol Hill which he famously labeled the "Do-Nothing Congress."
President Johnson's determination to enact his Great Society agenda (of which Medicare was a large part) and sheer political muscle—not to mention solid Democratic control of Congress — pushed Medicare (and its sister program, Medicaid) into being.
Naturally, Medicare faced strong opposition from conservatives. None other than Ronald Reagan made the ludicrous prediction that if Medicare were enacted, "You and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free." Sixty years later, we are no less "free" because of Medicare. In fact, having guaranteed healthcare makes seniors and people with disabilities (and their families) much more free — from disease, from worry, and financial ruin.
Today, 68 million people rely on Medicare for health coverage, including 12 million who are dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid.
Medicare isn't perfect: The for-profit Medicare Advantage (Part C) program is extremely problematic (see below). The Medicare Part A trust fund will become depleted in 2033 if Congress fails to take action to strengthen it. Traditional Medicare still doesn't cover basic hearing, vision, and dental care — which we have been pushing for many years. But most concerning of all, President Donald Trump and his party have spent this 60th anniversary year actively undermining both Medicare and Medicaid.
The "Unfair, Ugly" bill that Trump signed earlier this month slashed nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid, which will strip health coverage from an estimated 10 to 16 million lower-income Americans. The new law — projected to add some $4 trillion to the national debt — could trigger cuts to Medicare down the road.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is recklessly taking steps to privatize the entire Medicare program. It has announced a pilot project to involve private companies in conducting prior authorizations for care in traditional Medicare. The administration, under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Director Mehmet Oz, also has announced a plan to automatically enroll new Medicare beneficiaries in the for-profit Medicare Advantage (MA) program — a huge gift to the multibillion-dollar insurance industry at the expense of patients.
The problems with Medicare Advantage (MA) have become legendary. Enrollees are basically put into health maintenance organizations run by insurance giants, with limited networks of providers. Unreasonable denials of care are rampant. Patients who become disenchanted with MA plans often find it nearly impossible to switch to traditional Medicare. Meanwhile, some MA Insurers have been overcharging the government for their services and ripping off taxpayers. (Several of these companies are currently under investigation.)
We are watching to see if the Trump administration, which talks a good game about lowering prescription medication costs while simultaneously doing favors for Big Pharma, will honor the provisions of President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, which made myriad patient-friendly reforms to the Part D drug program — including out of pocket caps for beneficiaries and empowering Medicare to negotiate prices with the industry.
The bottom line is: Let's not allow President Trump and congressional Republicans to shred one of the greatest legacies of LBJ's Great Society. We and our fellow advocacy groups are pushing back — and so is the grassroots "Hands Off" movement. But we don't want to be fighting this same battle every time Medicare (and Medicaid) mark an anniversary when we should be purely celebrating.
- Max Richtman is president and CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare. He is former staff director at the United States Senate Special Committee on Aging.
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Every single American will be hurt, and many will die, thanks to this Trump betrayal
Americans pay more for medications than anybody else in the world. We’re the planet’s suckers: although everybody uses, by and large, the same meds, the drugs that carry the highest prices are — you guessed it — ours, the ones sold here in the USA.
And Donald Trump is committed to making it even worse. He’s barely been back in the White House six months and he’s already lobbed a grenade straight into America’s medicine cabinet, and he was grinning when he pulled the pin.
Not only that, he’s doing it in violation of the Constitution, which gives the sole power to impose tariffs to Congress. Trump’s claiming emergency powers to override Congress’ authority, but there is no emergency. He’s simply breaking the law, and nobody is holding him to account.
His administration’s newly announced 15 percent tariff on branded European pharmaceuticals — a framework unveiled just days ago — is already sending shock-waves through the healthcare system. And it will jack up the price of lifesaving medicines for millions of Americans.
Europe supplies roughly 60 percent of all U.S. pharmaceutical imports by value. That’s about $127 billion a year worth of medicines Americans depend on, out of a total $212.7 billion in U.S. pharmaceutical imports last year. These aren’t obscure treatments; they’re the drugs routinely found in bathroom cabinets across America:
- Ozempic and Wegovy for diabetes and weight loss, manufactured in Denmark and Belgium
- Humira and Stelara for Crohn’s, arthritis, and psoriasis, produced in Ireland
- Keytruda, a breakthrough cancer drug used every single day in hospitals
- And yes, even Botox and Viagra, the favorites of the Mar-a-Lago donor class
Trump’s tariffs hit them all. Pharmaceutical companies will not quietly absorb the cost. They’ll pass it on to you, one way or another. Expect higher out-of-pocket costs at the pharmacy, higher insurance premiums, and bigger taxpayer burdens as Medicare and Medicaid — already in Republican crosshairs — are forced to foot the bill.
Trump loves to boast about “lowering drug prices,” but his second-term policies are doing the exact opposite. Analysts estimate this tariff scheme could add $13–$19 billion in annual costs to America’s healthcare system. That’s billions ripped out of ordinary Americans’ pockets to prop up a political stunt dressed up as economic nationalism. All to stroke his ego, forcing foreign leaders to come groveling to him in public.
And the consequences are deadly. When drug prices rise, patients start cutting doses, skipping refills, or walking away from the pharmacy altogether. If you’re diabetic and can’t afford your insulin, you could die. If you’re fighting cancer and can’t afford Keytruda, you could die. If your child needs Humira and you can’t pay the new price, they could end up in the ER, or worse.
This is the pattern of Trump’s second term so far: policy as punishment. He’s attacked reproductive rights, gutted environmental protections, and is now turning medicine into a bargaining chip. And it’s all happening with lightning speed while Congress and the Courts seem oblivious to his flipping his middle finger at our Constitution.
Even the pharmaceutical industry — yes, the same industry infamous for gouging insulin prices — warned Trump’s administration in May not to do this. They told the Commerce Department tariffs would backfire, raise costs, and harm patients.
Trump ignored them because this was never about making Americans’ lives better. Instead, it’s all about his ego and his brand: bluster, short-term optics, and making sure the people who can least afford it always take the hit.
But this moment is also about more than tariffs and Trump’s naked violation of our Constitution’s having granted tariff power exclusively to Congress. It’s also, in a big way, about the fact that America is the only developed country without guaranteed healthcare for all.
In nations with universal systems, a politician couldn’t weaponize trade policy against patients because the government itself — not the for-profit insurers — would negotiate and protect prices. If we had Medicare for All or another form of guaranteed care, we wouldn’t have to watch Big Pharma and politicians turn our health into a bargaining chip. Until we build that system, every American’s life will remain hostage to policies like this one.
Trump’s team calls this “America First,” but here’s what it really means:
- You pay more at the pharmacy.
- You pay more in premiums and taxes.
- You get fewer options and longer waits for new therapies.
- And Trump gets to brag at rallies about being “tough on Europe” while he makes a mockery of our constitutional form of government.
He’s counting on us not noticing until our pharmacy bills double or our insurance companies announce another crushing premium hike. And by then? He’ll blame someone else. Democrats. Immigrants. Whoever’s convenient. Meanwhile, Big Pharma will quietly thank him for padding their profits while passing the tariff costs along to you and me.
And so the most expensive prescriptions in the world will continue to be, uniquely, ours. The ones Big Pharma sells to us, here, even though people in other countries pay a fraction of what we do.
Don’t fall for it. Trump’s second term is already proving to be a wrecking ball aimed at the foundations of our Constitution and your care. This tariff plan, justified by a non-existent “emergency,” is just the latest swing. If he keeps going unchecked, expect more of the same: higher costs, less coverage, and more Americans dying because they couldn’t afford the medication they needed.
Trump calls that “America First.” We should call it what it is: America last, with Trump and his big business buddies first.
Now is the moment to fight back. Organize. Call your representatives and demand they block these tariffs (the Congressional switchboard is 202-224-3121). Demand a national healthcare system like every other developed nation in the world has so no president, now or in the future, can hold your health hostage.
Because if we stay silent, the next obituary could be someone you love, or even your own.
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One Arizona man showed the power of marching for your beliefs
The last time I saw Alfredo Gutierrez was at this year’s May Day rally outside the State Capitol.
He was standing toe-to-toe with a MAGA supporter who had shown up at the protest and was marching through the crowd, wielding an oversized Trump flag, determined to start trouble.
While I couldn’t hear what he was telling the man over the din of the protestors, it was clear Alfredo wasn’t having it. Even at his advanced age, Alfredo let the surly MAGA loyalist know he wasn’t about to let him cramp the enthusiasm of rally-goers, even going so far, at one point, as to jerk down the man’s flag before onlookers stepped in to keep the face-off from escalating.
The incident was quintessential Alfredo Gutierrez, who died this week at 79 of cancer.
To say that Alfredo Gutierrez was passionate about social justice would be a colossal understatement. A follower of civil and human rights icons like Cesar Chavez, Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the arc of Alfredo’s life was driven by the struggle for civil rights here and nationwide.
Booted out of Arizona State University in the 1970s for helping lead a student protest to raise the wages of laundry workers — though he returned last year to complete his undergraduate degree — Alfredo possessed a piercing and daunting intellect.
Born in Miami, Arizona, a small mining town east of Phoenix, to engage Alfredo was to know that this was a man who spent a great part of every day pondering the state of the world. He was never afraid to share his opinion, whether on stage or from the audience — and when he stood to speak, he commanded attention.
There was a presence about him, a physical and intellectual quality that ensured he would not be ignored, attributes that no doubt came in handy later as a state legislator, lobbyist and born-again protest leader.
After an extended stint as a businessman, Alfredo returned to grassroots activism with unfettered passion in the 2000s, eager to fight against the state’s growing anti-immigrant tilt. Partnering with other established Latino leaders and a deep bench of young, up-and-coming immigrants rights activists, Alfredo helped organize the largest protest march in Arizona history in 2006. By some accounts, as many as 100,000 people marched that day in support of immigrants rights.
Later, Alfredo would help organize Arizona’s opposition to Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Senate Bill 1070, then the most stringent anti-immigrant bill in the nation. More recently, he’s been a vocal critic of right-wing, Trump-era policies against immigrants.
In his later years, his reputation as a firebrand evolved not so much to temper but refine his unquenchable spirit.
Alfredo Gutierrez was a trailblazer for justice whose voice shaped Arizona for decades. From leading student protests to championing migrant rights, his work opened doors for countless families. As a leader in the State Senate, Alfredo shaped state policy and was pivotal in the… pic.twitter.com/Bf0YSsjdXs
— Governor Katie Hobbs (@GovernorHobbs) July 29, 2025
I didn’t always agree with Alfredo — like when he once suggested that Latino voters should step away from voting as a way to remind party leaders of the value and power of our burgeoning electoral bloc — but I always knew that he had arrived at his points of view honestly and logically.
As confrontational as he could be, he was also capable of great humility. I saw an example of this up close at a luncheon honoring former Arizona Gov. Raul H. Castro, the state’s first and only Latino governor, when Alfredo approached our table to show his deep respect for the aging ex-governor despite a decades-long rift between the two men.
At heart, Alfredo was the consummate Chicano activist, a true believer in El Movimiento. Despite his forays into Democratic Party politics and later as a lobbyist, he always remained convinced that marching in the streets could effect change.
In a fictionalized version of Alfredo in my play, American Dreamer: The Life & Times of Raul H. Castro, I imagined him making this point to Castro:
GUTIERREZ: Your problem is you think the system is here to help you. All that talk about the founding fathers. They’re not my founding fathers. My people are proud mestizos, who, despite the rejection of this country at almost every turn, had the courage to push off the yoke of our oppression so we could live our lives with dignity.
CASTRO: How? By marching in the streets?!
GUTIERREZ: Sí, hombre, sí. How do you think we passed the Civil Rights Act? The Voting Rights Act. It’s because we marched in the streets. We didn’t need an army or guns to do it. All we needed was the people’s army and our faith in justice man, justice.
Rest in justice, Alfredo Gutierrez, rest in peace.
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Trump is not just a conman on climate
When I was a cub reporter at the New Yorker in the early 1980s, New York City was actually a somewhat seedy and dangerous (if fascinating) place (sort of fitting the image currently assigned it by MAGA ideologues who have ignored its almost complete makeover into a remarkably safe enclave). In those days, anyone wandering the Times Square neighborhood where I worked could count on seeing a three-card monte game on every block, with fast-talking card sharps hustling the tourists. It wasn’t very sophisticated, but it must have worked because they were out there every day.
The grift playing out this week in the federal government around climate is no more complicated, but it too relies on speed and distraction. On the first day of his term, U.S. President Donald Trump set up the con by asking the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to evaluate its 2009 finding that greenhouse gas emissions were dangerous. Yesterday, EPA czar and former failed gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin dutifully made his long-awaited announcement: Nothing to fear from carbon dioxide, methane, and the other warming gases.
Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said when he first announced the idea. “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S., and more.”
Trump didn’t really need to do this in order to stop working on the climate crisis — he’s done that already. The point here is to try and make that decision permanent, so that some future administration can’t work on climate either, without going through the long and bureaucratic process of once again finding that the most dangerous thing on the Earth is in fact dangerous.
The problem with this simple one-two punch from Trump and Zeldin is that someone will challenge it in court as soon as it becomes official. “If EPA finalizes this illegal and cynical approach, we will see them in court,” said Christy Goldufss of the Natural Resources Defense Council. And they’ll have an argument, since — well, floods, fires, smoke, storms. I mean, if carbon dioxide was dangerous in 2009, that’s a hell of a lot more obvious 16 years later.
The Supreme Court upheld the idea that CO2 was dangerous in 2007 — here’s how Justice John Paul Stevens began that opinion:
A well-documented rise in global temperatures has coincided with a significant increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Respected scientists believe the two trends are related. For when carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, it acts like the ceiling of a greenhouse, trapping solar energy and retarding the escape of reflected heat. It is therefore a species — the most important species — of a “greenhouse gas.”
But that was a different, and non-corrupted, Supreme Court. John Roberts wrote the dissent, and he’s doubtless eager to do with climate change what he’s already done with abortion. But that would be easier if they had some “well-respected experts” to say that there’s not any trouble — stage three of this grift.
It’s true that there aren’t any well-respected experts that believe that, but the White House has hired several aged contrarians who have maintained for decades that global warming is not a problem, even as the temperature (and the damage) soared. And yesterday they released a new report that reads more or less like a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
In it, they cherry pick data, turn to old and long-debunked studies, and in general set up a group of strawmen so absurd that one almost has to grin in admiration. Actual climate scientists were lining up to say their papers had been misquoted, but all you needed was a modicum of knowledge to see how stupid the whole enterprise was.
Just as an example, our contrarians hit the old talking point that CO2 is plant food — indeed, “below 180 ppm [parts per million], the growth rates of many C3 species are reduced 40-60% relative to 350 ppm (Gerhart and Ward 2010) and growth has stopped altogether under experimental conditions of 60-140 ppm CO2.”
Great point except that there is no one calling for, and no way, to get CO2 levels anywhere near that low. I led a large-scale effort to remind people that anything above 350 ppm is too high, and that was so successful that we’re now at 420 ppm and climbing. Too little carbon dioxide is a problem for the planet in the way that too little arrogance is a problem for the president
And yet, when it finally reaches the court, they will doubtless cite this entirely cynical and bad-faith document to buttress the case that the EPA should be allowed to stop paying attention to carbon dioxide. As I said, it’s a pretty easy to follow swindle, but they count on the fact that most people won’t. Butter won’t melt in their mouths — as Energy Secretary (and former fracking executive) Chris Wright said in his foreword to the new report:
I chose the [authors] for their rigor, honesty, and willingness to elevate the debate. I exerted no control over their conclusions. What you’ll read are their words, drawn from the best available data and scientific assessments. I’ve reviewed the report carefully, and I believe it faithfully represents the state of climate science today.
Every word of that is nonsense, but it doesn’t matter — because it’s an official document on the right letterhead it will do the trick. This is precisely what science looks like when it’s perverted away from the search for truth. It’s disgusting.
Still, there’s another grift also under way this week, and this one that may work the other way and do the world some good. The president announced his new trade deal with the European Union, which calls for 15% tariffs — but it’s sweetened by the European promise to buy $750 billion worth of American natural gas in the next three years.
Trump has essentially been using the tariff process as a shakedown, a way to repay his Big Oil cronies for their hundreds of millions in support: it’s pretty much exactly like a mob protection racket, where you buy from the guy you’re told to or you get a rock through the window.
The White House quickly put out a list of thank yous, including one from the American Petroleum Institute: “We welcome POTUS’ announcement of a U.S.-E.U. trade framework that will help solidify America’s role as Europe’s leading source of affordable, reliable and secure energy.”
And yet, as Reuters first noted and then many others also calculated, the numbers are clearly nonsense. First, the E.U. actually doesn’t buy any energy itself, and it can’t tell its member states what to purchase; in fact, even those member states usually rely on private companies to buy stuff. Second, it’s physically impossible to imagine the U.S. selling Europe $250 billion worth of natural gas a year. As Tim McDonnell wrote at Semafor:
Total U.S. energy exports to the world were worth $318 billion last year, of which about $74.4 billion went to the E.U., according to Rystad Energy. So to meet the target, the E.U. would need to more than triple its purchases of U.S. fossil fuels — and the U.S. would need to stop selling them to almost anyone else.
“These numbers make no sense,” said Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a researcher specializing in European gas markets at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
The biggest reason it won’t happen, though, is that Europe is quickly switching to renewable energy. As Bill Farren-Price, head of gas research at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, explained to the Financial Times:
“European gas demand is soft, and energy prices are falling. In any case, it is private companies not states that contract for energy imports,” he said. “Like it or not, in Europe the windmills are winning.”
Trump will doubtless coerce some countries into buying more liquefied natural gas (LNG) in the short run, and that will do damage. Global Venture announced Tuesday that they’d found the financing for the massive Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2) export terminal, which has been opposed by both climate scientists and environmental justice activists.
As Louisiana’s Roishetta Ozane said Tuesday:
The CP2 LNG facility is an assault on everything I hold dear. It’s a direct threat to the health and safety of my community and an assault on the livelihoods of our fishermen and shrimpers.
I’ve seen my kids struggle with asthma, eczema, headaches, and other illnesses that result from the pollution petrochemical and LNG plants dump into my community. I won’t stop opposing this project in every way I can, because my children — and everyone’s children — deserve to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and live in a healthy environment. I refuse to let Venture Global turn my community into a sacrifice zone for the sake of its profits.
But my guess is that such facilities won’t be pumping for as many decades as their investors imagine. Europe pivoted hard to renewables because Russian President Vladimir Putin proved an unstable supplier of natural gas; Trump’s America is hardly more reliable, since the president has made it clear he’ll tear up any agreement on a whim. Any rational nation will be making the obvious calculation: “I may not have gas of my own, but I’ve got wind and sun and they’re cheap. I’d rather rely on the wind than the windbag.”
Trump’s a conman, but he’s also a mark.
- Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and co-founder of 350.org and ThirdAct.org. His most recent book is "Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?." He also authored "The End of Nature," "Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet," and "Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future."
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This is what fascist control looks like
Today I want to describe for you the specific mechanism of control the Trump regime is using over the core institutions of America — the media, higher education, our largest corporations, and Wall Street.
It's all in the fine print.
Start with CBS. It’s now owned by Skydance Media. Under its Trump-appointed chairman, Brendan Carr, the Federal Communications Commission insisted, as a condition of allowing Paramount to sell CBS to Skydance, that the new owner install an “ombudsman.”
What will that ombudsman do? According to Skydance Media’s agreement with the FCC, the ombudsman will “receive and evaluate any complaints of bias or other concerns involving CBS” for at least two years.
The agreement doesn’t specify the meaning of “bias,” nor does it define whose “complaints” are to be responded to, nor enumerate what “other concerns” might trigger action. But none of this is difficult to imagine. Trump himself could complain of CBS’s bias or anything else. In fact, he probably will. He already has at least once.
If the ombudsman then decides that any complaint of bias or other concern is justified, CBS will have to remedy it. If the ombudsman decides that CBS has not remedied it, Skydance Media’s new president, David Ellison, must do so.
If Ellison does not remedy it — or if Trump believes the problem continues, regardless of what the ombudsman decides — the Trump regime can claim that CBS has reneged on its agreement, in which case Skydance’s ownership of CBS could be contested by the FCC. Its stock price would plummet.
Note that this method of Trump control is indirect but powerful. The regime doesn’t have to assert control over CBS; it just retains the power to do so. And it’s up to Trump to determine what CBS will have to do to avoid being found to be “biased” or avoid any “other concern.”
This mechanism of control is similar at Columbia University, whose new agreement with the Trump regime stipulates a mutually agreed-upon “monitor” who will, like CBS’s ombudsman, respond to complaints about “bias.”
Columbia will provide the monitor detailed information about the race of students who are admitted and rejected, including grade point averages and standardized test scores broken down by race. All data related to faculty and administrative staff hiring and promotion practices must be provided to the monitor annually, and hiring data will be subject to a “comprehensive audit.”
The monitor is also charged with assuring that the university establishes processes to guarantee “civil discourse, free inquiry, open debate, and the fundamental values of equality and respect.” And the monitor will review data to assure Columbia is meting out discipline without regard to a student’s immigration status.
The monitor’s decisions are advisory. If the Trump regime is dissatisfied with the monitor’s decision or feels that the university is not acting in accordance with it, the Trump regime reserves the right to open a new investigation of Columbia and possibly revoke current or future federal research funds.
Just like the CBS agreement, the Columbia agreement gives final power to the Trump regime. It allows the regime to maintain control over Columbia by holding a cudgel over the university. As Linda McMahon, Trump’s secretary of education, told Fox Business, “This is a monumental victory for conservatives who wanted to do things on these elite campuses for a long time because we had such far-left-leaning professors.”
Or consider the Trump regime’s agreement allowing Nippon Steel to acquire U.S. Steel.
During his 2024 campaign, Trump denounced Nippon Steel’s acquisition of U.S. Steel as a threat to American manufacturing.
“I am totally against the once great and powerful U.S. Steel being bought by a foreign company, in this case Nippon Steel of Japan,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “As President, I will block this deal from happening. Buyer Beware!!!”
On resuming office, though, Trump approved the deal. But this was after forcing Nippon Steel to give a “golden share” to the Trump regime — essentially giving Trump veto power over strategic decisions by the company.
You see the pattern? Veto power over strategic decisions. Ombudsmen. Monitors.
They’re all mechanisms for giving the Trump regime power to prevent these institutions — a television network, university, or corporation — from doing something that the Trump regime doesn’t want it to do. But because that power is held in reserve, Trump doesn’t have to display it. The heads of these institutions will do all the work for him; they’re likely to go out of their way to avoid offending the regime. The potential chilling effect is enormous.
It’s much the same with major law firms that have surrendered to Trump. And with ABC. And with Jeff Bezos’s control over The Washington Post’s editorial page — which appears to be motivated by fear that Trump might retaliate against Bezos’s other businesses unless Bezos forces the Post to toe the line.
It’s the same even with Wall Street.
“I have been working on multiple deals where I have people inside the White House telling me what I can and can’t do,” a top dealmaker involved in mergers and acquisitions unrelated to the government recently told the Financial Times. “It’s a level of intrusion I have never experienced before.”
Note these words: A level of intrusion I have never experienced before. That from a dealmaker on Wall Street! The words apply to more and more institutions in America that used to be free from government control.
This level of intrusion inhibits public criticism of Trump, which is what Trump wants. It also deters so-called “conservative bias” in university hiring, however the Trump regime wants to define it. It eviscerates whatever Trump dislikes, such as corporate “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs, or transgender women in women’s sports, or contracts with people or institutions against which Trump holds grudges.
In short, this level of intrusion gives the Trump regime potential control over almost every institution and organization in America, every aspect of American life — but indirectly, quietly, and as a default if the leaders of the institution go too far.
I’m old enough to remember when conservative Republicans stood for limited government and accused Democrats of wanting too much government. No longer.
We’re now at a point in American history when a so-called Republican regime in Washington is extending its control far beyond the wildest dreams of the most left-wing of Democrats — or even socialists.
But this control is not exercised publicly. It’s behind the scenes. It’s found in the fine print. And it is personal. It depends on Trump’s whims.
This is what fascist control looks like, people.
By the way, my memoir of my life and times, entitled Coming Up Short, will be out next Tuesday, August 5. If you wish, you can preorder here from Bookshop.org, which supports local bookstores, or find it wherever books are sold.
I wrote it to share what I’ve learned about stopping bullies — at a time in American history when we’re dealing with an authoritarian bully who is encouraging bullying throughout the nation and the world.
I hope you find it helpful for understanding how we combat the bullies. And why I believe so passionately that we will.
- Robert Reich is a professor emeritus of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com
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Trump knows GOP can use this scandal to end him
If you’re like me, you were kinda blindsided by the Epstein scandal, and that’s because, if you’re like me, you are not in thrall to conspiracy theories that claim to explain how reality “really” works, which is to say, “theories” about imaginary villains plotting to take over the world.
Yet here we are, nearly a month into a transformational controversy involving a sex trafficker who years ago killed himself in federal detention and his former best friend, Donald Trump, a president who thrives on conflict — indeed, whose power hinges on fomenting conflict — who now would like everyone to calm down and move on.
The poor man can’t even take credit these days for pretending to solve an international crisis that he alone created without some damn-fool reporter asking about Jeffrey Epstein.
“After Trump announced a major trade agreement between the US and the European Union in Scotland on Sunday, a reporter asked if part of the rush to get the deal done was to knock the Epstein story out of the headlines,” the Washington Post said.
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me with that,” Trump said.
A month in the age of Trump equals a billion news cycles, so it’s probably safe to say the Epstein scandal isn’t going away soon, if ever, and the longer it goes on, the worse things are going to get. There are just too many people with too much incentive to let go.
I don’t only mean the Democrats and their angling before the midterms.
I mean some Republicans have incentive, especially those who are seeing the Epstein scandal as both an expiration date on Trump’s leadership of the Republican Party and a means by which they can position themselves to take full advantage of that eventuality. Trump is old. He’s in poor health. He’s in some stage of cognitive decline. Ambitious Republicans can now treat him like a RINO, push for the release of the Epstein files, and look even more MAGA while doing it.
And I mean MAGA influencers, like Chaya Raichik and Nick Fuentes. They were instrumental over the last half-decade in spreading the gospel of the Epstein files though social media, podcasts and TikTok. They became a powerful faction by exploiting the fear and paranoia of believers in QAnon, as well as the fear and paranoia of those who are not conspiracy theorists, per se, but who nevertheless care about their reputations as defenders of the sexual innocence of underage girls.
Like ambitious Republicans, MAGA influencers can see an opportunity to become even more influential with their audiences by never being satisfied with whatever Trump does to put the Epstein scandal to rest. (Consider, for instance, how Elon Musk apparently perceives Trump’s gambit to tamper with Ghislaine Maxwell’s congressional testimony.)
I could be wrong, but it looks to me like the Epstein scandal is going to dog Trump the way the scandal over his age dogged Joe Biden. Like the former president, Trump is getting to a point where he can’t talk about anything without appearing to deliberately draw attention away from an issue that too many people have too much incentive to let alone.
Biden told the truth. No one listened.
Trump lies. Is anyone listening?
The comparison between Trump’s Epstein and Biden’s age makes more sense than you might think.
Both controversies come from the same pool of fear and paranoia. To MAGA, Epstein represented a shadowy (and Jewish) cabal of criminal super-elites who secretly conspire with enemies, foreign and domestic, to control the United States government, the corporations and the media. To MAGA, Biden’s age wasn’t really about him or his age, but how he was too old and weak to be in charge. Biden was a puppet, from the conspiratorial viewpoint, and the shadowy cabal represented by Epstein was his puppetmaster.
The cult of MAGA is used to thinking about Biden’s age in conspiratorial terms, but so is the Washington press corps, though the conspiracies in question are very different in nature. In a recent interview, NPR’s Steve Inskeep asked former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg about the Epstein files. He then asked whether the Democrats were guilty of a conspiracy to cover up Biden’s age.
Jake Tapper’s crackbrained book is the obvious subtext for such a question, but so is the fact that lots of Democratic voters didn’t want Biden to run again. In large part, I think, that’s because the conspiracy theories related to Epstein helped undermine confidence in his ability to campaign. (Yes, the debate seemed to validate that feeling later.)
Conspiracy theories start small but grow rapidly if there’s enough incentive and enough means to circulate them. Given the Washington press corps’ need for conflict and “hidden truths,” there was incentive aplenty. Given the expansion of the internet and the contraction of local news over the last decade, there was plenty of means, too.
No matter what Biden did — save the country from COVID, revive domestic industries, decrease inflation, increase wages, and so on — his transformative accomplishments could not rise above the din over his age, a din that came from the merger of conspiracy theories about a secret cabal plotting to take over the world and incentives from inside and outside the Democratic Party to keep suspicions going.
Just three and half weeks into the Epstein scandal, it’s possible to imagine Trump becoming as isolated as Biden was in the end, particularly from his purported allies. The lower his polling numbers go, as a result of the Epstein scandal, the faster his isolation might be. It took nearly four years for Biden’s approval on inflation to drop to -30 percent. For Trump, it took less than six months.
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Trump's depraved cruelty doesn't just hurt his victims
"Moral injury is the social, psychological, and spiritual harm that arises from a betrayal of one's core values, such as justice, fairness, and loyalty." — "Moral Injury," Psychology Today. Emphasis added.
I became interested in the term "moral injury" when I read of suicides of Israel Defense Forces soldiers who have served in Gaza. One reservist who killed himself by self-immolation is quoted as saying, "I smell and see burning bodies all the time.”
It's the concept that violence and injustice have more victims than the directly victimized. And can affect how we function and are able to fight back when we participate in, witness, or fail to prevent something of intolerable evil.
Part of the horror is doubting that the values ever existed. Certainly the inmates of the most incarcerated nation on Earth — the USA — might have different attitudes to the claims of minimal justice, fairness.
We are in a season of injustice and cruelty. Do fascist periods occur like seasons? Is there a periodicity?
The quote that is attributed to Voltaire — that belief in absurdities leads to atrocities — is being acted out, stupidly.
We're now exposed — often in real time — to video of abducted mothers torn from their children, workers taken at their jobs, green card holders handcuffed when reporting to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) appointments, in the USA, and to videos of people in Gaza shot, burned, or bombed, or herded, starving, from blasted place to blasted place by pitiless IDF operations in a not-so-hidden logic of extermination.
The displaced and bereaved in Gaza, and the disappeared in America, are not the only ones experiencing injury. We who witness and cannot stop it also lose confidence in our ability to effectively support decency and justice, or be confident that we live in a world of such things.
Unlike trauma from an accident or natural disaster, this "moral injury" is to our social sense — what we can expect from our society. Masked, heavily armed men grabbing men, women, children, brutalizing them as if they were enemies, on our streets, and knowing they are government agents, bruises our sense of moral order.
Judith Levine in The Guardian wrote:
The colossal buildup of ICE will create the largest domestic police force in the U.S.; its resources will be greater than those of every federal surveillance and carceral agency combined; it will employ more agents than the FBI. ICE will be bigger than the military of many countries. When it runs out of brown and Black people to deport, ICE — perhaps under another name — will be left with the authority and capability to surveil, seize, and disappear anyone the administration considers undesirable.
There is no doubt of our direction. Billions have been appropriated to build detention for ICE targets. Random exile to a torture prison in El Salvador and a concentration camp in the Florida Everglades making it clear that arbitrary abuse and inhumanity is the intention. Government terror.
Every day has a new horror. A video of a huge ICE raid in a strawberry field in California's Central Valley, terrorizing workers, shows "rounding up" of 100.
The United States government is overtly voicing white supremacy, of a "pure" historic "Homeland," more suited to 1925.
The vice president has proposed the idea that ancestral pedigree should add a qualitative weight in American discourse. Mr Vance has complained that Uganda-born New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is "ungrateful." The president campaigned with a complaint of immigrants "poisoning the blood" of the U.S.
"Legality" and due process is gone, in a country of ICE snatch gangs grabbing anyone who speaks a "foreign" language, has some profession or marker of "alienness," terrorizing swaths of the American community, tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
The following are two posts from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security:
A Department of Homeland Security message posted on X. (Screengrab)
A Department of Homeland Security message posted on X. (Screengrab)
The stupidity and vulgarity of this government department harkening to an imaginary "white" American kitch is unbearable.
(Their vacuous, absurd Hollywood America elides
- Slaughtered and dispossessed native peoples of North America;
- Africans enslaved and shipped as livestock, their destiny as sub-human chattel, stigmatized to this day;
- Spanish-speaking citizens of territory subsumed into the United States in 1848; and
- Generations of "undesirable" immigrants, each scorned as they did useful work.)
MAGA erasure of transgender people mirrors the 1933 Nazi burning of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute of Sex Research library nearly 100 years ago — and the Nazi purge of "Jewish degeneracy" in German scholarship is mirrored in the purge of "woke influences" in universities.
Am I — a secular non-Zionist Jew with roots in Brooklyn, descendant of the Jewish Great Migration 120 years ago from Eastern Europe — part of the "Homeland" they work to protect with all the powers and monopoly of violence of the federal government? I'm not without fear for my life and comforts. And nauseated that by skin color and class I am part of what they "protect."
In my Jewish immigrant culture, weaned on the stories of the Holocaust and of Eastern European persecution, we are warned to be alert for what might come to us.
In a mendacious way, this administration has taken up antisemitism as a cause, mixing Judaism with Zionism, and casting resistance to the Israeli state as terrorism. (Eurocentric Americanism is yoked to a Jewish supremacist concept of Palestine.) I may easily be not who they "protect," but who they target as a terrorism advocate.
Absurd, stupid. Not without precedent. Both Mussolini and Hitler and their appointees were comical, but it didn't matter, they managed deadly transformations of their societies for a time. That's why I wonder about periodicity—that it's a time of fascism, much as a season.
The president on July 24 issued an "executive order" declaring unhoused people a threat to public order, and saying the "vast majority" of them are drug addicts or mentally ill, and declaring public policy to "clear them" from public spaces into detention by "civil commitment."
Unquestionably, this administration is choosing the most vulnerable people — immigrants, those without housing, transgender people — to target, and has shown that it intends to deprive human rights of those it stigmatizes. We can Niemöller the trend from here.
Once we've created concentration camps like "Alligator Alcatraz" and many other unofficial miserable holding sites for people beyond the law's protection, the only question is the rate of further construction — and the funding has been voted.
Six months in, the confidence with which the Trump administration has turned the guiding philosophy of government from aspirations to equality to criminalization of non-whiteness — unleashing of police power, contempt of any sort of "queer" nonconformity, prioritization of a standard "white" model of American, and mockery of scholarship — makes me feel there is a momentum that is … tidal, and as King Canute demonstrated, impervious to commands to fall back before its fullness is reached.
- Abba A. Solomon is the author of "The Miasma of Unity: Jews and Israel" and "The Speech, and Its Context: Jacob Blaustein's Speech ‘The Meaning of Palestine Partition to American Jews,' Given to the Baltimore Chapter, American Jewish Committee, February 15, 1948."
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This grotesque GOP charade does nothing to help us heal
Another mass shooting has struck Ohio. Another officer lost in the line of duty. Another wave of heartbreak for a community shattered.
And once again, as we grieve, the same lawmakers line up at the podium to offer their “thoughts and prayers” as if the cycle hasn’t become grotesquely familiar.
But Ohioans aren’t asking for sympathy anymore. We’re asking for change. And for that, we need to call out the legislative doublespeak happening in plain sight.
Even as they mourn tragedies, the Ohio state GOP is pushing legislation that will make our communities less safe.
The Second Amendment Preservation Act, currently making its way through the legislature, is a perfect example of political posturing disguised as principle.
If passed, this law would prohibit local agencies from participating in the enforcement of federal gun regulations. That means agencies could use federal tools like ballistics databases but not assist federal investigations — despite those tools being inherently federal.
The result? Legal confusion, paralyzed enforcement, and chaos for prosecutors who face $50,000 civil penalties simply for doing their jobs.
The language in this bill is so vague it could even prevent prosecutors from pursuing justice in violent cases involving guns. And it doesn’t stop there: joint task forces that combat gun trafficking, organized crime, and drug networks would be disrupted.
The very partnerships that make communities safer would be torn apart.
This isn’t a theory … it’s a warning from law enforcement itself.
Officers and police chiefs across Ohio have spoken out against this bill, saying it endangers their ability to keep people safe.
When those responsible for public safety say this bill is harmful, elected leaders should listen. Instead, they ignore the testimony of survivors, families, and law enforcement professionals in favor of gun lobbyists and party talking points.
If legislators cared about protecting Ohioans, they’d invest in proven, evidence-based solutions like safe storage laws, extreme risk protection orders, and community violence intervention programs. These approaches save lives. They respect the Second Amendment while holding dangerous individuals accountable.
But that’s not what we’re getting. We’re getting empty gestures. We’re getting the same soundbites every time a tragedy unfolds — “thoughts and prayers,” followed by legislative silence or worse, active harm.
Gun violence is now the number one cause of death for children in America. That horrifying reality should jolt every lawmaker into action. Instead, they keep passing bills that ignore our cries and bury our dead.
Let me be clear: no one is asking to take guns away from responsible, law-abiding citizens.
What we are asking is simple — basic safeguards, accountability, and the courage to stand up to extremism.
We deserve leaders who do more than mourn. We deserve leaders who act.
And until that happens, Ohio will continue to suffer, not because we lack solutions, but because some lawmakers have chosen politics over people.
- Erick Bellomy serves as the Ohio State Lead for Brady United Against Gun Violence. A survivor of gun violence, Erick lost his father in 2017 and has since become a passionate advocate for commonsense gun legislation nationwide.
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Head, meet desk: here's the real reason Americans vote for Trump
I am going to start today, by actually giving the America-attacking Trump credit for something: He understands far better than any politician in America that the majority of the American public is comprised of complete morons.
The sooner Democrats figure this out the better. And by sooner … I mean RIGHT NOW.
It’s a national emergency.
We’ve all been tortured by these dreaded political operatives, experts, analysts and partisans endlessly ranting at us about Democrats’ inability to craft a message that resonates with the American public. The party is viewed by roughy 80 percent of America as out of touch and irrelevant. I’m sure I have punished you by writing about this 15 times myself.
And while this is no doubt true, it’s actually far worse than that, because even if Democrats could communicate like Abraham Lincoln, they’d have absolutely no idea how or where to reach the people who need to hear what they have to say.
The Democrats have become expert at going high and talking to each other in the clouds, instead of going low and reaching the tens of millions of morons out there who could stand to hear what they are saying, despite themselves.
Since bursting on the scene like a racist hand grenade in 2015, Trump has proven beyond all doubt he understands the American electorate better than anybody. The man is so sure of himself that he went right out there and said he could shoot one of his supporters in the middle of the street and not lose their vote.
Now, there’s confidence, folks.
When you reckon with the fact that most Americans are morons as Trump has, and start expecting less instead of more, the way forward will seem less daunting.
We don’t have an over-thinking problem in America, we have an under-thinking one.
I’m not wrong about this.
Look, the most important issue facing America, and the entire world for that matter, is climate change. In addition to costing us trillions of dollars, our overheating planet will eventually end all of us if it is not addressed with the urgency it demands.
Spoiler: It won’t be.
It’s hard to get a moron worried about something that they either don’t believe is happening, or if it is, most likely won’t affect them in any meaningful way during what’s left of their moronic lifetime.
When the world ends, they’ll be long gone anyway, so why bother?
I was standing on a beach in North Carolina quietly taking in the breathtaking Atlantic Ocean last summer — true story — when a friendly chap my age approached. We made some small talk before he said quite unprompted that all this talk about climate change was “a bunch of bullshit.”
According to him none of it was happening. It was nothing but political hooey designed to get us all worked up.
I’m certain he thought the old, white guy he was talking to would be a sympathetic ear for his moronic denialism, so when I told him that the ocean we were staring at was going to swallow us all whole someday, he said again: “No. That’s just bullshit.”
And then just like that he tipped his cap, told me to genuinely have a nice day, and skipped away to assault the next unsuspecting beachgoer with his pale-full of ignorance.
In the year since I was mentally assaulted on that beach, the pyromaniacs in the new administration are doubling down and literally throwing gasoline on our heating planet.
What the hell are we supposed to do with that, Democrats?
I mean we can’t ignore climate change, and must do what we can to mitigate it, but continuing to make it a central campaign issue is worthless because of all the damn morons out there.
I was sure democracy was a pressing issue, too, especially after the violent attack on January 6, 2021. Well, not only don’t most people much care about it, the morons who perpetrated the attack have been hailed as heroes by millions of other morons, and are back out on the street and free to try it again if and when necessary.
So I ask again: What we are we supposed to do with that?
And don’t even get me started about vaccines, a woman’s right to choose, or myriad other issues that are killing all of us …
I began typing this on Monday afternoon and was scratching my head after watching a press gathering in Scotland, where the Prime Minister of UK had just surrendered himself at Trump’s golf course.
You read that right: the leader of Great Britain was a visitor in his own country.
Can you imagine if Sir Keir Starmer roared into the United States and promptly summoned Trump to meet him at his beach house?
That place would be flattened by a tomahawk missile, with Starmer in it, five seconds later.
I actually felt embarrassed for my British family and friends over there, until I remembered that as bad their leader just looked, we are getting the moron who emasculated him back in our White House in a couple of days to water his racist house plant, Stephen Miller.
Anyway, Trump said more stupid things in 30 minutes, than Joe Biden has said in 30 years. Words just came out of the guy’s mouth that meant absolutely nothing. We’ve all seen him do this. On Gaza, for instance, he breathlessly said this:
“We’ll be helping with the food. We have a lot of access to food. We have a lot of food ourselves. So we’re going to get them some good strong food.”
Strong food …
Go ahead and watch if yer brave enough.
And it’s always the steadfast confidence and determined stupidity in which he addresses the world’s most pressing and obvious issues as he discovers them all for the very first time. He’s the 2-year-old who bashes his head with a rock, and earnestly brags to his mother how hard it really and truly-ooly is.
His head, I mean.
And let’s not forget the fact that he was double-dipping by doing business (playing golf) on one of his properties on our dime. But it’s the public servant studying climate change that needs to be run out of her job …
And, hey, I am the guy who wrote the book on this stuff back when I thought it was all just some terrible anomaly and America would get back on track in 2020 after four years of word salads, and 250,000 needless deaths.
I simply underestimated how big our moron problem in America was at the time.
It’s staggering, it really is.
Now, seven years later, Trump’s complete idiocy and lack of command about anything resembling policy have been completely normalized, and I have grudgingly come to understand most average Americans are just fine with it.
Taking somebody’s healthcare away might be serious, but eating their dogs and cats?! Well now … we need to have a serious talk about that one, buster.
So Democrats need to start meeting the majority of Americans where they are: most likely staring at their phones and communicating with each other in Emoji.
Healthcare for all: smiley face
Billionaires are bad: grumpy face
Stop worrying about people like me, Democrats. As a haughty independent who pays attention, you most likely have my vote for the foreseeable future, just as long as voting is still a thing in this country, or you decide to eat my cat.
It’s the disaffected out there you need to start reaching with alacrity by hitting them where they’re at, and preferably with a dumbed-down message any moron can understand.
(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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