Trump's fanning the flames of conspiracies finally backfires
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
Here's the tipping point that will plunge Trump into impeachment
I keep asking myself when Trump’s authoritarian fascism will become so intolerable to the vast majority of Americans that they rise up against it — not only massively protest but put enough pressure on Republicans in Congress that they join with Democrats in impeaching and convicting him.
In other words, what’s the tipping point for ridding us of this menace?
I thought we’d reached that tipping point when he went to war with Iran without congressional approval. Or when he sent active military troops into Los Angeles. Or when he imposed tariffs on all products imported to the United States, essentially raising taxes on Americans. Or when he forced out the president of the University of Virginia for insufficiently rooting out DEI. Or when he attacked major law firms for employing lawyers who once tried to hold him legally accountable.
Obviously, we haven’t reached the tipping point yet. So what will it take? Several possibilities come to mind:
1. He raises tariffs 25 percent on almost all products imported into the United States, resulting in substantial price increases across the economy. Americans who pay no attention to politics now find they’re struggling to pay the bills.
2. He stations active military troops in every major American city to “protect” ICE agents who are going house to house, apartment to apartment, demanding proof of citizenship. Americans who haven’t before been affected by Trump’s police state are now aware of it, as many of their relatives or friends get caught up in the dragnet.
3. He builds a gulag of detention centers across America into which he sends Americans who criticize him, prior to revoking their citizenship and expelling them to prisons in foreign nations. Americans who haven’t been concerned about his actions against immigrants now find that he is silencing all criticism about him or his regime.
4. He announces that the Supreme Court is intruding on presidential powers and he is therefore not bound by the court. Americans who haven’t paid attention to his lawlessness are now forced to confront his constitutional coup.
Hence today’s Office Hours question: What actions by Trump and his lackeys do you believe will trigger such a massive upheaval in America that even Republican lawmakers who have supported him will join with Democrats to impeach and convict him? Where’s the tipping point?
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
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Hidden 'truths' about violent attacks are giving me whiplash
On the morning that Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband were assassinated, I was speaking to a civic group on the dangers of political polarization.
I opened by reflecting on our increasingly violent political climate as indicated by these shootings and last year’s attempted assassination of Donald Trump.
At a lunch table afterward, someone challenged me. “That Trump thing,” she said, “was staged. It was set up to make him look brave.”
Startled, I asked about the blood. “Faked by the Secret Service when they tackled him.”
The man killed? “A mistake.”
This was from a woman who, 30 minutes before, had argued that religious fanatics are causing today’s polarization.
Later that day, voices on the other side of the political spectrum insinuated that Gov. Tim Walz was somehow responsible for Hortman’s death because he had appointed the alleged killer to a volunteer advisory board. Or crazy Marxists were behind it.
I was feeling whiplash.
Two tragedies. Two shocking theories. One disturbing pattern: If a terrible event can help the other side, they must have orchestrated it.
This partisan reflex is connected to what social scientists refer to as zero-sum bias — the tendency to assume that a gain for an out-group creates a loss for the in-group. It also stems from motivated reasoning about politics: We don’t just take in public facts neutrally — we filter them through our political identities. If an event seems to bolster our opponents, we instinctively look for a way to discredit it or blame them for it. Think 9/11 (Bush set it up to justify war) or the Sandy Hook kindergarten massacre (a hoax by gun control fanatics).
Of course, tragic events often do have political consequences. A shooting can lead to pressure for gun control. An assassination attempt can rally support.
Consequences, however, are not the same as causes. Correlation does not prove conspiracy.
But in our era of conflict entrepreneurs, viral social media, and deep mistrust of institutions, the leap from “this helps them” to “they set it up” is becoming more common — and more reflexive. There are no disturbed lone wolves or random events anymore. It’s the other side’s plan. Internet clicks and partisan admiration flow to those who proclaim these hidden “truths.”
We have to name and resist this. As individuals and communities, we can hold two truths at once: That tragedy can have political consequences, and that those consequences do not always mean orchestration.
When we succumb to this way of thinking, we unravel the very idea of a shared public life.
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Elon Musk's baloney virtue is as bankrupt as Tesla
As a car company, Tesla is effectively bankrupt. This past quarter, Tesla’s reported profits were only $405 million, a profit shown only because he sold “emissions credits” to General Motors and other car companies to the tune of $595 million.
In other words, he’s not in the car business, but in the business of selling the right to pollute. He helps GM sell Chevy Tahoes that get 15 miles per gallon.
That is because Musk is a master of conjuring money out of thin air — or more accurately, dirty air.
So, my dear green friends, when you buy a Tesla, you’re not reducing your carbon footprint by a quarter-inch, because Musk is selling your good intentions to General Motors so they can pollute more.
It’s like when the medieval Catholic Church sold indulgences, so your relatives didn’t have to go to hell.
When you buy a Tesla, you’ve actually increased your total carbon footprint because Tesla will sell your so-called “emissions savings” while your car is still producing a huge amount of carbon.
There ain’t no such thing as an “emissions free” car, because even Musk can’t get away with violating the law — the Second Law of Thermodynamics. When you buy your Tesla, you’ve moved your pollution from the tailpipe to the electric plant smokestack. For the pinheads who operate their Teslas in Wyoming, that means your car is 100% powered by coal.
Climate change is the looming hell on Earth which no amount of pollution indulgences from Musk will change, no matter how much your friends in Beverly Hills congratulate you on your baloney virtue.
Learn more — see ‘Elon Musk: Batteries Not Included’
- Greg Palast is the author of investigative reports for outlets including the Guardian, the BBC, and Rolling Stone, and New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits. His latest film, Vigilantes Inc.: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen, is narrated by Rosario Dawson and produced by Martin Sheen and George DiCaprio. On Substack, he writes at Greg Palast Investigates
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'Scarcely begun': Trump is running away from Texas tragedy's cause
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
On July 4, the broken remnants of a powerful tropical storm spun off the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico so heavy with moisture that it seemed to stagger under its load. Then, colliding with another soggy system sliding north off the Pacific, the storm wobbled and its clouds tipped, waterboarding south central Texas with an extraordinary 20 inches of rain. In the predawn blackness, the Guadalupe River, which drains from the Hill Country, rose by more than 26 vertical feet in just 45 minutes, jumping its banks and hurtling downstream, killing 109 people, including at least 27 children at a summer camp located inside a federally designated floodway.
Over the days and weeks to come there will be tireless — and warranted — analysis of who is to blame for this heart-wrenching loss. Should Kerr County, where most of the deaths occurred, have installed warning sirens along that stretch of the waterway, and why were children allowed to sleep in an area prone to high-velocity flash flooding? Why were urgent updates apparently only conveyed by cellphone and online in a rural area with limited connectivity? Did the National Weather Service, enduring steep budget cuts under the current administration, adequately forecast this storm?
Those questions are critical. But so is a far larger concern: The rapid onset of disruptive climate change — driven by the burning of oil, gasoline and coal — is making disasters like this one more common, more deadly and far more costly to Americans, even as the federal government is running away from the policies and research that might begin to address it.
President Lyndon B. Johnson was briefed in 1965 that a climate crisis was being caused by burning fossil fuels and was warned that it would create the conditions for intensifying storms and extreme events, and this country — including 10 more presidents — has debated how to respond to that warning ever since. Still, it took decades for the slow-motion change to grow large enough to affect people’s everyday lives and safety and for the world to reach the stage it is in now: an age of climate-driven chaos, where the past is no longer prologue and the specific challenges of the future might be foreseeable but are less predictable.
Climate change doesn’t chart a linear path where each day is warmer than the last. Rather, science suggests that we’re now in an age of discontinuity, with heat one day and hail the next and with more dramatic extremes. Across the planet, dry places are getting drier while wet places are getting wetter. The jet stream — the band of air that circulates through the Northern Hemisphere — is slowing to a near stall at times, weaving off its tracks, causing unprecedented events like polar vortexes drawing arctic air far south. Meanwhile the heat is sucking moisture from the drought-plagued plains of Kansas only to dump it over Spain, contributing to last year’s cataclysmic floods.
We saw something similar when Hurricane Harvey dumped as much as 60 inches of rain on parts of Texas in 2017 and when Hurricane Helene devastated North Carolina last year — and countless times in between. We witnessed it again in Texas this past weekend. Warmer oceans evaporate faster, and warmer air holds more water, transporting it in the form of humidity across the atmosphere, until it can’t hold it any longer and it falls. Meteorologists estimate that the atmosphere had reached its capacity for moisture before the storm struck.
The disaster comes during a week in which extreme heat and extreme weather have battered the planet. Parts of northern Spain and southern France are burning out of control, as are parts of California. In the past 72 hours, storms have torn the roofs off of five-story apartment buildings in Slovakia, while intense rainfall has turned streets into rivers in southern Italy. Same story in Lombok, Indonesia, where cars floated like buoys, and in eastern China, where an inland typhoon-like storm sent furniture blowing down the streets like so many sheafs of paper. Léon, Mexico, was battered by hail so thick on Monday it covered the city in white. And North Carolina is, again, enduring 10 inches of rainfall.
There is no longer much debate that climate change is making many of these events demonstrably worse. Scientists conducting a rapid analysis of last week’s extreme heat wave that spread across Europe have concluded that human-caused warming killed roughly 1,500 more people than might have otherwise perished. Early reports suggest that the flooding in Texas, too, was substantially influenced by climate change. According to a preliminary analysis by ClimaMeter, a joint project of the European Union and the French National Centre for Scientific Research, the weather in Texas was 7% wetter on July 4 than it was before climate change warmed that part of the state, and natural variability alone cannot explain “this very exceptional meteorological condition.”
That the United States once again is reeling from familiar but alarming headlines and body counts should not be a surprise by now. According to the World Meteorological Organization, the number of extreme weather disasters has jumped fivefold worldwide over the past 50 years, and the number of deaths has nearly tripled. In the United States, which prefers to measure its losses in dollars, the damage from major storms was more than $180 billion last year, nearly 10 times the average annual toll during the 1980s, after accounting for inflation. These storms have now cost Americans nearly $3 trillion. Meanwhile, the number of annual major disasters has grown sevenfold. Fatalities in billion-dollar storms last year alone were nearly equal to the number of such deaths counted by the federal government in the 20 years between 1980 and 2000.
The most worrisome fact, though, may be that the warming of the planet has scarcely begun. Just as each step up on the Richter scale represents a massive increase in the force of an earthquake, the damage caused by the next 1 or 2 degrees Celsius of warming stands to be far greater than that caused by the 1.5 degrees we have so far endured. The world’s leading scientists, the United Nations panel on climate change and even many global energy experts warn that we face something akin to our last chance before it is too late to curtail a runaway crisis. It’s one reason our predictions and modeling capabilities are becoming an essential, lifesaving mechanism of national defense.
What is extraordinary is that at such a volatile moment, President Donald Trump’s administration would choose not just to minimize the climate danger — and thus the suffering of the people affected by it — but to revoke funding for the very data collection and research that would help the country better understand and prepare for this moment.
Over the past couple of months, the administration has defunded much of the operations of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nation’s chief climate and scientific agency responsible for weather forecasting, as well as the cutting-edge earth systems research at places like Princeton University, which is essential to modeling an aberrant future. It has canceled the nation’s seminal scientific assessment of climate change and risk. The administration has defunded the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s core program paying for infrastructure projects meant to prevent major disasters from causing harm, and it has threatened to eliminate FEMA itself, the main federal agency charged with helping Americans after a climate emergency like the Texas floods. It has — as of last week — signed legislation that unravels the federal programs meant to slow warming by helping the country’s industries transition to cleaner energy. And it has even stopped the reporting of the cost of disasters, stating that doing so is “in alignment with evolving priorities” of the administration. It is as if the administration hopes that making the price tag for the Kerr County flooding invisible would make the events unfolding there seem less devastating.
Given the abandonment of policy that might forestall more severe events like the Texas floods by reducing the emissions that cause them, Americans are left to the daunting task of adapting. In Texas, it is critical to ask whether the protocols in place at the time of the storm were good enough. This week is not the first time that children have died in a flash flood along the Guadalupe River, and reports suggest county officials struggled to raise money and then declined to install a warning system in 2018 in order to save approximately $1 million. But the country faces a larger and more daunting challenge, because this disaster — like the firestorms in Los Angeles and the hurricanes repeatedly pummeling Florida and the southeast — once again raises the question of where people can continue to safely live. It might be that in an era of what researchers are calling “mega rain” events, a flood plain should now be off-limits.
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'Don't lie': Why Trump's obsession with weeding out leakers will fail
By Brian O'Neill, Georgia Institute of Technology
The Trump administration has recently directed that a new wave of polygraphs be administered across the executive branch, aimed at uncovering leaks to the press.
As someone who has taken roughly a dozen polygraphs during my 27-year career with the CIA, I read this development with some skepticism.
Polygraphs carry an ominous, almost mythological reputation among Americans. The more familiar and unofficial term – lie detector tests – likely fuels that perception. Television crime dramas have done their part, too, often portraying the device as an oracle for uncovering the truth when conventional methods fail.
In those portrayals, the polygraph is not merely a tool – it’s a window into the soul.
Among those entering government service, especially in national security, the greater anxiety is not the background check but passing the polygraph. My advice is always the same: Don’t lie.
It’s the best – and perhaps only – guidance for a process that most assessments have concluded is a more subjective interpretation than empirical science.
Why the polygraph persists
Polygraphs are “pseudo-scientific” in that they measure physiological responses such as heart rate, blood pressure and perspiration. The assumption is that liars betray themselves through spikes in those signals. But this presumes a kind of psychological transparency that simply doesn’t hold up. A person might sweat and tremble simply from fear, anger or frustration – not deceit.
There also are no specific physiological reactions associated with lying. The National Academy of Sciences in 2003, and the American Psychological Association in a 2004 review, concluded that the polygraph rests more on theater than fact. Recent assessments, published in 2019, have reached the same conclusion.
Accordingly, polygraph results are not generally admissible in U.S. courts. Only a handful of states – such as Georgia, Arizona and California – permit their use even under limited conditions. And they typically require that both parties agree to admission and a judge to approve it. Unconditional admissibility remains the exception, not the rule.
And yet, inside many national security agencies, polygraphs remain central to the clearance process – a fact I observed firsthand during my time overseeing personnel vetting and analytic hiring within the intelligence community.
While not treated as conclusive, polygraph results often serve as a filter. A candidate’s visible discomfort – or the examiner’s subjective judgment that a response seems evasive – can stall or end the hiring process. For instance, I know that government agencies have halted clearances after an examiner flagged elevated reactions to questions about past drug use or foreign contacts, even when no disqualifying behavior was ultimately documented.
In some cases, an examiner’s suggestion that a chart shows an anomaly has led otherwise strong applicants to volunteer details they hadn’t planned to share – such as minor security infractions, undeclared relationships, or casual drug use from decades earlier – that, while not disqualifying on their own, reshape how their trustworthiness is perceived.
The polygraph’s power lies in creating the conditions under which deception is confessed.
A predictable pattern
No administration has been immune to the impulse to investigate leaks. The reflex is bipartisan and familiar: An embarrassing disclosure appears in the press – contradicting official statements or exposing internal dissent – and the White House vows to identify and punish the source. Polygraphs are often part of this ritual.
During his first term, Trump intensified efforts to expose internal dissent and media leaks. Department guidelines were revised to make it easier for agencies to obtain journalists’ phone and email records, and polygraphs were reportedly used to pressure officials suspected of talking to the press. That trend has continued – and, in some areas, escalated.
Recent policies at the Pentagon now restrict unescorted press access, revoke office space for major outlets and favor ideologically aligned networks. The line between legitimate leak prevention and the surveillance or sidelining of critical press coverage has grown increasingly blurred.
At agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, polygraphs are reportedly being used more frequently – and more punitively – to identify internal dissenters. Even “cold cases,” such as the leak of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs opinion ahead of its overturning of Roe v. Wade, have been reopened, despite prior investigations yielding no definitive source.
Government reaction varies
Not all leaks are treated the same. Disclosures that align with official narratives or offer strategic advantage may be quietly tolerated, even if unauthorized. Others, especially those that embarrass senior officials or reveal dysfunction, are more likely to prompt formal investigation.
In 2003, for example, the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame’s identity – widely seen as retaliation for her husband’s criticism of the Iraq War – triggered a federal investigation. The disclosure embarrassed senior officials, led to White House aide Scooter Libby’s conviction for perjury, later commuted, and drew intense political scrutiny.
Leaks involving classified material draw the sharpest response when they challenge presidential authority or expose internal disputes. That was the case in 2010 with Chelsea Manning, whose disclosure of diplomatic cables and battlefield reports embarrassed senior officials and sparked global backlash. Government reaction often depends less on what was disclosed than on who disclosed it – and to what effect.
A narrow set of disclosures, such as those involving espionage or operational compromise, elicit broad consensus as grounds for prosecution. But most leaks fall outside that category. Most investigations fade quietly. The public rarely learns what became of them. Occasionally, there is a vague resignation, but direct accountability is rare.
What the future holds
Trump’s polygraph campaign is not likely to eliminate leaks to the press. But they may have a chilling effect that discourages internal candor while diverting investigative energy away from core security priorities.
Even if such campaigns succeed in reducing unauthorized disclosures, they may come at the cost of institutional resilience. Historically, aggressive internal enforcement has been associated with declining morale and reduced information flow – factors that can hinder adaptation to complex threats.
Some researchers have suggested that artificial intelligence may eventually offer reliable tools for detecting deception. One recent assessment raised the possibility, while cautioning that the technology is nowhere near operational readiness.
For now, institutions will have to contend with the tools they have – imperfect, imprecise and more performative than predictive.
Brian O'Neill, Professor of Practice, International Affairs, Georgia Institute of Technology
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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There's only one way to stop Trump
Never before in American history, not even in wartime, has one man exercised such unbridled discretion affecting the lives of so many of us, while simultaneously preventing others — Congress, the courts, the American people — from having a say or even knowing what he’s going to do next.
On Monday, he sent ICE agents and National Guard troops into a Los Angeles park, over the objections of the governor of California and the mayor of Los Angeles. He is also sending 200 Marines to Florida to aid ICE.
Where will he next direct ICE, National Guard, and active duty military? He isn’t saying. But it’s our country.
He has targeted undocumented agricultural and hospitality workers for arrest and deportation, after saying he would not do so. What’s the policy here? He isn’t telling us. But it’s our country.
Meanwhile, he said yesterday that he’d subject imports from Japan, South Korea, and a dozen other nations to new 25 percent tariffs — which will, of course, translate into additional taxes on American consumers — effective August 1.
He threatened to impose even higher tariff-taxes on countries that align with BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) after that group expressed “serious concerns” over any country imposing unilateral tariffs.
I remember a time when American presidents had to go to Congress to impose tariffs. How can he tax us without our consent? It’s our country.
He is consulting with Benjamin Netanyahu about the next stage of the war with Iran, but not consulting Congress, yet it’s our country.
He is targeting universities that he believes haven’t adequately eliminated DEI, or have allowed transgender athletes to compete, or failed to stop demonstrations against Israel’s war in Gaza. Last week, his regime forced a major university president to resign.
Which universities are next, and for what reason? He isn’t saying, even though it’s our country.
He intends to go after more law firms and media companies that have crossed him. But which, and why?
Will he let TikTok continue to function in the United States even though Congress has passed a law prohibiting it? He hasn’t said.
He says it’s all a “bargaining strategy” to make better deals. But deals for whom?
Rubbish. It’s not a bargaining strategy. He doing all this because he loves to display his power. He relishes it when powerful people plead with him, prostrate themselves before him, beg him, and submit to his whims. He delights in changing his mind and keeping everyone else guessing.
Some who seek his favor are pouring money into TV ads for his eyes only in West Palm Beach, where he resides at Mar-a-Lago (according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of advertising data).
Some who seek his favor are buying his crypto coins.
Some are sending him lavish jet airplanes.
Some who seek his favor are speaking publicly of his brilliance, his insight, his daring. They talk of putting his face on Mount Rushmore. Of nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Many are afraid to criticize him.
This, my friends, is called a dictatorship.
The chief executive of a democracy doesn’t say — as Trump did recently — “I may or may not, nobody knows what I’ll do.” The chief executive of a democracy doesn’t say this because power in a democracy belongs to the people.
This is why Congress enacted a War Powers Act, so presidents have to gain Congress’s consent before sending the United States to war.
It’s why the Constitution gives Congress the power to set the terms of international trade, including tariffs.
Why the Constitution gives Congress the power to appropriate funds.
Why laws bar a president from sending active military troops into a state without the permission of the state’s governor.
And why there’s no basis in law or the Constitution for a president to single out specific law firms, universities, or media companies for penalties because they have angered him.
So how do we take our democracy back?
The federal courts are playing a crucial role. Across America, judges — appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents — are stopping the tinpot dictator from taking over entirely. They deserve our gratitude.
But you and I are playing the most critical roles — marching, organizing, demonstrating, boycotting, demanding, supporting leaders who stand up to him and criticizing those who won’t.
It may seem like months ago, but on June 14, some 6 million of us protested against him — the largest civil demonstration in American history. It showed the power of the people. It gave many of us hope.
We must follow that extraordinary event by an even larger nationwide demonstration on July 17, Good Trouble Lives On Day.
On July 17, five years since the passing of Congressman John Lewis, communities across the country will take to the streets, courthouses, and community spaces to carry forward his fight for justice, voting rights, and dignity for all.
On July 17, we must DOUBLE the number of us who turned out June 14. Because it’s our country.
And we must also appear in town halls that any Republican senators and representatives are holding, to tell them we refuse to live in a dictatorship. And tell them that we’re going to make sure they aren’t reelected.
Democracy is not a spectator sport.
- Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com
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This guy's freaking out — and that means we're in big trouble
James Carville isn’t a man prone to panic, but when he says, “I would not put it at all past [Trump] to try to call martial law or declare that there’s some kind of national emergency” around next year’s elections, it’s time to sit up straight.
Speaking to NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo, Carville warned that as Donald Trump sees a political shellacking coming in the 2026 midterms — particularly in states like New Jersey and Virginia — he may try something extreme to hold onto power. “The hoof prints are coming,” Carville said — and he’s not wrong.
This isn’t hyperbole. This is history — the history of nations that have lost their democracies like Hungary and Russia — threatening to repeat itself.
Donald Trump has already laid the psychological and structural groundwork to undermine or suspend elections; he just may not need to declare martial law if his fixers pull off what’s happening already this year.
Award-winning investigative journalist Greg Palast, a committed non-partisan, has laid it out in painful detail. And what he’s uncovered should terrify every American who believes in democracy.
Palast argues that Trump’s GOP doesn’t have to wait for November 2026 to win. They plan to win it in 2025, through something he calls The Great Purge, authorized by five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court.
That’s right: before you even cast a vote, millions of names may already be scrubbed from voter rolls. If you’re Black, Latino, a student, a woman who changed her name at marriage, a military service member, or simply someone who moved apartments, you’re already a target.
Let’s break it down:
— In the lead-up to the 2024 election, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission reported over 19 million names purged from voter rolls. While many were valid (deceased or moved), at least 4.47 million were blocked from voting due to bureaucratic tricks like “failure to return confirmation notices,” a tactic voting rights lawyers call “caging.”
— In Georgia, Palast’s team working with the ACLU found that 63.3% of voters purged via caging were wrongly removed. Many were African-American.
— Georgia’s GOP Secretary of State proudly doubled down in 2023, targeting 875,000 voters, and that’s just one state.
— Thirty states now use an error-ridden system called ERIC for voter purging. Not accurate enough? Trump’s legal henchwoman, Cleta Mitchell, is pushing for a new program called EagleAI, the modern version of the GOP’s 1960s “Eagle Eye” voter intimidation operation.
If that wasn’t enough, Republicans have introduced the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would force every newly registered or updated voter to present proof of citizenship in person. And if the name on your birth certificate is different from your passport or driver’s license, you can’t register or vote.
According to Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center, over 21 million Americans don’t have those documents readily available. And 69 million women don’t have their married name on their birth certificate. Many Americans don’t know where their passport or birth certificate is, especially those living in poverty, moving frequently, or serving overseas.
And let’s be clear about the excuse for this law: A racist myth. The Heritage Foundation, pushing the SAVE Act, claims millions of undocumented immigrants vote. But even Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State who made it his mission to arrest illegal voters, found exactly zero in court. In fact, his law blocked 36,000 legal Kansas voters and was thrown out for being unconstitutional.
And now they’re bragging that they just purged 5 million new names so far this year, according to Judicial Watch.
Still, these tactics persist. Why? Because they work.
In 2000, George W. Bush won Florida by just 537 votes after tens of thousands of Black voters were falsely labeled as felons and purged by George’s brother, then-Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Today’s tactics are far more sophisticated and widespread, and with a Trumpified Supreme Court, far harder to stop.
Under Trump, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division — once the bulwark against voter suppression — has become complicit. Don’t expect any help from the feds if your name goes missing from the rolls.
In fact, Georgia’s Secretary of State has already requested access to DHS’s SAVE database — a tool used to track deported immigrants — to cross-reference voters. When Florida tried this in 2012, they removed 172,000 voters but only found one actual non-citizen: an Austrian Republican. But thousands of Hispanic voters were wrongly barred because they had common names like Jose Garcia.
That’s not election security. That’s systemic suppression.
While official channels do their damage, Trump’s allies are also organizing a private MAGA militia of self-appointed “fraud hunters.” In 2024, these vigilantes challenged over one million ballots. In 2026, Palast reports, they’re gearing up to challenge even more, targeting key swing states like Georgia and Pennsylvania.
And if state officials don’t comply with Trump’s purge lists, Cleta Mitchell promises her army will go door-to-door, one voter at a time.
Remember, all of this happens before a single vote is cast.
And if that doesn’t work? Now that Congress has funded ICE to become the largest (secret, masked) police agency in America with a network of concentration camps across the country, answerable only to Donald Trump, pretty much anything is possible.
Carville may sound alarmist when he talks about martial law, but let’s remember: Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, summoned a mob to the Capitol, and flirted with using the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against protesters, who he had asked his generals to “shoot in the legs.”
He’s mused to his followers, “You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.” That’s not subtle. That’s a warning.
And while right-wing pundits like Bill O’Reilly chuckle and offer “18 muffalettas” in mockery, the groundwork for a democratic backslide is already laid, through legal loopholes, voter suppression, intimidation of Republican legislators like we saw yesterday, misinformation, and judicial capture.
Martial law may not arrive with tanks. It may come in the form of a national emergency declaration, a manufactured riot, or the pretense of mass fraud. Trump doesn’t have to cancel the election; he just has to delegitimize it enough to override it.
So what do we do?
As Palast warns: don’t despair. “They can’t steal all the votes all of the time.” But they sure as hell can steal enough.
We need:
— Massive voter education on how to confirm your registration and re-register early.
— Lawsuits and court challenges in every state adopting suppression tactics.
— Federal action, if not from the Justice Department, then from an organized, relentless citizenry.
— Election monitoring from independent and international groups.
— And, when Democrats are again in power (G-d willing), a law that explicitly says we have a right to vote. It’s insane that government has to get a court order (thanks, Supreme Court) to take away your gun, but doesn’t even have to notify you when they take away your vote.
If Trump succeeds in today’s ongoing massive purge of largely Democratic voters and delegitimizing results, he won’t need martial law. The authoritarian train won’t arrive with a bang; it’ll glide in silently, on rails we failed to see being laid down this year.
So yes, James Carville is right to sound the alarm. And Greg Palast has done the reporting to prove it.
Now it’s up to us to stop it. Pass it along.
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New York Times just published a deceptive hit piece sourced from a eugenicist
The sad fact is that there is nothing terribly out of character about the New York Times’s decision to publish a deceptive hit piece about New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, based on hacked data supplied by a noted eugenicist to whom they granted anonymity.
The newsroom will go to extreme lengths to achieve its primary missions — and one of them, most assuredly, is to take cheap shots at the left.
You can see it almost daily – just this past week alone in a condescending article about Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s brave defense of democracy, and a celebratory story about Trump’s achievements that likened dissenting views to “asterisks” on his legacy.
Under what other circumstance could a story that breaks so many of the Times’s own rules have won the approval of senior editors?
And you can trace it back to the very top: to editor Joe Kahn and his boss, publisher A.G. Sulzberger. As I’ve exhaustively chronicled in my coverage of the New York Times, the newsroom is constantly under pressure from its leaders to prove that it is not taking sides in politics — or democracy, for that matter. And because printing the truth is seen as punching right, that requires expending a lot of effort to punch left. Punching left becomes the holy grail.
I mean think about it. Under what other circumstance could a story that breaks so many of the Times’s own rules have won the approval of senior editors?
Why else would the Times, which notoriously refuses to respond to critics, have issued a ten-tweet defense of its actions? Why else would Kahn have praised the story in Monday’s morning meeting?
Consider everything that was wrong with the article. It’s a long list.
- You don’t print articles based on hacked data unless they are truly newsworthy. The fact that Mamdani, whose childhood was spent in Africa, checked several boxes including one for “African American” on a failed college application when he was 17 is not newsworthy. Its only value is to his political opponents, to employ as a scurrilous attack.
- You identify the source of the hack as fully as possible, so the readers can judge their motives. You don’t cover up the source’s identity and motives, like the Times did – you expose them. The source, as quickly became clear, was a noted eugenicist named Jordan Lasker.
- You don’t use the format of an attack story unless there’s a legitimate grievance. (First paragraph: Mamdani says X. Second paragraph starts with the word “But.”)
- You don’t hide behind a headline that says the disclosure you just made “raises scrutiny“. It’s either legitimate news or it’s not. (And it isn’t.)
- You don’t bury key information. Here, that Mamdani wrote in “Ugandan” as a way of explicating his checked box. (He was born there.)
- You don’t engage in racial policing. That is socially harmful and highly unseemly, especially coming from such a white-dominated institution.
- You don’t publish political stories whose lead byline is a free-lance writer who is a culture warrior. Benjamin Ryan is well known online as a critic of trans healthcare and trans reporters.
- You don’t rush to print in order to “scoop” a right-wing culture warrior. Semafor reported that Times editors hurried to greenlight the article because they had heard Rufo was also pursuing the story. That should actually have made them hesitate to print, rather than hurry.
There’s more about the Mamdani piece in this excellent article by Liam Scott in the Columbia Journalism Review.
Parker Molloy, in her newsletter, points out:
When Times columnist Jamelle Bouie had the temerity to post “i think you should tell readers if your source is a nazi,” he was apparently forced to delete it for violating the paper’s social media guidelines. Think about that for a moment. The Times will protect the anonymity of a white supremacist, but will silence their own Black columnist for accurately identifying him.
And Guardian media columnist Margaret Sullivan , who previously worked as the Times' public editor, concludes that “this made-up scandal” — combined with a nasty pre-election editorial – makes the Times look “like it’s on a crusade against Mamdani.”
The Times did its own self-serving follow-up article here, reporting that its disclosure had “provoked sharply different reactions.”
It also published — in what the New Republic’s Jason Linkins called an attempt to “reverse-engineer a pretext for their Mamdani piece” — a query asking readers what they think of racial categories.
The Need for a Public Editor
When a Times article sets off an understandable explosion of media criticism, like this article did, the response would ideally come from a public editor, or ombud, whose job is to explain what happened and independently assess whether the Times was at fault or not. There would ideally be some learning.
Parts of the Times operation remain brilliant, most notably its investigative journalism and Cooking. But its coverage of anything remotely political is poisoned by its obsession to prove its neutrality by taking cheap shots at the left.
Sadly, The Times eliminated the position of public editor eight years ago. The publisher at the time said “our followers on social media and our readers across the Internet have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog, more vigilant and forceful than one person could ever be.”
So on Saturday, the response came from the Times’s hackish “assistant managing editor for standards and trust” Patrick Healy. To say that he does not inspire trust is an understatement.
Healy, who until May was the deputy opinions editor, drove the Times’s excellent columnist Paul Krugman to quit his job. Prior to that, he led a series of right-leaning citizens panels.
He was the newsroom’s politics editor during the 2020 presidential election, and the unapologetic leader of the paper’s “but her emails” coverage.
In short, he seems to revel in trolling the libs.
In his tweets, Healy focused on the article’s “factual accuracy” and he recognized concerns about how the source was identified. But he refused to engage with the concerns that the article was not newsworthy or that its sourcing was repugnant.
“The ultimate source was Columbia admissions data and Mr. Mamdani, who confirmed our reporting,” Healy wrote defensively.
That he is a rising star at the Times – indeed, said to be among the possible successors to Kahn – tells you everything you need to know about what’s wrong there.
Parts of the Times operation remain brilliant, most notably its investigative journalism and Cooking.
But its coverage of anything remotely political is poisoned by its obsession to prove its neutrality by taking cheap shots at the left, no matter the cost to its obligation to accuracy and fairness.
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Here's the crude reality of the Trump agenda's next stage
Trump’s Big Ugly Bill delivers $170 billion for border and immigration enforcement.
This is on the scale of supplemental budgets passed by the United States when we enter war.
ICE will add 10,000 agents to the 20,000 already on the streets.
Its annual budget for detentions will skyrocket from $3.4 billion in the current fiscal year to $45 billion until the end of the 2029 fiscal year. That’s a 365 percent increase.
Funding for ICE detentions will exceed funding for the entire federal prison system.
When government capacity is built out this way, there’s always political and bureaucratic pressure to utilize such capacity. Supply creates its own demand.
“They pass that bill, we’re gonna have more money than we ever had to do immigration enforcement,” Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said recently, adding, “You think we’re arresting people now? You wait till we get the funding to do what we got to do.”
Which means that the number of people detained in ICE facilities — numbering 56,397 as of June 15 — will likely grow dramatically. A four-fold increase in the detention budget could mean a quarter of a million people locked up.
Don’t fall for the Trump regime’s lie that these people are criminals. As of now, 71.7 percent of ICE detainees have no criminal record. Some have been hardworking members of their communities for decades.
Even before the huge increase in funding, Trump aide Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem demanded that immigration agents arrest 3,000 people a day.
That’s triple the number of daily arrests that agents were making between February and April.
Given that border-crossing numbers have plummeted, just meeting this 3,000-per-day target will require far more aggressive enforcement in non-border communities nationwide.
Big Democratic cities will be hit hardest. In a recent social media post, Trump called on ICE officials to “expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside.”
How will ICE agents know whom to round up and detain? The crude reality is that they’ll focus on anyone looking Latino or with surnames ending in “z.”
There are 65.2 million Latinos in the United States, the vast majority of whom are citizens. Inevitably, some American citizens will be swept up, arrested, and detained.
As the number of raids on workers and families escalates, ICE agents will engage in more warrantless knocks on doors, searches, and arrests.
And more of these agents will mask themselves to avoid being held responsible for their actions — an abuse of power commonly associated with Eastern Bloc police states.
This giant federal police effort will be supported by a supercharged surveillance system, also financed by Trump’s Big Ugly Bill. The Department of Homeland Security is joining with the Department of Government Efficiency to create the federal government’s first national citizenship data bank.
According to The New York Times, Palantir corporation’s software will be used to combine data gleaned from the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Social Security Administration, and the Internal Revenue Service. Meanwhile, the administration wants access to citizens’ and others’ bank account numbers and medical claims.
The regime will not limit the purpose of its growing internal police apparatus to deporting undocumented people.
Trump is already attacking the citizenship of people born in the United States to parents who may or may not have been citizens at the time of their birth — so-called “birthright citizenship.”
The regime is also going after naturalized citizens (born outside the United States), using a McCarthy-era law that the Justice Department then used to sniff out former Nazis who lied their way into becoming American citizens — a law that allows the Department to “denaturalize,” or strip, someone’s citizenship.
According to a memo issued to Department lawyers last month by Attorney General Pam Bondi, denaturalization should be aimed at anyone who may “pose a potential danger to national security” — a standard so vague as to allow the Department to expel people from the country based on unsubstantiated claims or even on their negative opinions about Trump.
Trump has already publicly called for deporting “bad people … many of them [who] were born in our country.”
Last week, Andy Ogles, a Republican congressman, asked Bondi to investigate whether New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani — who was born in Uganda and naturalized in 2018 — should be subject to denaturalization proceedings because he “publicly glorifies” people connected to Hamas in a rap song.
Bondi has not publicly responded to the letter.
The coming expansion of Trump’s police state under the Big Ugly Bill — featuring total surveillance, 10,000 ICE agents, and a network of detention facilities — will mark an escalation of Trump’s authoritarianism — using the pretext of an immigrant crime wave that does not exist.
What you can do:
1. Protect the vulnerable. If anyone in your community is confronted by ICE agents demanding proof of citizenship, make sure they know they have a right to remain silent and to refuse consent to searches of their cars, homes, or persons.
Red cards with this and other pertinent information are available in various languages. You can download and print them for free here.
2. Make sure you know your own rights. If stopped, you are not required to answer questions. You can refuse a search of your person, car, or belongings. If the agents proceed with a search despite your refusal, make it clear you do not consent. If you’re not under arrest, you can ask if you are free to go. If the answer is yes, leave.
If you or someone in your community believes rights have been violated, document everything you can of the encounter with ICE agents.
3. Finally, know that the purpose of Trump’s police state is to silence not just immigrants but the rest of us. Do not be intimidated or discouraged from speaking out, writing, demonstrating, boycotting, or undertaking any other nonviolent action in opposition to what the regime is doing.
To the contrary, become even more active. Share any abuses you witness (and, ideally, have recorded on your phone) as widely as possible, so that more people are apprised of what’s happening and are ready to join the resistance.
Be safe. Be careful. Have courage. Hug your loved ones.
- Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com
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'Stable genius' takes on disaster response
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
This farmer is just a speck in the universe — and he can end the Trump nightmare
Kansans now confront a “big, beautiful bill” approved by 218 Republican puppets in the U.S. House, and then signed into law by a convicted felon who was found guilty of sexual abuse, and who has faced multiple criminal cases over the past few years. Many of his indictments went to the core principles of our democracy. Unlike the average American, he has been given free pass after free pass by a Supreme Court that exists primarily to do his bidding — never mind right and wrong.
Is all of this part of a bad dream? If only that were the case.
We are bombarded by distortions perpetuated by hundreds of millions of dollars of “dark money” used via social media. Our reliance on that device in the palm of our hands has become a seductive tool to manipulate the masses. It’s how our president was bought and sold. Those devices supposedly foster connections, but the reality seems to be that they fuel isolation, especially at a time when we need to talk to each other.
How to make sense of the absurd? How to square any of this with the founding principles of this country, or with the role that the United States has come to play in an increasingly troubled world? I am not certain that Camus and Kafka, working in collaboration, could put all of this madness into words.
We now confront darkness.
For those of us old enough to remember, words from one of the most memorable Simon and Garfunkel songs come to mind: “Hello, darkness, my old friend, I’ve come to talk to you again.” Darkness leads to isolation, and that leads to lack of communication, along with feelings of hopelessness. There is much darkness now among a large segment of the population as we see actions, and hear words, that we know reveal a lack of morality, of decency, among many of our elected officials.
How to cope with these feelings? How to figure out how to make a difference?
For me, strength comes from being in a place that brings good memories, comfort and perspective. That place is in the midst of an ocean of wheat on one of our farms. I stand alone with my thoughts, in the presence of earth and sky as far as my eyes can see. I realize that I am but a speck in the universe, but I gain strength in knowing that, by my actions, I can make a difference.
Darkness is countered by light. By speaking out, and speaking the truth, we can begin to bring about change. There is fear among the populace about speaking out, because we have already seen some actions from this administration that are eerily reminiscent of tactics used by prior and current fascist regimes.
A student whom I am mentoring asked me about taking a summer job with a law firm that had caved into demands from the Trump administration.
She asked: “How do I decide?”
I said the answer is simple — look in the mirror and ask yourself if you are doing the right thing. Your conscience will be your guide. That basic idea applies here, too. My mirror is my wheat field. For others, it may be an actual mirror, or it could be some other place, another person or a certain event in your life.
Just remember that, in these dark times, silence in the midst of what you know is wrong will lead only to more darkness. Remember that we have a limited number of days. Why speak out? Because it matters.
Ben Palen is a Kansas native and a fifth-generation farmer and agriculture consultant in Colorado and Kansas.
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This McDonald's line proves why Republicans are wrong on health care
Imagine walking into a McDonald’s with two service lines.
Above one cashier reads a sign: “This employee has healthcare coverage.”
Above the other cashier reads a different sign: “This employee does not have healthcare coverage.”
Which line are you getting in?
Our collective public health is the one thing that binds us all together. Whether we like it or not. Regardless of economic status, race, creed or religion. Even across the vast political divide.
Anyone who thinks that someone else’s healthiness is someone else’s problem might want to consider this: It’s your problem too — and that of your family, friends and associates — should any of you come into contact with any of them if they’re unwell.
And those who lack preventive care — or who can’t afford treatment when they become ill — are far more likely to carry infectious germs, from the common cold to brain-eating amoebas (so as not to leave the nation’s leading health official out of this).
Consider it the Boomerang Doctrine. Whatever negatively impacts the health of one group comes flying back on all other groups. With no exemptions or opt-outs.
You might enjoy the most platinum, premier, crème de la crème healthcare coverage money can buy, but if you or yours encounter the wrong restaurant server, childcare provider, retail clerk or delivery person, you get whatever they have. Medically speaking, of course.
For my readers of more substantial means, think butler, chauffeur, concierge or country club attendant. (And see my Founder’s level here.)
But here’s the reality: No white-glove medical attention can compensate for someone else’s black hole where healthcare should have been.
It’s long troubled me that my side of the healthcare debate has refrained from framing the case through the prism of self-interest. I suppose it’s the nature of discord today that we default to our differences rather than seek common cause.
Self-interest is hardly the most noble motivation. In a better world, care and compassion for the less fortunate would be enough—so too would the principle that healthcare and insurance coverage should rank among the most fundamental rights of a civilized society.
But we don’t live in one of those at the moment. Instead, we’ve become ever more angry and tribal and inconsiderate. “Blessed is he that considereth the poor” worked fine as a psalm, but wouldn’t pass as a referendum in lots of states.
Yes, it is a searing moral indictment of our times that our federal government just enacted one of the most heartless measures imaginable to rip basic health coverage from as many as 12 million Americans who need it most.
But the larger that number grows, the more Americans find themselves numbed by the numbers. I’d rather focus on the opposite — on the far more minuscule total that one can count in their own family.
The underlying rationale for Medicaid “work requirements” — truly a fig leaf — is that vast numbers of Medicaid recipients somehow are too lazy to work or otherwise delight themselves in gaming the system. As that smear goes, the poor enjoy lives of leisure at the expense of hardworking Americans like you and me.
It’s a lie rooted in the racist — and utterly discredited — tropes that animated resistance to social change dating back to the Great Society of the 1960s. And now, arguably, even to FDR’s New Deal.
But if the argument is litigated on that ground, it’s just another in the interminable litany of issues and grievances that tear us apart. So I say everyone dismount their high horses and lay down their political arms.
Just come together to ask one question:
Which line are you getting in?
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