The rise of Trump's ‘Republican National Guard’
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
This JD Vance stupidity is most damaging of all
The vice president was on the TV recently, and said something that was not only stupid but a bald-faced lie made more disgusting by the fact of its stupidity.
“As we've kicked illegal aliens out of our country,” JD Vance said, “you actually see housing costs start to level off."
Though the regime is snatching more immigrants from our streets, housing costs are not leveling off here in Connecticut. Someone like me, who makes a modest living, cannot find a modest house for under $350,000. Rents are worse, and they keep going up. Mine did. And none of this is due to the presence, or absence, of “illegal aliens.”
Vance is lying but he’s also asking us to be stupid. Are we supposed to blame the most vulnerable people for a policy problem? That’s what the housing crisis is.
For one thing, there’s not enough of it. (State and local laws inhibit new construction.) For another, bad actors are gaming the system (private-equity groups gobble up properties and use AI to gin up rents.)
One more thing: much of the blame for the housing crisis can be laid at the feet of the president. And JD Vance knows it.
High inflation leads to higher interest rates, which means people are not selling, because there are not enough buyers who want to buy at higher rates, which reduces an already-reduced housing supply. Meanwhile, people like me, who cannot afford to buy, must compete for apartments, which drives up rents. And lying beneath all that is something the vice president would prefer you did not think about.
Tariffs.
Donald Trump’s illegal national sales tax is keeping inflation high, because it pushes prices higher. The Federal Reserve won’t cut interest rates with inflation as high as it is, which means borrowing is more expensive, which means people are not buying, which means people are not selling, which means the housing supply keeps getting smaller.
In theory, I suppose you could say, as Vance does, that a solution to the housing crisis is just getting rid of “illegal aliens” so there are fewer people competing for housing.
But that’s stupid. A better solution is to stop taxing the essentials of life so inflation can ease, so interest rates can fall, so people can start putting their houses up for sale again. But it’s not just stupid. It’s disgusting. Getting rid of people should not be the solution to a policy problem. What we need is better policy.
To hear the vice president tell it, the Trump regime isn’t to blame for these problems, only a Democratic Party that allegedly puts “the rights of foreigners over the interests of American citizens.” And while they search for scapegoats for the problems they create, the problems they create continue to impoverish people like me. And that makes me mad.
Let me put it this way.
In the coming months, my health insurance premium is going to spike. By how much? I don’t know exactly, but it will be more than double. I buy coverage through Connecticut’s insurance exchange (Obamacare). In Trump's “big, beautiful bill,” the Republicans in effect repealed the federal subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act. They are set to expire at year’s end, at which point I will face a kind of Sophie’s choice: Either I pay impossible rates every month or I just go without health insurance.
I won’t be alone.
“Nearly all of the roughly 24 million Americans enrolled in healthcare coverage via the ACA exchanges will face massive premium hikes – in many cases, three and four times higher than what they’re paying right now,” Charles Gaba told me recently.
“Millions will be priced out of being able to afford coverage at all,” Charles said, “while most of the rest will have to either eat the higher premiums, downgrade to a lower-quality plan with higher deductibles, higher copays, a worse provider network or all of the above. Or they’ll have to move to non-ACA coverage via so-called ‘junk plans,’ which have few if any of the patient protections required by ACA plans.”
Millions will be priced out. That almost certainly includes me.
The vice president would have us believe that whatever problems the people of this country face, the solution is getting rid of “illegals.”
Let me tell you something: no immigrant ever taxed me, illegally. No immigrant raised my rent. No immigrant made it prohibitive to buy a house. No immigrant made choices that resulted in my grocery and electric bills going up and up. No immigrant forced me to give up my health insurance. No immigrant lied about the injuries he caused.
And no immigrant tried to silence me.
The regime has established checkpoints in Washington, DC, to demand that residents prove who they are. It’s a model that could be replicated nationally at next year’s midterm elections.
“This will not start and end in DC,” said Attorneys General Kathy Jennings of Delaware and Kwame Raoul of Illinois in a statement. “The president has made his intentions very clear that he wants to abuse his powers to take over other cities, using these troops as a tool to advance his political agenda.”
If voter intimidation and harassment don’t work, there’s always cheating. Texas passed legislation that would redraw its congressional maps, giving the president five more House seats. Other red states are following suit. The governor of Texas has said he will sue in federal court to prevent blue state leaders from counterattacking.
In a democracy, we are supposed to be able to complain when our leaders and their policies do us harm. But Trump is creating conditions that are tantamount to those of rape, so he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, and all the rest of us can do is shut up and take it.
As you can imagine, I’m not in the mood for Democratic leaders to be equivocal about the injuries that are being committed by this regime.
I’m not receptive to Hakeem Jeffries, for instance, for saying New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s rent-controlled apartment is a “legitimate” subject of public concern, not when my own extortionate rent is very much a burden to me for the fact of it being out of control.
I’m not warm to Democrats accepting as true the total falsehood that Americans actually like the military occupation of Washington, DC.
And I’m not open to Democrats who pretend to believe the lies told by their enemies about virtually anything – whether the subject is crime or immigrants or other Democrats – not when inflation would be down, interest rates would be lower, housing would be more affordable and I would still have healthcare coverage had Kamala Harris been elected.
I am, however, interested in resentment, which is to say, I’m interested in any Democrat who can tell the difference between resentment based on nothing (the kind the vice president panders to) and resentment based on something (like mine).
I’m interested in any Democrat who has the spine to come to his own conclusions for the purpose of putting all that energy to good use. And I’m interested in any Democrat who is willing to speak the whole truth, saying that no immigrant has hurt Americans the way this president is hurting us.
No immigrant told me lies.
And unlike JD Vance, no immigrant asked me to be stupid.
Keep reading...
Show less
How a single memo gave us the disaster that is President Donald Trump
Last week marked the start of the slide that ended in the catastrophe of Trump.
On August 23, 1971, less than two months before he was nominated to serve as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote a memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
It was titled “Attack On American Free Enterprise System” and it outlined ways in which corporate America should defend and counter attack against “disquieting voices” — environmentalists, consumer advocates, and labor unions. Powell warned that their voices were growing louder and their influence was gaining in the halls of Congress.
I remember the time very well. The nation was witnessing a flowering of reform. Just as the “muckrakers” of the first years of the 20th century had spawned the Progressive Era in response to the wide inequalities and corruption of the first Gilded Age and its “robber barons,” the reformers of the 1960s were on the verge of spawning another progressive era that would rebalance the American economy in favor of all its stakeholders.
Louis Powell thought so, too, but he was deeply alarmed by it. He told corporate America that businesses must pour money into political campaigns, public relations campaigns, and litigation all aimed at putting an end to this wave of reform.
Corporate America duly followed Powell’s advice. An entire corporate-political complex was born, including tens of thousands of lobbyists, lawyers, political operatives, and public relations flacks.
Within a few decades, big corporations became the largest political force in Washington and in most state capitals. The number of corporate political action committees (PACs) mushroomed from under 300 in 1976 to more than 1,200 four years later. Between the late 1970s and the late 1980s, corporate PACs increased their expenditures on congressional races nearly fivefold. Labor union PAC spending rose only about half as fast.
I saw Washington change. When I arrived there in 1974 to work in the Ford administration, it was a rather seedy town. By the time I returned as secretary of labor in 1993, it had been transformed into a glittering center of corporate America — replete with elegant office buildings, fancy restaurants, pricy bistros, five-star hotels, major conference centers, beautiful townhouses, and a booming real estate market that pushed Washington’s poor, most of whom were Black, out of the increasingly upscale Northwest portion of the city and made two of Washington’s adjoining counties among the wealthiest in the nation.
By that time, corporations employed some 61,000 people to lobby for them, including registered lobbyists and lawyers. That came to more than a hundred lobbyists for each member of Congress.
That tsunami of big money from giant corporations and their CEOs, top executives, and major investors was engulfing American politics. It not only sank reform; it began to rig the entire system in favor of the moneyed interests and against average working people.
In subsequent years, the Supreme Court opened the floodgates, ruling absurdly that money was speech under the First Amendment and corporations were people.
And America is in a second Gilded Age of near-record inequality and corruption, featuring robber barons like Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and the biggest robber of them all, Trump.
What’s the answer? No easy one, of course, but we have to get big money out of politics. Start with campaign finance reform — public funds matching small-donor contributions to candidates who agree to limit their campaign spending.
Here’s a video my talented team and I created about all this:
- YouTubeyoutu.be
Should you wish for more detail — and to understand how the Powell memo fit into subsequent decades of widening inequality and mounting corruption and what we must do to reverse course — you might want to read my new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America. You can support local bookstores by ordering it at bookshop.org.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/
Keep reading...
Show less
Trump just delivered the darkest of messages
On Friday, the FBI raided the home and office of John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser.
Although it cannot be confirmed that the agents wore flak jackets emblazoned “DJT Retribution Tour 2025” on the back, they didn’t need to. Trump’s DOJ apparatchiks had already swarmed social media in the most unserious law-enforcement performance since the great Leslie Neilsen’s Police Squad classics.
The tweets were something to see. All just happened to get posted right around the times FBI agents were showing up for coffee with the Boltons. All were delivered in classic mean-face protocol, which of course demanded that no reference be made to anything in particular.
From FBI Director Kash Patel: “NO ONE is above the law … @FBI agents on mission.”
Agents on mission? What are you, 12?
But Patel’s was the serious stake in the ground. Others just retweeted it:
From Attorney General Pam Bondi: “America’s safety isn’t negotiable. Justice will be pursued. Always.”
From Deputy FBI Director Don Bongino: “Public corruption will not be tolerated.”
Bongino’s prospective bunkmate, Andrew Bailey, must be chomping at the bit to have a piece of this action.
This is such amateur hour. These performative fools have debased the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
We have a real problem here. The specifics of Bolton’s situation are beside the point.
In matters referencing national security, affidavits are almost always sealed — sometimes forever. There won’t be a lot of substance for liberals to pore over this weekend with their biscuits and gravy at Cracker Barrel.
The only part of this story worthy of prospective consideration is whether somehow, some way, the Republican political establishment might get nudged out of its cultish trance by this happening to old ally. I don’t think so.
Bolton is not a sympathetic figure on a personal level. From his earliest days as a vitriolic, super-militaristic, hyper-partisan neocon, his persona has remained the rarest of acquired tastes across the political spectrum.
More directly to the point of this story, it remains impossible to forgive Bolton for putting his bank account ahead of his country in 2019. That’s when he refused to testify in Trump’s first impeachment so as not to compromise upcoming profits from the 2020 release of his explosive tell-all book, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.
Who knows what would have happened had Bolton done the right thing?
It’s widely assumed that the book — and Trump’s years-long public feud with Bolton — are the beginning, middle and end of this FBI adventure. And yes, karma’s a bitch.
But remember that famous old passage? “They came for the crotchety national security advisors, but I wasn’t a crotchety national security advisor, so I said nothing.”
In that sense, Bolton presents an ominous test case. Whatever natural base of supporters he might have had is likely limited to his cellphone contacts. He could be in for a rough time.
And I truly don’t believe anyone should be celebrating that.
I’ll harken back to my June 9 column on another part of Trump’s terroristic playbook. That was about ICE stormtroopers, but it applies equally to the police-state tactics involved today with the FBI:
“There’s an ancient Chinese proverb that reads: “Hang one to scare a hundred.”
I assure you there a whole lot more than a hundred former Trump officials, military brass and other vocal critics who won’t sleep well tonight. Trump just delivered the darkest of messages — and it has been received.
If anyone might harbor even the slightest doubt that this is 100 percent about vindictive, petty and malicious retribution, it’s helpful that the Dark Lord of Vengeance couldn’t contain his devilish glee.
“Good morning. John Bolton. How does it feel to have your home raided at 6 o'clock in the morning?” — Roger Stone.
This is what America voted for.
And John Bolton’s home won’t be the final venue.
Keep reading...
Show less
This Orwellian Trump tactic should terrify us all
When people use the term “Orwellian,” it’s not a good sign.
It usually characterizes an action, an individual, or a society that is suppressing freedom, particularly the freedom of expression. It can also describe something perverted by tyrannical power.
It’s a term used primarily to describe the present, but whose implications inevitably connect to both the future and the past.
In his second term, Donald Trump has revealed his ambitions to rewrite America’s official history to, in the words of the Organization of American Historians, “reflect a glorified narrative … while suppressing the voices of historically excluded groups.”
This ambition was manifested in efforts by the Department of Education to eradicate a “DEI agenda” from school curricula. It also included a high-profile assault on what detractors saw as “woke” universities, which culminated in Columbia University’s agreement to submit to a review of the faculty and curriculum of its Middle Eastern Studies department, with the aim of eradicating alleged pro-Palestinian bias.
Now, the administration has shifted its sights from formal educational institutions to one of the key sites of public history-making: the Smithsonian, a collection of 21 museums, the National Zoo, and associated research centers, centered on the National Mall in Washington, DC.
On August 12, 2025, the Smithsonian’s director, Lonnie Bunch III, received a letter from the White House announcing its intent to carry out a systematic review of the institution’s holdings and exhibitions in the advance of the nation’s 250th anniversary in 2026.
The review’s stated aim is to ensure that museum content adequately reflects “Americanism” through a commitment to “celebrate American exceptionalism, [and] remove divisive or partisan narratives.”
On Aug. 19, 2025, Trump escalated his attack on the Smithsonian.
“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was…” he wrote in a Truth Social post. “Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future. We are not going to allow this to happen.”
Such ambitions may sound benign, but they are deeply Orwellian. Here’s how.
Winners write history
George Orwell believed in objective, historical truth. Writing in 1946, he attributed his youthful desire to become an author in part to a “historical impulse,” or “the desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.”
But while Orwell believed in the existence of an objective truth about history, he did not necessarily believe truth would prevail.
Truth, Orwell recognized, was best served by free speech and dialogue. Yet absolute power, Orwell appreciated, allowed those who possessed it to silence or censor opposing narratives, quashing the possibility of productive dialogue about history that could ultimately allow truth to come out.
As Orwell wrote in 1984, his final, dystopian novel, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
Historian Malgorzata Rymsza-Pawlowska has written about America’s bicentennial celebrations that took place in 1976. Then, she says, Americans “helped contribute to a pluralistic and inclusive commemoration … using it as a moment to question who had been left out of the legacies of the American Revolution, to tell more inclusive stories about the history of the United States.”
This was an example of the kind of productive dialogue encouraged in a free society.
“By contrast,” writes Rymsza-Pawlowska, “the 250th is shaping up to be a top-down affair that advances a relatively narrow and celebratory idea of Americanism.”
The newly announced Smithsonian review aims to purge counternarratives that challenge that celebratory idea.
Ministry of Truth
The desire to eradicate counternarratives drives Winston Smith’s job at the ironically named Ministry of Truth in 1984.
The novel is set in Oceania, a geographical entity covering North America and the British Isles and which governs much of the Global South.
Oceania is an absolute tyranny governed by Big Brother, the leader of a political party whose only goal is the perpetuation of its own power. In this society, truth is what Big Brother and the party say it is.
The regime imposes near total censorship so that not only dissident speech but subversive private reflection, or “thought crime,” is viciously prosecuted. In this way, it controls the present.
But it also controls the past. As the party’s protean policy evolves, Smith and his colleagues are tasked with systematically destroying any historical records that conflict with the current version of history. Smith literally disposes of artifacts of inexpedient history by throwing them down “memory holes,” where they are “wiped … out of existence and out of memory.”
At a key point in the novel, Smith recalls briefly holding on to a newspaper clipping that proved that an enemy of the regime had not actually committed the crime he had been accused of. Smith recognizes the power over the regime that this clipping gives him, but he simultaneously fears that power will make him a target. In the end, fear of retaliation leads him to drop the slip of newsprint down a memory hole.
The contemporary US is a far cry from Orwell’s Oceania. Yet the Trump administration is doing its best to exert control over the present and the past.
Memory holes
Even before the Trump administration announced its review of the Smithsonian, officials across government had taken unprecedented steps to rewrite the nation’s official history, attempting to purge parts of the historical narrative down Orwellian memory holes.
Comically, those efforts included the temporary removal from government websites of information about the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. The plane was unwittingly caught up in a mass purge of references to “gay” and LGBTQ+ content on government websites.
Other erasures have included the deletion of content on government sites related to the life of Harriet Tubman, the Maryland woman who escaped slavery then played a pioneering role as a conductor of the Underground Railroad, helping enslaved people escape to freedom.
Public outcry led to the restoration of most of the deleted content.
Over at the Smithsonian, which earlier in the year had been criticized by Trump for its “divisive, race-centered ideology,” staff removed a temporary placard with references to President Trump’s two impeachment trials from a display case on impeachment that formed part of the National Museum of American History exhibition on the American presidency. The references to Trump’s two impeachments were modified, with some details removed, in a newly installed placard in the updated display.
Responding to questions, the Smithsonian stated that the placard’s removal was not in response to political pressure: “The placard, which was meant to be a temporary addition to a 25-year-old exhibition, did not meet the museum’s standards in appearance, location, timeline, and overall presentation.”
Repressing thought
Orwell’s 1984 ends with an appendix on the history of “Newspeak,” Oceania’s official language, which, while it had not yet superseded “Oldspeak” or standard English, was rapidly gaining ground as both a written and spoken dialect.
According to the appendix, “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the worldview and mental habits proper to the devotees of [the Party], but to make all other modes of thought impossible.”
Orwell, as so often in his writing, makes the abstract theory concrete: “The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds.’ … political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts.”
The goal of this language streamlining was total control over past, present, and future.
If it is illegal to even speak of systemic racism, for example, let alone discuss its causes and possible remedies, it constrains the potential for, even prohibits, social change.
It has become a cliché that those who do not understand history are bound to repeat it.
As George Orwell appreciated, the correlate is that social and historical progress require an awareness of, and receptivity to, both historical fact and competing historical narratives.
- Laura Beers is a professor of history at American University
Keep reading...
Show less
This Trump surrender was the worst yet
Lindsay Graham says he believes Donald Trump is ready to “crush” the Russian economy if that country’s leader, Vladimir Putin, doesn’t agree to peace talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“Trump believes that if Putin doesn’t do his part, that he’s going to have to crush his economy,” the US senator told reporters in South Carolina last week. “Because you’ve got to mean what you say.”
This is an amazing thing to say.
Just three days prior, Trump met with Putin in Alaska for three hours. Beforehand, he said there would be “severe consequences” if Putin didn’t agree to a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine. Trump said he “solved six wars in six months,” implying that this one would be no different.
Then he choked.
His demands melted into the air. He was all smiles, all handshakes, all deference verging on reverence. The leader of the world’s most powerful military emerged from his meeting with a cut-rate tyrant as if he’d been dogwalked. It was so bad even a Fox reporter had to admit it looked like “Putin came in and steamrolled, got right into what he wanted to say and got his photo next to the president and then left.”
The Washington Post’s George Will, who is not a liberal, also saw the plain truth.
“The former KGB agent currently indicted for war crimes felt no need to negotiate with the man-child,” Will said (my stress). “The president’s thunderous demands — a 50-day deadline, a 10-day deadline, 'severe consequences,' a ceasefire before negotiations — all were just noise."
So yes. Senator Graham is right. You’ve got to mean what you say. Trump doesn’t. Indeed, he never does. That’s why he choked.
Because of that, he and other Trump allies have spent their time in the days after that disastrous “summit” trying to rewrite history in order to protect the president from the consequences of his own weakness.
Graham now says Trump is ready to “crush” the Russian economy, as if Trump really were the big strong man he portrays himself to be, rather than the milksop who actually called Putin “the boss” and later phoned him during a meeting with European leaders, as if getting permission.
But Graham isn’t alone.
“The president has this uncanny ability to bend people to his sensible way of thinking,” US envoy Steve Witkoff told Sean Hannity last night.
“He does it each and every time,” he said. “I've never seen anything quite like it and I've been around some master dealmakers. He is the legend as far as I'm concerned. His policy prescriptions are so pragmatic and so sensible and in a distorted world, he’s recalibrating it all. It’s simply remarkable. And every single leader that I have met in my travels, they say the same things I do. Every single one of them.”
Witkoff is the envoy who Anne Applebaum said was “an amateur out of his depth” who “misunderstood his last meeting with Putin in Moscow if he thought that the Alaska summit was going to be successful.”
On Fox, noted international relations expert Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke said: “President Trump has done an unbelievable job against long odds,” before speculating, oddly, that “it'll end up probably with a land bridge between the Crimean peninsula and Russia.”
He also said that Trump “hasn’t changed where his mission focus is. It’s peace.”
Peace through surrender.
Isn’t that the most striking thing? The US is unrivaled in its military and diplomatic might. We could end this war, now. As Applebaum said, “arm Ukraine, expand sanctions, stop the lethal drone swarms, break the Russian economy, and win the war. Then there will be peace.”
But Trump chooses weakness.
He chooses to look strong, not be strong.
And no matter what his Republican allies in the Congress do to cover up that fact, they themselves cannot make him. They, too, are weak.
Graham said the clock is ticking and that Trump must “impose steep tariffs on countries that are fueling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by buying its oil, gas, uranium, and other exports,” according to the AP, and such threats might push Putin to the negotiating table.
“If we don’t have this thing moving in the right direction by the time we get back, then I think that plan B needs to kick in,” Graham told the AP.
Plan B would be Congress acting without Trump.
Which means there is no plan B.
The Republicans are weak, because they surrendered their power, first to the rightwing media apparatus, then to Trump, who surrendered his power to Putin, who dominates the rightwing media apparatus.
And has for a decade.
We can speculate about the dirt Putin has on Trump, but fact is, he could mortally wound the president by turning the world’s biggest firehose of disinformation away from his “woke” enemies and toward him. Trump’s base is already confused by his refusal to release “the Epstein files.” Russian propaganda could be deployed to savagely widen the already broad gap between him and the MAGA faithful.
More likely, though, the Kremlin could sow doubt about Trump’s alleged strength. He’s all talk, no walk. We saw it. Russian state media brags about it. Echoes are now bouncing around mainstream media.
While Graham was shielding Trump from his weakness, the UK’s biggest conservative paper ran this hed and dek: “European rearmament is pushing Trump into irrelevance on Ukraine. This vain, vacillating, gullible US president no longer commands the West.”
The importance of the rightwing media apparatus to the Republicans is evident in their efforts at damage control. Trump showed his whole ass. Now it’s up to allies to persuade his supporters that they did not see what they saw or if they did, it was the most amazing thing ever.
They have a lot of work to do. The Economist reported that Americans have a -14 approval rating of his handling of foreign policy. The public knows next to nothing about global affairs, but we know what fear looks like. After meeting Putin, Trump looked scared. And I think he looked scared, because Putin reminded him of something important.
He who can destroy a thing controls it.
So Trump chooses weakness.
And the rest of his party follows.
Keep reading...
Show less
This Republican hero is right about one big thing — and also so wrong
Arnold Schwarzenegger, a lifelong Republican, has benefitted the world in immeasurable ways.
As California’s 38th governor, he reduced the state's greenhouse gas emissions by moving the state away from fossil fuels and toward renewables, particularly hydrogen and solar. He sought and obtained a waiver to allow California to adopt more stringent greenhouse gas emissions standards for passenger vehicles than those mandated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He’s been named an EPA Climate Change Champion for his work in green energy, clean technology and the overall struggle against climate change.
Schwarzenegger’s climate progress is even more impressive considering the size of California’s economy, now the fourth-largest in the world. With a $4.1 trillion GDP, California’s economy is larger than that of almost all countries, including Japan, Russia, and India. Only the economies of China, Germany, and the US are larger.
Given the cost and complexity of transitioning industries away from fossil fuels, especially 20 years ago, Schwarzenegger’s success demonstrates deep intelligence and an ability to see beyond the immediate. His prescience makes his “vow to fight” California’s redistricting efforts all the more puzzling.
Texas is rigging the midterms
At Trump’s insistence, Texas is passing a law designed, by intent and craft, to rig future elections beginning with the 2025 midterms.
Sensing voter backlash, Trump demanded that Republicans gerrymander Texas years ahead of its scheduled census. Having just completed its congressional maps in 2021, Texas wasn’t due to re-draw them until 2031. On Wednesday, the Texas House of Representatives obliged, creating five new Republican-leaning Congressional seats. The Texas Senate is following suit and Abbott will soon sign it into law.
Republicans don’t hide the fact that they’re manipulating voting boundaries to carve up Democratic voters, merging them with heavily Republican districts where their votes will be outnumbered. The practice got the green light in 2019 in Rucho v. Common Cause, when the Supreme Court ruled that partisan gerrymandering was a political question beyond the reach of the federal courts.
Rigging elections to protect Trump in perpetuity portends too many disastrous consequences to list. So California Gov. Gavin Newsom is pushing back with a plan to redistrict five Congressional seats. Newsom vowed only to move forward with his plan if Texas states continued theirs. Texas is moving forward, and now Trump is pushing other red states to do the same.
Arnie is right about gerrymandering
Newsom’s “Election Rigging Response Act” is a defensive move to counteract what Trump and Republicans are doing. The challenge for California is that in 2010, when Schwarzenegger was governor, an independent commission approved by voters redrew maps with the laudable goal of reducing partisanship in districting.
Although Newsom’s plan would only temporarily suspend the commission's authority, Schwarzenegger has come out swinging against it, hoping to “terminate gerrymandering.”
Schwarzenegger, who successfully campaigned for independent redistricting in California, argues correctly that gerrymandering undermines democracy and voter trust. His spokesperson said Schwarzenegger “calls gerrymandering evil, and he means that. He thinks it’s truly evil for politicians to take power from people.”
Schwarzenegger isn’t wrong. It is truly evil, as well as despotic, for politicians to choose their voters instead of the other way around. But if Newsom and other Democrat governors fail to counter Trump’s partisan redistricting war in Texas and elsewhere, Republicans will seize power nationwide, possibly permanently.
Schwarzenegger’s ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’ principle is no defense to concentration camps, book bans, state forced births, and Trump’s ever-spreading police state, to say nothing of accelerated climate destruction.
Welfare state v. donor state
Compared to California, Texas is a welfare state. In 2022, Texas received approximately $71.1 billion more from the federal government than it paid in. In contrast, California taxpayers pay far more than they receive from the federal government. In financial year 2023-24, California’s total federal taxes were $806 billion — nearly twice as much as Texas, which contributed $417 billion.
Comparative economic health is relevant here because most of the Republican-led states seeking to rig elections for Trump are also welfare states presenting drains on federal resources.
California leads not only Texas, but the nation in Fortune 500 companies, high-tech industries, new business start-ups, venture capital access, manufacturing output, and agriculture.
Despite their decades-long campaign claims, Republican economies create poverty, not wealth. Nineteen of the 20 richest states are predominantly Democratic, while 19 of the 20 poorest states are predominantly Republican. Letting poverty-producing states steer the national economy is economically backward, especially as they reject science, pretend climate change is a hoax, and ignore evidence that climate devastation is accelerating.
The partisan redistricting fight could deliver a fatal blow to democracy. Schwarzenegger is right about that, as he’s been right about so many existential challenges. The Brennan Center for Justice warns of an extremely dangerous time for American democracy: “Gerrymandering … flips the democratic process on its head, letting politicians choose their voters instead of the other way around.”
But that’s where we are: the president’s party is committed to seeking power at all costs.
As Schwarzenegger continues to lead globally on climate, pushing back against ignorance from the right that threatens to drown coastal regions and incinerate habitats out of existence, he should see that California’s redistricting response is a matter of survival. California voters will stand on Schwarzenegger’s ceremony at the nation’s peril.
- Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
Keep reading...
Show less
This Trump outrage is no mere 'distraction'
I have grown sick and tired of the word, “distraction.”
And if you are a patriot doing what you can to fight against the most anti-American administration in our nation’s history, I bet you know exactly what I am talking about.
I am done being lectured to by so-called “influencers” and Democratic “operatives” and politicians that everything the America-attacking Donald Trump and his odious fascists are doing today, is just a mere “distraction” from something they did yesterday. Every terrible thing they did yesterday, is but a mere “distraction” from some gruesome thing they did last week …
Note to all of these people: Please shut up. You are insulting as hell, are part of the problem, and are giving me a headache.
The word “distraction” is being thrown all over the Internet in response to Trump’s FBI search of the home of his former national security adviser, John Bolton. The search is allegedly just a “distraction” from the Epstein files, which were a “distraction” from any of the other 227 terrible things Trump and his panting hyenas have inflicted on this country the past decade.
Here’s what I’ll say about the Bolton “distraction” before stepping on and stomping out the drunken overuse of that word:
Rather than testify in the impeachment inquiry into then-President Trump in 2019, Bolton instead hogged the spotlight and toyed with Democrats before deciding to save his damning evidence for a book. This was grotesque, and anti-American.
Bolton is just another selfish, gutless Republican like his former boss, who believes in his interests before his country's. He is one of hundreds of Republicans with influence like, say, Mitch McConnell, who could have ended this nightmare years ago, and protected our country, but decided to profit off it instead.
Bolton helped create Trump. He could have endorsed Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris, last year but refused to do that, too. I loathe men like this, and how little they think of the United States of America.
Was the search of Bolton’s home chilling? Yes, of course. Was it predictable to anybody paying even the slightest amount of attention, and who has managed not to get “distracted” by what has been going on in this country the past 10 years? Of course it was. Was it any more chilling then rounding up United States citizens and shipping them off to God knows where? Of course not.
Was it merely a “distraction” to drag attention away from whatever is happening with the elusive Epstein Files? Please ...
Stop insulting us with all this crap. We aren’t distracted, you nitwits, we are wide awake, and furious about ALL OF IT, and wondering when the hell it is people like you will stop worrying about us being “distracted.”
- Unless, of course, you want to go on telling us that turning our military loose on OUR streets to be used against us, is merely a “distraction.”
- Unless you think a president bombing onto our military bases to sell his cheap memorabilia, while going after his political opponents is merely a “distraction.”
- Unless you think firing non-partisan, non-political experts for delivering job numbers Trump doesn’t like is merely a “distraction.”
- Unless you think killing life-saving vaccine research is merely a “distraction.”
- Unless you think attacking safeguards on our clean air and water, is merely a “distraction.”
- Unless you think Trump posting videos of a kneeling Barack Obama being placed in handcuffs is merely a “distraction.”
- Unless you think re-writing our nation’s history by minimizing caging, beating and owning other human beings is merely a “distraction.”
NONE of these things, or the scores of other gruesome events perpetrated on American citizens by this heinous administration, are mere “distractions.”
They are awful, intentional attacks, many of which used to be crimes in this country. Taken separately any of these things would have threatened to bring down entire presidential administrations.
Now they are being treated as just another cloudy afternoon in America.
But if you are one of these feeble, simple-minded people, who are easily confused, and have a problem with all these “distractions” maybe I can help:
Trump declared war on the United States of America on January 6, 2021, when he refused to accept the results of an election he lost by more than seven million votes.
It was an attempted insurrection, in which law enforcement officers were savagely beaten with rebel flag poles, clubs, stanchions, bats, and anything else Trump’s mob could get their filthy hands on.
Millions of dollars of damage was done to OUR capitol building, where politicians — Republicans and Democrats — were hunted down and threatened with hanging and/or death.
Instead of stopping his attack, Trump sequestered himself in the White House for more than three hours and rooted for its success. When it had failed, he grudgingly stalked out on the White House lawn, and told his homegrown terrorists to surrender and go home, but not before also telling them: “We love you, you're very special.”
Read that again … HE TOLD THEM THAT HE LOVED THEM.
EVERYTHING Trump has done since that terrible day has been designed around exactly ONE thing: rebuilding his anti-American army, exacting revenge on American patriots who are standing up for our country, and putting an end to our 249-year Democracy, so Republicans never relinquish power again.
Got it?
Good.
Now try concentrating on only this, and stop lecturing the rest of us about being distracted.
- (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.)
Keep reading...
Show less
Even this ruby red state doesn't like what Trump's doing
I’m writing to you from Houston, Texas, where I’m flogging Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America to every Texan who might be interested. So far, I think I’ve sold two copies.
Just kidding. Last night, in fact, I met hundreds of Texans who seemed interested.
Texas wasn’t always the bastion of right-wing extremism it seems today. Remember Ann Richards? She was the progressive firebrand governor of Texas from 1991 to 1995. I recall her keynote speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta when she said of then-President George H.W. Bush, “Poor George, he can’t help it — he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”
Today, the progressive torch is being carried in Texas by people like Beto O’Rourke, Rep. Greg Casar (from Texas’s 35th congressional district), and State Rep. Nicole Collier.
Earlier this week, Collier remained in the Texas House chamber overnight to protest a Republican-imposed requirement that Democrats agree to a mandatory police escort to leave the Capitol after a redistricting walkout. She viewed the requirement as restriction on her constitutional rights.
Collier was right, of course. Texas Republicans are treating Texas Democrats as if they’re sworn enemies. Trump has stoked this by telling Texas Governor Greg Abbott to find five additional Republican congressional seats by gerrymandering the state even more wildly than it was already gerrymandered.
On Wednesday, the newly redrawn map finally passed.
Trump is putting pressure on other red states to do the same. It’s all part of Trump’s plot to keep Republicans in control of Congress in the 2026 midterms.
The stakes are huge. Republicans could easily lose their current seven-vote majority in the House, or possibly their six-vote majority in the Senate.
Hopefully, blue state governors and legislatures — starting with Gavin Newsom’s California — will stop this assault on voting rights by credibly threatening to gerrymander an equal number of additional Democratic congressional seats.
With blue states mobilized, it wouldn’t be a race to the bottom. It would be a race to save democracy by removing any incentive for red states to try to gerrymander their way to more Republican seats.
Two other parts to Trump’s plot to keep Republicans in control of Congress are also coming into view.
He’s attacking mail-in ballots. As he wrote on Monday in a social media post, he intends to “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS.”
He also intends to target what he says are “Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES, which cost Ten Times more than accurate and sophisticated Watermark Paper, which is faster, and leaves NO DOUBT, at the end of the evening, as to who WON, and who LOST, the Election.”
Can anyone doubt what Trump is trying to do?
Asked about his effort to end mail-in voting and rid the election process of voting machines, he told reporters, “We’re going to start with an executive order that’s being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they’re corrupt.”
The third part of Trump’s plot is to occupy major cities, mostly led by Democratic mayors, which are centers of Democratic voting. He probably figures that militarizing these cities will intimidate voters to stay away from the polls.
He’s doing a trial run now in his occupation of Washington, D.C. — deploying ICE agents, National Guard troops, and the Army. To justify it, he charged that: "Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people.”
Rubbish. According to the Justice Department’s own data (which, of course, Trump rejects), violent crime in the city hit a 30-year low last year. City data shows homicides are down by more than 10%, robbery down by almost 30%, and carjackings down nearly 40%.
Let’s be clear about what’s going on here.
The man who instituted a coup against the United States when he failed to win the 2020 presidential elections — demanding that Republican governors “give” him the votes he needed, instructing his vice president not certify the election, and encouraging a mob to attack the Capitol — does not want free and fair elections in 2026 or beyond.
That’s why the rest of us — Democrats, independents, and Republicans who still believe in democracy — must organize a counter-offensive, now.
Part of that counter-offensive begins with Newsom’s California; other blue states must join in. Trump’s attacks on mail-in ballots and voting machines, and his occupation of our cities, should be challenged in the federal courts. A wide coalition of state and city officials should participate.
The rest of us must make good trouble by ensuring that Trump’s plot is widely known, and that we will resist it.
Most of the Texans I’ve talked with over the last few days (including at a coffee bar where we’ll be doing Saturday’s Coffee Klatch) tell me they don’t support what Greg Abbott is doing.
Texans relish their freedoms. They don’t want to be controlled by Washington. They don’t want to live in a dictatorship. The spirit of Ann Richards lives on.
- 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
Keep reading...
Show less
Trump will find this atrocity isn't covered by immunity
Last week, Donald Trump directed hundreds of masked agents and soldiers, who may soon be armed, to “do whatever the hell they want,” presumably to whomever the hell they want, on the streets of the US capital.
Someone should do Trump a solid and explain, slowly, that when ICE starts murdering civilians on his request, he will be criminally liable for the bloodshed, and the Supreme Court's immunity ruling won’t save him.
US soldiers, trained to kill, are also trained to obey. But when a Commander-in-Chief authorizes clear violations of federal law, soldiers have a legal duty to disobey.
The good news is that four out of five troops who were recently polled said they understand their duty to reject illegal commands.
The bad news is human nature.
As Trump sends more and more newly minted ICE agents marching across the streets of Washington D.C. and other Democrat-run cities, along with the FBI, the DEA, U.S. Marshals, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, on top of the National Guard, MAGA extremists among them will grow more and more confident in roughing people up and worse.
It's no secret that Trump’s MAGA fans, including the violent January 6 criminals he pardoned, are champing at the bit to engage in more political violence in Trump’s name, especially if they are let loose on immigrants, democrats, Black, brown, or gay people.
At Trump’s insistence, this is the targeted “enemy within.” When extremists are armed, pumped, and encouraged by the President of the United States to brutalize his domestic “enemies” any way they want, they won’t wait to be reminded.
Trump’s directive, issued in conjunction with an unprecedented military deployment on domestic soil, literally invited federal troops to commit felonious assault on American citizens. Because such a blatantly illegal and unconstitutional directive falls outside Trump’s preclusive constitutional authority as defined in Trump v. United States, he will find no presumptive immunity for the bloodshed he causes.
A president's role as Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. military falls under his "exclusive constitutional authority," but encouraging soldiers to execute American citizens would not fall within this authority because it is patently unlawful.
A president enjoys broad authority to direct the military with very few limitations, but one such limitation is that his orders may not contravene the Constitution or the laws of the United States.
Although the line between official and unofficial conduct requires further legal analysis, there is no immunity shield for blatantly unconstitutional acts, and there never will be. If Trump hadn’t traded competent legal advisors for bobble-headed Fox News sycophants, counsel would have told him that by now.
Despite lamentations from the dissent, the Roberts Court’s immunity ruling did not license Trump to commit murder. While Trump would argue that he has unchecked authority to declare bogus national emergencies, even under Justice John Roberts' unitary executive license, Trump is only presumptively immune for actions taken in pursuit of his constitutional role as president.
Article II of the Constitution vests the president with the duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” and to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.” Encouraging federal troops to assault, physically abuse, or murder citizens is not an act to faithfully execute the laws, it is the opposite.
Under the Constitution, no one in the national government — including Trump — may deprive another “of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” A presidential command to dismantle this constitutional protection could never, even under Roberts’ permissive structure, be deemed a ‘core constitutional function’ cloaked in immunity.
In Trump v. United States, the Court made very limited factual findings. Instead of addressing how Trump assembled and incited the January 6 mob to violence, the court basically only ruled that the president was immune on charges related to Justice Department communications, not for the violent acts that followed.
The court did not rule that Trump could organize a mob to attack the capital, or that Trump could murder his political adversaries, racial minorities, or members of the opposing political party. Post immunity, Trump’s executive power still remains subject to constitutional constraints.
What Trump is doing to incite political violence under his maximalist approach to power will produce both predictable and unpredictable results. Along with offering signing bonuses of $50,000, and student loan forgiveness of $60,000, ICE is now recruiting Trump loyalists to join the fun in “deporting illegals” with “your absolute boys” — directly tapping MAGA’s thirst for aggression.
The most violent day in our capital’s recent history was January 6, 2021. On that date, Trump lied about the outcome of the 2020 election to incite mass violence. This year, he’s lying about a “crime wave” in D.C., a migrant invasion in LA, and other manufactured “emergencies” to incite mass violence.
Five people died from Trump’s three hour attack on J6, and those cases are still pending.
How many people will die over the next three years of Trump telling masked agents to do whatever the hell they want?
- Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
Keep reading...
Show less
This stunning finding shows Trump is destroying his own support
By Tatishe Nteta, Adam Eichen, Alexander Theodoridis, Jesse Rhodes, and Raymond La Raja, UMass Amherst.
Has President Donald Trump survived the latest and most serious firestorm of controversy over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal? Or has the Trump administration’s handling of the release of information concerning the prosecution of a convicted child sex trafficker, Trump’s former friend, hurt the president?
A number of journalists, pointing to recent public opinion polls, have claimed that the scandal has hurt Trump. Others have argued that the public has largely moved on and the Epstein controversy no longer presents a political liability for Trump.
But both of these conclusions are based on limited polling about the Epstein controversy and thus may be premature.
Our recent University of Massachusetts Amherst national poll includes particularly detailed questions about the Epstein controversy and attitudes toward Trump, and thus provides fresh insights on how the controversy has affected public support for Trump.
We find that Trump’s handling of the Epstein controversy has done significant damage to his standing, particularly among his core supporters.
'Fumbling the matter’
Americans are paying close attention to the prolonged Epstein controversy. Our polling finds that three in four respondents have heard, read or seen “a lot” or “some” about Epstein.
Moreover, most believe that Trump is fumbling the matter.
Seven in 10 Americans believe that Trump is handling the matter “not well.” This includes pluralities of Trump’s most loyal supporters: 43 percent of Republicans, 43 percent of conservatives, and 47 percent of those who voted for him in 2024.
When we drill down on the 47 percent of 2024 Trump voters who disapprove of Trump’s handling of the Epstein controversy, we find significant cracks in the MAGA facade. Among members of this group, 28 percent now disapprove of Trump as president.
When we take demographics, ideology, partisanship and assessments of the economy into account, disapproval of Trump’s handling of the release of the Epstein files is still associated with an increase in disapproval of Trump.
Voter regret
Even more significantly, we find that among 2024 Trump voters, negative views of Trump’s handling of the Epstein files are associated with an increased desire to make a different choice if the 2024 election could be rerun.
More specifically, among Trump voters who believe that the president has mishandled the release of the Epstein files, more than one quarter – 26 percent – indicate that they would not vote for Trump if they had the opportunity to vote again in the 2024 election.
While there are no election do-overs, it is clear that the Epstein scandal has hurt Trump among his base of voters.
Much can happen between now and the midterm elections in November 2026, of course.
But if Trump fails to satisfy his political base, perceptions among Trump voters that he has mishandled the controversy could reduce enthusiasm and participation in the elections. Even if the share of Republicans alienated by the Epstein controversy is relatively small, this could hurt Republicans in close contests.
With over a year to go, the facts on the ground will likely change. But as of today, the controversy over the release of the Epstein files remains relevant. Whether the president responds in a manner that satisfies his voters is a question that could have important political consequences.
Keep reading...
Show less
Trump's worst outrage is close to being forgotten
Most of us humans have scant ability to hold in our minds things that seemed of tremendous importance not that long ago. We seldom hark back to an incident that at the time seemed momentous, only to be shoved to the back of our minds by a succession of more recent attention-grabbing events.
Thus, far too seldom do we think back on one of the most disturbing incidents in US political history: Donald Trump’s illegal scheme to destroy American democracy by attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results and replace the duly elected president, Joe Biden, with the loser, Donald Trump.
Trump’s assault on democracy is something we must never forget.
The evidence of Trump’s criminality was such that the Department of Justice indicted him on four felony counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States and witness tampering. If brought to trial and convicted, Trump would have faced serious prison time.
The indictment cites compelling evidence of Trump’s illegal activities:
- Using knowingly false claims of election fraud to get state legislatures and election officials to change electoral votes
- Organizing fraudulent slates of electors to cast fraudulent votes for Trump
- Using the Justice Department to conduct sham election crime investigations
- Using Vice-President Pence in the certification proceeding to fraudulently alter the election results
- Inciting a Capitol insurrection to halt the certification process of electoral votes
If Trump’s illegal scheme had worked, he would have supplanted Biden as president and American democracy would have been crushed. The election of the US president in accordance with the Constitution would have been subverted, the American people would have been denied their constitutional right to elect their president, and the losing candidate would have pulled off a bloodless coup against the US government.
The American people cannot be reminded too often or strongly that the person who attempted to destroy our democracy is now sitting in the White House. Had he not been elected president, he would have stood trial and if convicted by a jury of his peers, could very well be sitting in prison today.
Trump’s first seven months in office shows that he is as disdainful of democracy as when he attempted to subvert it in 2020. He has attacked judges who have ruled his executive orders illegal or unconstitutional, run roughshod over the Constitution and rule of law, usurped the authority of a compliant legislature, and appointed servile loyalists to head the FBI, CIA, and DOJ and do his authoritarian bidding.
Attempting to skew the 2026 midterm elections in Republicans’ favor, Trump has vowed to enact an unconstitutional executive order to end mail-in voting and pressed Texas to add five Republican-dominated election districts through gerrymandering to try and maintain a House majority.
With still a year and a half before the election, Trump will assuredly devise other schemes to try and corrupt the mid-term election process as he did the 2020 presidential election results.
We must never forget that our current president poses the greatest internal threat to American democracy of any president in history. He has already proven that he was willing to destroy our democracy to stay in power. Every day that he remains as president is a reminder that no person has ever been less deserving of the office.
So much has gone on since Trump was reelected that his vile assault on democracy in 2020 is a fading memory: his tariff wars, his outrageous lusting to acquire Greenland and make Canada our 51st state, his treacherous attacks on universities and blue states, his using his presidential power to wreak vengeance on his “enemies,” his failed claim to end Russia’s war on Ukraine, his green-lighting Israel’s genocidal slaughter of Palestinian civilians, and his transparent, pathological lying that reveals an ever-growing state of delusion.
Each of Trump’s latest outrages pushes the 2020 election treachery farther into the recesses of memory.
So what happens now that we’ve elected a democratic-smashing authoritarian president? First, we make sure that we never again elect a person whose is not 100 percent committed to protecting and preserving American democracy. Lesson learned.
Next, we do everything possible to mitigate the damage that Trump can do as president.
As patriotic Americans, we can protest regularly en masse against Trump’s ongoing attempt to turn America into an autocracy like Russia or Hungary. We can elect Democratic majorities to the House and Senate in 2026 to rein in an overreaching, power-grasping president and ensure that no onerous, anti-democratic laws are passed.
We should strongly encourage the 2026-elected Congress to impeach Trump, shortening the amount of time he has to shred our democracy. If democracy is as precious and inviolable to us as to our forefathers, we will do everything within the law to remove the democratic annihilator from the White House as soon as possible.
- Tom Tyner is a freelance editorialist, satirist, political analyst, blogger, author and retired English instructor
Keep reading...
Show less
MAGA is panicking as Trump finally meets his match
Gavin Newsom knows that politics isn’t just about policy papers or legislative roll calls — it’s about culture, imagery, and the stories people tell each other. That’s why he’s been trolling Donald Trump online with parody memes and razor-sharp mockery that’s spread faster than any campaign ad ever could.
The effect is unmistakable: the California governor is shifting the cultural battlefield, showing that Democrats can seize the same terrain of humor and symbolism Republicans have dominated since Richard Nixon’s “law and order” days. Newsom has left conservative pundits — particularly on Fox “News” — sputtering.
It’s the kind of cultural jujitsu that Antonio Gramsci imagined — flipping power by seizing the symbols and frames of your opponent — and it’s the kind of thing Democrats have needed to do for years but haven’t successfully pulled off since the days of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society.
Gramsci sat in one of Mussolini’s prison cells in the 1920s and 1930s, scribbling his Prison Notebooks and thinking about power. The Italian Marxist theorist recognized something most political leaders of his era missed: raw political control is never enough.
To truly rule with the broad consent of a nation’s citizens, he realized, you have to shape the culture. You have to convince people that your worldview is “common sense,” that your version of reality is the only normal, natural way to see the world.
He called this “cultural hegemony.” The churches, the schools, the newspapers, the songs people sang, the plays they watched and the stories they told all carried values. And those values shaped politics far more than any speech in parliament.
If you win the cultural battle, he argued, you will inevitably win the political one.
Gramsci’s ideas didn’t stay locked up with him. They passed through post-war European intellectuals, the British cultural theorists of the 1950s and 60s, and the American left in the academy. But conservatives were reading too, and by the 1990s a handful of right-wing thinkers had begun warning that liberals were using “cultural Marxism” to dominate universities and Hollywood.
Their solution was simple: steal Gramsci’s insight and use it to push back. Andrew Breitbart put the slogan on bumper stickers: “Politics is downstream from culture.” Steve Bannon made it into a strategy for the Trump White House.
Change the story the nation tells itself, control the cultural conversation, and politics will follow.
Republicans have taken that playbook and used it ruthlessly. Following Frank Luntz and other experts’ advice, they reduce every issue to a frame that touches the gut, not the head, and then repeat it until it becomes the background noise of American life.
Nixon gave us one of the earliest, ugliest examples. His “law and order” campaign wasn’t about crime in general; it was code for crushing the civil rights movement and suppressing Black political power.
His “war on drugs” wasn’t a moral crusade against addiction; as his aide John Ehrlichman later admitted, it was a way to criminalize Black people and anti-war activists. They couldn’t outlaw being Black or protesting the Vietnam War, but they could associate both with drugs and then use police and prisons to break movements and communities.
That was cultural framing at its most cynical and vicious. Nixon didn’t have to talk about race. He just had to say “law and order” and “drugs,” and racist white voters understood the code.
The pattern has repeated itself ever since.
When Republicans attack reproductive rights, they don’t say they want to outlaw abortion or strip women of autonomy; they say they’re defending “life.” That single word is a cultural sledgehammer. Democrats, for years, answered with “choice,” which at least carried some emotional punch, but over time they got pulled into defending Planned Parenthood against smears and explaining the economic dimensions of reproductive healthcare as a women’s “economic issue.” Important arguments, yes, but they don’t resonate at the same visceral level as “life.”
On healthcare, Republicans took the word “choice” and made it their own. “Choose your own doctor” became the mantra of those defending corporate-controlled healthcare and insurance. Democrats talked about “single payer” or “public options,” language that could have come out of an actuary’s report. “Choice” sounds American, even when it means choosing between bad insurance plans or facing bankruptcy.
When Republicans use Reagan’s favorite phrase “small government,” people picture a plucky individual freed from bureaucrats and taxes, a man out west on horseback making a life for himself and his family out of the wilderness. What they mean, though, is making government too weak to tax billionaires, regulate corporate pollution, or protect people from discrimination.
But Democrats never met this frame with one of their own. Instead of talking about “government that works for all,” as FDR and LBJ once did, Democrats let the conversation drift into debates over the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges or the technical structure of regulatory agencies.
FDR understood that people don’t want less government or more government; they want a government that works for them. That is a cultural message, not a policy paper, and Democrats have abandoned it ever since Jimmy Carter’s well-intentioned but wonk-driven presidency.
Republicans say “tax relief,” and suddenly taxes are a disease from which you need to be liberated. Democrats counter with discussions about marginal rates and progressive brackets instead of using FDR’s old line that, “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society. Too many individuals, however, want civilization at a discount.”
Republicans say “red tape,” and instantly every rule protecting you from being poisoned, cheated, or injured is recast as a useless nuisance. Democrats instead talk about the importance of “regulation,” something all of us would like less of in our lives.
Republicans say “freedom,” and people see flags and hear the national anthem. Instead Democrats, too often, talk about “programs” or “safety nets.”
The same dynamic plays out on guns. Republicans wrap the issue in the word “freedom” and the power to “fight tyranny.” Democrats come back with talk about universal background checks and assault weapons bans. Important, necessary measures, but they don’t touch the same cultural nerve.
Democrats could have framed gun control differently: freedom from being shot at school, freedom from being afraid in a grocery store, freedom from the constant terror that your child might not come home. That’s freedom that resonates with ordinary people. But by ceding the cultural word “freedom” to the GOP, Democrats let Republicans define what freedom means in America.
On immigration, Republicans talk about “secure borders” and “sovereignty.” Democrats talk about “pathways to citizenship.” Republicans make it about the survival of the nation, Democrats make it about paperwork. The Democratic Party is the party of the Statue of Liberty (that was installed during Democrat Grover Cleveland’s presidency), yet Republicans have stolen the cultural image of America and turned it into one of a fortress under siege.
Education has become another cultural battlefield. Republicans push “parents’ rights” and book bans “to protect our children.” Democrats respond with statistics about test scores and defenses of teachers’ unions. But the cultural high ground belongs to the idea that every child has the right to learn the truth, and every parent has the right to send their kid to school without censorship or fear. Republicans frame themselves as liberators of children, even as they chain them to ignorance. Democrats need to call that out for what it is, in cultural terms that are impossible to ignore.
The lesson is the same in every case. Republicans don’t win by having better policies: their policies are almost uniformly cruel, corrupt, and designed to serve the morbidly rich at the expense of everyone else. They win because they fight at the cultural level. They win because they tell a story, over and over, that makes people feel. Democrats, for decades, have responded with charts that only tickle the intellect.
It wasn’t always this way. During the New Deal and the Great Society, Democrats owned the culture wars. FDR didn’t talk about the Securities and Exchange Commission; he talked about “saving capitalism from itself,” about “restoring faith in America,” about “freedom from want and fear.”
Lyndon Johnson didn’t just present Medicare as a program; he said it was part of building a Great Society where people could live with dignity. He sold the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts with similar rhetoric. Those were cultural narratives, not policy briefs. They tied the Democratic party to the most powerful emotions and aspirations of the American people.
If Democrats want to win again, they have to stop ceding the cultural battlefield. Instead, they need to seize today’s opportunities to fully engage in the culture wars, from policy prescriptions to Gavin Newsom ridiculing Trump to JB Pritzker calling out the GOP’s embrace of fascism.
That means reframing every major issue not just in terms of policy mechanics, but in terms of the classic and compelling American values of freedom, fairness, safety, dignity, and opportunity.
- Taxes aren’t a burden; they are the way we all pay for the freedom and opportunity America makes possible.
- Regulations aren’t red tape; they are the rules that keep the game fair.
- Healthcare isn’t about exchanges; it’s about whether you have the right to live without fear of medical bankruptcy.
- Guns aren’t about background checks; they’re about whether your child comes home from school alive.
- Immigration isn’t about paperwork; it’s about whether America still stands for the promise on the Statue of Liberty.
Republicans learned from Gramsci and weaponized culture. They turned it into dog whistles, slogans, and memes that bypass reason and lodge themselves in the national gut. Democrats can learn from the same source without resorting to the GOP’s lying, cruelty, and thinly coded racism.
The closest Democrats have come in recent years was Barack Obama’s “Hope and Change” campaign in 2008, revisited in 2012. But those terms, while culturally potent, lost their impact as the Democratic Party continued to bow to the demands of the banks (not a single bankster went to prison for the 2008 crash they caused) and health insurance (Obamacare was written by the Heritage Foundation and gifted the industry with trillions after Obama dropped the public option) industries.
We can tell the story of freedom that is big enough to include everyone. We can tell the story of America not as a fortress for billionaires but as a community where everyone has a fair shot and nobody is left behind.
Like FDR and LBJ, Democrats can again talk about America realizing its potential as a “we society” instead of the selfish Ayn Rand “me society” that Republicans idolize with their “I got mine, screw the middle class” policies and memes.
The alternative is to keep losing ground to a Republican Party that has mastered the art of cultural hegemony in the worst sense of the term. Nixon showed how destructive that could be with his law and order rhetoric. Reagan perfected it with his “welfare queen” lies. Trump and Bannon have pushed it into the realm of authoritarian spectacle, where politics becomes theater and culture becomes a weapon to bludgeon democracy itself.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
The Democrats of the New Deal and Great Society eras knew how to speak to the heart as well as the head. They knew that politics is not just about what laws are passed but about what stories a nation tells itself about who it is. They knew that culture is not an afterthought; it is the riverbed through which politics flows.
Republicans now know it too, and they’ve been poisoning that river for half a century. If Democrats want to save democracy, they must reclaim the story of America, the cultural high ground, and the word freedom itself.
Keep reading...
Show less
Copyright © 2025 Raw Story Media, Inc. PO Box 21050, Washington, D.C. 20009 |
Masthead
|
Privacy Policy
|
Manage Preferences
|
Debug Logs
For corrections contact
corrections@rawstory.com
, for support contact
support@rawstory.com
.