Opinion
What if Democrats could take down Trump by starting from the bottom?
What if, lacking an organized resistance to fascism like we have had in previous eras (the civil rights movement, SDS, BLM, the Wobbly’s) the Democratic Party itself could play the role of producing radical, positive transformation across America?
Sound crazy? It’s actually happened twice.
The first time was in the 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal literally flipped our politics and the American economy upside down, turning us from a raw, harsh capitalist system to a democratic socialist system with Social Security, legalized unions, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, workplace safety rules, massive infrastructure construction, and millions of Americans being employed directly by the government to end poverty.
It happened again in the 1960s, with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, producing Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, food stamps, low income housing, National Public Radio, a transformation of our educational system for the better, USAID, Job Corps, VISTA, Head Start, a major Social Security expansion, The National Endowment for the Arts, and what was essentially free college.
Last Sunday, I was on Ali Velshi’s show on MSNBC for a conversation about protest movements. I pointed out that back in the 60s, when I was in SDS, there were a number of groups that were quite active, particularly on college campuses, but today most of them have been gutted or banned.
Black Lives Matter has disintegrated, the movement against Israel’s slaughter in Gaza has led to universities rolling over and capitulating, and the #MeToo and abortion rights movements are essentially leaderless.
Which leaves the Democratic Party, as I mentioned on Ali’s show. Billionaires and racists turned the Republican Party into a neofascist protest party over the past decade; progressives and those of us who want to preserve democracy in America need to similarly says control of and radicalize the Democratic Party in the tradition of FDR and LBJ.
There is a vital lesson progressives must learn, which is how the far right took control of the Republican Party over a decade ago and forced the entire Conservative establishment to lurch so far to the Right that they’ve even dumped people like Liz Cheney and George W. Bush.
If progressives hope to have any shot at influencing today’s Democratic Party and kicking out the corporate sellout Democrats and replacing them with real-deal progressives, then we need to get to work right now to do exactly what the Tea Party did a decade and a half ago to take power.
And it starts in our own backyards.
Let me introduce you to the now-defunct Concord Project, a right-wing organization that, a decade ago, was in charge of helping the Tea Party’s successful effort to take over and radicalize the GOP.
The Concord Project expanded their get-out-the-vote strategy beyond just traditional phone banking, canvassing, and putting up “vote Republican” signs. Instead, they decided to infiltrate local politics by encouraging Tea Partiers and conservatives more generally to become “Precinct Committee Members.”
Here’s their pitch in their own words from one of their Obama-era YouTube training videos:
“What’s the most powerful political office in the world? It is not the President of the United States. It’s Precinct Committeeman.”
So why is a Precinct Committeeman (or person) so important?
“First, because precinct committeemen and only precinct committeemen get to elect the leaders of the political parties; if you want to elect the leadership of one of the two major political parties in this country, then you have to become a precinct committeeman.”
As in the oldest and most basic governing reality in a republic: true and effective political power flows up from the bottom.
It starts with Precinct Committeemen and women — people who are either appointed or win local elections with very few votes at stake, in some cases only 10 or 20 votes — to gain positions that pretty much anyone can hold but which wield enormous power.
It’s Precinct Committee Persons who elect district, county, and state party officials and delegates, who choose primary nominees that then go on to hold elected office, and who help draft a party’s platform.
They’re also generally the first people who elected officials meet with when they come back into the district. And those officials listen carefully to what Precinct Committee persons have to say.
So, the Concord folks told their people, if far right Tea Partiers moved in and took over Precinct Committee seats then they’d also be able to nominate a slew of Tea Partiers to hold higher offices within the Republican Party and for primaries.
And those Tea Party Republican Party primary candidates would then be winnowed down in the primary to one Tea Party Republican to run against the Democrat in the general election. This way, Tea Partiers would end up dominating the GOP.
That was their pitch: take over the party from the inside, from the bottom up. And it worked.
Control the primaries — as the Precinct Committee Members do — and you control the ultimate candidate, the election, and ultimately the nation, as we’ve seen repeatedly since the Tea Party era.
This is from a video they posted in January of 2010, with the same Concord Project Representative encouraging people in the Tea Party to do exactly what I just described:
“This video is for all the people out there in the Tea Party movement, the 9/12ers, just good decent people who are really fearful of what’s going on in the country and want to do something to fix things and they’re not sure what to do. Well, I’ve got a solution for you. The best way to ensure that conservatives win that all-important primary election is to become a real ball player in the ball game of politics. And that ball game is called party politics.
“And this is a secret, they don’t want the party establishments, any incumbents don’t want you to know about this and that’s why I’m telling you about it. Only precinct committeemen get to vote for, to elect party leaders. Only precinct committeemen can vote to endorse candidates.”
Again, that was in 2010, 11 months before that year’s elections.
In 2008, half of the Republican Party’s Precinct Committeemen positions around the country were vacant.
But by 2011, motivated by the efforts of people like the Concord Project, the Tea Party (which has now mostly morphed into MAGA) had swept in to fill the gaps: They’d filled up the Republican Party.
And we saw the results of the Precinct Committee takeover first in 2012 and more and more vividly in every election since: the GOP is now being driven largely from the bottom up by activists who’ve taken over the party and are also running for school boards and other local offices.
In 2012, after this campaign to get movement conservatives into the GOP, Tea Party candidates got onto nearly every ballot around the country and picked up 87 new seats in the US House of Representatives and nine new seats in the Senate.
And even though the Tea Party didn’t then control a majority within the GOP in Congress like MAGA does now, they did control the Republican Party’s platform because they had control of the Precinct Committees.
Progressives and believers in democracy who want to fight Trump’s fascism need to do the same thing, only within the Democratic Party.
The rules about how to become a Precinct Committee Person vary from state to state, so step one is to show up at your local Democratic Party, sign up, and find out who the players are and what the rules are.
Even the names of these positions vary, as former Ohio Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper notes on his excellent Substack newsletter Pepperspectives:
“In Cincinnati, we call them ‘precinct executives.’ Elsewhere, they are called ‘committeemen’ or ‘committeewomen.’ In other places, ‘ward chairs.’ Whatever they’re called, they are the basic unit of each city or county party structure in the country.”
If we’ve learned one thing over the last few years, it’s that the Democratic Party shifted to the corporate “center” with Clinton and Obama and its establishment has been highly resistant to adopting real progressive change or elevating genuine progressives (like AOC) to senior/leadership positions.
And as we see right now in the Party’s leadership’s apparent inability to call out Trump and his parade of horribles, this unwillingness to stand up and fight is leading to the dismantling of programs that progressives fought so hard for over the entire last century.
We have been too often losing these fights, and to win them takes more than union protests in Wisconsin, a march on Trump’s birthday, or even voting, although those are all important.
But to really take power, like the Tea Party did in one short year, it will take an infiltration of the Democratic Party itself through claiming Precinct Committee positions, as well as simply showing up regularly at the meetings.
If this year, starting now, we execute the same strategy the Tea Party did when the billionaires funding it first set out to take over the GOP, then we can move the Democratic Party back to its progressive roots and finally see the progressive reforms — and election victories — that we’ve been fighting for.
We have 16 months before the 2026 midterm elections and your mission is to show up at your local Democratic Party headquarters and begin the infiltration.
Good luck and get started!
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Trump knows one man has the strength to finish him off
By Andrew Dodd, Professor of Journalism, The University of Melbourne and Matthew Ricketson, Professor of Communication, Deakin University.
If Rupert Murdoch becomes a white knight standing up to a rampantly bullying US president, the world has moved into the upside-down.
This is, after all, the media mogul whose US television network, Fox News, actively supported Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election result and paid out a $787 million lawsuit for doing so.
It is also the network that supplied several members of Trump’s inner circle, including former Fox host, now controversial Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth.
But that is where we are after Trump filed a writ on July 18 after Murdoch’s financial newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, published an article about a hand-drawn card Trump is alleged to have sent to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2003. The newspaper reported:
A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly “Donald” below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.
The Journal said it has seen the letter but did not republish it. The letter allegedly concluded:
Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret.
The card was apparently Trump’s contribution to a birthday album compiled for Epstein by the latter’s partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence after being found guilty of sex trafficking in 2021.
Trump was furious. He told his Truth Social audience he had warned Murdoch the letter was fake. He wrote, “Mr Murdoch stated that he would take care of it but obviously did not have the power to do so,” referring to Murdoch handing leadership of News Corporation to his eldest son Lachlan in 2023.
Trump is being pincered. On one side, The Wall Street Journal is a respected newspaper that speaks to literate, wealthy Americans who remain deeply sceptical about Trump’s radical initiative on tariffs, which it described in an editorial as “the dumbest trade war in history.”
On the other side is the conspiracy theory-thirsty MAGA base who have been told for years that there was a massive conspiracy around Epstein’s apparent suicide in 2019 that included the so-called deep state, Democrat elites and, no doubt, the Clintons.
Trump, who loves pro wrestling as well as adopting its garish theatrics, might characterize his lawsuit against Murdoch as a smackdown to rival Hulk Hogan vs Andre the Giant in the 1980s.
To adopt wrestling argot, though, it is a rare battle between two heels.
Friendship of powerful convenience
Murdoch and Trump’s relationship is longstanding but convoluted. The key to understanding it is that both men are ruthlessly transactional.
Exposure in Murdoch’s New York Post in the 1980s and ‘90s was crucial to building Trump’s reputation.
Not that Murdoch particularly likes Trump. Yes, Murdoch attended his second inauguration, albeit in a back row behind the newly favoured big tech media moguls. He was also seen sitting in the Oval Office a few days later looking quite at home.
But this was pure power-display politics, not the behaviour of a friend.
Remember Murdoch’s derision on hearing Trump was considering standing for office before the 2016 election, and his promotion of Ron DeSantis in the primaries before Trump’s second term. Murdoch’s political hero has always been Ronald Reagan. Trump has laid waste to the Republican Party of Reagan.
Murdoch knows what the rest of sane America knows: Trump is downright weird, if not dangerous. This, of course, only makes Murdoch’s complicity in Trump’s rise to power, and Fox News’ continued boosterism of Trump, all the more appalling.
But, in keeping with Murdoch’s relationship to power throughout his career, what he helps make, he also helps destroy. Perhaps now it’s Trump’s turn to be unmade. As a former Murdoch lieutenant told The Financial Times:
He’s testing out: Is Trump losing his base? And where do I need to be to stay in the heart of the base?
And here is Murdoch’s great advantage, and his looming threat.
Double-edged sword
The advantage comes with the scope of Murdoch’s media empire, which operates like a federation of different mastheads, each with their own market and aspirations. While Fox News panders to the MAGA base, and The New York Post juices its New York audience, The Wall Street Journal speaks, and listens, to business. Each audience has different needs, meaning they’re often presented with the same news in very different ways, or sometimes different news entirely.
Like a federation, though, News Corp uses its various operations to drive the type of change that affects all its markets.
It might work like this. The Wall Street Journal breaks a story that’s so shocking it begins to chip away at MAGA’s unquestioning loyalty of Trump. This process is, of course, willingly aided by the rest of the media. The resulting groundswell eventually allows Fox News and the Post to tentatively follow their audiences into questioning, and then perhaps criticising, Trump.
The threat is that before that groundswell builds, Murdoch is seriously vulnerable to criticism from a still dominant Trump, who can turn conspiracy-prone audiences away from Fox News with just a social media post. Trump has already been busy doing just that, saying he is looking forward to getting Murdoch onto the witness stand for his lawsuit.
If the Fox audience decides it’s the proprietor who’s behind this denigration of Trump, they may decide to boycott their own favoured media channel, even though Fox’s programming hasn’t yet started questioning Trump.
The Murdochs’ fear of audience backlash was a major factor in Fox’s promulgation of the Big Lie after Trump’s defeat in 2020. The fear their audience might defect to Newsmax or some other right-wing media outfit is just as real today.
History littered with fakery
We also need to consider that Trump might be right. What if the letter is a fake?
Murdoch has form when it comes to high-profile exposés that turn out to be fiction. Who can forget the Hitler Diaries in 1983, which we now know Murdoch knew were fake before he published.
Think also of the Pauline Hanson photos, allegedly of her posing in lingerie, all of which were quickly proved to be fake after they were published by Murdoch’s Australian tabloids in 2009.
There was also The Sun’s despicable and wilfully wrong campaign against Elton John in 1987 and the same paper’s continued denigration of the people of Liverpool following the Hillsborough stadium disaster in 1989.
But while Murdoch’s News Corp has a history of confection and fakery, the Wall Street Journal has a reputation for straight reportage, albeit through a conservative lens. Since Murdoch bought it in 2007, it has been engaged in its own internal battle for editorial standards.
Media rolling over
What Trump won’t get from Murdoch is the same acquiescence he’s enjoyed from ABC and CBS, which have handed over tens of millions of dollars in defamation settlements following dubious claims by Trump about the nature of their coverage.
In December 2024, ABC’s owner Disney settled and agreed to pay $15 million to Trump’s presidential library. The president sued after a presenter said Trump was found guilty of raping E. Jean Carroll.
Trump had actually been found guilty by a jury in a civil trial of sexually abusing and defaming Carroll and was ordered to pay her $5 million.
CBS’ parent company, Paramount, did similarly after being sued by the president, agreeing in early July to settle and pay $16 million to Trump’s library. This was despite earlier saying the case was “completely without merit”.
Beware the legal microscope
From Trump’s viewpoint, two prominent media companies have been cowed. But his campaign against critical media doesn’t stop there.
Last week, Congress passed a bill cancelling federal funding for the country’s two public-service media outlets, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR).
Also last week, CBS announced the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s stridently critical comedy show, although CBS claims this is just a cost-cutting exercise and not about appeasing a bully in the White House.
Presuming the reported birthday letter is real, Murdoch will not bend so easily. And that’s when it will be important to pay attention, because at some point Trump’s lawyers will advise him about the dangers of depositions and discovery: the legal processes that force parties to a dispute to reveal what they have and what they know.
If the Epstein files do implicate Trump, the legal fight won’t last long and the media campaign against him will only intensify.
Right now we have the spectre of Murdoch joining that other disaffected mogul, Elon Musk, in a moral crusade against Trump, the man they both helped make. The implications are head-spinning.
As global bullies, the three of them probably deserve each other. But we, the public, surely deserve better than any of them.
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One key right is older than America — but still under threat from Trump
By Ray Brescia, Associate Dean for Research and Intellectual Life, Albany Law School.
As the United States edges up to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026, one of the core principles the founders sought to advance — that the government must act with accountability and in accordance with the rule of law — is being strongly tested.
In their deliberations leading up to the declaration, the founders would not just raise deep concerns that the government of King George III was violating the Colonists’ rights, which they described in the Declaration. They would also enshrine these principles in the U.S. Constitution over a decade later, through the concept of “due process.”
What did the framers likely mean when they did so? That’s no longer simply an academic question for legal scholars like me. The meaning and application of due process has become a crucial issue in the U.S., most often with respect to the Trump administration’s migrant deportation efforts.
Over the past several months, the U.S. Supreme Court has made several rulings in deportation-related cases with respect to what’s called the due process clause of the Constitution.
In April 2025, in the case Trump v. J.G.G., the court seemed to state quite clearly that deportations could not take place without due process. More recently, however, in D.H.S. v. D.V.D., the Supreme Court prevented a lower court from providing due process protections to a group of men the administration wanted to deport to South Sudan, where they are at risk of facing torture and even death.
These seemingly contradictory rulings not only make it unclear when due process applies but probably leave many asking what the term “due process of law” even means and how it works.
Origins of due process
The American concept of due process can be traced from medieval England to its modern formulation by the U.S. Supreme Court. Doing so allows the meaning of due process to come into focus. It also calls into question the court’s most recent ruling on this issue.
The concepts of due process and the rule of law largely emerged in the 13th century in the Magna Carta, a formal, written agreement between King John and the rebel aristocracy that effectively established legal constraints on government.
One key passage from the Magna Carta provided that “No Freeman shall be taken, or any otherwise imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or destroyed; nor we will not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful Judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the Land.”
This accord established formal constraints on a previously unrestrained regent, setting English law on the course that would prioritize rule of law over the whims of the monarch.
Over a century later, Parliament passed the statute of 1354 that said “That no Man of what Estate or Condition that he be, shall he put out of Land or Tenement, nor taken nor imprisoned, nor disinherited, nor put to death, without being brought in Answer by due Process of the Law.”
These principles evolved over time in British law and then informed the emerging revolutionary spirit in the American Colonies.
Released in January 1776, Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense helped galvanize and steel many Colonists for the revolutionary conflict to come. The work shifted the focus of Colonists’ anger from trying to force the king to treat them better to more radical change: independence and a country governed by the rule of law.
What the Colonists wanted, Paine wrote, was not a monarch: “So far as we approve of monarchy, that in America THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.”
Defining due process
After independence, many of the original 13 states adopted their own constitutions that enshrined principles akin to due process to protect their constituents from government overreach, such as that government was to be bound, as in Virginia’s Declaration of Rights in 1776, by “the law of the land.”
But it was not until the nation adopted the Bill of Rights — the first 10 amendments to the Constitution — in 1791 that the federal government could not act in a way that deprived the populace of life, liberty or property without due process of law. After the Civil War, the 14th Amendment applied these same protections to all government action, state and federal.
The contemporary and most comprehensive formulation of what due process requires can be found in the Supreme Court’s ruling in the 1970 case Goldberg v. Kelly, brought by welfare recipients challenging their loss of such benefits without a hearing.
The court determined that when governments attempt to deprive someone of their life, liberty or property, the target of those attempts must receive fair notice of the charges or claims against them that would justify that loss; be given an opportunity to defend against those claims; and possess the right to have such defenses considered by an impartial adjudicator.
The Supreme Court in 1976 accepted that due process protections in different settings will vary based on a number of variables. Those include what is at stake in the case, the likelihood that government might make a mistake in a particular setting, and the benefits and burdens of providing certain forms of process in a given situation.
When someone’s life is literally on the line, for example, more exacting procedures are required. At the same time, regardless of how important the interest that is subject to due process — whether it is one’s life, one’s home, one’s liberty, or something else — the components of fair notice, an opportunity to be heard, and to have one’s case decided by an impartial adjudicator must be meaningful.
As the court said in Mullane vs. Central Hanover Bank & Trust Co. in 1950: “Process which is a mere gesture is not due process.”
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Only one man is to blame for this MAGA crisis of faith
Liberals should bear in mind that recent revelations by the Wall Street Journal would not have the impact they are having if the president had not already triggered a crisis of faith in the cult of MAGA.
The Journal reported this month that Donald Trump had given Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious child-sex trafficker, a birthday note in which he appeared to joke about their shared interest in sex with underage girls.
The Journal reported last week that Trump was informed in May that his name appeared multiple times in Epstein files, along with hundreds of others. The implication is that his presence in the files is the reason the Department of Justice decided earlier this month to close the case.
From the liberal view, this is damning confirmation of what we already know, including that Donald Trump is an adjudicated rapist with a documented history of association with Epstein. The revelations merely add to our understanding of the president, as a man who will corrupt the government if that’s what it takes to cover up his crimes.
And because we already know these things, some of us are prone to believing these revelations, and any revelations to come, will make no difference at all. As one liberal put it today, in frustration: “The Epstein files thing is so baffling — like Trump supporters would find out that he's guilty of pedophilia and suddenly they would stop supporting him? They love all his criminality. And his corruption. And his lies.”
But if it made no difference, we must account for why Trump’s normal diversionary tactics are not working, and why so many Republicans and MAGA media personalities are not letting the Epstein scandal go.
It is not because these people are suddenly concerned about their leader’s apparent complicity with America’s most famous pedophile ring. Liberals are correct to be skeptical about that. Where liberals should be open is in the fact that the president himself triggered a crisis of faith — by way of covering his ass. As a result, people around him sense weakness and some are now using the crisis as a means of positioning themselves advantageously for a post-Trump future.
To explain, I need to remind you of something I said last week — that as far as MAGA was concerned, for the last decade or so, Trump has been the exception to the rule of everything, such that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose support. He could lead an attempted paramilitary takeover of the US government and not lose support. He could be friends with a child-sex trafficker and not lose support. No matter what he did, MAGA never held him accountable.
Why? In large part, because MAGA is in thrall to conspiracy theories that claim to explain how things work. One of them holds that the world is dominated by shadowy elites who control the government, the corporations and the media. This (Jewish) cabal is so powerful it can commit any crime — including the most heinous, like child-sex trafficking and even cannibalism — and get away with it, all while conspiring with allies, foreign and domestic, to bring America down.
Belief in these stories was so strong that even when Trump was found guilty of committing crimes, as he was before the election when a jury convicted him on 34 counts of fraud, he couldn’t possibly be that guilty in the eyes of MAGA. After all, his conviction was seen as proof of the conspiracy against him and America. The MAGA faithful was never going to believe he was a felon, because they believed he was just like them — a victim of a conspiracy of galactic proportions that justified virtually any reaction. If Trump had to become a dictator to defeat it, so be it.
If this were still the context for the president, recent revelations by the Wall Street Journal would not have had the impact they are currently having, because Trump’s followers would have understood those reports as proof of the conspiracy against him and America. News about Trump being in the Epstein files would have been seen as affirmation of the faith. News about Trump covering up his involvement would have been understood as a necessary move in the battle against evil.
But Trump can no longer have confidence in a context that made him the exception to every rule, because the MAGA faithful are now beginning to doubt whether he really is like them, which is to say, whether he really is a victim of the conspiracy against America.
When the Department of Justice closed the case on Epstein earlier this month, Trump’s followers were forced to choose between their leader and their belief in a pernicious plot to destroy their way of life, and because they were not going to stop believing in their imaginary enemies, they were suddenly open to the possibility that Trump isn’t the man they believed him to be. It was a crisis of faith.
This crisis of faith is why Trump’s normal diversionary tactics are not working as they used to. With assistance from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, he tried to draw attention away from the Epstein scandal by accusing Barack Obama of “cheating” in the 2016 election.
That might have worked when MAGA believed Trump is a victim of the deep state (which, in MAGA world, is controlled by those who control Obama) but now that Trump won’t release the Epstein files, it’s no longer clear to MAGA whether he’s against “the globalists.”
This crisis of faith is also being seen as an opportunity by Republicans who believe the president has outlived his usefulness. With the GOP’s reconciliation bill now signed into law, there are very few policy fights left that do not take more than they give. MAGA media personalities are not going to stop catering to people who are themselves not going to stop believing in their imaginary enemies. Meanwhile, Trump is old. He is in poor health, reportedly. He is nearly a spent force. We are seeing the conditions, as Steve Millies told me, in which party operatives are quietly figuring out who’s going to lead the party after Trump.
How this ends is anyone’s guess. I’m not ready to speculate. No one should be. But whatever happens will be a product, in part, of liberals properly understanding what’s going on, and from that, devising a plan of action. As of now, liberals seem stuck on the idea that MAGA is in revolt because they realize Trump is what liberals have been saying about him for a decade. As one liberal said today, also in frustration: “They elected a rapist, now they’re upset that he’s a rapist?”
Not exactly.
The MAGA faithful were willing to overlook any of Trump’s crimes — if they recognized them as such — with the understanding that his were nothing compared to the crimes committed by perceived enemies so powerful that bringing them to justice required a man of action ready to break all the rules to get the job done. To MAGA, Epstein represented those enemies. To MAGA, Trump was that man of action. But now it looks like he’s not their criminal. He’s just a criminal, same as the rest.
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This candidate could finally be the one to take down the billionaires
I have no doubt that Zohran Mamdani, upset winner over the heavily favored former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, would have greatly preferred that his much better financed opponent would graciously accept the will of his party’s voters, thereby allowing the Democratic nominee to sail on through the final election in November as is generally the case. And so would we, his supporters, all.
Instead, Mamdani finds himself actively opposed by elements of just about every significant anti-democratic, anti-working class faction in American politics. As the Talking Heads song put it, this race “ain’t no disco; this ain’t no fooling around.” Should Mamdani’s campaign prevail over all of them, the victory will realign the nation’s politics more profoundly than anything since the first Bernie Sanders presidential campaign — a shift the nation is obviously in desperate need of.
On the one side we have a candidate arguing the need to pull out all the stops, to try all avenues — increased rent control and housing construction, reduced transit fares, city-owned supermarkets, higher taxes on great wealth, and so on down the line — in an effort to allow the city’s working class to remain the city’s working class, rather than become a stream of economic refugees who can no longer afford to live there.
On the other side we’ve got a magpie’s cast of characters, united only by their dread of the prospect of a mayor siding with the struggling many, while openly acknowledging that the overprivileged few — the billionaires who think that the city owes it all to them — are not the saviors they think themselves to be, but are actually part and parcel of the problem.
First up in the cast, of course, is the Republican Party, nominally in the person of its candidate Curtis Sliwa, founder of the unarmed crime prevention group the Guardian Angels.
Sliwa, however, is not expected to be a factor in the final outcome. Naturally, the party’s interest in the race is primarily represented — as it is in all things — by our intermittently coherent president, who has fulminated about arresting Mamdani, revoking his citizenship, cutting off federal funding to the city, and even taking direct control of it, a threat he was bound to make sooner or later to some local government not to his taste.
Then we have the Democrats more interested in corporate cash than in the working class — unfortunately a rather large sector of the party — along with those troubled by the fact that Mamdani opposes Israel’s ongoing obliteration of Gaza, two groups with significant overlap.
This dominant wing of the party is actually directly involved in this race to an unusual degree by dint of the fact that the minority leaders of both branches of Congress — Rep. Hakeem Jeffries and Sen. Chuck Schumer — are Brooklyn voters.
So are they going to pull the lever for their party’s nominee in November? We don’t know. Neither has actually opposed Mamdani, but the failure of the party’s leaders to endorse him thus far is without recent precedent. Since Schumer was recently pleased to be seen smiling in a group photo with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, you can see the problem. Others have been outright hostile. Democrat Laura Gillen, representative of a New York city-adjacent district, for instance, has characterized Mamdani as “a threat to my constituents.”
Next we have the independent candidates themselves, who have now come to seem more like anti-Mamdani place holders, even though one of them is actually the current mayor of New York.
That would be Eric Adams, elected to the position as a Democrat, who declined to enter his party’s primary after running into a few bumps in the road during his term of office. The problems were indictment on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, wire fraud, soliciting campaign contributions from foreign nationals, and soliciting and accepting a bribe; and a subsequent pardon by the ubiquitous Donald Trump.
The other major one is Andrew Cuomo, one-time Democratic governor of New York, forced to resign in the face of numerous charges of sexual harassment, and loser of the Democratic primary, despite the backing of independent expenditure committees spending more than $25 million — the heaviest spending in the history of New York City politics.
Cuomo has decided that the voters deserve a second chance to make up for their error in not choosing him the first time and declared that this time “It’s all or nothing. We either win or even I will move to Florida.”
His campaign has subsequently declared this was a joke — the Florida part, not the second shot. But there is precedent: Trump decamped there after the state’s voters rejected him and certainly he could fix the ex-governor up with something at Mar-a-Lago. It’d only be fair after everything he’s done for Eric Adams.
And last, but certainly not least, we have the billionaires, starting with former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg, never one to shy from putting his money where his mouth is — he spent over $1 billion on his own four-month presidential campaign in 2020 (he won American Samoa) — dropped $8.3 million on the Cuomo effort.
Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and William Lauder, executive chairman of The Estée Lauder Companies, were in for $500,000. Expedia chairman Barry Diller, Netflix chairman Reed Hastings, and hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb were down for $250,000. Alice Walton, of the Walmart family, contributed $100,000. Citadel CEO Ken Griffin was in for $50,000.
Ackman, Loeb, and Griffin were 2024 Trump supporters, by the way.
And reinforcements are on the way, with Hamptons polo patrons Kenneth and Maria Fishel of Renaissance Properties lining up new billionaires — in this case for Eric Adams — including grocery (Gristedes and D’Agostino) and real estate mogul John Catsimatidis, himself a former (Republican) candidate for New York City mayor.
As Kenneth Fishel told Fortune, “This is about keeping New York vibrant, keeping it free from socialism, and keeping it safe.”
At this point, this story might sound like something out of that recent Francis Ford Coppola movie that no one went to see, but it’s what’s actually happening.
(Personal disclosure: As one who was once slightly famous long ago, when elected to the Massachusetts Legislature at 32 as a self-described socialist — said to be the first since the Sacco and Vanzetti era — I am wildly jealous. Reading the news on election night, I was literally moved to tears of joy. And I don’t imagine I’m the only one feeling envious.
The upshot of all this? This is our race.
Who’s the we in “our”? Anyone who feels that we the people have to find a way to wrest control of the economic future of this country from the likes of Trump, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, all of the above-named billionaires, and the ones we don’t know. Whether it be knocking, calling, texting, posting, giving a buck — even if just that — all of us should give this race at least a bit of our attention. Just think of how sweet it will be to beat that whole crew.
- Tom Gallagher is a former Massachusetts State Representative and the author of 'The Primary Route: How the 99% Take On the Military Industrial Complex.' He lives in San Francisco.
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Benjamin Franklin warned us about this man — and I don't mean Trump
My wife Kitty and a number of our progressive friends have been telling me for years that I had to read U.S. Vice President JD Vance's 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.
They raved about it. Even today, nine years after it was published and Vance became vice president, they still rave.
They discounted the critics who thought that Vance was an egotistical loudmouth. So did plenty of others — sales to readers across the political spectrum made the memoir a bestseller, turning the author into a millionaire and helping to launch his political career.
True, for Vance to emerge from such a challenging childhood to become what he has become is amazing. Surely he had to be brilliant to rise so high so quickly.
But this July, Vance was the tiebreaker in the razor thin vote in the U.S. Senate (51-50) for the big Trump administration budget bill that will throw millions of Americans off Medicaid and federal food assistance programs.
This is the bill Rev. William Barber and Institute for Policy Studies researchers have charged with "policy murder." (And that's no exaggeration — a recent study estimates that over 51,000 people will die each year from the healthcare cuts alone.)
How to reconcile these two realities?
So, I read the book. In sum, I challenge Vance's central claim that the dire straits of the poor are the fault of the poor.
Vance describes the turning point in his life when his grandmother straightened him out and got him off drugs and alcohol. Then he describes his acceptance at Ohio State University, his four years in the Marines, and his time at Yale Law School.
Kitty urged me to keep reading. I did, but my suspicions kept building.
Here is what tripped me up. Vance complains about poor, downtrodden "hillbillies" who have some money but they spend themselves into "the poorhouse" by buying giant TVs and iPads and pretend they are "upper class," leaving no money for a rainy day or the kids who will need college tuition.
He denigrates the poor for "choosing" not to work when they should be looking for jobs, or for getting fired for being late to work. The poor, he laments, preach responsibility, but don't walk the talk.
There is no talk of the history of policies that have driven people into poverty — and no talk of decades of budgets that have prioritized the rich over the poor, like the one Vance just cast the deciding vote on.
So what should we do with JD Vance's book?
As his vote on the devastating budget bill reveals, Vance has turned everything he knows from his own life and his extensive education against the very people he professes to want to help. He's devoting his vice presidency to convincing the public that President Donald Trump is a great leader filled with wisdom who has saved the nation from a great villain who was trying to wreck our democracy.
Vance waits in the wings, coming out from time to chastise those that oppose Trump or don't adhere to the latest right-wing politics. When Trump departs the scene, Vance will be ready to vie for the presidency.
Vance, who grew up in dire poverty like Abraham Lincoln, is vying to lead the country backward. Vance took his painful background and educational attainments and turned them against the very people he came from.
One never knows from where a great leader will come to move us forward again. But we do know that we must oppose with all our strength the pretenders that Benjamin Franklin warned us against when our republic was born.
- Lewis M. Steel is senior counsel at Outten & Golden LLP and an Institute for Policy Studies board member. He's the author of The Butler's Child: White Privilege, Race, and a Lawyer's Life in Civil Rights
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The descent into neofascism is speeding up. Here's how we fight it
Donald Trump has entered a new and wilder stage of authoritarian neofascism. No holds barred. Nothing out of bounds. Rapacious, racist, nativist, vindictive, corrupt.
In his desperate attempt to deflect attention from his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein, he’s even accusing Barack Obama of treason.
If you’re also horrified by all this, know that most other Americans are, too (if polls are to be believed).
Resistance is more important than ever.
We are deeply indebted to all the judges who are trying to stop this. Most have shown themselves principled, steadfast, and courageous.
Gratitude is also due the public servants still in their jobs who are standing up to this.
We are grateful to all the communities trying to protect their neighbors from Trump’s vicious anti-immigrant dragnet.
Thankful also to the teachers, public employees, workers, and grassroots groups fighting his attacks on the poor and needy.
To the professors, administrators, and students joining together to fight his attacks on higher education.
Appreciative of all who are protesting, demanding, refusing to submit, making good trouble, and remaining hopeful.
The more Trump’s tyranny is exposed, the stronger the resistance. The worse it gets, the larger the backlash. The crueler and more vicious his regime becomes, the more powerful the alliances being formed at every level of society and the world to stop him.
We will sweep vulnerable Republican lawmakers out of office in 2026 or before.
We will support groups like the ACLU that are taking Trump to court.
We will stop the lies and spread the truth.
Tyrants cannot succeed where people refuse to submit to them. We will not submit. We will emerge from this stronger than we were before, and more committed to democracy and the common good.
Be safe. Be strong. Hug your loved ones.
- Robert Reich is a professor emeritus of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com
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My greatest editor was devoted to his readers. Right now, we need many more like him
I have had the luckiest journalism career and life ever, but today I want to take a few minutes of your time talking about a man who was a vital part of both.
Tulio Peter David Mazzarella died last week.
“Dave” was 87.
And before I make this about me and my relationship with Dave, which started long before we both knew it, I want to tell you a little about the man, while linking to his mind-blowing obituary that will tell you most of the rest.
Dave was once described by then-Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz as “maybe the best newspaper editor in America no one’s ever heard of.”
I would have struck the “maybe” as well as the last five words from that critique.
Dave shoehorned a mind-boggling newspaper career around two newspapers that were important to me, before I got to know him very well at a third.
Turns out, Dave, a Newark, N.J., native, was top editor at both of these newspapers during a career that took him around the world and to the top of more mastheads then I can count on both hands.
By 2000, we unexpectedly collided directly when Dave, fresh off his retirement at USA Today, took the job as ombudsman at Stars and Stripes, where I had spent the better part of last two years as managing editor of the important daily, which I also read as a sailor in the 1970s.
Dave Mazzarella at work. Photo: Stars and Stripes
It got worse yet on the very rare occasions civilian leaders at the paper cast aside their better judgment and threatened the newspaper’s integrity, by letting the military foxes loose in the henhouse.
I have always maintained that Stripes is at the very frontline of the fight for a free and independent press in America. Today, this has never been more true.
Dave vacated his ombudsman’s position during one of the paper’s heated times in 2003, and took over as the newspaper’s top editor in an effort to quiet things the hell down.
This also made him my direct supervisor, and that development got me to swallowing hard. All of a sudden, the man whose newspapers I delivered decades before — the best newspaper editor in America — had both his discerning eyes on me …
Don’t go telling me this isn’t a small, scary world.
Dave was the perfect guy for the job, but I had severe doubts if I was the perfect fit for him as his managing editor. In fact, I was sure I wasn’t, and figured it wouldn’t be long before he brought his own M.E. into the fold.
It was common practice at newspapers, particularly at Gannett, which owned both USA Today and one of the many newspapers I worked for during my still budding career, for editors to surround themselves with their people.
So I did my best to keep my head down, and mouth mostly shut, and began work underneath the toughest boss I ever had. He proceeded to teach me more about good newspapering than all my previous bosses bundled together.
Everything began and ended with the readers at a Mazzarella newspaper. By his thinking, there would be no newspaper without them.
“Why would the readers care about that,” he’d snap.
Every story the staff produced had to advocate for the readers, who have no direct voice in the newsroom. This will sound logical, but too often reporters and editors will let their bias and concerns get in the way of their editorial judgment, and the readers suffer for it.
Things were going along OK, and our reporters and editors were turning around some damn fine work for our readers, when Dave asked me one morning to produce a self-evaluation of my work as managing editor.
That’s when I figured my time was up. Honestly, I didn't know what I didn’t know until Dave came along.
So I sat down one night at home, poured a drink, and wrote a frank self-eval. I came down fairly hard on myself. I knew I was writing it for a man who grew up only miles from me in a hard-scrabble New Jersey suburb, and that there was no sense trying to bullsh–t a bullsh–tter.
I delivered the three-page critique and a few days later, the best newspaper editor in America called me into his office for a sit-down.
I figured I was on my way out, and somebody else was on their way in.
Instead, he told me I had written the most honest self-critique he had ever read, and while he didn't agree with all of it, it did save him the time of enlightening me on all my shortcomings.
Then he said, “Let’s fix those things and turn you into the newspaperman, I know you can be. You’re a helluva leader. A bit of a bomb-thrower, but a leader. Now let’s get back to work …”
That was it.
I never had a better day in the office than that.
And while that changed my life, I still had to be me, and I think Dave knew that. There was the time I dropped a bomb on our Pentagon appropriators during an interview with the late, great Bob Edwards of NPR’s Morning Edition fame ...
Edwards wanted to talk about the friction between a controlling military and a newspaper which wouldn’t be controlled. Things went great until I intentionally veered off script and let him, but mostly, them, know we could use a few more dollars to buy some much-needed help for our bustling Washington, D.C. newsroom.
Poor Dave caught the flak after that interview aired, but we got our new editors.
Just nine months later, Dave promoted me to the greatest job anybody could ever have in the business: Managing Editor of our worldwide editorial operations overseas.
I spent the next four years working closely with Dave from thousands of miles away while heading a staff in Europe, Japan, and the Mideast. I also began forging an important friendship with him that would last a lifetime.
When Dave made his way to Europe to check in on things, we always made a point to hit a favorite Italian restaurant. Tulio Peter David Mazzarella was one classy dude, who grew up in an Italian household, and had spent many years in Italy in various editorial capacities. He’d take command of the menu, and I’d just shut up and eat and drink while Dave charmed the staff and did the ordering in Italian.
By 2008, Dave had returned to his ombudsman role at the paper, to begin wrestling again with partial retirement, and I left the paper a year later after wrestling with people on the business side of the organization who valued their jobs more than our hard-fought editorial independence.
There weren’t enough bombs this time …
We stayed in touch fairly regularly after I left Stripes in 2009, until we stopped being in touch much at all the last few years.
I thought of him and his wise counsel all the time — especially when I’d write — and missed the thoughtful emails he’d type me that were worldly and wise.
He understood his reader.
The last time I saw Dave was in 2017. I was in Washington for some conference, and Dave was finally fully retired. We met at one of his favorite Italian restaurants in the city. Our meeting coincided with a certain, orange somebody’s first State of the Union address.
Dave and I had never discussed politics in earnest before that dinner, because it just would have gotten in the way of providing for the reader.
And because Dave is not here to tell it, I’ll relay my side of the conversation, confident he wouldn’t disagree with any of it. I was shocked, saddened, angry, and surprised that such a vulgar, incompetent person had just ascended to our nation’s top office. I figured it was a brutal aberration that would be corrected, and certainly never repeated — just to prove to you how wrong I can be about things sometimes.
When another one of our long dinners had ended, Dave insisted he drop me at my hotel even if it was in the other direction of his route home to his fabulous wife, Chris. As we navigated the rainy streets of D.C. that night, we hit an intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue, and just like that cops descended from everywhere, lights blaring, and shut down things to a standstill.
Turns out Trump’s motorcade was making its way up to Capitol Hill for his address.
That’s when I looked at Dave and said, “You know, if you wait for just the right time, and gun it, we could save millions of people a ton of grief. Hell, we might even be remembered as heroes.”
He said nothing for a few seconds, then turned to me and said, “Always the f–––ing bomb-thrower …”
Rest in peace, you legend.
(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.)
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Trump immigration policy is worse than merely cruel
In the name of “law and order,” the Trump administration has locked up countless immigrants — many of whom have no criminal convictions, and many of whom were here lawfully. The result is a sprawling detention system that punishes the innocent, tears families apart, and violates the very principles of justice it claims to uphold.
Even worse, these men, women, and children — snatched away from their homes, workplaces, or even scheduled immigration appointments — are often detained in brutal conditions.
In a new report, Human Rights Watch, Americans for Immigrant Justice, and Sanctuary of the South looked at three Florida detention centers: Krome, Broward Transitional Center (BTC), and the Federal Detention Center (FDC).
We found that conditions are not just inhumane — they actually violate international law.
Human Rights Watch documented detainees shackled for hours on buses without food or water, forced to sleep on concrete floors in freezing cells, and denied access to basic medical care.
Some were punished with solitary confinement for seeking mental health support. Others were returned to detention after emergency surgery and then denied prescribed follow-up medication.
These are systemic abuses, exacerbated by overcrowding and fueled by policies like the Laken Riley Act and Florida’s 287(g) agreements, which deputize local law enforcement to act as immigration agents.
The result? A dramatic surge in arrests and detentions, often of people who pose no threat to public safety.
As of June, nearly 72 percent of people in immigration detention nationwide had no criminal history. Many had lived in the U.S. for years, working, raising families, and contributing to their communities.
Some had entered lawfully under humanitarian parole programs, like United for Ukraine. Others had Temporary Protected Status (TPS) because their home countries of Haiti, Afghanistan, Venezuela, and Nicaragua were too dangerous to return to.
These protections were never meant to be traps. Yet under current policies that have terminated the humanitarian parole and TPS regimes, attending a scheduled immigration appointment can lead to arrest.
One man I spoke to was detained at his appointment to legalize his status in the U.S. after his marriage to an American woman. He was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) right after officials told him his application had been approved.
These are people following the rules the government laid out for them.
The cruelty is not just in the detention — it’s in the treatment.
Guards mocked detainees, denied them food, and forced them to eat like animals with their hands tied behind their backs. Two died after medical neglect while in detention. ICE held women in male-only facilities without access to medical staff, showers, or privacy.
The Trump administration’s policies are fomenting a climate of fear so pervasive that immigrants are avoiding hospitals, schools, and even churches, families told me. They are afraid to report crimes, seek medical care, or attend immigration appointments. This undermines public safety for immigrants and U.S. citizens alike and erodes community trust.
Congress needs to take meaningful action to reduce the harm of immigration detention.
That starts with rescinding the $45 billion Congress recently allocated in the massive tax bill for building ICE detention facilities, a tripling of its detention capacity, and the additional $13.5 billion it earmarked to reimburse state and local governments for immigration and border enforcement.
The administration should prioritize community-based alternatives to detention and reserve detention for cases where no other option exists.
Congress should also press the administration to re-designate and extend TPS and restore humanitarian parole programs. These protections are not loopholes — they are lifelines.
The United States has the capacity to treat immigrants with dignity — and the legal obligation to do so. And it has the moral imperative to stop punishing people for seeking safety, family unity, and opportunity.
- Belkis Wille is an associate crisis, conflict, and arms division director at Human Rights Watch, and the author of the recent HRW report “You Feel Like Your Life is Over.” Follow her on Twitter @belkiswille or on Bluesky @belkiswille.bsky.social.
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This 'Dark Triad' shows MAGA is sick enough to believe Trump's Obama lies
When the walls start closing in, Donald Trump doesn’t lawyer up: he doubles down. With Jeffrey Epstein’s ghost rattling through the headlines and the threat of explosive disclosures looming, Team Trump has rolled out its most cynical, racially-charged distraction yet: accuse Barack Obama of treason.
It’s not about justice. It’s not about truth. It’s a deliberate psyop meant to hijack the news cycle, enrage the MAGA base, and erase Epstein’s name from every chyron in America.
Which is why it appears that the Trump White House is closing in on the conclusion that the only story that could be “big enough” to blow Epstein off the front pages will be “Obama Committed Treason!”
They’re busily assigning investigators, FBI agents, lawyers, and others in the Justice Department to find everything they can that might implicate our first Black president in having committed High Crimes and Misdemeanors.
Democrats and many in the media are essentially ridiculing the effort, arguing that nobody is naïve enough — or malicious enough — to believe such a story. But things that seem illogical or even flat-out nuts to reporters and Democrats may, according to a scientific study published in recent months, make perfect sense for Trump supporters.
Titled Malevolent vs. Benevolent Dispositions and Conservative Political Ideology in the Trump Era and published last fall in The Journal of Research in Personality, the authors looked at the personality factors that showed up consistently among Trump supporters versus the rest of the American population.
What they found is both shocking and absolutely consistent with the observations and suspicions of those of us who have to regularly interact with Trump followers: they’re sick, at least by the standards of liberal democracy. They lack empathy and even get pleasure out of watching other people in pain.
In the conclusions section of their published article, the University of North Texas Psychology Department researchers explain:
“We examined the associations between broad dispositions with political ideology that included views of Trump. Malevolent (+) and benevolent (− ) dispositions predicted this ideology. In aggregate, those favorable to Trump reported greater malevolent and lower benevolent propensities, less empathy, and more enjoyment of others’ suffering.”
Given that Trump is quickly moving America toward autocracy, it shouldn’t be surprising that he himself displays the so-called Dark Triad of personality characteristics that are so easily observed in historical figures like Hitler, Pinochet, Mussolini, and modern-day autocrats like Putin, Orbán, and Erdoğan:
“Autocrats manifest socially aversive personality, including malevolent traits in the Dark Triad: narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, and the same has been found for Trump. Similar results have been found for authoritarians’ loyal foot soldiers. … Thus, it is not surprising perhaps that voters with aversive traits tend to prefer aversive political figures.”
They point out that there are numerous studies that have been done over the years showing that people with “malevolent” dispositions tend toward conservatism while those with “benevolent” personalities are more likely to be liberals. They define their terms in clear, analytical language:
“A malevolent disposition reflects wishing ill will or doing harm to others, while a benevolent disposition involves intending or showing goodwill or kindness to others …
“A malevolent disposition is measured via aversive features of Machiavellian manipulativeness, psychopathic callousness, and narcissistic self-absorption, all negatively associated with empathy and positively associated with antisocial behavior.”
As they note, Trump rings all the malevolent bells, but they wanted to know if his followers also had the same antisocial personality traits:
“A political candidate who boasts about being able to shoot someone can be understood in terms of a malevolent disposition. We seek to understand the voters who embrace such a politician and propose that insight may be gained by examining the links between malevolent dispositions and political ideology.
“Taken together, we propose that more extreme (malevolent) dispositions are necessary for understanding today’s modern incarnation of conservatism that includes a positive view of Trump.”
What they found was that — among white men — the stronger the constellation of antisocial personality characteristics a person carried, the more likely they were to support Trump and support him with a fervor that reflected the intensity of those qualities.
It was so vivid that even those on the extreme end of the antisocial spectrum — psychopaths — were generally enthusiastic about Trump and his policies, regardless (or perhaps because) of how many people those policies hurt:
“Across two different samples, we found a positive association between conservative ideology/positive view of Trump and malevolent disposition. For white men, psychopathic propensities predicted conservative ideology/positive view of Trump …
“Thus, the current results add to a growing literature on a link between malevolent (aversive) dispositions and conservative ideology. Moreover, our results are in line with Barber and Pope (2019) who found those tied to a Trumpian symbolic ideology were most inclined to be uncivil to others. The results from both samples found that latent psychopathic and malevolent disposition means were significantly elevated among individuals who viewed Trump favorably.”
Interestingly, they noted that among racial minorities and women carrying many of these same personality characteristics, there wasn’t the same strong correlation between antisocial personalities and support for Trump; they mused that “sociocultural factors must be at play as well.”
This was because, they concluded, discrimination and the violence often associated with it had shaped even the authoritarians among minorities and women to be more liberal, more accepting of others, and less willing to go along with policies that hurt other people:
“Longitudinal research suggests that race/ethnicity may moderate the associations of RWA (Right Wing Authoritarianism) and SDO (Social Dominance Orientation) with conservative political behavior and gender might moderate the association between personality and conservatism with a stronger association for males than females. These moderation effects may be due in part to the fact that RWA and SDO are linked with racism and sexism.”
Which brings us to the big question they must be debating right now in the White House: Will indicting or even trying Obama for treason be enough to cause even “liberal” college-educated reporters and media executives to decide that it’s a big enough story to eclipse their now-nearly-constant coverage of Trump’s association with Epstein and the young women and girls they are widely believed to have exploited?
Trump and his people already know that going after our nation’s only Black president is good politics when it comes to their base, and right now that’s the group they’re most freaked out about losing. If the base goes, Trump won’t be far behind. It wasn’t until Nixon’s public approval ratings had collapsed among the GOP base in 1974 that Barry Goldwater felt safe visiting the White House and telling him it was time to leave.
That suggests that they’ll go all in on attacking Obama, perhaps even manufacturing information or — like Tulsi Gabbard is now doing — coming up with straw man arguments that are close enough to truth to confuse the majority of Americans. The strategy seems to be working over on Fox “News” and on rightwing hate radio, which have been pounding on the Obama “treason” story for several days now with few signs of letting up.
I’m skeptical, however, that mainstream media outlets will go along with this unless they’re subjected to overwhelming pressure from the Trump White House. And until those news and opinion operations have a change of focus, Trump is going to find it very hard to put Epstein and his victims behind him.
Their second bet on this, being acted on by House Speaker Mike Johnson, is to assume that if they can shut down Congress for a month it’ll put a halt to all political conversations during the August summer vacation season, leading to a recess of sorts on the Epstein issue. Historically — as I’ve learned from doing political talk radio for 23 years now — the summer is pretty dead when it comes to politics.
This is probably wishful thinking in the Epstein/Trump case, however, because Trump can’t keep himself off the TV. He has a deep, neurotic need for attention and approval (which he interprets as love) that, as I lay out in detail in my new book The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink, drives him to constantly draw attention to himself.
Also, when Congress reconvenes in September it’s likely the discharge petition requiring a full confidential disclosure to members of Congress of the Epstein files — that will have “ripened” by then and thus be subject to a vote — will still be there.
Nonetheless, because Trump and the people around him all suffer from the same collection of personality disorders and assume that most other people think the same way they do, I’d bet that they’ll still go after Obama in as big a way as they can.
This isn’t just a political maneuver: it’s a scorched-earth strategy born of desperation and malevolence. Trump and his enablers know their only way out is down, dragging the country with them into a pit of conspiracy, vengeance, and manufactured outrage.
If the media blinks, if Democrats shrug, if the public falls for the bait, the damage won’t just be another headline. It’ll be a rupture in the fabric of truth itself.
The only question now is: will America call the bluff, or fall for the con?
Will it succeed?
Will it backfire?
Will Obama finally get up on his hind legs and start fighting (unlike when the GOP stole his nomination of Garland to the Supreme Court and he didn’t say much at all)?
Will JD Vance finally get the shot at the presidency that he so clearly seems to crave?
Stay tuned…
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This GOP cut will ravage children in red states
What do Louisiana, West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Alabama have in common? For one thing, they’re red states. For another, they’re poor states. Each has among the top 10 highest percentages of residents on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), popularly known as food stamps.
And finally, every one of their Republican lawmakers voted for U.S. President Donald Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” — which will result in the largest cut to SNAP in history, at $186 billion through 2034.
The bill doesn’t just cut federal SNAP spending. It also, for the first time, shifts much of that burden to the states. So state governments will need to raise taxes, cut spending, or further slash benefits to meet these added expenses. Others may eliminate their SNAP rolls entirely.
SNAP offers taxpayers a tremendous return on investment.
“One study estimates that every SNAP dollar invested in children returns $62 in value over the long term,” the Center on Policy and Budget Priorities reports.
So GOP lawmakers aren’t making these cuts because we can’t afford SNAP. They’re doing it to offset some of their deficit-busting tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy. Taking food from kids to give billionaires a tax break? Talk about Robin Hood in reverse.
In an open letter to congressional leaders, 23 state governors — including the leaders of historically red states like North Carolina, Kansas, and Kentucky — call these SNAP cuts “unrealistic” and warn they will “result in too many Americans forced to survive rather than thrive.”
Red states will be among the hardest hit, but it’s a truly national problem. In 2023, the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that 13.5% of U.S households were “food insecure,” meaning they have a “limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods.”
SNAP benefits currently serve more than 40 million Americans, almost half of them children.
Between cuts, burdensome new work and reporting requirements, and the cost shifting to the states, the “Big Beautiful Bill” could cause over 22.3 million families to lose most, if not all, of their SNAP benefits, according to the Urban Institute. That includes over 3.3 million children.
Studies show that work requirements don’t result in more employment — they only result in eligible people losing benefits because of the onerous reporting requirements.
Children whose families receive SNAP benefits also qualify for free and reduced school lunch and summer Electronic Benefits Transfer programs. But millions will lose this qualification under Trump’s new law, leaving kids hungry at school as well as at home. And children who are U.S. citizens but who have parents without a Social Security number will be prohibited from receiving food under this bill.
Children aren’t the only demographic at risk of going hungry. The National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) found that 55% of non-elderly adult SNAP recipients in 2023 were women, and one-third of them were women of color. Over half were single parents.
The NWLC also found that SNAP recipients are more likely to report “excellent or very good” nutrition than those who don’t receive benefits in low-income communities, pointing to the difference these benefits make for health. Pregnant mothers and kids in early childhood with access to SNAP also see improved long-term health outcomes.
“Do you know what it’s like to hold two master’s degrees, be called ‘Reverend,’ and still need food stamps?” said Reverend Regina Clarke at a rally led by Reverend William Barber’s anti-poverty group Repairers of the Breach.
Clarke is among the demographic of single parents who are SNAP recipients.
“When you strip away someone’s food security,” she said, “you strip away their strength to lift others.”
But lifting our voices and our communities is exactly what we need to do. Whether we live in red states or blue states, all of us need to speak out against this cruelty. Low-income kids and families shouldn’t be going hungry so billionaires can claim another tax break.
- Ta’Kyla Bates is a Henry A. Wallace Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.
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This Trump case will tell us if we still have a democracy
Oral arguments were heard this week in Harvard v. Trump’s cross motions for summary judgment. Summary judgment, or “judgment on the papers,” means both sides agree on the facts but disagree on how the law applies to those facts.
Neither Harvard nor the Trump administration dispute that Trump made certain unprecedented written demands to the university, accompanied by unprecedented threats if they refused to comply.
Harvard refused to comply, and sued.
Whichever party loses summary judgment will appeal, and the final disposition will likely, eventually, come from the Supreme Court. If the high court’s Republican majority further empowers Trump’s edicts under their misguided “unitary executive theory,” our 249-year history of ideological freedoms will come to an end and the nation will yield to Trump’s revenge.
Trump’s pressure campaign
The Trump administration, ostensibly seeking to reduce campus antisemitism following widespread protests over Gaza, threatened to withhold billions in federal funding from Harvard, place a lien on its assets, and put academic departments in receivership, unless Harvard agreed to:
- Exclusively promote faculty committed to Harvard’s mission and Trump’s viewpoints
- Submit the university to a Trump administration review of “viewpoint diversity”
- Scrutinize any “programs and departments” that might, in Trump’s judgment, fuel “antisemitic harassment”
- Submit all faculty to outside review for alleged “plagiarism”
- Submit to a comprehensive hiring and review audit conducted by the federal government
- Implement a comprehensive mask ban and suspend anyone who wears a mask
- Report to the federal government on any faculty members who “discriminated against” Jewish or Israeli students
- Screen student applicants to reject those with viewpoints “hostile” to Trump/Israel’s policies
- Establish outside review for Harvard programs that reflect “ideological capture” ie, programs where classroom messaging does not reflect Trump-supportive dogma
- Diminish the influence of its own professors and faculty over the university
- Establish “merit based” hiring and admissions policies that pleased the Trump administration.
Oral argument
Oral argument was both testy and basic. The lone Department of Justice lawyer arguing the motion, Michael Velchik, asserted that the administration “has the power to decide” where it will spend taxpayer money and that, “the government does not want to fund research at institutions that fail to address antisemitism to (the government’s) satisfaction.”
According to Velchik, when Harvard refused to go along with Trump’s demands, Trump was free to terminate any and all contracts with the university.
Trump essentially argues that the federal government can terminate or withhold funds under a contract for any reason at all, even if that reason violates free speech, the right of free association, or any other rights protected under the First Amendment.
Steven Lehotsky, Harvard’s counsel, countered that Trump’s attempts to control the university, including telling the university what it can teach and how it can teach it, represents Trump’s blatant “and unrepentant” violation of the First Amendment.
The Supreme Court has long held viewpoint discrimination to be such a serious violation of the First Amendment that it is treated as “presumptively unconstitutional.” Lehotsky argued plainly that, “It’s the constitutional third rail, or it should be, for the government to insist it can engage in viewpoint discrimination.”
Trump has been consistent in his belief that he can punish speech and political conduct he doesn’t like, notwithstanding clear and unequivocal legal precedent to the contrary. He has applied the same strong-arm tactics to boardrooms and corporations, national media outlets, law firms, and, most recently, comedians.
If the Roberts court continues to enable him, Trump will extend the same reasoning to imprison or otherwise punish anyone who criticizes him, following the same authoritarian playbook that produced such hits as Nazi Germany, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, and Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Even if Harvard allowed the expression of antisemitic views on campus — despite a strong Jewish presence among Harvard faculty — there still has to be some nexus, or some connection, between what the government is trying to fix (antisemitism) and the methods it uses to fix it. The judge went to the heart of this concept when she asked Trump’s counsel to explain the relationship between antisemitism and cutting off unrelated cancer research funding, noting that Trump is “not taking away grants from labs that have been antisemitic.”
An amicus brief filed in the case by Jewish scholars also points out that Trump routinely uses “antisemitism” as a ruse to attack freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of association. As noted in their amici brief, many Jewish scholars reject the notion that being Jewish “requires adherence to a specific conception of Zionism or support for the Israeli government or its policies and practices.”
Judge Allison Burroughs noted that if Trump, or any federal administration, could punish a university without due process simply because they don’t like their politics, or their message, or the substance of their curriculum, the constitutional consequences would be “staggering.”
Harvard v. Trump asks the most fundamental questions one can ask about the relationship between the government and the governed. Under the First Amendment, can the federal government control what is taught in the classroom and what is said on campus at various universities? Can the federal government withhold federal funds if it doesn’t like what it hears, or doesn’t agree with the viewpoints expressed?
If the answer is no, then our Constitution stands. Trump will join a 249-year line-up of presidents who have to grin and bear it when students call them ugly names and protest their policies. Who knows, Trump might even someday learn why the framers made free speech and association the very first amendment to the Constitution.
But if the answer is yes, the First Amendment will fall under the Roberts court, and there’s no reason to believe any other Constitutional protection will stand. Trump will forcibly insert his right-wing ideology onto campuses, boardrooms, and legacy media nationwide. That ideology will serve a madman’s lust for power and revenge, and America’s democracy will cease to exist.
- 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.
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