Pam Bondi reminds Epstein's victims why they should thank Trump
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
Trump just gave MAGA a million reasons to walk away
With apologies to Lady Gaga (who managed to be overshadowed by Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl), Donald Trump’s million reasons are a lot different than hers.
Seems pretty sus to me, but then again, I’m not in the world’s dumbest death cult.
And yet MAGA is still finding ways to avoid that truth. It’s honestly impressive that they’re still able to hold their phones in their hands, considering they’ve twisted themselves into the tightest conspiracy pretzel yet.
Trump’s pet AG, Pam Bondi, lied under oath yet again on Wednesday during a House hearing. I don’t know who arrests her for committing that federal offense, but since Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) said she lied under oath, she should be impeached immediately.MAGA knows the truth. They just don’t want to have to admit to anyone, but especially to themselves, they were wrong about Trump. I don’t know when being wrong on the internet became a fate worse than admitting your Dear Leader might have done very bad things, but again … I’m not in a cult.
Instead, I’m a magnet for one. Lucky me!
The MAGA morons got triggered by a tweet of mine about the Million Mentions, and now it’s getting a lot of troll traffic. They MAD! They want to scapegoat and harass me into spoon-feeding them details to dispute. They want to send me on a wild Google chase. Tara don’t play like that, my friends.
Yeah, if your name isn’t “Jeffrey Epstein,” but you’re mentioned in the Epstein Files MORE THAN A MILLION TIMES, it’s probably not for a good reason.
Steve is an actual person, not a bot. He’s a perfect example of how MAGA operates on Twitter. He went from that dumb take to the typical goalpost move of “Why didn’t Joe Biden release the files,” while calling me “Karen,” because they think dumb bullying will hurt my feelings.
MAGAt, please.
After a decade and a half of their juvenile trolling and distraction tactics, there’s nothing a MAGA cultist can say to derail me. They can try it, but they fail every time because I have this pesky thing on my side called the TRUTH. The “Eff Your Feelings” Red Hat Death Squad is a case study in projection language mired in spineless snowflake self-victimization. They’re mad that Bill Clinton is mentioned about 1,000 times, but there hasn’t been anything about Bill with young girls.
(Quick Clinton sidebar: Whatever arrangement Bill and Hillary had/have in their marriage isn’t our business; what they each did when voters tasked them to serve our country is all that matters. Regardless of what Bill did while in office, he never stopped doing his job or threatened our national security. And while I know this isn’t the strongest argument, Bill Clinton likes women who look like WOMEN, not girls. Check his blemished track record for yourself: the man has a type. None of them resembled little girls or his daughter, did they? Even Monica Lewinsky, who was 22 and therefore capable of giving consent, took a lot of hits from the press (and Saturday Night Live) for being a healthy, curvy woman. So enough with the “But Bill Clinton” or “Why didn’t Joe Biden?” when Trump is mentioned OVER ONE MILLION TIMES, FFS.)
That Steve guy trolled me under my reply to Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), a self-described rape survivor who’s the worst woman in Congress now Marjorie Taylor Greene has self-deported back to Georgia. Nancy simply doesn’t use Trump’s name in literally any of her tweets about the Epstein survivors she claims to stand with. It’s like Trump simply isn’t a person who’s been alive for nearly 80 years. (Oh, if only.)
If you read any of Nancy’s tweets about the Epstein Files (which I don’t recommend, but you do you), you get a narrative that Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell did all the bad things, and Trump is just an innocent victim who had no idea what they were up to when he accidentally crossed their paths.
What bad luck, huh? Between the “witch hunts” and the “fake news” lying about him, he just happened to accidentally be friends with a couple of international sex trafficking rapists, one of whom claimed to have introduced him to his third wife. (Who has threatened to sue over the claim.) Those million mentions? Just anecdotal, hearsay, or whatever the Putin Propaganda of the Day might be.
I’ve tried all of the ways to get an answer out of Nancy, but no one in any of her offices will give me one. They don’t respond to emails. They say they can’t answer my questions when I call, because the comms director just can’t be located. She’s never going to reply to my tweets. I guess someone will have to make Mace stand on the House floor to declare her loyalty to a rapist pedophile cult over America, and then be forced to resign so she can go right to jail. Protecting a pedophile rapist cult while pretending to care about its victims is re-traumatizing for Epstein survivors and the worst possible way to throw away your life, but the MAGA cult is clinging to every last shred of hope that the Epstein Files are somehow Biden’s fault.
Trump has lied to his minions about everything, but especially Epstein. The timeline of lies began with a campaign promise to release them. We still haven’t gotten all the files, fully unredacted. Perhaps a million more mentions are on the way, but they still won’t be enough to convince the diehards who need to keep living this lie.
This is the MAGA cult today, and it will remain who they are until they decide that being decent human beings is more important than “owning the libs.”
- Tara Dublin is a political writer/commentator based in Portland, OR, who has been blocked by Donald Trump on Twitter since August 2015 and can occasionally be heard as a fill-in host on SiriusXM Progress. She is also the author of The Sound of Settling, a rock ‘n’ roll love story available at taradublinrocks.com
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Is this the most dangerous lie in US history?
Get ready.
At Tuesday's hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Eli Crane (R-AZ) lied through his teeth, saying of Democrats’ opposition to the SAVE Act:
“They let millions of illegal aliens into the country. They set up sanctuary cities so you can’t enforce these federal laws that are on the books that Congress has passed.
“Now they won’t vote to stop these illegals from voting in our elections. If the American people don’t understand what this is about, it’s about one word. It always has been. That is power.
“They want power and they need illegals to vote in our elections. That’s why they don’t care about fraud either. They need those votes as well.”
And it’s not just a lone crackpot congressman from Arizona. As Walter Olson wrote for the Cato Institute in 2024:
“If you believe Elon Musk, ‘Democrats’ are permitting large numbers of immigrants into the country on purpose in order to win elections. By ‘ushering in vast numbers of illegals,’ he wrote on X March 5, ‘they are importing voters.’ …
“Musk’s co-thinker on this topic … Donald Trump, said in January in Iowa: ‘That’s why they are allowing these people to come in — people that don’t speak our language — they are signing them up to vote.’ And a television ad from [then] Ohio Republican Sen. J. D. Vance claims that current border policies mean ‘more Democrat voters pouring into this country.’
“‘Treason indeed!’ exclaims Musk.”
Trump has made good use of the propaganda technique known as the Big Lie, famously claiming that the 2020 “election was stolen” from him. And now he’s preparing to use one of the GOP’s favorite perennial Big Lies to disrupt this November’s midterm elections.
If he can find an excuse (Tulsi Gabbard is working on it, from media reports) to seize ballots and voting machines in congressional districts that may flip from Republican to Democratic this fall, his lickspittle Squeaker Mike Johnson can refuse to seat the newly-elected Democrats in the House, keeping it in GOP hands.
After all, Johnson was in the middle of the conspiracy to steal the 2020 election by organizing Republicans in the House to refuse to certify Joe Biden’s Electoral College votes that year, and this year he held up the swearing in of Dem Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) for over a month just because he could.
All he’ll need is for Tulsi (or others) to find even one questionable ballot among the ones they took from Georgia — or insert one — to wave around like a bloody shirt and, if history is any guide, the corporate media will fall into line, saying, “Ah, ha! He’s found voter fraud!”
And then Johnson can claim “election irregularities,” just like Republicans did in the election of 1876, and refuse to seat Democratic winners in the House, giving their seats instead to the Republican losers. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) mentioned this exact scenario on my radio/TV program on Tuesday, saying Democrats are seriously concerned House Republicans may be actually planning for it.
All to keep Democrats from taking over the House and having the power of the subpoena so they can investigate Trump’s massive corruption, self-dealing, bribe-taking, Putin-bootlicking, and possible exploitation of young girls with his “best friend” Jeffrey Epstein.
The driving force behind all of this is a classic GOP Big Lie, the false allegation of widespread “voter fraud” in America.
Republicans have been using this lie to attack the heart of our democracy right out in the open ever since the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, the year they responded by rolling out Operation Eagle Eye, yelling about nonexistent “illegal alien voter fraud” and using it as an excuse to intimidate minority voters in the Goldwater-Johnson race.
It’s a phrase Republicans essentially invented, although it was occasionally used by the Confederacy when they used it to suppress the votes of poor whites who opposed that oligarchy. And the GOP has been using it for more than 60 years now with barely a peep from either Democrats or today’s media.
Back in the day, future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s Arizona arm of Operation Eagle Eye was one of dozens of such formal and informal Republican voter suppression operations that exploded across the United States that year. As the New York Times noted on Oct. 30, 1964:
“Republican officials have begun a massive campaign to prevent ‘vote fraud’ in the election next Tuesday, a move that has caused Democrats to cry ‘fraud.’
“The Republican plan, Operation Eagle Eye, is designed, according to party officials, to prevent Democrats from ‘stealing’ the 1964 election. Republicans charge that the election was stolen in 1960.”
Keep in mind, this was novel back then. The GOP’s “voter fraud” Big Lie was brand new. Nobody had been talking about “voter fraud” outside of a few southern states for a century; the phrase usually appeared in quotation marks as it was so unusual. The 1964 Times article continued:
“The Democratic National Chairman, John M. Bailey, has criticized the Republican plan as ‘a program of voter intimidation.’ He has sent a protest to all 50 state Governors and has alerted Democratic party officials throughout the country to be on their guard.
“‘There is no doubt in my mind,’ Mr. Bailey wrote the state chairmen yesterday, ‘that this program is a serious threat to democracy as well as to a Democratic victory on Nov. 3rd.’”
But that one NYT article was about it for the media taking on this particular Republican Big Lie.
In the 60 years since then, no major American news media has seriously and persistently challenged the Republican “voter fraud” lie. Even though for the last few decades they have routinely used it for blocking minority and woman voters, and purging voting rolls the way, for example, Brian Kemp and Ken Paxton did in Texas and Georgia.
Weirdly, the billionaire-funded Heritage Foundation and CATO Institute have both weighed in on the issue, and not in a way that makes Trump happy.
Over at Cato, Stephen Richer last week wrote an article titled, “Trump’s Claims About Noncitizens Voting Are False. We Can Prove It.” And, as Reuters reports, “The conservative Heritage Foundation found 24 instances of noncitizens voting in U.S. elections between 2003 and 2023.”
That’s 24 instances total over a period of 20 years! And if you go all the way back to 1982 in the early years that Ronald Reagan was talking about “undocumented alien voter fraud,” you’ll discover, as Heritage did, a total of 99 cases in 44 years.
Not a single election in modern American history has ever been even slightly affected by a non-citizen voting. None.
And in the past few years, in response to Trump’s squealing about 2020, multiple Republican governors have audited their own voter rolls with a fine-toothed comb. Utah, it turns out, had one non-citizen on its rolls. Idaho found 36, Louisiana had 79, and Montana 23. Most were probably errors.
After all, what kind of idiot is stupid enough to risk going to prison to cast one vote out of millions? What immigrant wants to draw the attention of law-enforcement by voting? What possible payoff is there to that?
It defies common sense, although that’s never stopped Republicans from pushing a good conspiracy theory.
Among functioning democracies, this Republican Big Lie and its use to make it harder for people to vote is unique to America. No other functioning democracy in the world worries about “voter fraud” because it’s every bit as nonexistent in other modern democracies as it is here.
The only three major countries in the world that use “voter fraud” as an excuse to make it harder for minorities and women to vote are Hungary, Russia, and, now, the United States.
Most countries don’t even have what we call voter registration, because they don’t need or want a system to try to cut back on the number of people who can vote. Like with Social Security here, when you’re born you’re put on the list (which is also usually the list for their national healthcare system and their equivalent of Social Security), and when you turn 18 you can vote. In many democracies, particularly across Europe, they simply mail you a ballot and you vote by mail. Everybody who’s on the list gets one.
As I document in The Hidden History of the War on Voting, in all the years since the 1960s when Republicans began this continuous and relentless attack on American voting rights claiming that “voter fraud” was happening in Black and Hispanic communities across America, our media has been totally asleep at the switch.
Most even behave as if the GOP’s phony claims of “voter fraud” are legitimate, so Republicans continue to aggressively use them to make voting hard, reject mail-in ballot signatures, and purge voting rolls of Black and brown people.
As reporter Greg Palast found, the only reason Trump is in the White House and Republicans control the House and Senate today is because Republicans succeeded in preventing more than 4 million US citizens from voting or having their votes counted in 2024’s election.
The simple reality is that there’s never been a non-citizen “voter fraud” problem in America — or any other advanced democracy — so there’s no need for a “solution.”
What Republicans know, however, is that the lower a person is on the economic ladder, the less likely they are to have kept or have easy access to the kinds of documentation of birth and citizenship necessary to meet the GOP’s anti-voter-fraud registration requirements.
And the poorer a person is, the more likely they are to vote Democratic.
Republicans also know that millions of women are seriously pissed off about the Dobbs decision, particularly in the 20 Republican-controlled states with bans on abortion. This is on top of the long-term reality that women are 12 percent more likely to vote Democratic than men.
Thus, we now have Republicans pushing federal legislation that would mandate ID all across the nation, and would require that birth certificates carry the same name as driver’s licenses and passports.
This demand for proof of citizenship to prevent “voter fraud” is the main way the GOP is now expanding its suppression efforts to women. The National Organization for Women notes:
“Voter ID laws have a disproportionately negative effect on women. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, one third of all women have citizenship documents that do not identically match their current names primarily because of name changes at marriage. Roughly 90 percent of women who marry adopt their husband’s last name.
“That means that roughly 90 percent of married female voters have a different name on their ID than the one on their birth certificate. An estimated 34 percent of women could be turned away from the polls unless they have precisely the right documents.”
Many women won’t have them, won’t be able to track them down, or can’t afford to replace them, so millions will just shrug and go back to their lives, figuring that “just one less vote” won’t make that much difference.
And women who adopted their husband’s last name at marriage but failed to go before a judge to make a formal, legal name-change will be locked out of the voting process, too. As many as 80 million of them.
Claiming widespread non-citizen “voter fraud” is the GOP’s primary go-to strategy to prevent people from voting or even registering to vote and every day it seems they come up with new ways to exploit it, as Crystal Hill pointed out at Democracy Docket:
“Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) sued one of the state’s most populous counties to block its plan to mail out over 200,000 voter registration forms to residents, claiming the move will ‘facilitate [voter] fraud.’”
Additionally, the GOP has expanded their campaign against “voter fraud” by planning to dispute millions of mail-in votes, particularly in Blue cities, through so-called “exact signature match challenges.”
The GOP is recruiting as many as 100,000 people to examine millions of signatures on mail-in ballots, the majority in Blue cities, so they can reject ballots that, in the observers’ opinions, don’t exactly match signatures and thus could be “fraudulent.” Those ballots will not be counted unless the voters show up at the Secretary of State’s office within a few days of the election to prove that their signature is still theirs.
And it’s all based on the lie that there are non-citizens voting, which is total BS.
Expect this “voter fraud” Big Lie to burst onto the scene over the next few weeks with much sturm and drang — and pontificating Republicans on Sunday shows trying to act like Very Serious People as they wring their hands about non-citizens voting — as the media will almost certainly give Trump and the GOP another pass on this monstrous lie when they threaten to shut down our government this weekend over ICE funding.
There is a way to put an end to this Republican scam, though: a way to fight back.
Here’s FDR’s take on the GOP’s perennial willingness to make things up, as he shared in 1944 with a group of UAW auto workers, complete with his suggestion about how to confront Big Lies the first time Republicans rolled them out:
“The [Republican] opposition in this year has already imported into this campaign a very interesting thing, because it is foreign. They have imported the propaganda technique invented by the dictators abroad.
“Remember, a number of years ago, there was a book, Mein Kampf, written by Hitler himself. The technique was all set out in Hitler’s book—and it was copied by the aggressors of Italy and Japan.
“According to that technique, you should never use a small falsehood; always a big one, for its very fantastic nature would make it more credible — if only you keep repeating it over and over and over again.”
When Trump started squealing about the 2020 election being “stolen” after his wipe-out 7-million-vote loss and being crushed in the Electoral College, the media ignored FDR’s warning and treated Trump’s Big Lie claim like a joke for years.
As a result — just like Roosevelt predicted — it’s now an article of faith among over 70 percent of Republicans that Trump won the 2020 election but it was stolen from him. That worked for them, so now they’re trying to do it with “voter fraud.”
This situation has reached today’s crisis point because our media has almost entirely ignored the truth about this Republican “voter fraud” scam for 60 years.
No democracy anywhere in the world can long survive if its citizens don’t believe their votes are legitimately cast and counted. This lie about non-citizen voting — that the GOP first rolled out in 1964 — is now a harpoon pointed right at our elections, what Thomas Paine called “the beating heart” of our republic.
If it’s not debunked and destroyed by both the Democratic Party and our national media, it could well signal the end of democracy in America and the beginning of a Putin/Orbán-style fascist reign.
It’s beyond time for our corporate media to do their damn job and point out the evil lie of “voter fraud” before it succeeds in killing American democracy altogether.
- Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.
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This tawdry spectacle showed Republicans' contempt for law, victims and decency itself
“Epstein, Epstein, Epstein.”
That was the exasperated refrain from Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) during Wednesday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing with Attorney General Pam Bondi, a hearing that should have centered on survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse but instead showcased all the conceit and sexism of the GOP and Bondi herself.
One of the all-white (with hair to match), middle-aged, narrow-minded Republican men dominating the committee’s GOP side, Van Drew seemed far more interested in shouting Epstein’s name than demanding justice for the women harmed by him and his powerful associates.
As survivors sat in the room, Republicans talked about everything except the questions Americans actually want answered:
- Why hasn’t there been full accountability?
- Why are co-conspirators still uncharged?
- Why were victims’ identities exposed?
- Why does it appear that the rich and powerful always come out on top?
There was a stunning lack of self-awareness. Republicans angrily complained about their personal information being referenced in the investigations of Special Counsel Jack Smith, yet showed little concern for survivors whose names and identifying details were alarmingly visible and unredacted.
They spoke with outrage about themselves, but indifference toward exploited girls and women.
They ignored the survivors. They ignored the uncharged co-conspirators. They ignored calling out the wealthy men who enabled or participated in Epstein’s abuse. Bondi’s only response came from her pathetic “burn book,” loaded with nonsense about Democrats on the committee.
Van Drew’s performance was especially galling. This is the lawmaker who switched parties in 2019 rather than vote to impeach Donald Trump, to whom he pledged “undying support.” Watching him now, breathlessly invoking Epstein as if he were some trivial offender, he seemed to ooze annoyance, as though the whole thing was just an inconvenience.
Presiding over it all was Chairman Jim Jordan, who carries his own longstanding controversy. Jordan was an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State University, from 1987 to 1995. Team doctor Richard Strauss abused at least 177 male students, according to a 2019 independent investigation. Former wrestlers allege Strauss’s misconduct was an open secret and Jordan knew but failed to act.
The irony of Jordan chairing a hearing about answerability over sexual exploitation was impossible to ignore. Abuse survivors were in the room, yet the man banging the gavel has faced years of questions about whether he failed to protect young athletes.
And yet — almost impressively, in such company — it was Bondi who did most to turn the proceedings into a seedy and tawdry spectacle.
She was defensive, combative, and dismissive, and yammered like a political hack. When Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), the only Republican willing to press her directly, challenged her about the Epstein files, she laughed.
She deflected. She repeatedly blamed her predecessor, Merrick Garland, as if she were a bystander rather than the sitting attorney general responsible for the department’s actions and compliance with federal law.
Massie cut through it. In essence, he told her: this is your responsibility.
She insisted she wanted to hear from victims, yet when asked whether they had ever met with her or anyone at the DOJ, not one survivor in the room stood to say yes.
If this is what “supporting victims” looks like, no wonder survivors feel abandoned.
Perhaps the most jarring moment came when Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT) confronted Bondi.
Balint, the first woman and openly LGBTQ+ person to represent Vermont in Congress, has spoken openly about how her worldview is shaped by her family’s Holocaust history.
Instead of addressing the substance of Balint’s questions about Epstein survivors, Bondi pivoted to accusations of antisemitism. The implication was vulgar and deeply inappropriate.
Balint forcefully reminded Bondi that her own grandfather was killed in the Holocaust.
As Balint angrily left the room, Bondi laughed.
It was a horrific display, tone-deaf and insidious, and was emblematic of the broader indifference shown toward the survivors of Epstein’s abuse.
Meanwhile, Democrats — including Black, Asian, LGBTQ+, and women lawmakers — centered questions on the survivors.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) asked the question that cut to the heart of the matter: What compensation should survivors receive if the DOJ exposed their identities?
Survivors were asked to stand if they had confidence in Bondi. Not one stood. That silence summed up Bondi’s obtuse testimony.
Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) described Bondi’s performance as “Jekyll and Hyde.” The description fitted. She was syrupy and deferential with Republicans, openly hostile to Democrats. She claimed to protect victims while attacking those who pressed for accountability.
Bondi went so far as to call Trump “the greatest president in history.” It was an astonishing display of political fealty from an attorney general sworn to uphold the law, not flatter a dictator.
Pressed about Epstein, she shifted blame back, invoking Garland again and again, echoing her boss’s familiar tactic of redirecting responsibility to the past.
But the Epstein files are on Bondi now. And she prepared for the hearing not by making sure the victims' questions were answered, but by memorizing her opposition research.
What this hearing revealed was not a commitment to transparency or justice. It revealed a pattern of deflecting blame, protecting the powerful, marginalizing survivors. Cry loudly when your own information is mentioned, shrug when victims’ identities are compromised.
Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) told Bondi she did a good job of “suffering fools.” He was referring to Democrats. But it was Bondi and Grothman’s GOP colleagues who were fatuous fools.
Wrapping up the hypocrisy of it all was a Baptist “minister,” Rep. Mark Harris (R-NC), implying that former CNN journalist Don Lemon was “accosting” members of the church he was reporting on when he was wrongly arrested. Harris nodded at racism, and lied about Lemon. The antithesis of “minister.”
The GOP members of the committee made their priorities clear. They lied. They sneered. They deflected. They protected their own. They ignored the women in the room.
The hearing was a masterclass in misogyny, staged by stale, old, white, narrow-minded Republicans.
- John Casey was most recently Senior Editor, The Advocate, and is a freelance opinion and feature story writer. Previously, he was a Capitol Hill press secretary, and spent 25 years in media and public relations in NYC. He is the co-author of LOVE: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality (Rizzoli, 2025), named by Oprah in her "Best 25 of 2025.”
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Red state AG's sociopathic nonsense is a threat to us all
Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway has filed a lawsuit seeking to require the Census Bureau to “redo” the $14 billion 2020 Census to exclude the persons she doesn’t consider persons. The U.S. Constitution requires that every 10 years “the whole number of persons in each state” be counted for the purpose of apportioning representatives.
Hanaway’s press release brags that her “first-in-the-nation suit” is “the most significant election lawsuit in a generation.” Indeed, her attempt to dilute the voting power of those in states with large minority populations (which tend to be blue, but also include Texas and Florida) is groundbreaking in its disregard of constitutional text and history. Since the first census in 1790, we have always counted non-citizens.
At both the founding of the nation and the adoption of the 14th Amendment, women like myself and Hanaway did not enjoy the rights of citizenship. But we were counted in the census anyway.
To this day, we do not let children vote, but we still count them. Because children are part of the population. The point of the census is to count the population.
Neither authorized nor unauthorized migrants can vote, but we need to know how many of them live here so we can allocate representation and resources.
There is one group of people who were not always counted as whole persons for purposes of apportioning representation. Hanaway’s attempt to evade that history is chilling. Her lawsuit correctly notes that the 14th Amendment states: “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed.”
Then her filing goes on to assert: “this same rule — expressed with materially identical text — also governed when the Constitution was first ratified.”
“Materially identical” leaves me at a loss for printable words.
When the Constitution was ratified, the text laid out that enslaved persons would only count as three fifths of a person for apportionment purposes. The 14th Amendment invalidated that horrifically racist provision. It got rid of the rule that only free persons and indentured servants be fully counted. This is the opposite of “identical.” But Hanaway and five other lawyers signed their names to this sociopathically revisionist nonsense.
Hanaway, presumably not wanting to beat up on the founders or the framers of the 14th Amendment, tries to re-write history to say we only started counting non-citizens in the census during the Carter administration.
Her claims are also incompatible with the constitution’s text. There is a word the framers used instead of “person” when they intended to limit something to citizens. That word is “citizen.” Courts have long recognized that the word “person,” for example as used in the Fifth Amendment’s guarantees of due process, grants rights to undocumented persons.
It’s good for the census to get a full count of who lives in the country, even if they are visa holders or undocumented. I also think it’s good to apportion representation and federal funding accordingly. You can disagree with me on this as a policy matter. But if you do, your beef is with the framers, so your only remedy is to amend the U.S. Constitution.
Constitutional text and history doesn’t get more explicit than this.
The requirements of the constitution aside, counting everyone in the census is also the right thing to do for moral and contractual reasons. Immigrants are persons who live in our states. Even those without legal status came at our invitation.
This country wanted undocumented workers’ low-paid labor. We gave them tax-ID numbers so they could pay taxes. We encouraged them to build lives and families here for decades. We built industries and got all our food on their backs. But we gave them no path to citizenship.
Hanaway filed her lawsuit at a moment when people are being grabbed off the street in Minnesota and across the country by masked ICE agents who have been detaining anybody who looks non-white. Hanaway’s suit was filed after multiple people trying to document or stop this have been shot by ICE agents, two of them fatally.
Hanaway’s lawsuit is ugly and unfounded. Even in these dark times for the rule of law and basic human decency, this gambit should fail and she should be judged for the attempt.
- Bridgette Dunlap is a lawyer and writer living in St. Louis County. She has written for Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, ReWire, Ms. and Slate. Bridgette wants Missouri to be a great place for her kids, and all kids, to grow up.
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An economic tidal wave is heading straight for America
May I be candid with you about the U.S. economy? It’s growing nicely, and the stock market has soared. But on what really counts to most Americans — jobs and wages — it’s sh---y.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this morning that employers added 130,000 jobs in January. That’s not bad until you see that health care accounted for more than half of them. Construction gained 33,000 jobs. Most other sectors were flat.
I would have expected far more job growth, considering the paucity of new jobs last year.
Artificial intelligence isn’t the culprit directly. I think employers have been cautious about hiring given all the uncertainty in the political economy, starting with Trump’s wildly-vacillating tariffs.
But many employers are assessing AI’s likely impact on their businesses, and may be holding back on some of their hiring in anticipation. After all, payrolls comprise two-thirds of a typical business’s costs.
Promoters of AI are working overtime to spin it as benefiting average people. Anyone who watched the Super Bowl ads for AI last Sunday saw how AI is being spun as a wondrous boon to humankind.
Consider the breathless front-page headline in a recent Washington Post: “These companies say AI is key to their four-day workweeks.” The subhead was as euphoric: “Some companies are giving workers back more time as artificial intelligence takes over more tasks.” As the Post explained:
“More companies may move toward a shortened workweek, several executives and researchers predict, as workers, especially those in younger generations, continue to push for better work-life balance.”
Hurray! There’s utopia at the end of the AI rainbow! A better work-life balance!
Similar articles are appearing in Fortune and the New York Times. The AI spin brigade is in full force.
Business leaders are rhapsodizing about how AI will “free” their employees to take more time off. Zoom’s Eric Yuan told the Times that “AI can make all of our lives better, why do we need to work for five days a week? Every company will support three days, four days a week. I think this ultimately frees up everyone’s time.”
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, says advancing technology could push the workweek down to just three-and-a-half days. Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates openly wonders whether a two-day workweek could be the future.
Elon Musk pushes the idea to the extreme (as he does everything else): “In less than 20 years — but maybe even as little as 10 or 15 years — the advancements in AI and robotics will bring us to the point where working is optional.”
Even better: “There will be no poverty in the future and so no need to save money,” says Musk. “There will be universal high income.”
All of this is pure rubbish.
Even if AI produces big productivity gains — which is still an open question (an MIT study last year found that “despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI, 95 percent of organizations are getting zero return”) — it’s far from clear that most workers will see much, if any, of AI’s benefits.
If productivity rises, as it’s supposed to do when the workplace becomes immersed in AI, each worker will generate more value, by definition. And with more value, supposedly we’re all better off.
But worker productivity has been rising for years, yet the median wage has barely risen when adjusted for inflation.
Here’s the truth: The four-day workweek will most likely come with four days’ worth of pay. The three-day workweek, with three days’ worth. And so on.
So, as AI takes over their current work, most workers will probably get poorer or have to take additional jobs to maintain their current pay.
In his famous 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the great British economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that in a century, “the discovery of means of economizing the use of labour” would outpace our ability to “find new uses for labor.” In other words, less work.
Yet Keynes was sure that by 2030 the “standard of life” in Europe and the United States would be so improved by technology that no one would worry about making money. Productivity gains would create an age of abundance.
In fact, by 2030, he predicted, our biggest problem would be how to use all our leisure time:
“For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem — how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”
We’re still four years away from Keynes’s prediction, but at the rate we’re going, it seems wildly wrong.
Rather than creating an age of abundance in which most people no longer have to worry about money, new technologies have contributed to a two-tiered society comprising a relatively few with extraordinary wealth and a vast number of people barely making it.
AI is likely to further widen inequality. It already is. This week, as layoffs climbed and job openings plunged — especially for professionals exposed to AI — the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 50000 for the first time.
Imagine a small box — call it an iEverything — capable of producing for you everything you could possibly desire. It’s a modern-day Aladdin’s lamp. You simply tell it what you want and — presto! —the item or service suddenly appears.
Sounds wonderful until you realize that no one will be able to buy the iEverything because no one will have any means of earning money, since the iEverything will do everything.
This is obviously fanciful, but the dilemma is very real. Productivity gains are great, but the too-little-discussed question is how they’ll be distributed.
The distribution issue can’t be ignored. When more can be done by fewer people, who gets paid what?
It comes down to who has the power.
For most of the last 40 years, the jobs and wages of blue-collar Americans were eroded by globalization and computer software, and most of the benefits from productivity gains went to the richest 10 percent.
AI is now putting the jobs of millions of white-collar Americans on the line. If nothing is done, we’re likely to see white-collar jobs suffer the same erosion — with most of the benefits from the productivity gains going to the richest 0.1 percent.
Unless Americans — white collar, blue collar, pink collar — have the power to demand a share in the productivity gains, profits will go to an ever-smaller circle of owners — leaving the rest of us with less money to buy what can be produced, which is a formula for a fragile economy and an even worse politics.
If the five-day workweek with five days of pay shrinks to four days with four days of pay, and then to three, and to two, and perhaps one, AI will supplant most people’s work and drive down our take-home pay. We may see a dazzling array of products and services spawned by AI, but few of us will be able to buy them.
But this isn’t necessarily our fate. Assuming AI delivers big productivity gains, most Americans could receive the benefits of those gains if most Americans have the bargaining power to get them.
Could labor unions ever be revived to the point that they gave most Americans the bargaining power they need? (I’ll deal with that question shortly.)
Will at least one of our two dominant political parties enact laws that distribute those gains more fairly? (Think a Universal Basic Income, for example, or wealth taxes financing child care, elder care, and universal health care.)
These are not impossible outcomes. After all, as I’ve argued, the future owners of AI have a financial interest in enabling most people to buy the dazzling array of products and services AI spawns.
In the meantime, though, don’t fall for the breathless rubbish about AI allowing employers to “free up” employees’ time.
AI may deliver wondrous benefits. The real question is whether AI’s productivity gains (assuming AI delivers them) are widely shared.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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Trump's Kryptonite just got even more dangerous to handle
This is what we in the business of journalism call a news story.
Last week, the Justice Department released a document showing that Mark Epstein submitted a 2023 tip to the FBI stating that he believed President Donald Trump authorized his brother Jeffrey’s murder. The government had classified Epstein’s 2019 death in prison as a suicide.
Here’s what Mark Epstein wrote to the FBI on February 22, 2023.
“Jeffrey Epstein was murdered in his jail cell. I have reason to believe he was killed because he was about to name names. I believe Presient [sic] Trump authorized is [sic] murder.”
Journalists cannot treat Mark Epstein’s allegation as established fact. There is no public evidence supporting it, and the official ruling remains suicide. But it is not our role to declare his claim false either. Our role is to report that he made it — and that it was submitted to the FBI.
All we know for sure is that the American people have a right to know. And that so much information and context has not been widely reported — through convention or cowardice — by the news media they trust.
Mark Epstein is not claiming America faked the moon landing. He is not alone in doubting the federal government’s assertion that his brother — while in federal custody, facing charges that could send him to prison for life — managed to commit suicide.
According to the Bureau of Prisons, Epstein was found hanging in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center on Aug. 10, 2019. He had been taken off suicide watch despite having been found semiconscious with marks on his neck three weeks earlier. On the night he died, both guards assigned to check on him were asleep. Security cameras malfunctioned. His cellmate had been transferred out, leaving him alone.
In the 40 years preceding Epstein’s death, the Metropolitan Correctional Center — a fortress that has held everyone from John Gotti to El Chapo — had recorded only one successful suicide. The system had worked for four decades. But presumably not in this case.
Dr. Michael Baden, a former New York City Chief Medical Examiner hired by Mark Epstein to observe the autopsy, concluded that injuries to Jeffrey Epstein’s neck — including fractures to the hyoid bone — were “extremely unusual in suicidal hangings” and more consistent with “homicidal strangulation.” The New York City Medical Examiner nevertheless ruled the death a suicide.
Still, the media had no appetite for the story at the time. Today it’s treated as some frivolous footnote to the Epstein story.
Consider what Trump has said publicly. Throughout his political career, Trump has brazenly embraced retribution as principle. He has mused about handling whistleblowers “like we used to in the old days.” He labeled his former attorney Michael Cohen a “rat” for cooperating with authorities. When Trump uses the word “retribution,” he is signaling that the cost of betrayal is total.
The Trump administration arrested Epstein in July 2019. The Trump Justice Department oversaw the facility where he died six weeks later. Epstein was facing life in prison. His only bargaining chip was information.
Trump and Epstein were photographed together multiple times in the 1990s. In a 2002 interview with New York Magazine, Trump said he had known Epstein for 15 years and described him as someone who liked “beautiful women … many of them on the younger side.”
Epstein's testimony would have carried obvious political risk for anyone he might have implicated — including Trump — regardless of whether any allegations were true.
Still, taking all that into account, it's an enormous leap to ponder whether an American president might even consider involvement such as that alleged by Mark Epstein. But one needn't take that leap to examine the documented historical record.
Unlike any other president in American history, Trump entered office with a business record marked by decades of litigation and documented dealings with contractors and associates later convicted in organized crime cases. Long before Trump entered politics, elements of his real estate and casino operations were examined in court records, regulatory findings and investigative reporting.
In the 1980s, Trump’s construction projects used S&A Concrete, a company federal prosecutors later described in racketeering indictments as being controlled by Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno and Paul Castellano, who were convicted in organized crime cases.
In 1982, Trump purchased Atlantic City property from Salvatore Testa, later identified by law enforcement as a member of the Philadelphia crime family. The transaction was reflected in public property records and later detailed in investigative reporting.
In 1991, the New Jersey Casino Control Commission fined Trump Plaza $200,000 for regulatory violations involving high-rolling gambler Robert LiButti, who in secretly recorded FBI conversations referred to Gambino boss John Gotti as “my boss.” That same year, the commission imposed additional fines related to luxury vehicle transactions tied to LiButti.
In separate litigation, Judge Charles E. Stewart Jr. ruled that Trump had engaged in a conspiracy to violate fiduciary duties in connection with undocumented Polish workers employed during the demolition of the Bonwit Teller building. The demolition contractor, William Kaszycki, was later linked in court records to organized crime figures.
Trump was never charged with organized crime offenses in these matters. None of this history establishes any connection to Jeffrey Epstein’s death. It does, however, form part of the documented public record of Trump’s pre-presidential business career.
Courts operate under strict evidentiary rules designed to limit what juries hear. Journalism operates differently. Our role is not to adjudicate guilt, but to report what has been alleged and what is known.
The media is not a court of law; it’s a court of public opinion. It’s governed by rules of fairness, honesty and thoroughness.
But now, after all the clamoring for the release of the Epstein files, a veritable news blackout has greeted the bombshell allegation that Jeffrey Epstein’s brother told the FBI he believed his brother did not commit suicide and that the president of the United States authorized his murder.
For those of us who believe the public has a right to know what their government does in their name, that silence is the story.
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I saw roving 'hunt clubs' kill street kids in Colombia. I'm sick that it's happening here
Donald Trump’s presidency now has a human body count.
“We really feel like we’re being hunted, we’re being hunted like animals,” an undocumented farm worker in Ventura county, California, told a reporter for The Guardian.
I’ve seen this movie before. Or at least where it leads.
Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I spent a fair amount of time in Colombia on behalf of the German-based international relief organization I’ve worked with for more than half my life. I shared the story in my book about those experiences, The Prophet’s Way, detailing one of the “hunt clubs” I ran across in Bogotá.
These were mostly middle-class European-ancestry (white) men, many of them off-duty cops, who go out at night in camo with high-powered rifles and night-vision gear to hunt dark-skinned “los gamines,” the million or so street children who commit much of the petty (and often serious) crime in the city.
Afterwards, they go drinking and partying, celebrating their kills. Some of the clubs even have names, like “the deer hunters” (cazadores de ciervos).
“Hunt clubs” is my term (and that of my host in Bogotá); during that era, what these men were doing was called “social cleansing” or “limpieza social” and in addition to killing kids, they also targeted for beatings or death homeless people, sex workers, LGBTQ people, drug users, and others they labeled “undesirable.”
As Amnesty International noted in a 1993 press release:
“There is concern for the safety of thousands of street children in Bogota following the appearance on 11 August 1993 of posters in the city centre inviting them to attend their own funerals.
“These posters, which announce the extermination of ‘delinquent street children’ are signed in the name of industrialists, shopkeepers and civic groups. There have been an increasing number of reports of killings of so-called ‘social undesirables’ (desechables sociales) in what are routinely called ‘social clean-up operations,’ generally attributed to shadowy ‘death-squads.’”
But the hunt clubs of Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s were pikers, compared to what Trump, Miller, Homan, Noem, et al are running today in America.
So far since Trump took over their operations, they’ve killed at least 40 people, both in their so-called “detention facilities” and on the streets of our cities, and imprisoned more than 70,000 men, women, and children in over 230 concentration camps. And Trump just cut off funding for medical services for those in the camps, so expect the death numbers to grow quickly.
Unlike the “volunteers” in Bogotá, Trump’s thugs are well-paid, making up to $200K when you include signing bonuses, bounties, and other benefits.
And they get to go hunting!
- Supervisory Border Patrol agent Charles Exum, for example, reportedly bragged to his fellow ICE hunt club members that when he shot Miramar Martinez in Chicago suburb Brighton Park there were “5 shots, 7 holes.” The following day, he shared with his ICE buddies a text message saying, “Cool. I’m up for another round of ‘fuck around and find out.’”
- After shooting Renee Good five times for daring to tell him to “have a nice day,” ICE hunt club member Jonathan Ross called her a “fucking bitch.”
- And when two ICE thugs murdered Alex Pretti, they rolled his body over to count the bullet holes as nearby agents laughed and applauded.
Like the hunt club members in Bogotá, today’s ICE hunt club members — under color of law and with the approval of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the applause of Trump’s senior officials — pick out people based on how dark their skin is and routinely kick in brown-skinned people’s doors or drag them out of their cars before assaulting and even killing them.
And, while the hunt club members in Bogotá only occasionally wear masks or balaclavas to conceal their identity, ICE hunt club members can do it all the time.
America has — at least for the past few generations — always considered itself better than this.
These ICE hunt clubs don’t operate in secret. They wear (concealed) badges. They draw salaries from your and my tax dollars. They joke about murder and violence in their text messages. They pose for photos with their victims.
And they know — absolutely know — that powerful people will protect them. After all, the vice president of the United States claimed they have “absolute immunity” from prosecution.
But that protection only works if the rest of us stay quiet.
Colombia’s hunt clubs didn’t (largely) vanish because they had a moral awakening. They ended when the public finally said no and forced accountability. And the country today shudders every time that story is told. History tells us, unambiguously, how this sort of disgrace ends.
Every modern society that normalizes “hunts” of the poor, the dark-skinned, the undocumented, or the politically inconvenient eventually discovers that the culturally-acceptable definition of “undesirable” keeps expanding.
Today it’s brown-skinned migrants. Tomorrow it’s white protesters (they’ve already started that, building a database of “domestic terrorists” who film them and even revoking their access to TSA PreCheck). Then journalists (they just raided the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson). Then judges (they arrested Judge Hannah Dugan).
Then anyone who won’t clap loudly enough.
Colombia learned this lesson the hard way. As did Germany, Chile, and Argentina. So did the American South after Reconstruction, when “posses” and “night riders” were praised as patriots until, in the 1950s and 1960s, we finally admitted to ourselves what they really were and did something about it.
But here we are again.
The people running today’s ICE hunt clubs may feel untouchable now. After all, people like them always do. But history keeps receipts and is utterly merciless with those who choose to hunt human beings.
- Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.
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This is Trump’s dead giveaway that he was in over his head with Epstein
Every time he sees trouble brewing, Donald Trump exhibits a telltale panic response.
When he’s cornered, when the walls close in and facts start to make the hair left on his head stand straight up — although a stiff wind will do that too — Trump doesn’t simply deny. He lies by preemptively distancing himself.
It’s the first clue he’s in real trouble, and it’s turned into one of his most revealing traits.
He muddies timelines. He feigns ignorance. He never knew the person or persons in question. He suddenly remembers “falling out,” years earlier. He insists everyone else knew more than he did.
We know the routine: Trump is lying through his teeth.
He tries to get ahead of the story by pretending he was never really in it. Panic kicks in, and he does something so over-the-top it screams “Guilty, guilty, guilty!” He goes on the offensive by reinserting himself as a supposedly credible source.
This is exactly what makes newly surfaced FBI records from a 2019 interview with a retired Palm Beach police chief so damning — not because they accuse Trump of a crime, but because they expose his reflexive damage control in real time.
It’s the kind of response you only deploy when the truth is biting your bulbous ass. A maneuver only Trump has perfected — or imperfected.
According to those records, first reported by the indefatigable Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald, in July 2006, shortly after Jeffrey Epstein’s first criminal investigation became public, Trump called Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter.
Trump didn’t call to express shock or support. He didn’t call to ask questions. And he didn’t call because he had just learned something stunning.
No, he called to say, in essence: “Everyone already knew, and I had nothing to do with it. Nothing.”
He wanted it known he was nowhere near Epstein, had barely known him, and definitely didn’t need looking into as well.
Here’s what Trump reportedly said, but you can read between the lines: “Thank goodness you’re stopping him. Everyone has known he’s been doing this.”
Trump allegedly described Epstein’s behavior with teenage girls as “disgusting,” warned that Epstein partner Ghislaine Maxwell was his “operative,” and urged police to focus on her, calling her “evil.”
Then came the magnum opus: Trump claimed he had once been around Epstein when teenagers were present, and had “got the hell out of there.”
OMG, Donald, slow down. Take a breath. Methinks thou dost protest too much.
This wasn’t a man discovering a predator. This was a man carefully placing himself just far enough away from one while making sure law enforcement heard, loud and clear, that he shouldn’t be counted among the naïve.
And yes, I know what you’re thinking. If he knew, if he saw Epstein with teenage girls, why didn’t he say something? Why didn’t he go to the authorities? Why didn’t he blow the whistle?
Because, of course, Trump was likely fibbing. You can bet he didn’t get “the hell out of there.” He stayed. And he played. You can make that assumption because of Trump’s overreaction.
For years afterward, Trump told a very different story.
- He minimized his relationship with Epstein, saying, “Well, I knew him like everybody in Palm Beach knew him.”
- He claimed he banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago two decades ago because the sex offender was stealing young spa workers.
- He insisted they hadn’t spoken in 15 years. Twenty, 15, who’s counting?
- His lawyers said he had “no knowledge whatsoever” of Epstein’s conduct.
- When Maxwell was arrested, Trump didn’t condemn her. He famously said he “wished her well.”
Those statements are irreconcilable with the 2006 call in which Trump claimed everyone knew Epstein abused minors.
Everyone knew, but Trump didn’t? All of Palm Beach knew, but Trump, a fixture of Palm Beach society, didn’t? Sure. I guess when the gossip started at Mar-a-Lago, Trump ran to the DJ and blasted “YMCA” so he couldn’t hear the sordid scuttlebutt.
While Trump’s linguistic gymnastics are laughable, what he’s lying about is not. Nearly every man tied to Epstein lied about his relationship with him, until the drip, drip, drip of documents exposed the deceit. The same holds true for Trump.
The FBI records don’t accuse Trump of criminal wrongdoing. But they do something arguably more damaging. They show he understood exactly how bad Epstein was when it mattered, and then spent two decades pretending otherwise.
It’s Trump’s pattern.
He didn’t know about the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels, didn’t know her either, until investigators produced the canceled checks. He had “nothing to do” with Project 2025, until he staffed his administration with its authors.
He denied knowing Paul Manafort, his campaign manager, shared data with a Russian associate.
He claimed he took no classified documents from the White House, until his own voice contradicted him.
Now this gem. The irony is that Trump followed his playbook with (now former) Prince Andrew, flatly denying he knew him, only to have photos and his own past praise prove the relationship he rushed to disown was real.
There are too many examples to list, because Trump’s diversions happen daily.
Every time, the same routine: distance first, details later. Denials until evidence forces revision. By then the truth is a muddle.
The 2006 call isn’t vindicating. Trump wasn’t confessing. He was positioning. He was laying down a narrative designed to frame himself as an outsider to Epstein’s crimes rather than someone entangled in Epstein’s orbit and behavior.
It’s as if Trump believed that by calling police and loudly declaring “everyone knows,” he could immunize himself from scrutiny.
The FBI files show Trump knew. Trump lied about knowing. And Trump did what he always does. He tried to talk his way out before anyone asked the right questions.
That’s the dead giveaway.
Trump was in deep. Way deep. In over his head. Now the question is, why isn’t Trump’s head rolling like so many others?
- John Casey was most recently Senior Editor, The Advocate, and is a freelance opinion and feature story writer. Previously, he was a Capitol Hill press secretary, and spent 25 years in media and public relations in NYC. He is the co-author of LOVE: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality (Rizzoli, 2025), named by Oprah in her "Best 25 of 2025.”
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Trump's disturbing new moves suggest something deeply ominous
News broke last week that President Donald Trump was conditioning approval of an infrastructure spending bill on renaming New York City’s Penn Station and Washington’s Dulles Airport in his honor. It was unsurprising because there’s a disturbing pattern in Trump’s approach to governing that includes the glorification of the leader, the erasure of norms, the use of threats of retribution to stifle critics, and a reliance on “alternate facts” to keep the faithful in tow.
Because I am once again writing about President Trump, I know that some will accuse me of having what the president calls “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” I confess to being obsessed with his incendiary speech, his behavior, and the movement he has inspired, precisely because of the danger they pose to American democracy.
During Trump’s first term we dreaded turning on the news each morning and learning about the threatening tweets he had posted overnight. But because there were guardrails in place — senior staff who would slow walk his demands or simply refuse to act on them, or Congress or the courts that served as a check on his behavior — most often the threats turned out to be hollow.
As has been noted, in his second term, because the guardrails are gone, the president has become emboldened to move beyond empty words to actions which his minions faithfully attempt to execute. As a result, we are entering uncharted waters in which an imperial presidency is testing the resilience of our system of “checks and balances.”
Entering the second year of his second term in office, the pattern is clear. He employs bullying tactics to get his way — with other individuals, institutions, or countries. He “floods the zone,” disorienting opponents by daily confronting them with a barrage of new challenges. And following lessons learned from his mentor, Roy Cohn, he always attacks, never admits mistakes, and always claims victory.
In just the past few weeks, Trump has undertaken several deeply disturbing initiatives. Individually, each pose a problem, but when viewed collectively they suggest something far more ominous.
He ordered the FBI to seize the 2020 election ballots from Fulton County, Georgia, presumably because he still believes he was cheated out of victory — even though the official who controlled the Georgia balloting in 2020 was a Republican. It is unprecedented for a president to take an action of this sort and to accompany it with a statement saying:
“Remember, the states are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes … They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”
In this one statement, the president calls for violating the Constitution and the prerogative it gives states in running elections. And by equating himself with the federal government and saying that when he speaks, he does so on behalf of and for the good of the country, he is laying the groundwork for an imperial presidency.
The president also made what appears to be a spur of the moment decision to shutter the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He said that the reason for closing the Center was that the building was in such disrepair that it was a danger to patrons. However, given that just a few days before the announced closure, the White House had used this very same venue to host the premiere of the documentary about his wife, Melania, insiders suggest another reason behind the abrupt decision to shutter the Center.
Unilaterally changing the name of the Center, removing its board, and adding his supporters as board members with himself as chair has made the once-revered institution partisan and toxic. It was losing members and donors, performers were cancelling, and it was bleeding money. Rather than admit defeat, the president shut it down.
One of the president’s earliest actions was to try to bring the nation’s most prestigious universities to heel. He did so by charging them with chronic antisemitism and using “diversity quotas” in hiring and admissions. Because these two issues resonate with his base, he was determined to win. He began by withholding federal grants until universities complied with his demands to rid their campuses of antisemitism (which meant ending protests against Israel) and make admissions and hiring blind.
A number of smaller schools submitted to the threats, but Harvard held out. Finally, after a year or fruitless negotiations and threats, the story came out that the White House was backing down on its threat to fine Harvard. This suggestion of defeat so enraged the president that he both denied it and announced that instead of penalizing Harvard $200 million if they didn’t agree to his demands, he was raising Harvard’s penalty to $1 billion, an example of personal peeve becoming policy.
These recent actions by the president are part of a pattern that grows more pronounced each day. He makes decisions unilaterally without regard to the Constitution or established procedure. He acts to punish those who do not submit to his dictates. And he governs as if “L’État, c’est moi.” With the support of a compliant Congress and a base of true believers, right now this president appears to be untouchable. But should he push too far or should Republicans lose control of Congress in November, the tide could turn, leaving Trump’s effort to create an “Imperial Presidency” to die on the vine.
- Dr. James J. Zogby is the author of Arab Voices (2010) and the founder and president of the Arab American Institute (AAI), a Washington, D.C.-based organization which serves as the political and policy research arm of the Arab American community. In 1984 and 1988, Zogby served as Deputy Campaign manager and Senior Advisor to the Jesse Jackson Presidential campaign. In 2000, 2008, and 2016 he served as an advisor to the Gore, Obama, and Sanders presidential campaigns.
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Trump's bleak nightmare is also a rare opportunity
A few days ago I was approached on the street by someone I didn’t know.
“Are you Robert Reich?” she asked.
“Yes,” I replied.
“I just want you to know …” she began, and then burst into tears. I felt awful but couldn’t think what to say. Then, in a flash, she was gone.
I don’t know what she wanted me to know, but I do know that lots of people are weeping these days.
They’re weeping for family members who have been arrested and abducted by ICE. For children arrested and imprisoned, even if their own families haven’t been affected. For people murdered by ICE or Border Patrol.
Grieving the children now dying around the world because they no longer have medicines that America used to provide through USAID or because they’re starving in places of war or famine in which America is implicated.
Crying for our planet being destroyed because Trump won’t adhere to the Paris Agreement and promotes oil and coal and kills subsidies for solar and wind.
In tears over the common decency that’s being demolished, as Trump reposts a video of the Obamas as apes, calls Somali-Americans “garbage,” and demands his name on an airport or train station in return for approving a vital transit project in New York.
Lamenting an America being sacked with impunity by billionaires like Jeff Bezos — handing Melania Trump $28 million while slashing the Washington Post newsroom and laying off thousands of Amazon workers, at the same time raking in billions of dollars more.
Or Elon Musk — planning AI data centers in space while his AI Grok floods X with sexually explicit images, and promising to flood American politics with more of his money.
And the shameless, wealthy, powerful men who abused young girls in Jeffrey Epstein’s island retreat and New York townhouse.
They’re sobbing because they’re sickened by what has happened to America.
Cry, our beloved country.
I understand the tears. I have wept, too.
But let’s not just weep.
As bleak as this era is, I hope you can also see in it an opportunity.
We could not have stayed on the road we were on even before Trump — toward widening inequality, a politics polluted by wealthy campaign donations and corporate super PACs, a market increasingly rigged by and for billionaires, an economy dominated by finance, and a climate collapsing.
So now we have an opportunity to begin the rebuilding of America. A chance to reimagine what we can become and how we can live.
To commit ourselves to stopping the self-dealing, crony capitalism, and legalized bribery that have led us to where we are. Override Citizens United and get big money out of our politics. Prevent the oligarchy from monopolizing our economy, owning our media, and taking over America.
An opportunity to update our Constitution and our means of self-government. Abolish the Electoral College. Stop political and racial gerrymandering.
And never again allow a loathsome wannabe king to tyrannize America and the world.
In other words, my friends, now is the time to rededicate ourselves to the values enshrined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address, and FDR’s first and second inaugural addresses.
A time to educate the next generation so they don’t make the same mistakes. To teach our children and our grandchildren what happened and why, and instill in them a passion for democracy and the rule of law.
To read them the poems of Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, Emma Lazarus’s “New Colossus” — which adorns the Statue of Liberty — and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the Washington Monument.
To celebrate the courage of generations of American soldiers, the selflessness of our teachers and social workers, and the kindness of people like Renee Good and Alex Pretti and the people of Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Yes, weep for what we have lost. But don’t just weep. Turn these losses into a new beginning — based not only on what’s gone wrong with America but also on what’s still good.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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The simple reality of this stinking scandal is all roads lead to Trump
It’s been building for more than a decade, but my head finally exploded after hearing the news that not only had convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell pleaded the Fifth in refusing to answer questions about Jeffrey Epstein during a deposition before the House Oversight Committee (HOC) — she also said through her lawyers she’d only speak the “unfiltered truth” if granted clemency by President Donald Trump.
I believe this is called blackmail.
The same statement said “both President Trump and President [Bill] Clinton are innocent of any wrongdoing” and that “Ms. Maxwell alone can explain why.”
We’re all being asked to believe that a single thing emerging from Maxwell’s mouth after a pardon would have any resemblance to the truth. The woman will naturally say and do anything to get herself out of prison, or whatever it is they call the minimum-security playground currently housing her.
The very idea that Maxwell’s legal team would even release something this brazenly shameless speaks volumes about where we are as a country. It’s mind-boggling that such an offer could even be committed to paper.
Does it actually give Trump cover to pardon Maxwell, under the supposed pretext of revealing the unvarnished truth of the Epstein saga? Trump may think so. But then, he claims to think a lot of things, few rational, none sincere.
We live in Crazytown U.S.A., ladies and gentlemen. Everything that’s come out in the redacted Epstein Files stinks. The affair is taking down powerful men internationally, but here in America it’s much more about protecting those who can purchase guilt-free status.
I’m sick to death of all the pretending. We are constantly asked to suspend disbelief, to substitute the implausible for the obvious, because the human being whose culpability appears greatest happens to be the one with the farthest to fall and the greatest power.
Come on. An innocent man wants the truth out there to clear his name. A guilty one hides, deflects, diverts, threatens — everything Trump has done since day one of the Epstein outrage.
What we get instead is Rep. James Comer (R-KY), oversight chair, going after former President Clinton and his wife, Hillary. The Clintons have called for an open hearing, with cameras. But Comer isn’t interested in getting to the bottom of anything, preferring to concentrate on sullying a couple of long-targeted Democrats.
I truly don’t much care what the Clintons have to say about Bill’s apparent involvement. I want to put Trump in the spotlight. Force him to lie under oath, because we know he would. Simply making him answer publicly for his involvement in the greatest pedophile scandal in modern history would be a major step toward a measure of accountability.
Maxwell’s lawyers asserted that Trump and Bill Clinton were innocent in order to make her outreach appear non-partisan and somehow genuine. But it’s all just part of the coverup.
I want U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, fronting for the corrupt Department of “Justice,” to be called to testify about what he discussed with Maxwell that landed her a Club Fed hotel suite where she gets to munch escargot and cuddle puppies. Part of the quid pro quo for keeping her big yap shut, perhaps?
Why aren’t the Dems – and, for that matter, the survivors/victims of Epstein and his pals – demanding that Blanche get on the stand and make sure he’s threatened with the same Contempt of Congress charge that they slapped on the Clintons if he refuses?
The reality is that all roads lead back to Trump.
Trump is mentioned in the 3 million pages of released Epstein files some 5,300 times. It’s well established that Epstein and Trump were best friends for at least a decade. The odds Trump wasn’t aware of Epstein’s criminal penchant for trafficking and abusing underage girls are approximately zero. He is guilty of, at the very least, felonious complicity.
Comer: “We’re interested in talking to anyone that might have information that would help us get justice for the survivorship.”
Oh really, Congressman? Well then, step right over here. I’d like you to meet a dude who’s mentioned in the files more than 5,000 times. Think he might have a couple of tidbits that could interest you? No? Perhaps you’d like to fill us in as to why not?
It was on Nov. 17, 1973, that President Richard Nixon famously declared during a televised press conference, amid the Watergate scandal, “People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.”
People have also got to know whether or not their president is a pedophile or someone who protects those who commit such heinous acts. The only way to purportedly know the answer is to question Trump while he’s sworn to tell the truth.
There is no precedent to think we should just take Trump’s word for it, as he has no credibility. At least getting him on the stand conveys the presumption of forced candor.
It’s well past time to get this all out in the open instead of cherry-picking enemies like the Clintons. This has never been a Democrat vs. Republican issue but one pitting the powerful vs. the powerless. The survivors themselves have grown sadly, disgustingly irrelevant, mere collateral damage to an ever-raging hurricane.
- Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.
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No wonder Trump hates this great American spectacle
Sunday night’s Super Bowl was great. The guys wearing blue beat the guys wearing white, and Bad Bunny and Lady Gaga made MAGA snowflakes cry.
But the NFL can also teach Americans a huge lesson about economics, “socialism,” and the differences between Republican “free market” nuts and FDR’s re-regulation of the American economy that created the largest middle class in history and the first in the world to include more than half of a nation’s citizens.
Most Americans would be highly offended, for example, if the NFL took big bucks from Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg or somebody like these monopolists to change the rules so whichever team gave the league the most money could have an extra three players on the field at all times.
But that’s pretty much exactly what Reaganomics and deregulation have brought us in our marketplaces; it’s the staggering difficulty that every small business in America faces today in the form of massive corporations like Walmart, Facebook, X, Google, and Amazon.
For capitalism to work in a way that doesn’t produce oligarchs and monopolies, it must be regulated. Capitalism, after all, is just a game that people play using money and mutually agreed-upon rules. Just like football.
The NFL heavily regulates football in the United States, at least the football played by its teams. Those regulations include how many players are on the field at any time, exactly what constitutes a down or a touchdown, and rules about how players may physically contact each other, and under what circumstances.
The NFL’s super-socialist regulations also decide which team gets first pick of new players: they decided that the worst-performing teams should have first choice of newly available players, giving every team an opportunity to rise up through the ranks in the following season.
It’s much like progressive income taxation and the estate tax, giving the little guy a chance while slightly restraining those already at the top. These regulations guarantee the safety and stability of the game itself, and also guarantee that fans of football have a consistent experience, because everybody understands and follows the rules.
That’s not meritocracy; it’s planned redistribution of future resources to maintain league balance. If American public policy worked this way, the millionaire opinion bots at billionaire-owned Fox “News” would spontaneously combust.
The league also pools its television and licensing revenue and divides it equally among all teams: No owner gets richer just because they’re in a bigger market. In a pure “free market,” the Cowboys and Giants would drown everyone else in cash. The NFL says, “Nope, everybody eats.” That’s redistribution by design.
And they impose a hard salary cap so rich owners can’t simply buy championships, and they require owners to spend what is effectively a minimum wage on players rather than hoarding profits. Teams that overspend are punished: that’s collective control of capital to prevent oligarchy, the exact thing conservatives scream about.
NFL teams are also required to spend a minimum percentage of shared revenue on their players. Owners can’t just hoard money; they must reinvest in labor. That’s closer to social democracy than laissez-faire capitalism.
The NFL figured out something America forgot after Reagan: markets only work when rules prevent the powerful from rigging the game.
In other words, the NFL is a regulated market with enforced rules that prevent monopolies, protect labor, and preserve competition. And because of that, small-market teams can win, dynasties don’t last forever, and fans get a fair game.
If the American economy were run more like the NFL, we’d have fewer oligarchs, more competition, and a much healthier middle class.
But imagine if Milton Friedman, Robert Bork, or the other idiots like them who first advised the Reagan administration and now have guided Republicans ever since were to have taken over the NFL.
The teams with the wealthiest owners would always get the best players, and thus would win every game. They might even decide that the team that gave the NFL the most money could have an extra player or three on the field at various times.
They’d assure us that the teams that didn’t perform as well just have to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” Perhaps their problem is just that their players are “lazy,” these people would tell us, and the solution is to cut their salaries and reduce the amount of protective equipment they can wear so that they will have a “incentive” to play harder and increase their performance.
Then the richest teams would begin buying the poorer teams, until all the teams are owned by three or four billionaires. Sounds like every industry in today’s America. But conservatives would try to convince you it would create a football paradise, right?
Of course it wouldn’t be a paradise: Fans would stop watching, kids would stop dreaming of playing, and the game itself would collapse under the weight of rigging and unfairness. Not to mention that if the socialist NFL ever actually tried some crazy “free market” stupidity like that, Congress would be holding hearings within a week and the public outrage would be deafening.
But when the same thing happens in our economy, we’re told by Republicans that it’s just “the free market.” We’re told that “monopolies are natural,” that “billionaires are geniuses,” and that working people who can’t get ahead in a rigged system somehow “deserve their fate.”
We’re told by these fools that any attempt to re-write the rules so the American economy is fair again and our middle class can recover from the massive $50+ trillion hit it’s taken from 45 years of Reaganomics is “socialism,” even though FDR’s system is exactly how every successful capitalist system in history has worked.
Franklin Roosevelt understood this. He knew markets don’t self-police any more than football does. Without referees, rules, and consequences, the biggest and most ruthless players take over, the game stops being a game, and democracy itself is put at risk. And when the morbidly rich write the rules, they inevitably only benefit themselves; everybody else gets screwed.
The NFL doesn’t regulate football because it hates competition: it regulates football and “redistributes” wealth and opportunity so competition can exist at all. America once did the same thing with capitalism, and the result was the greatest middle class the world had ever seen.
Two-thirds of us were in the middle class when Reagan came into office, and could get there with a single paycheck thanks to FDR‘s and LBJ‘s “socialist” New Deal and Great Society policies. Today it’s only roughly 45 percent of us, and requires two paychecks. All because of 45 years of Reaganomics.
The choice in front of us is simple. We can keep pretending that letting billionaires write the political and economic rules and own the media is “freedom,” or we can remember that a fair game is what freedom actually looks like.
Because when the rules only work for the owners, the rest of us aren’t players anymore. We’re just there to watch, pay, and lose what little we have so the billionaires can buy another super-yacht.
- Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.
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