Trump's right — some things really are dirt cheap now
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
Sinister GOP blueprint laid bare by these shameless red-staters
Let’s be blunt: Michigan Republicans, like their counterparts nationally, are no longer merely questioning elections. They are actively seeking to undermine them.
Their latest maneuvers, calling for federal intervention by baselessly smearing Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s ability to fairly oversee elections to cheering President Donald Trump’s pardons of the state’s alleged false electors, reveal a party more invested in manufacturing distrust than in protecting democracy.
Put together, these moves are not isolated issues. They form a strategy: cast doubt, sow suspicion, and demand federal oversight, all the while shifting focus from governance to grievance.
'Conflict of interest' gambit
On Thursday, GOP leaders in the Michigan Legislature demanded that the U.S. Department of Justice step in and monitor the state’s 2026 elections because Benson might have a personal political stake — she’s running for governor — and therefore cannot be trusted to run elections impartially.
But those who know how our elections work also know Michigan has a deeply decentralized system administered across 1,600+ local jurisdictions and that electoral oversight is routinely conducted with bipartisan monitors and observers.
What’s happening here is not about transparency, it’s about casting suspicion.
Rather than offering credible evidence of wrongdoing, these Republicans are demanding a federal takeover of state elections under the guise of “protecting fairness.”
That is opposite the principle of local control and further erodes public confidence.
The optics of a state handing over election control to Washington, D.C., are antithetical to stated conservative principles valuing states’ rights over those not explicitly delineated to the federal government.
Pardons of false electors
Furthering this attempt to undermine elections were the October pardons by Trump of 16 Michigan Republicans who allegedly signed on as a false slate of electors in 2020 in an effort to overturn the certified election results in the state.
The pardons, which were wholly unnecessary after the charges were dismissed, undercuts faith in the very system Republicans insist they are defending.
It is breathtakingly hypocritical.
Keep in mind that the Republicans charged in the false elector case were not exonerated. After having sat through hours of testimony in the case, it was clear to me that the evidence showed an attempt to try and overturn Joe Biden’s Electoral College win.
But a poorly handled investigation and an overreaching prosecution ultimately left the judge little choice but to reject the charges.
When you pardon those who seemingly tried to subvert the system and were already cleared of any consequences, how do you then credibly say you’re working to protect the system?
Why this matters
The integrity of elections is built by process, by transparency, and by predictable rules. In that regard, Michigan is among the best, having been ranked second in the nation for election administration in 2024 by the Elections Performance Index.
Released by the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, the report scored Michigan at 88 percent on the index, second only to New Mexico, which also scored 88 percent.
The report noted Michigan had shorter wait times for voters, far fewer registration and absentee ballot issues than the national average and a much lower rate of unreturned mail ballots. Michigan was also higher than the national average in both voter turnout (59.3 percent compared to 47.5 percent nationally) and voter registration (91 percent compared to 84 percent nationally).
Yet now, Republicans lawmakers seem fixated not on improving how we vote but on how they can discredit how we vote.
When political actors sow doubt in elections without credible evidence, they are not engaging in oversight — they are delegitimizing democracy.
When they then demand federal intervention in a state process because they don’t like the referee, they are undermining the system of state-run elections that the U.S. Constitution guarantees.
State Republicans’ relentless refusal to accept the basic legitimacy of our voting system aren’t signs of vigilance: they’re warnings.
If we continue down a path where power matters more than truth and sabotage masquerades as oversight, then the greatest threat to Michigan’s elections won’t come from foreign actors or technical glitches — it will come from those who claim to defend democracy while dismantling it from within.
- Jon King is the Michigan Advance’s editor-in-chief, having previously served as the outlet's senior reporter, covering education, elections and LGBTQ+ issues. King has been a journalist for more than 35 years and is the Past President of the Michigan Associated Press Media Editors Association who has been recognized for excellence numerous times, most recently in 2022 with the Best Investigative Story by the Michigan Association of Broadcasters. He is also an adjunct faculty member at Cleary University. Jon and his family live in Howell. Michigan Advance is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
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These Republican reps exposed as cowards by one colleague
One member of Kansas’ U.S. House delegation has stepped up to demand government accountability in the Jeffrey Epstein case. The other three representatives?
They’re missing in action.
Rep. Sharice Davids, a Democrat, has signed onto a discharge petition that would force a vote on releasing files about Epstein, his powerful friends and crimes against teenage girls.
Reps. Derek Schmidt, Tracey Mann and Ron Estes, all Republicans, have declined to add their names. They will be on the record soon enough. A vote on the petition appears likely this week.
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to believe that something has gone awry in the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein case.
The deceased financier committed sex crimes and boasted of famous pals, including President Donald Trump and former President Bill Clinton. Official and journalistic inquiries into his depravity have continued for decades, and documents have trickled out throughout that time. The current administration swept into office promising unprecedented disclosure of case files.
Then the administration abruptly declared there was no news there, with Trump dubbing the affair a “Democrat hoax.”
That sounds, well, suspicious.
The stories keep coming. Earlier this year, we learned about a birthday letter to Epstein bearing Trump’s name (the president denies the signature is his). A tranche of email messages to and from Epstein landed just last week. So forgive me, and folks from across the partisan divide, who believe there’s more to learn about case.
In the House, four Republicans have joined all Democrats in demanding the government release everything it can. Party leadership has opposed the effort, and Trump has lobbied hard to shut it down. He’s denounced GOP Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie online. Neither have been known for liberal views, to say the least. Administration bigwigs apparently lobbied Rep. Lauren Boebert inside the Situation Room.
One might assume our GOP representatives in Washington, D.C., would be front and center, demanding answers and accountability. After all, they come from a party that supposedly highlights both family values and a tough on crime stance.
Yet Schmidt, Mann and Estes haven’t supported the petition. They haven’t spoken up. To me, that looks like a missed opportunity.
Estes’ office at least sent a statement: “Rep. Estes appreciates the good work that the House Oversight Committee has done to provide transparency about this despicable person, including the 20,000 pages of documents that were released this past week. He is reviewing the bill that will come before the House to ensure it provides sufficient transparency while protecting innocent victims.”
I’m sure all of these representatives detest Epstein and find his crimes appalling. I’m sure they all want justice for his victims and to understand how far the corruption went among American elites who curried Epstein’s favor. I’m sure that, given their druthers, they would support any and all efforts to seek the full release of information about the case.
How unfortunate that we live during a time when they face political risk for doing so. They know which way the wind blows, and they have seen Trump’s attacks on Greene and Massie. I’m sure they believe it’s safer to avoid the whole mess and stay in the good graces of their party leader — the same man who once stated Epstein was “a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
(Trump himself has been accused by nearly 30 women of sexual impropriety. His 2016 campaign for president was nearly derailed by a tape in which he talked about grabbing women by their genitalia. Diehard Trump supporters have made their peace with all this, however, so let’s move along.)
The real question of the moment is how Schmidt, Mann and Estes justify their position in this moment, right now. They have to know that their votes, and the votes of their colleagues, will be recorded and reported across the nation.
I reached out repeatedly to the offices of all three men before writing this column. As noted above, I heard back from Estes. Good for him, and good for staff members who check their email messages.
I didn’t hear back from Mann or Schmidt. That was especially disappointing given that Mann’s staff insisted three months ago that they were committed to communicating.
Apparently not when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein!
Anyway, I don’t want to think poorly of anyone. If Schmidt or Mann or their spokespeople want to send along a comment about the discharge petition — or the underlying bill — I will happily include it in an updated version of this column. I’ve done it before and will again. Their words and their stances matter.
Frankly, I haven’t written about Epstein or his crimes until now because I don’t see the controversy. Who would willingly block records about a rich and powerful sex offender? I don’t care about your party or political beliefs.
Release the records, and let the chips fall where they may.
- Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
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This staggering crisis has even the GOP saying enough on Trump
Is Marjorie Taylor Greene leading the way, or the exception that proves the rule?
By the shocking light of today’s glaring headlines, it’s time to ask a larger question that no one in the media appears to be willing to say out loud: at what point does the accumulation of misconduct by Donald J. Trump become so brazen, so corrosive, so frankly immoral and even criminal, that Republican elected officials and voters finally say, “Enough is enough?”
So far:
- Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex-trafficking ring are demanding Congress release all the files, and Trump was attacking Republicans for even considering going along with them (now he’s opened his own “investigation,” which will prevent their public release regardless of Congress as he pretends to call for them to be made public). A coalition of Epstein survivors has urged Congress to declassify every remaining record tied to his global network of child sexual abuse. They argue that decades of secrecy protected rich and powerful men while silencing victims. House Democrats dropped a political bombshell this week, releasing emails from Epstein’s estate that appear to show Trump wasn’t just aware of the abuse taking place in Epstein’s orbit but “spent hours at my house” with at least one of the presumably underage girls.
- The January 6 insurrection, the Big Lie, and the GOP’s shrugging at treason. Trump incited a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol after insisting, against all evidence and over 60 court losses, that the 2020 election was stolen from him. That wasn’t protest: it was a violent assault on American democracy itself that led to the death of three police officers and the hospitalization of over 140 others. Yet the GOP continues to use Trump’s lie as a political weapon.
- He’s incited hate against those least able to defend themselves, promoting a culture of violence and intolerance. From people fleeing murder and rape in their own countries to those merely seeking a better life to American communities of queer people and religious and racial minorities, Trump has licensed the most base and disgusting elements in our society.
- His trade wars gutted American credibility, paved the way for bribes to himself and his boys, all while punishing the very supporters he claimed to champion. Trump’s tariffs on China, Europe, and beyond slapped billions in hidden taxes on U.S. consumers and farmers. They crippled small manufacturers, triggered retaliatory tariffs abroad, and exposed how “America First” became America isolated. In response, corporate and foreign leaders showered Trump and his boys with gifts, investments, gold, crypto, a jet, and overseas Trump hotel projects. The GOP, once the party of free markets, turned away as this con man and his family accepted bribes, committed economic vandalism, and “earned” a reported $5+ billion during his first ten months in office.
- His praise for Vladimir Putin and contempt for Ukraine revealed a chilling abandonment of America’s historic role in defending democracy. Even after Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, his kidnapping Ukrainian women and children, and his ongoing nightly missile and drone attacks horrified the world, Trump boasted of “good talks” with Putin and mocked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. His words told the world that U.S. loyalty could be traded for personal favors and ego-fluffing — or blackmail. When strength is redefined as submission to autocrats, freedom everywhere grows weaker.
- The most horrific symbolic act of corruption yet: demolishing the East Wing of the White House to build a Trump-style billionaires’ ballroom. In October 2025, the East Wing, a historic cornerstone of American democracy (Thomas Jefferson himself designed the East Portico), was razed for a 90,000-square-foot “Presidential Ballroom,” financed by companies and billionaires buying Trump’s favors and conducted with virtually no oversight. Some preservationists called it the most reckless desecration of the People’s House in American history. This isn’t a renovation, it’s a Marie Antoinette-style attempt at monarchy.
- He is now the first U.S. president convicted of 34 counts of felony election fraud, and whose company was nailed for falsifying business records to rip off insurance companies and the taxpayers of New York. A Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of orchestrating a criminal cover-up to hide hush-money payments from voters during the 2016 election. It’s the first time in history an American president has been convicted of a felony, and yet the GOP still kneels at his feet. When “law and order” applies to everyone except the powerful, justice collapses.
- In a civil trial, a jury of average people found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation, with evidence showing he’d committed what the judge in the case called the common-sense “definition of rape.” Writer E. Jean Carroll accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a Manhattan department store, and the jury believed her. Judge Lewis Kaplan said that the verdict meant what Trump had done to her met the ordinary understanding of rape. The GOP’s continued embrace of a man found legally liable for sexual violence — after bragging on tape that he had regularly sexually assaulted other women — shows moral bankruptcy in its purest form.
- Twice impeached, and twice rescued by the party that pretends it swore an oath to the Constitution. Trump was impeached in 2019 for abusing power by trying to blackmail Ukraine into creating phony dirt on his political opponent, and again in 2021 for inciting the January 6th insurrection. Both times, Republicans in the Senate saved him. When loyalty to one man outweighs loyalty to country, impeachment stops being a safeguard and becomes a ritual of surrender.
- He’s fired senior officials and watchdogs across government agencies, installed incompetent toadies in critical positions, and gutted the guardrails against presidential corruption. From food safety to pollution controls to safeguarding public lands to stopping climate change, Trump has elevated the interests of his donors and morbidly rich friends above those of average Americans and our nation itself. He’s cut taxes on billionaires while hitting working-class Americans with billions in tariff taxes to pay for those same tax cuts. He prodded Texas to gerrymander/rig the 2026 election while demanding his Attorney General prosecute California for their attempt to rebalance the playing field. And now he’s going after his political enemies — many of them Republicans who could no longer stomach his criminality and corruption — with trumped-up charges designed to wipe out their retirement savings or even leave them homeless.
This is a crisis that’s tearing apart the soul of democracy itself.
How much corruption, how much deceit, how many assaults on truth can a republic endure before its citizens stop believing that justice still matters?
When the weight of wrongdoing piles high enough, it isn’t just the Republican Party that breaks and submits; it’s the faith of the people in the very idea of democratic self-government that dies.
And yet the GOP continues to worship him, to kiss his a--, to pretend he’s a great and brilliant man, a modern-day Wizard of Oz. They still rally behind the man. They still defend him, excuse him, and elevate him.
Why? Because corruption is addictive. Once a party decides that power is more important than truth, every lie becomes easier to rationalize, every abuse becomes normalized, every crime becomes “politics as usual.” Power is a drug that numbs the conscience, and the GOP has become a party of addicts.
Democracy can’t survive this level of violence against the rule of law. It must have accountability to survive. It requires honesty. It depends on the courage to face truth even when that truth is painful. The longer a party or a people look away from corruption and criminality, the deeper that corruption and criminality spread, until the whole system collapses from the rot within.
The only cure for that rot is trust, brought about by the evenhanded application of justice and the enforcement of laws and democratic norms. And the only path back to that trust is truth and accountability.
The GOP must decide whether it still believes in the words and examples of Republican presidents like Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower or whether it’ll continue to worship at a cheap, gold-painted altar atop which stands one man.
For the sake of democracy, for the sake of the next generation of Americans, these abuses can’t continue. There must be an accounting, and it must come before Trump’s damage is irreparable.
If the Republican Party continues to accept a leader who shatters every norm, effortlessly breaks laws, and ridicules every moral boundary, then the experiment called America will fail.
Because if Republicans continue let a man who once bragged he could “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it” prove himself right, they haven’t saved our country: they’ve destroyed it.
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This hapless leader can't even see when he's winning
On Monday last week, I was angry with the eight Democrats, under Chuck Schumer’s direction, who voted with the GOP to reopen the government. I called them traitors who betrayed their party by surrendering before the fight was over.
Later, I thought perhaps I was too hard. Then I read Bill Scher’s assessment in the Washington Monthly. Turns out I wasn’t hard enough.
I had surmised that Schumer caved under pressure from the airlines and business interests depending on them. (The FAA had reduced 10 percent of flights, causing thousands of cancellations and tens of thousands of delays.) But Bill, citing the Post’s Karen Tumulty, suggested a worse reason.
It looks like Schumer capitulated because he and others were afraid that Donald Trump and the Republicans would eliminate the filibuster. (To be clear, Bill said this is one of the reasons for his rolling over, not the reason.)
The Democrats had used that 60-vote rule to force the president to bargain over healthcare policy (eg, Obamacare subsidies and Medicaid cuts). Trump refused. Instead, he decided to fire federal workers, steal food stamps and otherwise ramp up public suffering in order to bring the Democrats to heel.
But Trump’s extortionist tactics were backfiring — on the Republicans. Poll after poll blamed them for the pain of the shutdown. Last week’s elections rewarded the Democrats for standing form and trying to bring down costs. Trump, though, would never admit being wrong. So he pestered Senate Republicans into nixing the rule that he saw as the source of his problems.
While there was no serious movement toward abolishing it, just talking about it seems to have given Schumer the chills.
“This was all about the filibuster,” Tumulty said on Twitter.
When asked if she meant the Democrats hoped that the Republicans would nuke it, she clarified: “They were afraid they would.”
The point of the shutdown, in my view, was never about extracting policy concessions, as the regime is a criminal enterprise that cannot be trusted to honor its agreements. Instead, it was about drawing a bright line between illegitimate rule and legitimate resistance to it. Thanks to the regime’s cruelty, the public seemed to get behind the Democrats in asserting that whatever Trump and the Republicans do with appropriations, it’s on them.
That said, the end of the filibuster would have been a win for the Democrats, no matter how “win” is defined. In time, and with the 60-vote threshold out of the way, the Democrats could achieve previously unimaginable policy goals, including Medicare for all, adding two more states, hence two more Senate seats, adding more justices to the Supreme Court, raising the federal minimum wage, reformed housing policy, “Green New Deal,” the list goes on.
That might be why eight Democrats, under Schumer’s direction, caved.
A Senate without the filibuster would expose “moderate” Democrats, forcing them to choose between serving the progressive demands of the base or the status-quo demands of many of the elites. “The world’s greatest deliberative body” would be reshaped by removing the greatest means of rationalizing cowardice. Many Democrats talk a good game about democratic reforms. No filibuster would reveal those who are all talk and who are ready for action.
There are those who would say that ending the filibuster would be as bad for democracy as it is for the squishes in the Senate. Jonathan Bernstein said Tuesday that liberals like me “are dramatically underestimating the damage that Republicans would do over the next 15 months with that constraint removed,” including “election reforms” that so far have been filibustered.
“Essentially, in the middle of a full-on assault by Republicans against the republic, eliminating the filibuster would suddenly give them a powerful new weapon,” Bernstein wrote. “That doesn’t seem sensible to me. At all.”
But if that’s the reason for capitulating, Schumer should say so. He should have added harms done by ending the filibuster to all the harms that were being done by the regime during the shutdown. As David M Perry put it: “Maybe Senate Democrats should say: ‘The Republicans were going to kill people by starving them to death, and because we aren't monsters, we decided to let this fight go. We'll keep fighting. Stop electing monsters.’”
Instead, we got a fantasia of rationales, the most dispiriting being that “standing up to Donald Trump didn’t work,” according to Angus King.
And even if I’m underestimating the damage that could be done by the Republicans without the filibuster, it’s still true that the regime is doing great damage without the Congress. In saying no, the Democrats refused to be complicit in its crimes. In saying yes, they made themselves complicit and made the public task of identifying the “monsters” that much harder to do.
I agree with Bill. Replacing Schumer would not make the Democrats more progressive. But it would send a message. Failure has consequences. Rolling over was a failure. Sadly, only a handful of Democrats in the Congress are calling for his head. The message so far: failure has no consequences and asking a party like that to enact democratic reforms is a fool’s errand.
But getting rid of Schumer would do something else. It would restore some measure of trust among people like me who are deeply skeptical of his real motives. If it’s about protecting the republic and not the status quo, prove it.
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Trump's about to infuriate the one group that has the power to destroy him
The reason the famous and prolific Harvard economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, is often referred to as a political economist can be seen in the continuing relevance of his book The Culture of Contentment (1992). His thesis explains in significant part why President Donald Trump’s wrecking of America has not more significantly collapsed his support, now below 39% approval.
In the US, the contented classes hail from both parties. They are not a majority of the population by any means, given that half of all Americans are “poor” or “near poor.” They are a majority of the politically and economically influential people who support policies that maintain their comfort at the expense of the necessities of the “functional underclass” left behind in poverty. The contented classes include the super rich, of course, but also the managerial, professional, and wealthier working classes. In addition, they vote at a higher percentage than the poor.
Before Trump, this contented class, which includes members of Congress, was doing well, so much so that they stood in the way of increasing the federal minimum wage, frozen at $7.25 per hour, or increasing Social Security benefits, frozen for over 40 years. These changes could have been paid for by hiking Social Security taxes on, you guessed it, the contented classes. Despite public opinion polls favoring expanding the social safety net, the contented class wants the status quo of no paid sick leave, no paid family or maternal leave, no subsidized childcare, and no universal paid vacations. Western European countries all have a more robust social safety net than the US.
When you crank in the damage done by Trump and his Trumpsters in Washington, DC, members of the contented classes are largely unaffected. The costs of universally damaging programs cutting preparedness for climate violence, pandemics, huge expansions in the police state against immigrants, and the military-industrial complex are not felt where the contented classes live, work, and raise their families.
Trump’s tyrannies and treacheries; his open flouting of the laws (the establishment likes such flouting to be discreet); and his revolting, foul-mouthed defamations tower over Richard Nixon’s transgressions.
We can make a list of the terrible closedowns or strip-mining of federal agencies’ law enforcement and regulatory initiatives. Very few exclusively impact the contented classes. Some may actually benefit.
Other Trump moves, many of them illegal and unauthorized by Congress, delight these people. They support lower taxes on upper-income people and businesses, large or small. The Internal Revenue Service is now going further with its unauthorized dilutions of the 15% minimum tax on corporate profits. The rising stock market adds to the complacency of the contented classes.
The most cruel and vicious actions by Trump—abolishing the US Agency for International Development, medical, water, food assistance to desperate millions abroad—cuts to Meals on Wheels, Head Start, Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) impact the masses—tens of millions of them directly and daily. They do not reach the contented class members of our population.
This is not to say that millions of these contented persons do not care what is happening to their fellow citizens. But normative caring is not viscerally feeling the pain and suffering, the anxiety, dread, and fear of losing healthcare coverage; tomorrow’s meal; the brunt of chronic indebtedness; or abandoning the disabled, the sick, and the casualties of the workplace.
Galbraith wrote that living in their contented culture leads to short-term thinking, underinvestment in public goods, and ignoring the widening inequality between the “haves” and the “have-nots.” Inequality also stems from making money from money—a source of wealth denied to people living paycheck to paycheck.
The capture of the Democratic Party by this complacent class has become so pronounced that the blue-collar working-class members have broken away from their unions and parents or grandparents’ devotion to the FDR-like New Deal politics and fallen prey to the rhetorical seduction of the corporatist GOP.
What could Trump do to alienate large portions of this contented class, which Galbraith argues has been the only force that can disrupt the status quo? When will these contented ones collectively start saying, “Enough is enough” and it’s time to say to Donald Trump, “You’re Fired”?
When the following come together—serious recession, serious inflation, with destabilizing (to their businesses) tariff-driven surging prices; a reckless foreign war quagmire; plunging stock markets; daily spreading chaos; and the media-exposed sickening stench of raw corruption flowing from the White House throughout the upper realms of the executive branch—the contented classes should join the resistance to the Trump madness.
Back in 1974, the Republican establishment decided it was time for Richard Nixon to go, despite his having won reelection in 49 of 50 states in 1972, with a 60% approval in the polls. He was not considered “useful” to the power brokers anymore.
Trump’s tyrannies and treacheries; his open flouting of the laws (the establishment likes such flouting to be discreet); and his revolting, foul-mouthed defamations tower over Richard Nixon’s transgressions.
History instructs that latent revulsions and fears by the power elites are often launched onto the public stage by some specific outrage, decadence, or bullying. Stay tuned. With Dictator Donald (he regularly intones, “This is only the beginning”), THE WORST IS YET TO COME.
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Trump's week from hell has him on the ropes — but the knockout blow is still to come
I feel emotionally whipsawed. I expect you feel the same.
I was cheered by Mamdani’s election and the Democratic sweep across America.
But I was deeply upset this past week at Senate Democrats who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by caving in to Republicans.
I tell myself that this is what progress looks like in a tempestuous time — a roller coaster whose highs are higher than its lows.
This past week’s Democratic sellout was certainly a low. But the high of the November 4 elections was higher, because it changed the trajectory of the nation.
Besides, the shutdown wasn’t a total failure. It let Democrats spotlight the Republicans’ pending withdrawal of health coverage from millions of Americans. And it revealed more of Trump’s selfish cruelty when he boasted about his lavish White House ballroom and renovated Lincoln Bedroom while refusing food stamp benefits for 42 million people.
It also showed why an older generation of Democrats — Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, Tim Kaine — have had their day and must now move on.
The party’s energy and future belong to Zohran Mamdani, AOC, and others — such as Seattle’s newly elected progressive young mayor, Katie Wilson. Wilson is a community organizer, self-described socialist, and first-time candidate pushing for higher taxes on the wealthy to finance what most people in Seattle need. Some call her the “West Coast Mamdani.”
A few days ago I spoke with Mamdani’s first deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan, and was impressed with his experience, knowledge, and commitment. I came away confident that Mamdani will be able to implement his ambitious goals, and more.
Other signs of progress — the Democrats’ surprise redistricting win in Utah and a potential upset in a special congressional election in Tennessee next month.
Meanwhile, young people across America are ushering in a new era of progressive activism.
On Thursday, more than a thousand Starbucks baristas walked off the job — demanding better hours, more pay, and better working conditions and threatening to escalate their protests if Starbucks didn’t deliver. (You can support them by boycotting Starbucks.)
Progress, too, in the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein returning this week to haunt Trump with more evidence of Trump’s complicity.
Recall that in 2024 Trump said he’d “have no problem with” the release of Epstein’s list of clients. Yet since then, Trump has done everything possible to cover it up.
House Speaker Mike Johnson even refused to seat Adelita Grijalva, the newly elected representative from Arizona, because she’d provide the crucial 218th signature on the discharge petition leading to a House vote on releasing the Epstein files. And she did, when sworn in this week.
The petition became effective Thursday when two Republican signers, Reps. Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace, refused to take their names off it — despite intense pressure from Trump and Justice Department officials. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene is splitting with Trump over Epstein.
And now, in a pathetic effort to take heat off himself, Trump has ordered his attorney general flak Pam Bondi to investigate prominent Democrats who appear to be linked to Epstein. Won’t work.
All the while, Trump’s polls have continued to tank. Only 33 percent now approve of the way he’s managing the government, down from 43 percent in March. Among independents, his approval has plummeted to a remarkable 25 percent.
Democrats, meanwhile, are fired up. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll shows them far more determined than Republicans to vote in the midterms, with 44 percent of Democrats “very enthusiastic” about casting their ballot next year, compared with 26 percent of Republicans.
All progress.
Rest assured, there will be more frustrations and setbacks to come. Trump and and his fanatic lapdogs (Miller, Vought, Vance, Hegseth, Kennedy Jr., Bondi, and Noem), will pull the nation further into their authoritarian muck.
We haven’t seen the bottom yet. But we will prevail.
We won’t be discouraged by tactical defeats, such as this past week’s. We’ll keep fighting — organizing, mobilizing, phoning and writing our members of Congress, demonstrating, boycotting, protecting the vulnerable, winning state and local elections, winning next year’s midterm elections.
We’ll keep fighting because the stakes are so high. We’ll keep fighting because future generations depend on us.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/
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Trump’s death squads are darkly familiar
Today, Donald Trump presides over his own Murder Incorporated, less a government than a death squad.
Many brushed off his proclamation early in his second term that the Gulf of Mexico would henceforth be called the Gulf of America as a foolish, yet harmless, show of dominance. Now, however, he’s created an ongoing bloodbath in the adjacent Caribbean Sea.
The Pentagon has so far destroyed 18 go-fast boats there and in the Pacific Ocean. No evidence has been presented or charges brought suggesting that those ships were running drugs, as claimed. The White House has simply continued to release bird’s-eye view surveillance videos (snuff films, really) of a targeted vessel. Then comes a flash of light and it’s gone, as are the humans it was carrying, be they drug smugglers, fishermen, or migrants. As far as we know, at least 64 people have already been killed in such attacks.
The kill rate is accelerating. In early September, the U.S. was hitting one boat every eight to ten days. In early October, one every two days. For a time, starting in mid-October, it was every day, including four strikes on Oct. 27th alone. Blood, it seems, lusts for blood.
And the kill zone has been expanding from the Caribbean waters off Venezuela to the Colombian and Peruvian coasts in the Pacific Ocean.
Many motives might explain Trump’s compulsion to murder. Perhaps he enjoys the thrill and rush of power that comes from giving execution orders, or he (and Secretary of State Marco Rubio) hope to provoke a war with Venezuela. Perhaps he considers the strikes useful distractions from the crime and corruption that define his presidency. The cold-blooded murder of Latin Americans is also red meat for the vengeful Trumpian rank-and-file who have been ginned up by culture warriors like Vice President JD Vance to blame the opioid crisis, which disproportionately plagues the Republican Party’s white rural base, on elite “betrayal.”
The murders, which Trump insists are part of a larger war against drug cartels and traffickers, are horrific. They highlight Vance’s callous cruelty. The vice president has joked about murdering fishermen and claimed he “doesn’t give a shit” if the killings are legal. As to Trump, he’s brushed off the need for congressional authority to destroy speedboats or attack Venezuela, saying: “I think we’re just gonna kill people. Okay? We’re gonna kill them. They’re gonna be, like, dead.”
But as with so many Trumpian things, it’s important to remember that he wouldn’t be able to do what he does if it weren’t for policies and institutions put in place by all too many of his predecessors. His horrors have long backstories. In fact, Donald Trump isn’t so much escalating the war on drugs as escalating its escalation.
What follows then is a short history of how we got to a moment when a president could order the serial killing of civilians, publicly share videos of the crimes, and find that the response of all too many reporters, politicians (Rand Paul being an exception), and lawyers was little more than a shrug, if not, in some cases, encouragement.
A Short History of the Longest War
Richard Nixon (1969-1974) was our first drug-war president.
On June 17, 1971, with the Vietnam War still raging, he announced a “new, all-out offensive” on drugs. Nixon didn’t use the phrase “war on drugs.” Within 48 hours, however, scores of newspapers nationwide had done so, suggesting that White House staffers had fed the militarized phrase to their reporters.
Nixon’s call for a drug offensive was a direct response to an explosive story published a month earlier in the New York Times, headlined “G.I. Heroin Addiction Epidemic in Vietnam.” Tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers were addicts, with some units reporting that more than 50 percent of their men were using heroin.
At press conferences, Nixon was now being questioned not just about when and how he planned to end the war in Vietnam, but whether drug users in the military would be sent to rehab or punished. What, one journalist asked, was he “going to do about” the “soldiers who are coming back from Vietnam with an addiction to heroin?”
What he did was launch what we might today think of as Vietnam’s second act, a global expansion of military operations, focused not on communists this time, but on marijuana and heroin.
In 1973, shortly after the last U.S. combat soldier left South Vietnam, Nixon created the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Its first major operation in Mexico looked eerily like Vietnam. Starting in 1975, U.S. agents went deep into northern Mexico, joining local police and military forces to carry out military sweeps and airborne fumigation. One report described it as a terror campaign of extrajudicial murder and torture against rural marijuana and opium producers, mostly poor peasant farmers. The campaign treated all villagers as if they were the “internal enemy.” Under the cover of fighting drugs, Mexican security forces, supplied with intelligence by the DEA and the Central Intelligence Agency, ferociously suppressed peasant and student activists. As historian Adela Cedillo wrote, rather than limiting drug production, that campaign led to its concentration in a few hierarchically structured paramilitary organizations that, in the late 1970s, came to be known as “cartels.”
So, the first fully militarized battlefront in the War on Drugs helped create the cartels that the current iteration of the War on Drugs is now fighting.
Gerald Ford (1974-1977) responded to pressure from Congress — notably from New York Democratic Congressman Charles Rangel — by committing to a “supply-side” strategy of attacking drug production at its source (as opposed to trying to reduce demand at home). While countries in Southeast Asia, along with Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran, had been major suppliers of heroin to the U.S., Mexicans, long a source of marijuana, had begun to grow poppy to meet the demand from heroin-habituated Vietnam vets. By 1975, it was supplying more than 85 percent of the heroin entering the United States. “Developments in Mexico are not good,” a White House aide told Ford in preparation for a meeting with Rangel.
Ford increased DEA operations in Latin America.
Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) supported the decriminalization of pot for personal use and, in his speeches and remarks, emphasized treatment over punishment. Overseas, however, the DEA continued to expand its operations. (It would soon be running 25 offices in 16 Latin American and Caribbean countries.)
Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) reigned in an era when drug policy would take a turn toward the surreal, strengthening the linkages between rightwing politics and illicit drugs.
But let’s backtrack a bit. The convergence of rightwing politics and drugs began at the end of World War Two when, according to historian Alfred McCoy, U.S. intelligence in Italy came to rely on crime boss Lucky Luciano’s growing “international narcotics syndicate,” which would reach from the Mediterranean Sea to the Caribbean Sea and from Istanbul to Havana, to conduct covert anti-communist operations. Then, in 1959, after the Cuban Revolution shut down that island’s lucrative drug trade, traffickers moved elsewhere in Latin America or to the United States, where they, too, joined the anti-communist cause.
The CIA then used those gangster exiles in operations meant to destabilize Fidel Castro’s Cuban government and undermine the domestic antiwar movement. At the same time, the CIA ran its own airline, Air America, in Southeast Asia, which smuggled opium and heroin as a way to support that agency’s secret war in Laos. And the FBI notoriously used the pretext of drug policing to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” political dissidents, including the Black Panthers. They worked, for example, with local police in Buffalo, New York, to frame African American activist Martin Sostre, who operated a bookstore that had become the center of that city’s Black radical politics, on trumped-up charges of selling heroin.
Nixon’s creation of the DEA drew those threads together, as its agents worked closely with both the FBI in the U.S. and the CIA in Latin America. When, after the war in Vietnam ended in defeat, Congress tried to rein in the CIA, its agents used the DEA’s expansive overseas network to continue their covert operations.
By the time Reagan became president, cocaine production in the Andean region in Latin America was in full swing, with a distinctly curious dynamic in operation: the CIA would work with rightwing, repressive governments involved in coca production even as the DEA was working with those same governments to suppress coca production. That dynamic was caught perfectly as early as 1971 in Bolivia when the CIA helped overthrow a mildly leftist government in the first of a series of what came to be known as “cocaine coups.” Bolivia’s “cocaine colonels” then took as much money as Washington was willing to offer to fight their version of the drug war while facilitating cocaine production for export abroad. President Carter cut off drug-interdiction funding to Bolivia in 1980. Reagan restored it in 1983.
The rise of Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet followed the same dynamic. Pinochet partly framed his 1973 CIA-enabled coup against socialist President Salvador Allende as a front in Nixon’s drug war. Working closely with the DEA, the general tortured and killed drug traffickers along with political activists as part of his post-coup wave of repression. Meanwhile, Pinochet’s allies began “to deal drugs with impunity,” with Pinochet’s family making millions exporting cocaine to Europe (with the help of agents from his infamous security forces).
Once in office, Reagan began escalating the drug war as he did the Cold War — and the bond between cocaine and rightwing politics tightened. The Medellín cartel donated millions of dollars to Reagan’s campaign against Nicaragua’s leftwing Sandinista government. The ties were murky and conspiratorial, part of what McCoy has termed the “covert netherworld,” so it’s easy to fall down the deep-state rabbit hole trying to trace them, but details can be found in reporting by Gary Webb, Robert Parry, Leslie Cockburn, Bill Moyers, John Kerry, and CBS’s 60 Minutes, among others.
George H.W. Bush (1989-1993) engaged in a very Trump-like move in making his case to the public that the war on drugs needed to be escalated. He had the DEA go to the poorest part of Washington, D.C., to entrap a low-level African American drug dealer, Keith Jackson, paying him to travel to the White House to sell an undercover agent three ounces of crack cocaine. Bush then held up the drugs on national television to illustrate how easy it was to buy narcotics. A high school senior, Jackson spent eight years in prison so Bush could do a show-and-tell on TV.
The president then ramped up funding for the war on drugs, expanding military and intelligence operations in the Andes and the Caribbean. These were the Miami Vice years, when efforts to suppress cocaine smuggling into Florida only shifted transport routes overland through Central America and Mexico. Bush’s signature contribution to the War on Drugs was Operation Just Cause, in which, a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989, he dispatched 30,000 Marines to Panama to arrest autocrat Manuel Noriega on drug trafficking charges. Noriega had been a CIA asset when Bush was the director of that agency. But with the Cold War over, he had outlived his usefulness.
Bill Clinton (1993-2001) escalated his Republican predecessor’s “tough on drugs” policies. He maintained mandatory minimum sentencing and increased the number of people serving jail time for drug offences.
In his last year in office, Clinton rolled out Plan Colombia which committed billions of dollars more to drug interdiction, but with a twist: privatization. Washington doled out contracts to mercenary corporations to conduct field operations. DynCorp provided pilots, planes, and chemicals for the aerial eradication of drugs (which had horrible environmental consequences) and worked closely with the Colombian military. A cyber start-up, Oakley Networks, now part of Raytheon, also received Plan Colombia money to provide “Internet surveillance software” to Colombia’s National Police, which used the tech to spy on human-rights activists.
Plan Colombia led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and widespread ecological devastation. The result? Estimates vary, but roughly twice as much Colombian land is now believed to be dedicated to growing coca as at the start of Plan Colombia in 2000 and the production of cocaine has doubled.
George W. Bush (2001–2009) again escalated the war on drugs, increasing interdiction funding both domestically and internationally. He also urged Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderón, to launch his own brutal military assault on the drug cartels. By the time Calderón left office, security forces and the cartels combined had killed or disappeared tens of thousands of Mexicans.
Conceptually, Bush linked the post-9/11 Global War on Terror to the Global War on Drugs. “Trafficking of drugs finances the world of terror,” he claimed.
Barack Obama (2009–2017), like President Carter, emphasized treatment over incarceration. Nonetheless, he took no steps to wind down the war on drugs, continuing to fund Plan Colombia and expanding Plan Mérida, which his predecessor had put in place to combat cartels in Central America and Mexico.
In February 2009, the former presidents of Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia — Fernando Cardoso, Ernesto Zedillo, and César Gaviria — released a report entitled “Drugs and Democracy: Toward a Paradigm Shift,” which called for an end to the war on drugs, proposing instead decriminalization and the treatment of drug use as a public health issue. The authors were establishment politicians, and Obama could have used their breakthrough report to help build a new public health consensus concerning drug use. But his White House largely ignored the report.
Donald Trump (2017–2021) increased already high-level funding for militarized counter-narcotic operations at the border and abroad, calling for the “death penalty” for drug dealers. He also floated the idea of shooting “missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs,” but to do so “quietly” so “no one would know it was us.”
In Trump’s first term, he offered a now-forgotten (in the U.S. at least) preview of the killing of civilians on boats. On May 11, 2017, DEA agents and their Honduran counterparts traveling by boat along the Patuca River opened fire on a water taxi carrying 16 passengers. Overhead, a DEA agent in a circling helicopter ordered a Honduran soldier to fire his machine gun at the taxi. Four died, including a young boy and two pregnant women, and three others were seriously injured. The incident involved 10 U.S. agents, none of whom suffered any consequences for the massacre.
Joe Biden (2021–2025) supported de-escalation in principle and actually decreased funding for aerial drug fumigation in Colombia. He also issued blanket pardons to thousands of people convicted on federal marijuana charges. Nonetheless, like the presidents before him, he continued funding the DEA and military operations in Latin America.
Donald Trump (2025-?) has opened a new front in the war against Mexico’s drug cartels in New England. The DEA, working with ICE and the FBI, claims that in August it made 171 “high-level arrests” of “members of the Sinaloa cartel” throughout Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” investigative team, though, reports that most of those arrested were involved in “small dollar drug sales,” or were simply addicts, and had no link whatsoever to the Sinaloa cartel.
Trump insists that the “war on drugs” isn’t a metaphor, that it’s a real war, and as such he possesses extraordinary wartime powers – including the authority to bomb Mexico and attack Venezuela.
Considering this history, who’s to argue? Or to think that such a war could end anything but badly — or, for that matter, ever end at all?
- Greg Grandin is a professor of history at Yale University. He previously taught at New York University. His most recent book was the 2020 Pulitzer Prize Winner in General Nonfiction, "The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America." His previous books include, "Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman," "The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World" and "Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City," a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history.
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These 25 Republicans could demolish a GOP scheme to save themselves
Republicans are obsessed with taking your health care away. This spring, they cut $1 trillion from Medicaid, all to give massive tax handouts to billionaires. For the last month and a half they shut down the government rather than prevent premiums from doubling on average for 24 million people in the Affordable Care Act marketplace. And they “won.”
The number of uninsured Americans is about to skyrocket, which is exactly what Republicans want. It is what they fight for every day: to steal your health care.
These cuts are devastating for seniors, who rely on Medicaid to pay for nursing homes and other long-term care (which typically isn’t covered by Medicare). They are also disastrous for Americans aged 50 to 64, many of whom are in the ACA marketplaces and will have the largest premium increases. Many will have no choice but to drop their health insurance and pray they don’t get too sick before they turn 65 and become eligible for Medicare — literally gambling with their lives.
Even if you’re not on Medicaid or the ACA, the Republican cuts will make your health care worse. Without the Medicaid dollars they need to survive, hospitals and nursing homes across the country are already closing their doors. Far more will close in the next few years, with rural areas and inner cities hit hardest.
The hospitals that remain open will have to cut staff due to lower revenue — even as their ERs are flooded with newly uninsured patients who have nowhere else to go. That means if you get hit by a car, you’ll likely have to go to a hospital further away and wait longer to see a doctor. All thanks to Republicans.
The only people in America whose health care isn’t about to get much worse are billionaires, who can hop into their private helicopters to see their private doctors.
Democrats are demanding that Republicans back off their draconian health care cuts. That’s what the just-concluded government shutdown was all about — Democrats refusing to vote for a budget that doesn’t fix the coming health care apocalypse.
Some Democrats thought that Republicans would come to the negotiating table and figure out a health care fix, if only out of political self-interest. But Republicans are ideologically committed to destroying health care at the behest of their billionaire donors.
House Republican Leader Mike Johnson is refusing to bring an extension of the ACA subsidies, which would prevent premiums from skyrocketing, up for a vote.
This refusal is why House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries has put forward a discharge petition to obtain a three-year extension of the ACA subsidies. If the petition gets 218 signers, it forces a floor vote which also needs 218 to pass. There are 214 Democrats in the House.
That means we need only FOUR Republicans to cross the aisle and we can get the subsidies to pass the House, putting pressure on the Senate.
It comes down to these 25 Republicans, who are in extremely tight races and whose constituents are getting hammered by spiking premiums and disastrous Medicaid cuts:
- Juan Ciscomani (AZ-06)
- Kevin Kiley (CA-03)
- David Valadao (CA-22)
- Darrell Issa (CA-48)
- Gabe Evans (CO-08)
- Cory Mills (FL-07)
- María Elvira Salazar (FL-27)
- Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-01)
- Zach Nunn (IA-03)
- Bill Huizenga (MI-04)
- Tom Barrett (MI-07)
- Nicole Malliotakis (NY-11)
- Tom Kean Jr. (NJ-07)
- Mike Lawler (NY-17)
- Mike Turner (OH-10)
- Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-01)
- Ryan Mackenzie (PA-07)
- Rob Bresnahan (PA-08)
- Scott Perry (PA-10)
- Andy Ogles (TN-05)
- Monica De La Cruz (TX-15)
- Rob Wittman (VA-01)
- Jen Kiggans (VA-02)
- Bryan Steil (WI-01)
- Derrick Van Orden (WI-03)
Republicans are betting that by dividing Americans against each other, they can duck the blame for the health care apocalypse they created. Let’s prove them wrong. That starts with flooding the phone lines of these Republicans and protesting outside their offices, to demand they save our health care.
- Alex Lawson is the Executive Director of Social Security Works, the convening organization of the Strengthen Social Security Coalition -- a coalition made up of over 340 national and state organizations representing over 50 million Americans.
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Trump can't grasp the terrifying reality of what he just promised
On Oct. 29, just before meeting China’s President XI Jinping, Donald Trump posted on his social media network Truth Social that “because of other countries [sic] testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis.”
The US stopped testing nuclear weapons in 1992 — that is, detonating nuclear warheads. It regularly tests “delivery vehicles,” the missiles that would be used to carry the nuclear weapon to its intended target. The most recent of these tests took place early on Wednesday, Nov. 5, when an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) was launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base, on the coast of California. It’s possible that Trump simply does not understand the difference between these two things.
Observers speculated that Trump’s nuclear test announcement was a response to Russia’s recent test of its Burevestnik missile, which is nuclear-capable — meaning it could carry a nuclear warhead, though it did not during the test — and powered by nuclear energy. Some pointed out that it would be the Department of Energy, rather than the Pentagon, that would carry out a test detonation of a nuclear weapon. Trump’s use of the phrase “on an equal basis,” given that China and Russia are not detonating nuclear weapons, was comforting to some.
Whatever he meant, it’s worth considering how this latest episode of existential terror imposed from above highlights what depths of apocalyptic misbehavior are now considered normal when it comes to how nuclear weapons countries behave toward one another.
The missile Russia tested was designed to deliver a nuclear weapon without being intercepted by missile defense systems, using nuclear power to extend its flight time much longer than non-nuclear powered missiles. The Russian government also claimed to have tested its Poseidon torpedo, also nuclear-capable and nuclear-powered, and designed to be used in coastal waters to create a huge wave of irradiated water that would wash ashore.
Neither of these, nor the ICBM test, amount to a “nuclear test.” But, should the US conduct a test explosion of a nuclear warhead, it would be adding to the environmental burden that has led to nearly half a million deaths, by one scholarly estimate, from the over 1,000 test nuclear detonations the US has carried out. (This is about half of the over 2,000 total tests carried out worldwide between 1945 and 2017.) The health and environmental effects of this testing are ongoing, and the United States hasn’t come close to cleaning up after its earlier nuclear tests.
To take just one example, waste from tests conducted in the Marshall Islands is still sitting in the Runit Dome, a cracking concrete structure on Runit Island in the Enewetak Atoll that is under constant threat from worsening storms as a result of climate change. US nuclear testing has rendered Marshallese ways of life untenable for the long term, with no real prospects for full remediation on the horizon. (ICBM tests launched from Vandenberg are aimed at the Marshall Islands’ Kwajalein Atoll, a less dramatically destructive but still significant burden on a place that has long paid a high price for the maintenance of US nuclear weapons.)
Still, even if Trump is responding to recent nuclear tests that didn’t happen, this is largely in keeping with how nuclear-armed countries tend to justify changes in their nuclear policy as reciprocal responses to unprovoked aggression, no matter what the facts are. What’s more certain, however, is that if the US tests a nuclear weapon, Russia and China are far more likely to begin testing nuclear weapons of their own, as Russia has already threatened. This would lead to more environmental damage, more health consequences across the globe, and more normalization of nuclear explosions as part of the business of doing politics.
It seems as if much of the press has lost sight of the actual stakes here. The Washington Post‘s coverage of Trump’s announcement, for one, skipped over all the reasons a nuclear test might actually be undesirable and instead merely named “far-reaching consequences for relations with adversaries” as the real thing its readers should be worried about. If that is indeed the main concern, conducting multiple missile tests a year that signal the US’s willingness to use ICBMs should be viewed for what it is — a gesture that keeps nuclear war on the mind of governments around the world as a real possibility, a norm of global politics rather than a collective fate that must be avoided at all costs.
The reality is, Americans share the unfortunate situation of everyone else in the world of being first and foremost potential victims of nuclear weaponry, vulnerable to the whims of the leaders they have theoretically empowered to control the country’s thousands of nuclear weapons, nearly all of which are much, much more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nuclear arsenals have been maintained using advanced computer modeling for decades. The fact that nuclear test explosions have entered even the far reaches of possibility, even for an administration which embraces brutal violence with such open enthusiasm, is cause for alarm and collective action against the threat that nuclear weapons pose to human life.
It’s easy to dismiss a “test” as something less than the full terrifying reality of nuclear weapons use. In some cases, this is true. Underground nuclear tests are less immediately hazardous to human and environmental health than atmospheric tests, which the US stopped conducting in 1962. An ICBM test does not involve the detonation of a nuclear weapon.
But the scale and political importance of a nuclear weapon test means any indication of a willingness to use it under any circumstances has political significance. Historians have noted that one of the main reasons the United States ultimately decided to use nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to test whether they would work as expected.
We should not let nuclear testing once again become part of nuclear-armed countries’ business as usual. A nuclear explosion is a nuclear explosion, and the fallout will be all of ours to deal with.
- Emma Claire Foley is a Program Associate at Global Zero. She runs the Global Zero Military Incidents Project, which collects and analyzes open-source data to track the risk of conflict involving nuclear-armed states. She received her A.M. in Russian and Eurasian Studies from Harvard University's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.
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This direct line leads from 9/11 to Trump
This week, on Veterans Day, as I sometimes do, I thought about the memorable preface to Kurt Vonnegut’s 1973 novel, Breakfast of Champions.
This is what he said.
So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two.
I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.
One day is for remembering people who served our country. The other day is for remembering that time when people “stopped butchering one another.”
To give you an idea: the Battle of the Somme saw more than 1 million men killed or injured. From July to November in 1916, 1 million men died, or their lives, and the lives of everyone they loved, were changed forever.
One million.
According to Vonnegut, Armistice Day was a reprieve. A moment of grace.
That’s something you want to remember. Do we?
Something happened to America after 9/11. The conservatives were in charge. They thought the best way to protect democracy was to militarize it. For the duration of George W Bush’s tenure, he was seen by the press corps as more commander-in-chief than president. A democracy shouldn’t do that. When it does, well, I don’t have to tell you who the current president is.
It’s not like there weren’t signs of what was to come.
In the midterms following the 2001 terrorist attack, Sen. Max Cleland (D-GA), a Democrat, lost. His GOP opponent, Saxby Chambliss, questioned his patriotism, though Chambliss himself got a medical deferment (bum knee) to avoid the Vietnam draft. Cleland, meanwhile, lost an arm and both legs at Khe Sanh.
John Kerry was decorated for valor in Vietnam, but later protested the war. By 2004, when he challenged Bush, the GOP acted his campaign was an insult to the divine right of commanders-in-chief. They swiftboated his patriotism.
A Black president shocked those who believe this is a white man’s country. Pre-2008: “We must support the command-in-chief!” Post-2008: “Well …”
Veterans Day should remind us what honor means to some. It doesn’t mean sacrifice in defense of American principles. It means unconditional loyalty, especially by way of militarization, first to a party, then to a single man.
Donald Trump takes a militarized attitude toward everything, such that he can designate Caribbean fishermen as “narco-terrorists” to justify murdering them. His secretary of defense talks as if preparing for civil war. Trump’s national police force, ICE, acts like American citizens are enemy combatants.
There is a straight line from 9/11 to now.
I’m not a historian, but the way I understand it, the attitude we are seeing now from the Trump regime is similar to the attitude of governments in the run up to the First World War. They all thought that they were invincible, that war would “cleanse” their people, that combat sorted the men from the boys.
On Veterans Day, we remember the people who served our country, especially in times of war, but tend to forget the consequences of war.
Vonnegut didn’t. He was a prisoner of war in Dresden during the Second World War on the night allied bombers turned that city into a storm of fire. When the bombs ceased falling, he probably felt what the old men felt when “millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another.”
That the silence was the voice of God.
The more we forget that history, the more likely we are to repeat it.
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This startling new clue changes everything about Epstein's death
Now we have learned that Jeffrey Epstein was trying to leverage dirt on Trump when he “committed suicide” in a federal jail under Trump’s control, am I a conspiracist for pivoting backward, wondering how Epstein really died? And what does it say that I care more about atrocities Trump will commit in order to change national headlines than I care about how Epstein died?
Trump has already demonstrated his capacity for murder. Military analysts have written extensively about Trump’s summary execution of people in fishing boats. The proper term, under the US Code of Military Justice, the UN Charter, and the International Criminal Court, is “murder.”
So I guess that reality — Trump’s extrajudicial killings, aka murder — was already top of mind when I learned that Epstein was getting ready to spill the beans on Trump, and Trump likely knew it, before Epstein died under suspicious circumstances.
Epstein was shopping dirt
The House Oversight Committee has released 23,000 pages of correspondence maintained by Epstein’s estate, which is only a portion of the complete file. Salacious details will likely keep peppering the headlines as thirsty staffers read each page, or, more accurately, scan those pages into AI with a command to “select key words and phrases.” But it’s already clear that Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were thinking hard about the best way to turn on Trump, and how to capitalize on whatever dirt they had on him.
By now, most people have seen Epstein’s 2011 email to Maxwell about Trump not “barking.”
After Epstein had been under criminal investigation for several years, an investigation that grew legs as more victims came forward and high profile “clients” were named, he wrote to Maxwell, “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump. [Victim’s name] spent hours at my house with him.”
Maxwell, obviously aware of Epstein’s meaning, replied, “I have been thinking about that…”
Several years later, still shopping his dirt, Epstein asked a reporter, would you like to have “photos of donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen?”
Epstein also turned to journalist Michael Wolff for advice on how to hurt Trump. A few months after Trump announced his first run for president, Wolff advised Epstein that he should just let Trump “hang himself.”
Wolff wrote, “If (Trump) says he hasn’t been on (the Lolita Express) or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win (the presidency) you could save him, generating a debt.”
Trump had to know
Trump knew his friend was a pedophile, but that’s old news. Trump said publicly in 2002 that Epstein “was fun,” and liked girls “on the younger side.” There’s no nuance here. Epstein was a pedophile. Trump knew it. They remained close nonetheless, until they didn’t.
Epstein was sentenced in 2008, but served only 18 months under a sweetheart deal arranged by Miami U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, who later became Trump’s labor secretary. But Epstein was arrested again 10 years later, after the Miami Herald published Perversion of Justice, about the leniency Acosta showed.
That year, Epstein emailed one of his lawyers, Reid Weingarten, and asked him to dig into Trump’s finances, specifically Trump’s mortgage on Mar-a-Lago and a $30 million loan. Accusations of money laundering and other suspicious high-dollar real-estate transactions have followed Trump for years. Epstein said Trump’s finances were “all a sham” years before Trump was found guilty of fraud.
Epstein eventually tried to get Vladimir Putin involved. After Trump became president, before he met Putin in Helsinki in 2018, Epstein tried to get a message through to Russia: If you want to understand Trump, you need to talk to me.
Did Trump decide enough’s enough?
By spring 2019, Trump’s DOJ was building another criminal case against Epstein. Knowing what we know now about Trump’s perversion of the DOJ into his own personal pitbull, it’s likely the DOJ was asking questions and feeding Epstein’s accusations back to Trump.
That fall, Epstein was confined at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City, which was under the direct control of Trump’s Federal Bureau of Prisons. On August 10, prison guards found Epstein dead in his cell. Federal investigators concluded he killed himself by hanging.
People who knew Epstein said it was impossible for him to have committed suicide. The physical proofs seem to support that claim:
- A forensic pathologist hired by Epstein's brother, Dr. Michael Baden, noted multiple fractures in the hyoid bone and thyroid cartilage of Epstein’s neck, and concluded they were more indicative of homicidal strangulation than suicide by hanging.
- Reports and photos from Epstein's jail cell indicate that both his mattress and his body had been moved before FBI investigators arrived, and basic forensic tests were not conducted.
- Crucial surveillance video footage taken outside Epstein's cell at the time he died either went missing, was recorded over, or came from feeds other than the camera pointed at Epstein’s cell door.
Fear factor
Now Epstein is back in the headlines, Trump is again bullying Republicans into looking the other way. Trump warned on Wednesday: “Only a very bad, or stupid, Republican would fall into that (Epstein hoax) trap.”
In February, Rep. Eric Swalwell, (D-CA), said Republicans were “terrified” of crossing Trump, and it was not as simple as being afraid of being primaried: “It’s their personal safety” they fear for, with their spouses saying, “We will have to hire around-the-clock security” (if you cross Trump).
In April, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) confirmed Swalwell’s comments, and that US senators have genuine fear of Trump.
The evidence matches the hunch. Trump has killed 66 people so far, that we know of. Sixty-six people on fishing boats have been murdered without legal process, murdered without evidence of crimes. That Trump calls them “Narco-terrorists” and “unlawful combatants” offers cold comfort, given Trump has also issued an Executive Order labelling all Americans who dislike him “domestic terrorists.”
Whatever new atrocities Trump has planned for Americans, he is obviously pre-selling his narrative, getting his Proud Boys riled up. Whatever his plans, they will be executed miles away from due process and the rule of law, just like Epstein’s life and death and 66 people buried at sea.
- 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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This devastating history lesson is a wake-up call for a progressive dream
By Nicole West Bassoff, Posdoctoral Research Fellow in Public Policy, University of Virginia
After a decisive election win, Zohran Mamdani will become mayor of New York City on Jan. 1, 2026. His impressive grassroots campaign made big promises targeted at working-class New Yorkers: universal child care, rent freezes and faster, free buses.
Nevertheless, questions remain about whether Mamdani’s policies are economically and practically feasible.
Critics, from President Donald Trump to establishment Democrats, condemned his platform as radical and unrealistic. And The New York Times warns that Mamdani risks becoming the latest “big-city civic leader promising bold, progressive change” to “mostly deliver disappointment.” Among past offenders, it lists former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio.
But the comparison to de Blasio reveals a paradox.
As candidate for mayor in 2013, after the Occupy Wall Street movement against economic inequality, de Blasio campaigned on the core progressive tenet of tackling inequality through social welfare and the redistribution of wealth.
De Blasio’s promises — strikingly similar to Mamdani’s — included universal pre-K, rent freezes and a $15 minimum wage. De Blasio delivered on all three.
So what was the “disappointment” the Times so confidently cites?
New Yorkers today remember de Blasio not for his policies but for his persistent unpopularity.
Over two terms, de Blasio alienated many New Yorkers and became a pariah among Democratic politicians. A committed progressive, he is perceived to have lost touch with the movements and communities that he hoped to lead.
Maybe the question is not whether Mamdani’s policies are realistic, but what it actually takes to win over citizens with a progressive vision. De Blasio himself cautions that it takes more than policy. He recently said that he “often mistook good policy for good politics, a classic progressive error.”
As a scholar of public policy, I think that policy achievements are neither self-evident nor self-sustaining. In my research on urban governance, I have found that it takes continuous political work to maintain local belief in urban progress and its leaders.
Based on an analysis of de Blasio’s two terms, I have identified three key respects in which his politics fell short.
Keep up the ground game
Many accounts of de Blasio’s unpopularity emphasize his personal flaws. Open and humorous in person, he was described by critics — and even some supporters — as stubborn, didactic and self-righteous. His designs on higher offices — first governor, then president — repeatedly backfired.
But for someone elected with the support of progressives, de Blasio’s bigger problem was losing touch with local progressive politics. He missed the rise of the anti-corporate left in Queens in 2018, led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) — so much so that his team miscalculated and agreed to place an Amazon headquarters near her district.
And while de Blasio successfully ended his predecessor Mike Bloomberg’s racially discriminatory stop-and-frisk policing — feuding with the New York Police Department in the process — he later alienated progressives, including his own staff, with his tepid response to the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
The contours of progressive politics can shift under one’s feet. But as a veteran of street-level politics, Mamdani has the skills to respond to, and keep shaping, the city’s progressive movement. A dynamic “ground game” — on the model of his walk of the length of Manhattan — will likely remain as important in governing as it was in campaigning.
Protect local autonomy
In New York, hostility between the mayor and the governor is a time-honored tradition. De Blasio and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo famously took hostility to the extreme.
Early in de Blasio’s first term, while seeking state funding for universal pre-K, de Blasio angered Cuomo by insisting on funding it through a tax on the city’s wealthy. Lacking necessary state approval, de Blasio eventually accepted a different state funding source. Universal pre-K became de Blasio’s cornerstone achievement, but the lasting feud with Cuomo remained a problem, even compromising the city’s plans to address the COVID-19 pandemic.
Critics also thought de Blasio could have been tougher on Big Tech. Letting a Google-backed consortium run the city’s free Wi-Fi program without meaningful oversight left the city with a privacy scandal and serious financial deficits.
In trying to attract Amazon’s headquarters, de Blasio’s administration offended New Yorkers’ sensibilities by allowing the company to bypass local development review processes. Though famously byzantine, these processes were created to ensure local control over development decisions. One could not simply bulldoze them aside.
In another case, and to his credit, de Blasio was quick to see the need to regulate Uber’s explosive growth, but it took years to overcome the company’s aggressive opposition campaign.
Though some progressives wish mayors ruled the world, U.S. cities have traditionally depended on states, the federal government and private companies for capital and resources. As I and others have shown, and de Blasio’s experiences attest, these outside players can undermine the progressive ideal of a city that seeks to redistribute economic benefit.
Mayoral powers are limited, but Mamdani can use his popularity to protect New York City’s capacity for self-government from outside interference, while cooperating strategically with the state when necessary. Gov. Kathy Hochul’s endorsement of Mamdani, driven by a shared interest in universal child care, was a start. United, they stand a better chance of defending local — city and state — autonomy against threats from Trump.
Meanwhile, there is little evidence that it pays for cities to court private businesses with expensive incentives — a common but contested city practice. Instead, following mayors elsewhere, Mamdani might pressure tech companies to end union-busting practices and thereby ensure local workers’ right to organize.
Lead with the social compact
Though de Blasio delivered many progressive policies, he was unable to keep alive his campaign promise to end New York’s “tale of two cities” — the stark divide between extreme wealth and poverty.
A major, self-admitted failure was on homelessness, especially among single adults. Homelessness among this group grew despite increased spending on homeless services, creating the impression that de Blasio was insufficiently concerned with the welfare of his city’s most beleaguered residents.
Such inconsistencies loomed large in the public discussion. Over time, de Blasio’s administration could no longer convince the public that its energies were being channeled toward a coherent vision of progress.
I believe that urban governance is about clarifying the rights and responsibilities that urban residents can expect to have, what I think of as the social compact between the city and its subjects. De Blasio’s growing unpopularity weakened his ability to show that his policy achievements amounted to upholding a tacit progressive promise to guarantee basic economic rights for all.
Former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, father of losing mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo, often said: “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.” While campaigning, Mamdani offered a poetic vision for a new social compact in New York.
“City government’s job,” he has said, “is to make sure each New Yorker has a dignified life, not determine which New Yorkers are worthy of that dignity.”
Many commentators insist that Mamdani must now abandon poetry and deliver the policy. But that is only partly right.
New Yorkers will disagree about the details, but the election results suggest that they want to believe in the promise of a dignified life for all. Mamdani’s ability to lead New York City — and a wider post-Trump progressive movement — will be a matter of setting an example in rearticulating and reaffirming what that promise means, to him and to his city.
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