Here's who's really in charge of Project Freedom
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
Trump is being ruined by a personal crisis — and it's setting off explosions
Friends,
We are witnessing what happens to a person who is consumed with the need to dominate but cannot.
Iran is unlikely to give in. It can withstand the economic pressure of a blockade better than Trump can withstand the political pressure that comes with rising gas prices (now nearly $4.50 a gallon, on average), soon followed by rising food prices.
His looming failure in Iran is not just a serious geopolitical defeat for the United States; it’s a personal crisis for Trump.
Those rising prices coupled with an increasingly unpopular war have increased the likelihood that Democrats will take back control of the House and even possibly the Senate in the upcoming midterms.
Here again, not just a political defeat for the Republican Party but a personal crisis for Trump.
His ego cannot accept a humiliating loss, as we saw after the 2020 election. His need to bully, dominate, and gain submission is so hardwired inside his insecure head that the defeats he’s now facing — to Iran and to Democrats — are already setting off explosions.
He’s posting more wildly than ever — attacking, insulting, ridiculing, threatening.
On Sunday, Trump posted that Democrats had “RIGGED the 2020 Presidential Election. GET TOUGH REPUBLICANS—THEY’RE COMING, AND THEY’RE COMING FAST! They’re no good for our Country, they almost destroyed it, and we don’t want to let that happen again!” He demanded that Republicans “approve all of the necessary Safeguards we need for Elections to protect the American Public during the upcoming Midterms.”
More of his posts are bizarre AI-generated paeans to himself, his godlike powers, his wished-for physique, and his self-image of omnipotence. On Friday night, he posted an AI-image of himself, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Doug Burgum, all shirtless and with young physiques, standing in the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, along with an unidentifiable woman in a bikini. Minutes later, he posted an image of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries holding a baseball bat, with a caption calling Jeffries “low IQ,” “a THUG,” and “a danger to our Country.” On Tuesday, he posted AI-images of Joe Biden on one knee with the caption “COWARDS KNEEL,” Barack Obama with the caption “TRAITORS BOW,” and himself with his fist raised and the caption “LEADERS LEAD.”
His mouth — never in control — is now in diarrheic mode. He’s even back to attacking the pope, accusing him of “endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people,” adding, “but I guess if it’s up to the pope, he thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”
His thin-skinned vindictiveness is beyond anything we’ve seen before, which is saying a lot. Last week, after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the U.S. was “being humiliated by the Iranian leadership,” Trump repeatedly attacked and ridiculed Merz. The Defense Department then said it was pulling 5,000 troops out of Germany, and Trump said he was increasing tariffs on European cars and trucks to 25 percent (from 15 percent).
He’s becoming ever more obsessed with monuments to himself — his ballroom, his arch, his so-called “garden of heroes,” his Trump-embossed passports, his image on 24-karat gold commemorative coins, and his name plastered or etched all over Washington. His plans for self-monuments are becoming larger by the day, more grotesque, more grandiose, and more expensive. Senate Republicans just proposed $1 billion more for Trump’s ballroom, which, recall, was supposed to “cost taxpayers nothing.”
He has even directed the Treasury to announce that his own signature — yes, the same one that appears in a book of birthday greetings for Jeffrey Epstein — will replace the Treasurer’s on all new U.S. paper currency. This will be the first time in American history that a sitting president’s name will appear on circulating cash money.
His thirst for vengeance is exploding, too. Last week the Department of Justice launched another criminal case against former director of the FBI James Comey (whose earlier indictment was quashed by the courts) for posting a picture of seashells spelling out “86 47” on Instagram a year ago. Trump is also insisting that the Justice Department restart its criminal investigation of Jerome Powell and double-down against former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Mark Milley and others he considers “enemies.”
Facing the two monumental failures of Iran and control over Congress, Trump is fanatically seeking other ways to assert dominance. On Tuesday, his Education Department announced a civil rights investigation into Smith College over enrolling transgender students. Expect more of this.
Regardless of what happens in Iran, he’ll claim victory. That will be difficult to do convincingly when gas prices remain over $4 a gallon, but he’ll undoubtedly try.
What if Democrats win control of one or both chambers of Congress in the midterms and he claims they lost or cheated? The nation barely survived the last time Trump’s fragile ego faced a major loss.
We’ll also have to cope with Trump as a lame-duck president who can no longer dominate and gain submission as he did before. Will he try to remain president beyond his second term to avoid this?
The man is unwell. Seriously unwell. Lame-duck presidents fade away, but injured dictators can be dangerous.
- 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 insane pet project shows he knows the end is imminent
Donald Trump has been playing the long con with his MAGA cult for over a decade now.
When he descended that tacky gold escalator in June 2015 to declare his candidacy, he essentially set up a traveling game of Three Card Monte that’s never ended. Trump first learned how to grift from his con artist father, then polished his people skills under the close tutelage of Roy Cohn. But he really learned the art of patiently setting up his marks from Vladimir Putin, who immediately capitalized on Trump’s neediness and Daddy Issues when they met soon after Cohn’s death. Daddy Vladdy shrewdly played Trump by complimenting him, then trapping him with blackmail.
Trump acted as a subhuman bridge for Putin to compromise the Republican Party ahead of the 2016 election. What began as a slow process sped up significantly after the Russians hacked the RNC and DNC servers. I’d still love to know what could be so bad that it would make someone turn against the United States of America. No, seriously, we all deserve to know what was found, because a lot of it is probably in the Epstein Files.
And that’s how Trump, who was seen as a buffoon of a joke candidate, was able to get the party to legitimize him while funneling Russian propaganda on social media, which helped convince the MAGA cult that it was okay to bring their worst qualities out into the open. He talks just like me, they proudly tweeted along with their other grammatical errors. What it really meant was: Finally, someone who hates all the same people I do.
Donny Three Card Monte then went full PT Barnum, promising them the world for just a few dollars. But the problem with Trump is that once you give him a dollar, he takes a billion more.
Over the last 10 years, Trump has sold MAGA a lot of crappy merch made in China, from his dumb red hats to everything else he puts his name on. The allegedly devout God-fearing Christians of the MAGA cult happily ignore all of the Commandments when it comes to Donald Jesus Trump, forking over their very hard-earned money for a Bible with his stupid EKG of a signature stamped on the title page.
They bought his ugly gold Trump sneakers. They bought a gold Trump credit card, because why not let him ruin their credit ratings while he’s ruining everything else?
They prepaid for a Trump iPhone that still hasn’t materialized. The grift is literally endless, but there’s no bigger grift than Trump’s ballroom.
I’m still trying to understand how a ballroom at the White House makes anyone in America safer. Is every school in the country getting one to prevent mass shootings? Because Trump made a beeline from yet another “assassination attempt” straight to a press conference that raised more questions than it answered.
Before we get to the shady funding sources for what pundits have dubbed the “Epstein Ballroom,” I’d like to take this opportunity to point out that no one has asked anyone at the White House what happened to the historical artifacts in the East Wing before Trump bulldozed it like the ingrate he is. I can’t imagine anyone on Trump’s staff taking the time to carefully pack away and log every last thing the former First Ladies left for future generations, but NO ONE HAS ASKED THEM about it. So, maybe someone who still has a White House Press pass could take one for the country and ask.
Anyway, Trump first said the money for the ballroom that no one needed came from private donors. Also, any sentence that begins with “Trump said” is immediately followed by a lie. Then he did what he always does: he started slowly increasing the amount the ballroom would cost, without giving any real explanations. But all along, he insisted it was never going to cost the American taxpayers a dime.
Watch him shuffle those cards, my friends! Just as long as you’re not talking about the Epstein Files, Trump wins every time.
CNN actually did its job on Tuesday by releasing a supercut of Trump changing the price of the ballroom, as well as the source of its funding. (It’s also serving as a proper legacy for Ted Turner, who died on Wednesday. If Turner hadn’t been suffering from Lewy Body Dementia, I feel certain he would’ve been more outspoken about politics).
ONE. BILLION. DOLLARS.
For a ballroom.
WHY?
Is there actually going to be one of those awesome tricked-out Doomsday Preppers-type bunkers underneath it, like in all the end-of-the-world movies where the rich people get to keep living in luxury after all the have-nots have been wiped from the face of the Earth?
And what’s the endgame here? What are they planning for? If Trump is going to set off a bunch of nukes because he’s in the Epstein Files, who ends up down there with him? Because it won’t be “MAGAPatriot32570275” or anyone who still shows up for him at his ego rallies.
Seriously, I don’t get all of this Bond villain stuff. What are they going to do if they kill everybody else? Sit in the bunker and watch each other count their useless money?
You can show that CNN supercut to MAGA, but it won’t help change their minds. If they’re still supporting Trump despite all of the evidence in the Epstein Files, it means they’re going to keep clinging to his lies until they stop serving them and start hurting them personally. Maybe it’ll be the record-high grocery, prescription drug, and gas prices, rocketing healthcare premiums, and rent hikes that finally make them realize that Trump has never once cared about them.
I don’t care if people want to be in a cult, but I care very much when it comes with an unspeakable body count and takes a toll on democracy and humanity. I just wish MAGA cared about that too.
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This billionaire's anti-tax crusade just exploded in his face
Friends,
Google co-founder Sergey Brin, one of the three or four wealthiest people in the world, with a net worth hovering around $260 billion to $277 billion, is devoting some of his wealth to fighting California’s wealth tax on billionaires.
So far, he’s spent $57 million trying to defeat the measure.
Brin’s actions — along with Elon Musk’s $250 million “investment” in getting Trump reelected in 2024 — should be Exhibits A and B in why America needs a wealth tax.
First, let’s stipulate that there is nothing inherently wrong about being a billionaire, a multibillionaire, or even, as Musk is likely to become, a trillionaire.
Wealth isn’t a “zero-sum” game in which these vast accumulations at the top depend on the rest of us losing an equal amount. In fact, the super-wealthy may help the rest of us do somewhat better than we were doing before.
Even though the wealth of the top 0.1 percent has soared in recent years, the bottom 50 percent are doing somewhat better than before. (See chart below.)
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But wait.
The problem is that political power is a zero-sum game. The more political power is concentrated in a few hands, the less political power in everyone else’s hands.
It’s almost impossible to separate wealth from power, because the wealthy turn their fortunes into campaign contributions to politicians who will change laws to their liking and stop laws they’d detest — such as higher taxes on the super-wealthy. The wealthy also finance public relations campaigns and think-tanks to persuade the public of the wisdom of their positions.
Billionaire spending on presidential elections has soared even faster than billionaire wealth. And if you believe they’re donating because they want people with great integrity and excellent character to be elected president, consider that most billionaire political spending in 2024 went to Trump.
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They’re donating because they want to protect and enlarge their fortunes and don’t want politicians elected who support higher taxes on them.
Nor do they want politicians elected who support stricter anti-monopoly legislation or who would make it easier to form labor unions or stop climate change (all of which might reduce the profits of, say, Google).
Take Sergey Brin and his $57 million against California’s tax on billionaires — which, not incidentally, was proposed because California must now pay more for Medicaid for lower-income Californians, because Trump and his Republican lackeys enacted a giant federal tax cut whose benefits have gone mostly to the wealthy.
Brin has become a major Republican donor. Last May, he donated nearly half a million dollars to the Republican National Committee.
Why? Because the Republican Party is more dedicated to protecting and enlarging the wealth of the super-wealthy than is the Democratic Party.
By spending his fortune trying to stop California from taxing billionaires, Brin is illustrating why we need to tax billionaires. He’s making the argument for a billionaire wealth tax more clearly and articulately than anyone else possibly could.
Thank you, Serge.
- 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 slobbering sycophants bent to a new low — and may be fired anyway
I have newlywed friends in their 20s who recently bought a small house and then added spacious dining and family rooms. When I jokingly asked how they could afford such lavish renovations, the husband was quick to reply, “Her dad paid. When it comes to his baby girl, he spares no expense.”
When I heard the news yesterday that Senate Republicans proposed a $1 billion, taxpayer-funded, plan to “secure” Trump’s ballroom, I thought of my happy, well-housed friends. Because when it comes to their baby girl, the GOP Congress gives Trump everything desired.
Republican lawmakers have largely abandoned their constitutional role as a check on the executive branch, effectively granting baby girl Trump a mandate to govern by fiat. That doesn’t mean buying their baby girl an actual Fiat, but instead granting permission to illegally accept the world’s most luxurious jet from Qatar, and recently described as “notably opulent” and valued at approximately $400 million.
Coincidentally, the jet carries roughly the same price tag as Trump’s “privately” funded ballroom, which clearly is no longer the case. Don’t be fooled by the term “security.” That money is going toward construction, guaranteed
So what becomes of the $400 million in private donations for the ballroom? Trump’s private bank account will continue to bulge at the seams.
The GOP’s surrender to baby girl Trump is most evident in the Senate’s rubber-stamping of controversial and highly, highly unqualified Cabinet secretaries (Way too many to list here), along with the use of the “nuclear option” to bypass traditional rules and confirm over 100 executive branch nominees as a single bloc. All of them are surely unqualified as well.
By allowing the administration to bypass oversight and dismantle federal agencies without resistance, leadership like Speaker Mike Johnson has explicitly signaled that the legislative role is now one of capitulation rather than deliberation, prioritizing baby girl loyalty over doing what’s right and abiding by the law.
Congressional GOP members are sparing no expense or rule to give baby girl everything desired.
The most dangerous example, of course, is the GOP’s refusal to enforce the War Powers Act as the 60-day deadline for military action in Iran passed on May 1, 2026. The safety and security of U.S. troops come second to pleasing baby girl.
Despite the conflict resulting in American casualties and billions in costs, Republican leaders like Senate Majority Leader John Thune have deferred to the White House’s legally dubious claim that a temporary ceasefire “terminated” the war, thus resetting the clock on congressional approval.
This pattern of capitulation also extends to massive tax cuts through the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which only benefits the spoiled and rich friends of baby girl Trump.
And, yesterday. Just wow. The goings on in the Oval Office also showed how baby girl Trump is not only spoiled in wealth and finery, but in adulation and praise. In one of the most laughable moments in recent memory, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., another grotesque gift to baby girl, spoke about reinstating the Presidential Fitness Test (that is a whole other story), praising the physical stamina of the cabinet and stating many could complete a 50-mile hike.
When RFK Jr. did not immediately mention baby girl Trump, the interruption came quickly: “What about me? You didn’t mention my name.” RFK Jr. responded pathetically, claiming Trump could complete the hike because “this guy walks nine miles a day…on the golf course every weekend.”
I’m sorry, but there are no images of Trump walking a course. That is too strenuous for baby girl, who is always, always pictured in a golf cart wearing frumpy clothing.
Yesterday’s photo-op announcement looked like one of Trump’s Cabinet meetings that devolve into televised displays of sycophancy, where high-ranking officials humiliate themselves with flattery for their petulant, sleepy, baby girl.
Whether it is Attorney General Pam Bondi’s hyperbolic claim that the president saved the lives of 75% of the population, or Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer marveling at a banner of Trump’s “big, beautiful face” - baby girl is a pretty girl - outside the Labor Department, the pattern of adulation is sickeningly unmistakable.
But alas, baby girl Trump is prickly. Despite the coddling from Bondi and Chavez-DeRemer, baby girl grew fussy and asked them to leave the gilded castle. That means they won’t be attending the ribbon-cutting for the lavish, $1 billion taxpayer-financed ballroom. Their flattery was for naught.
And baby girl was particularly naughty yesterday, showing off a potty mouth in front of schoolchildren surrounding baby girl’s playpen, or what used to be called the resolute desk.
In a jarring display of repulsiveness, baby girl Trump was potty-mouthed, turning a fitness ceremony into a venue for R-rated language, lecturing a room of children on the “sick” realities of nuclear war and railing against transgender athletes and “mutilation” in a rambling that felt like a scene from an offensive Quentin Tarantino movie, and not suitable for an actual baby girl.
Thankfully, my friend whose father paid for home renovations isn’t a spoiled brat. But many children who are excessively indulged grow into insufferable adults. Clearly, Trump’s parents, the loathsome Fred and Mary, were overindulgent with luxuries for their baby girl son.
Baby girl is turning 80 next month and remains as peevish, irritable, and pampered as ever. There has been little change since the days of the bone-spur boo-boo.
So for those who weren’t treated like a baby girl as children, or as adults, and who understand the value of humility and hard work, it’s time to add another expense to already stretched budgets strained by escalating gas and grocery prices.
We will have to make room to pay for baby girl Trump’s new ballroom, while cutting back everywhere else.
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Trump's flood of insanity distracts from who's really pulling his strings
I’m old enough to have been politically cognizant, admittedly less so for a couple of the earliest, of 13 presidents (14 if you count one of them twice). Through all of those decades and all of those administrations nothing comes close to the way the current regime takes up ALL THE AIR IN THE ROOM! In fact, dare I say, no one has ever seen anything like it. The fire hose is so voluminous, ubiquitous, and inescapable that it literally takes one’s breath away.
How is this gargantuan enterprise sustained? I have a theory that President Donald Trump (or whoever are the real masters puling the strings on the public puppet) has at least two teams at work constantly. One team is in charge of producing the daily (or hourly or minute-to-minute) outrage and distraction. This is the team that has given us the Gulf of America, the takeover of Greenland, the cancer-causing windmills, the never-ending toilet flushing and never-working showers, the fight with the pope, etc., and then the really crazy stuff like the current war.
While we’re kept dizzy and disoriented by this onslaught, the other team, which consists of players like the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the tech broletariat, and other bastions of the oligarchic overlords, are quietly busy with the “deconstruction of the administrative state” (as Steve Bannon put it so aptly early on). At least those parts of the administrative state that serve the more general public interests. The parts that serve elite interests, however, like the military and their domestic adjuncts in the militarized police, the repressive courts and “justice” system, and the subservient elements of the media, are richly endowed and strengthened.
For just a moment, I’d like to dwell on the central role of the media (in its legacy and social forms) both in amplifying and downplaying the crazy as well as ignoring, minimizing, or trivializing the serious. Right now, both of these outcomes are accomplished through one certain mechanism, which I’ll name presently. One way that I try to keep up with the sometimes subtle changes in the inflections in the news cycle is by maintaining an evolving and revolving list of key words or phrases that become especially annoying, but through their (over)use capture an essential dominant characterization of events. Over the course of the past several months, and particularly at the height of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement invasions, the phrase du jour was “appears to contradict,” almost always in the circumstance of video footage putting the lie to the lies of administrative officials.
What might happen if serious journalists finally said enough is enough with the spectacle and distraction?
In a similar vein, and most often in the context of displaying the utter incompetence and buffoonery of administrative nominees or officials facing congressional “oversight,” we were repeatedly subjected to the slight variant phrase, “And he (or sometimes she) brought the receipts.” And finally, along these same lines, the now ubiquitous, “He (and again, sometimes she) said the quiet part out loud.”
What all of these anodyne formulations have in common is that they all highlight the crazy or horrendous without really calling them out explicitly. Which brings me to the current term of art, which because of its complete inadequacy is the most dangerous and enabling of all: sanewashing. This flaccid, hand-wringing, bland lament is now so easily deployed that those uttering it seem completely oblivious to its actual implications. Here the more “conscious” in the media have the opportunity to lodge a complaint against their less aware colleagues or competitors without themselves then having the obligation to call things out as they really are.
But do things have to be this way? I understand the exigencies that accompany access-requiring reporting, and I also understand the necessity for profit maximization for “news” organizations. But what might happen if serious journalists finally said enough is enough with the spectacle and distraction, and stopped covering the non-stop shit show that Team One puts out, and instead started to provide in-depth, relentless coverage of the activities of Team Two. The outrage and tantrums that would come from the main inhabitant of the White House at not being given constant attention, which could be covered as the lunacy they are, would produce enough controversy to guarantee viewer- and readership and healthy profits. And we could all use this breath of fresh air.
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This rage-fueled monster is turning on Trump
In a recent podcast interview with The New York Times, political science Professor Robert Pape pointed out that acceptance of political violence is today higher than it’s been in generations. Tens of millions of Americans, his research shows, are now accepting of things as extreme as assassination as a way to change politics.
This follows the third attempt at Trump’s life, the murder of prominent Democratic politicians in Minnesota, the murder of Charlie Kirk, and the ICE assassinations of at least three US citizens in the past year.
We’re also seeing an increasing acceptance of violence toward minorities and women.
ICE brutalizes mostly Hispanics, including children, sending them to foreign torture camps, deporting them to Congo and other war-torn hellholes, and keeping over 70,000 — including thousands of children — in brutal, primitive conditions that in some cases would get an animal shelter closed down.
Violence against women is also increasingly accepted across the right wing of American society. Trump has been credibly accused of multiple rapes and assaults (and nailed for one by a jury of his peers), Hegseth’s own mother called out how he’s abused his previous wives, and accused rapists like the Tate brothers are tight with the Trump boys as an online “Rape Academy” got 62 million American visitors in a single month this year alone.
Republicans shrug it all off — or revel in it— while attacking and dismantling DEI and “woke” as anti-white-male, as if it’s all just fine with them. Bring up the topic and you’re accused of being a snowflake.
What the hell is going on? Why have American men — particularly white men — seemingly gone violently nuts over the past generation or two? Why do they revel in images and memes of violence and follow so-called “manosphere influencers”?
This is being driven by three factors: economics, racism, and misogyny that have been brought together in this moment as a perfect storm.
Republicans understand this well — after all, they are driving it — and if Democrats fail to figure the dynamic out and offer clear, specific, concrete fixes, they’ll continue to get beaten at the polls, and the problem of political violence will expand, no matter how badly Trump and the GOP screw things up.
First, there’s the economics.
When Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981 and declared war on the New Deal and unions while cutting income taxes on billionaires from 74% to virtually nothing, a massive $80 trillion transfer of wealth began. It wiped out worker protections, froze wages, ended most pensions, and — over the past 45 years — has taken the middle class from two-thirds of us down to around 43 percent of us.
To add insult to injury, men who once defined their masculinity by their ability to singularly provide for their families now have to rely on their wives working to keep a household together. And even that wasn’t enough for Republicans; today over half of working Americans are a few paychecks away from homelessness or bankruptcy as a result of these GOP policies and tax cuts.
Rush Limbaugh was the first to identify this back in the 1990s, calling women who worked and demanded equal rights and pay “Feminazis.” He legitimized that sort of rhetoric, blaming the emasculation of working class men at the hands of corporate bosses on their wives and other women in the workplace.
Republicans in Congress joined the chorus, publicly and proudly opposing the Equal Rights Amendment, which simply and entirely says, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” They continue to block it to this day.
Trump’s famous claim that he could sexually assault any woman he wanted because “when you’re a star, they let you do it” added to the Republican permission structure, giving modern rape culture a huge boost.
But Republicans didn’t just blame the collapse of the middle class on women in the workplace; they also claimed that Blacks and Hispanics were “stealing jobs” and “driving down wages” to deflect attention from the GOP-aligned fatcats whose singular agenda is to “control labor costs” to increase profits and add to billionaires’ money bins.
On this issue of race, there are two clear factors. The first of these reminds us of the last era of widespread white adoption of organized racism when President Woodrow Wilson sponsored a White House screening of the Klan recruiting film Birth of a Nation in 1915 and then embraced an eugenics movement that was explicitly grounded in ideas of a racial hierarchy of intellect and talent with whites on top.
The result of the President of the United States endorsing white supremacy that year was immediate and widespread: membership in the Klan, which had been moribund for a generation, exploded from an estimated 400,000 to over four million in fewer than two years. Klan marches coinciding with the Fourth of July and other patriotic holidays became commonplace events in American cities (30,000 Klansmen marched in Washington, DC in 1925, for example) until the fever was broken by World War II.
Donald Trump and the racist lickspittles he’s surrounded himself with have created a similar permission and endorsement atmosphere over the past 15 years, starting with the racist “birther” attacks on Barack Obama he rolled out in March of 2011.
Now Trump’s even more explicitly and publicly racist, routinely using the epithets “thug” and “low IQ” to smear any Black person he thinks opposes him. Most recently he applied both to Hakeem Jeffries — who graduated from NYU Law School Magna Cum Laude and holds a Masters degree from Georgetown — this past weekend. (Trump refuses to release his own college transcripts.)
Trump’s explicit beyond-dog-whistle racism now echoes through the ranks of his white supremacist regime. The last Black Republicans will leave the House of Representatives this year, and six “conservatives” on the Supreme Court just let former Confederate states destroy any vestige of Black representation in the South through extreme gerrymandering.
Whiskey Pete Hegseth is purging the senior ranks of our military of Black and female officers after Trump allegedly said he “didn’t want to be seen” with one, Stephen Miller is on a jeremiad to purge America of Black and Hispanic immigrants, Black history is being stripped from our national monuments and museums, and federal contracts are being denied to any organizations with a policy of encouraging diversity in the workplace.
Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports that pasty-white South African immigrant Elon Musk has put up around 850 arguably racist tweets to his social media platform just in the past six months, many warning of the coming extinction of white people in America. They found:
“More than half of those posts have used the word ‘white.’ The billionaire has posted on X about race nearly daily — 166 out of 197 days — from last October to mid-April, The Post analysis found.”
The apparent reason for Musk’s panic and this recent explosion of virulent racism in America isn’t limited to Trump and the racists he’s surrounded himself with. America is browning, largely because of a 1965 change in our immigration laws that ended racial quotas, and white people are noticing.
Since that year, 59 million people have legally immigrated to America, shifting the white population from 85% white in 1965 to 58% white today. Within a decade, if current trends continue, we’ll be a majority-minority country, as Texas already is. This has caused a panic among those like Trump and his white billionaire buddies who think that race defines what they call “culture” and lament the loss of “Anglo-Saxon cultural values” (code for white people).
So, what are Democrats and people of good will to do? I have three suggestions to dial back white male America’s embrace of political and racial violence, and with a sufficiently large electoral majority all three can be pursued simultaneously.
First, bring back a healthy middle class. This isn’t rocket science: FDR did it in the 1930s and 1940s, and Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, and Carter all expanded his New Deal.
This would involve:
— Rolling back the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts for corporations and the morbidly rich, restoring tax rates as they were in 1980 when our national debt was less that one trillion dollars and we were on a steady path to paying that off.
— Joining every other developed country in the world in offering a free or low-cost national healthcare system and offer free or low-cost college to anybody who can qualify, while ending all student debt as Joe Biden tried to do.
— Enforce anti-trust laws, repeal the “right to work for less” Taft-Hartley Act, and outlaw the billion-dollar union busting industry while enforcing workers’ right to representation and democracy in the workplace.
Next, deal with the “race problem” in America by passing legislation outlawing gerrymandering and other ways Republicans politically disenfranchise non-whites. Strengthen anti-racism laws and have the FBI go after racist groups rather than persecuting the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Launch a national education program about America’s racial history to build understanding and empathy among white people and empower the newly emerging majority.
Finally, to deal with misogyny, as a society we must work to redefine masculinity around competence and contribution rather than control of women, a message President Obama once took on. Being a man isn’t about being the sole breadwinner; it’s about being reliable, emotionally literate, and capable, being someone who shows up for family, work, and community. And bring back DEI — which principally benefited white women — and put it back into law.
For half a century, Republicans have bled white working-class men dry, hoovered up their wealth and given it to the Bezos’ and Zuckerbergs, and fought to keep the middle class from re-emerging in a way that might slightly dent corporate and billionaire profits.
The acceptance of political violence, the rising racism, and the open misogyny we’re seeing across America aren’t a mystery but are the predictable result of 45 years of GOP policy that gutted the middle class and then sold white men the lie that women, Blacks, and immigrants were the ones to blame.
It’s time the Democratic Party started telling Americans the truth and setting out a clear vision to remedy these decades of Republican vandalism that have brought us to this perilous, violent moment in our nation’s history. Share this article widely so more Americans can see clearly who’s actually been robbing them, and join me in the fight for a Democratic Party willing to tell the truth and finally solve this growing crisis of political violence.
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Trump conned his MAGA base — and lost the GOP to this lunatic
Based on the latest dreadful poll numbers for Donald Trump, it appears that his once-diehard MAGA base might be splitting at the seams like Trump’s cankle-filled socks.
Trump is hanging by a thread as the untouchable golden idol of the red-hatted MAGA devotees, but that gold aura now only exists in his gauche Oval Office. He has spent much of the second year of his second term reneging on his “Make America Great Again” agenda.
He is in the throes of betraying the promises that got him elected. No new wars that go on forever? There’s one in Iran that shows no signs of stopping. Gas prices under control? Tell that to the guy filling up his F-150 pickup truck that now costs an astonishing $160.
The Epstein files? Trump’s pushing all kinds of craziness on Truth Social so those files get buried. Bringing down inflation? Ha. The joke’s on you, MAGA, and they’re beginning to realize it.
Trump’s poll numbers are slipping fast. He has alienated parts of his own coalition. Democrats are overperforming in special elections by margins not seen in years. A majority of Americans, including a notable share of Republicans, now say he’s not mentally fit to serve.
And yet he keeps escalating, seemingly indifferent to the damage he’s leaving behind, and detached from what comes after him.
If that’s the case, there needs to be a serious reckoning about the survivability of MAGA, because the signs point to ruin.
Look at what’s happening to Turning Point USA, the youth army that Charlie Kirk built into one of conservatism’s most powerful organizing machines. After Kirk’s assassination last September, the organization has struggled to hold itself together. When Vice President JD Vance headlined a recent event in Athens, Georgia, in a venue built for thousands, the crowd was a fraction of capacity.
Erika Kirk, who took over as CEO after her husband’s death, has overseen sweeping layoffs, with more than 60 staffers cut in what insiders described as a purge. Turning Point may be a canary in the coal mine for institutions built to sustain MAGA that are now showing signs of fracture.
That may be a preview of what’s coming to MAGA itself.
The question is whether this discontent can coalesce into something meaningful before 2028. And when you look at the roster of potential successors, the answer should worry Republican strategists.
JD Vance? The base has never fully embraced him. He feels more like an imposter when it comes to speaking the language of MAGA. He shares one quality with Trump, egomania. But to the base, Trump’s is playful, while Vance’s is irritating.
Marco Rubio? To the America First crowd, he remains tied to the establishment they spent a decade trying to tear down. If Vance is an imposter, Rubio is an affront. Even slurping up Trump’s Kool-Aid isn’t enough to quench MAGA’s thirst.
So who’s left?
Right now, there’s only one person who embodies Trump’s lunacy while espousing his original MAGA ethos, and that’s Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Greene began her congressional career as a fiercely loyal Trump ally. But tension emerged when Trump tried to sideline her, reportedly dismissing her chances of winning higher office.
She responded by doing something almost no one in Trump world would dare, she fought back. Greene escalated her criticism of his focus on foreign policy over domestic priorities and questioned his reluctance to release the Epstein documents.
She has openly suggested that she, not Trump, might better represent the “America First” agenda.
That was evident in her speech at the Ron Paul Institute over the weekend. She declared “MAGA is dead” and a “lie,” accused Trump of initiating an “unprovoked” war in Iran, and called his actions “evil.” She also alleged that Trump threatened her family after she pushed for the release of Epstein files and accused his administration of serving foreign interests.
Greene is positioning herself as someone willing to say what others won’t, channeling the same anti-elite anger that fueled Trump’s rise.
While Trump deflects or obfuscates on issues like Epstein or gas prices, Greene tears into them. She frames herself as aligned with the attitudes many in the movement feel. She is, in effect, out-MAGAing Trump.
Granted, her current political standing is weak. She has resigned from Congress. Her poll numbers in Georgia are poor, and in a traditional general election she would be a risky candidate at best.
But those numbers reflect the present moment, not necessarily the movement’s future. And the future may belong to whoever can still speak its emotionally anger-charged language. And given her history, no one does that more viscerally than Greene, especially when she feels wronged.
In that way, Greene, impulsive, combustible, unfiltered, still emulates Trump. Rubio and Vance could never do what Trump and Greene do and survive politically. Every wild outburst reinforces her image as someone unafraid of the system MAGA voters distrust.
If the next two years bring gridlock, investigations, or electoral setbacks, including the possibility of Democrats retaking Congress, that turmoil will only strengthen Greene. Every hearing, every subpoena, every stalled working-class initiative becomes evidence for her argument that the system is broken and only confrontation works.
And when the movement finally moves beyond Trump, it won’t choose the safest option. It will choose the figure who most convincingly channels its anger and affinity for the bizarre.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a literal and figurative wild-card for 2028, and she clearly isn’t the most reasonable choice for Republicans.
However, right now? Well, she’s the obvious one.
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John Roberts might as well wear the robes of the Klan
George Wallace was sworn in as Governor of Alabama in 1963 and famously declared in his inauguration speech (written by a Ku Klux Klan leader) “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Two years later, Alabama state troopers violently broke up a nighttime voting rights march during which a police officer shot and killed young African American protester and Baptist deacon Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was unarmed and protecting his mother.
In response, civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King and John Lewis, organized a mass march from Selma to Montgomery over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in an attempt to deliver a civil rights and voting rights message to Gov. Wallace. It became known as “Bloody Sunday” as state troopers gassed and beat the protestors, including fracturing Lewis’ skull and sending 57 others to the hospital. Televised images of the brutal attack shocked the nation, directly leading to President Johnson’s push for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Numerous Americans, black and white, were injured and even died fighting for the Civil Rights Act. John Roberts and his five Republican Supreme Court colleagues effectively overturned the Civil Rights Act and essentially disenfranchised black voters.
George Wallace tried to disenfranchise black voters with violent state troopers. Roberts disenfranchised black voters with the stroke of a pen. It’s not hyperbole to say that while Roberts wears the black robes of a judge, he may as well wear the white robes of the Klan.
It’s not hyperbole to say that while Roberts wears the black robes of a judge, he may as well wear the white robes of the Klan.
In her dissent to Louisiana v. Callais in which the 6-member Republican majority of the Court effectively overturned Section 2 of the Civil Rights Act, Justice Elena Kagan wrote: “The Voting Rights Act is—or, now more accurately, was—one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation’s history. It was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers. It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality.” Kagan concluded, “ I dissent because the Court betrays its duty to faithfully implement the great statute Congress wrote. I dissent because the Court’s decision will set back the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity. I dissent.”
But the Court didn’t destroy the Civil Rights Act in a day. It was part of a lifelong mission by John Roberts to do so.
Starting as early as 1981, as a 26-year-old lawyer just three years out of Harvard Law School, Roberts began his campaign to undermine the Civil Rights Act. He got himself a job as Special Assistant to Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General William French Smith. Congress was about to amend the Civil Rights Act to provide that state laws would be illegal if they had a racially discriminatory effect, without having to prove that they had a racially discriminatory intent—something almost impossible to prove.
Roberts zealously took on the assignment coming up with arguments against the Amendment. Roberts wrote over 25 memos opposing the Amendment. In one, he argued that the Civil Rights Act was “the most intrusive interference imaginable by federal courts into state and local processes.”
Despite the efforts of Roberts and others in the Reagan administration, Congress passed the Amendment with overwhelming bipartisan support. Little did anyone imagine at the time that Roberts would become Chief Justice and the leader of right-wing Justices’ ultimately successful efforts to undermine the Civil Rights Act as he had initially set out to do as a young Justice Department official.
At his confirmation hearing, Roberts told the Senate “The existing Voting Rights Act, the constitutionality has been upheld and I don’t have any issue with that.” He was lying.
In 2013, Roberts got his first shot at dismantling the Civil Rights Act. In his 5-4 ruling in Shelby v. Holder, he overturned Section 5 of the Act , which required that states with a history of racist voter suppression pre-clear changes in election laws with the Justice Department to be sure they were not reinstituting racial suppression. He argued that it was no longer necessary since racism in America had diminished since the Act had been passed. In response, many states previously subject to preclearance rushed to enact new voter suppression laws.
In coming years, the Roberts Court further chipped away at the Voting Rights Act. But Roberts finally got his opportunity to make the rest of the Voting Rights Act a nullity when Louisiana v. Calais came before the Court this year. In a 6-3 opinion, which Roberts assigned to his anti-voting rights ally Justice Samuel Alito, the Court overruled the other crown jewel of the Voting Rights Act which had previously held that racially gerrymandered districts were illegal if they had racially discriminatory effect. Instead, racially gerrymandered districts would only be illegal if it can be proven that they have a racially discriminatory intent, a bar that is almost impossible to clear.
This was the argument that Roberts first made as a young Justice Department attorney back in 1982. As Chief Justice, he finally succeeded in his long campaign to revoke the Civil Rights Act.
Meanwhile, if a state can claim that it’s gerrymandering is motivated by ensuring that its political party wins, it’s totally cool with the Roberts Court. With the Court overturning both Section 2 and Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, it effectively repealed the entire Voting Rights Act that so many had fought and died for.
The very next day, Florida passed a redistricting law that would allow for new levels of gerrymandering designed to erase districts with large populations of black voters.
Roberts accomplished with a pen what George Wallace had tried to accomplish with violent state troopers.
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This annual vulgarity honored the most obscene billionaire of them all
Friends,
Last night was the Met Gala, an annual homage to the conspicuous extravagance of America’s wealthy. Its honorary chairs this year were, appropriately, Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sanchez Bezos.
If you wanted a ticket to the Bezos Ball, all you needed to do was shell out $100,000 and wear something memorably daring and expensive. Oh, and you’d also have to be on the “A List” of Very Wealthy People.
A record 55 percent of Americans now report their financial situation is worsening, citing severe stress from high inflation, housing costs, and rising gas prices, according to Gallup/USA Today polling. One in 3 households is unable to cover a month of living expenses. Prices are soaring, wages are going nowhere, millions are losing access to health insurance. Yet corporate profits are in the stratosphere.
This year’s Met Gala was a testament to the vapid arrogance of the Bezos’s and other neo-Robber Barons of this second Gilded Age.
As I mentioned recently, Bezos has made his fortune off the backs of millions of working people. According to a newly unsealed filing in an antitrust lawsuit, Bezos’s Amazon has pressured major brands like Levi’s and Hanes to demand that competing retailers raise prices on their products.
Another recent lawsuit against Bezos accused Amazon of making it difficult for consumers to cancel its Prime subscription service. Amazon agreed to pay up to $2.5 billion — including $1 billion in penalties and additional payouts to consumers — but didn’t admit or deny wrongdoing.
Meanwhile, Bezos’s workers are among the worst-treated in America. Bezos is virulently anti-union. Until Trump took over the National Labor Relations Board, its attorneys were prosecuting Amazon for firing delivery employees because they’d voted to join the Teamsters, a direct violation of labor laws.
On April 6, an Amazon warehouse worker collapsed and died on the floor of Amazon’s warehouse in Troutdale, Oregon. A co-worker trained in CPR tried to help but was told by an Amazon manager not to. For more than an hour, employees said, they were instructed to continue packing items and loading trucks as the man lay dead. One manager reportedly told workers to “just turn around and not look” and get back to work.
As of April 2026, Bezos’s net worth was estimated to be between $259 billion and $269 billion, making him one of the three richest people in the world. And he won’t let anyone forget it.
He celebrated his wedding last year to Lauren Sánchez with a multi-day event in Venice, Italy, estimated to cost more than $50 million, featuring guests like Oprah Winfrey and Kim Kardashian.
His “homes” include three adjacent properties on Indian Creek Island in Florida, costing over $230 million; the former Warner estate in Beverly Hills, California, which features a 13,600-square-foot mansion and a golf course, which he purchased for $165 million; a 14-acre compound on Maui with a 4,500-square-foot main house and 700-square-foot pool; a $23 million mansion in Washington, D.C.; and a massive multi-lot compound with waterfront frontage in Medina, Washington.
What really puts Bezos at the head of all the other robber barons in this second Gilded Age is his slavish sycophancy toward the worst president in American history.
Bezos bought the legendary Washington Post for $250 million in October 2013 and has turned it into a Trump media suck-up — prohibiting its editorial page from endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024 and barring it from writing anything critical about American capitalism or Trump.
In February, Bezos fired more than 300 Post journalists, about a third of the staff. He paid $40 million to license the documentary “Melania” plus $35 million to market it — and earned back almost none of it — a blatant bribe of Trump.
And he does whatever Trump wants. After Trump complained to Bezos about Amazon’s plans to display for consumers the costs of Trump’s tariffs, Bezos immediately canceled the plan.
Bezos has sucked up to Trump presumably to secure Pentagon contracts for his Blue Origin rocket company, which landed a $2.3 billion NASA contract early in Trump’s second term. And to avoid further antitrust lawsuits or labor law scrutiny.
That he has zero scruples does not necessarily distinguish Bezos from the other robber barons of this despicable era. And one could say it’s not Bezos’s “fault” that he’s filthy rich — he’s just taken advantage of the current system. But he’s also made the system even more rotten.
Why did the Met choose him and his wife as honorary co-chairs of last night’s gala? It’s his money, of course. But there’s nothing honorable about him. His public-be-damned business practices, his conspicuous consumption, and his excessive sucking up to Trump make Bezos, at least to my mind, the worst billionaire of them all.
- 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 disastrous move is a dream come true — for America's nemesis
Nikita Khrushchev famously said, “We will bury you” (“My vas pokhoronim”) to Western ambassadors in Moscow on November 18, 1956. Seventy years later, it appears that Russia’s goal is being realized.
Putin called Trump last Wednesday and they talked for almost two hours. Fewer than three days later, America announced we’re pulling 5,000 US troops out of the NATO forces in Germany, accomplishing a 60-year-long Russian goal. Trump also ended sanctions on Russian oil, handing the Putin regime billions in revenue, while continuing to block U.S. weapons delivery to Ukraine.
Meanwhile, HHS Secretary brainworm-infected heroin addict Bob Kennedy has hollowed out America’s core public health infrastructure and elevated anti-vaccine messaging, undermining trust in immunization and disease prevention. The result is a sicker and more vulnerable America as measles and whooping cough outbreaks spread across the nation and U.S. science leadership in the world has been kneecapped.
Over at the Pentagon, Whiskey Pete Hegseth, whose mother says he abuses women, has purged senior career leadership of women and Blacks and weakened the independence of the JAG corps, eroding professional military norms and devastating morale. He’s stupidly burned through so much ordnance with his illegal, unconstitutional Middle East war crimes that our military readiness and deterrence capacity are at an all-time low in the modern era.
Through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Nazi-saluting, multiple-baby-producing billionaire Elon Musk has impaired basic federal functions and hollowed out institutional expertise. When he destroyed the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), killing millions in the Third World, both China and Russia swept in to fill the vacuum and secure key natural resources and strategic military outposts.
Over at the Voice Of America, conspiracy nut Kari Lake has turned the network from independent journalism into a right-wing propaganda operation that delights Putin and damages U.S. credibility abroad, weakening a cornerstone of America’s advocacy for democracy and soft power.
With ICE and an ever-expanding network of concentration camps, brutal racist Stephen Miller has driven hardline immigration policies that gut asylum processes and expand detention (even for children), straining courts, destroying our reputation around the world, and devastating tourism.
Over at the Office of Management and Budget, billionaire-lapdog and neofascist ideologue Russell Vought has weaponized budget authority to illegally defund agencies and programs Congress authorized, concentrating power in the hands of the president, undermining constitutional checks, and destabilizing federal operations.
The FBI has been weaponized by the unqualified drunk Ka$h Patel (as he brands himself), politicizing investigations and purging career officials, weakening the bureau’s independence and ability to fight actual crime, while complicating intelligence cooperation with allies.
After showboat Kristi Noem destroyed the credibility of DHS with mass detention policies and multiple unaccountable murders of American citizens, former plumber Markwayne Mullen continues to gut civil liberties safeguards and execute Miller’s vision of a nearly-all-white America.
Wrestling billionaire Linda McMahon is actively vandalizing the Department of Education, cutting support for public schools and student protections in ways that widen inequality and weaken long-term workforce competitiveness.
Climate change denier and fracking company CEO Chris Wright now runs the Department of Energy, which has been redirected toward aggressive fossil fuel expansion while obliterating clean-energy initiatives, making America weaker and more vulnerable to both climate disasters and oil supply disruptions.
Under fossil fuel shill Doug Burgum’s leadership at Interior, the National Park Service is being dismantled by political interference, workforce depletion, corruption, and the systematic erasure of American history. He’s prioritized drilling and mining over conservation, producing long-term environmental damage, while corruptly moving $100 million in our tax dollars over to a group run by Trump loyalists.
At the Department of Justice Pam Bondi (who dropped an investigation into Trump University when he gave her campaign $25,000), and now Trump’s former criminal defense attorney and Ghislaine Maxwell buddy Todd Blanche continue to hide the Trump-Epstein files and have gutted enforcement against polluters, fraudsters, and other white-collar criminals while pushing hard to torment and bankrupt with malicious prosecution those individuals who’ve called out Trump’s corruption.
Failed reality-TV star Sean Duffy now runs the Transportation Department, where oversight has been loosened in key safety and infrastructure areas. The result is increased risk for the traveling public in aviation, rail, and roadway systems while much-needed modernization has been delayed or killed off altogether.
Billionaire Scott Bessent controls America’s Treasury as he pushes deregulation and financial concentration, helping his fellow billionaires while increasing the systemic risk that inevitably hits homeowners, small investors, and ordinary working people like it did in 2008.
Billionaire and former Epstein Island buddy Howard Lutnick now runs the Commerce Department, pushing Trump’s tariffs and politicized trade decisions, disrupting supply chains and straining longstanding relationships with trading partners while exploding inflation here at home.
Real estate billionaire Steve Witkoff, with no diplomatic experience whatsoever, has screwed up our negotiations with Iran to the point that gas is now pushing five bucks a gallon here and the world is horrified. His sons hooked up with the Trump kids to make millions off their dads’ government jobs, as Witkoff himself regularly travels to Moscow to consult with Putin.
Rightwing crank Brooke Rollins runs USDA programs that have been reshaped to favor large agribusiness over small and mid-size farms while stripping millions of American children from food stamps and school meals, hitting rural America particularly hard.
At the Environmental Protection Agency, carbon hustler Lee Zeldin has rolled back pollution and climate regulations while reducing enforcement capacity, delighting Putin and increasing profits for fossil fuel billionaires.
Scott Turner is turning HUD from a pro-housing agency into one that pushes rightwing talking points and is shedding programs designed to give housing access to low-income and homeless families.
Putin-friendly Tulsi Gabbard now oversees the nation’s Intelligence agencies, politicizing their assessments while sidelining career analysts and distorting threat reporting. As a result, our allies have become less willing to share sensitive intelligence and Russia’s power is increased.
And at the State Department, Marco Rubio has hollowed out diplomatic staff and reduced emphasis on alliances and multilateral engagement, weakening U.S. influence and opening space for Russia and China to set the agenda.
This list is an operational blueprint, the kind of document a hostile foreign intelligence service might draw up if it had been handed unlimited access to the executive branch and told to dismantle the American republic from inside without firing a single shot:
— Hollow out the public health system so disease can do its work,
— Demoralize the officer corps and burn through munitions in unconstitutional wars,
— Terminate the diplomats and intelligence professionals who keep allies aligned,
— Replace independent journalism with state propaganda at Voice of America,
— Defund the agencies Congress created,
— Abandon the clean energy transition that would have weakened OPEC and Russia simultaneously,
— Politicize the FBI and DOJ so they target dissenters instead of crooks,
— And turn armed, masked ICE thugs loose to terrorize immigrant communities while training the rest of us to accept anonymous federal agents disappearing our neighbors into massive concentration camps.
Every line item that would appear on such a plan has been checked off in the last 14 months, executed by a Cabinet of grifters, ideologues, and 13 billionaires whose loyalty runs to Trump and the morbidly rich rather than to the nation whose Constitution they swore an oath to defend.
When Louise and I lived in Germany back in the 1980s, we could feel what the American military presence meant to the Germans we shared meals and beers with. The GIs at Ramstein and Grafenwöhr weren’t an abstraction or a budget line; they were the visible, daily reassurance that the United States had learned the lessons of 1914 and 1939 and that we would never again let Europe sleepwalk into catastrophe.
Older Germans I met would talk about the Marshall Plan and the Berlin Airlift the way Americans of that generation talked about Pearl Harbor or the moon landing, with a kind of stunned gratitude that another country had voluntarily done such a thing for them.
That moral capital, accumulated over eight decades and across both Republican and Democratic administrations, is precisely what Trump’s people set on fire this week, with the Pentagon’s announced 5,000-troop withdrawal coming on the heels of that nearly two-hour Putin call and Trump’s weekend promise that we’re cutting “a lot further” still.
In Europe, Boris Pistorius, Donald Tusk, Friedrich Merz, and Keir Starmer are now openly discussing how to defend the continent without us, which is exactly the world Vladimir Putin has been trying to engineer ever since the day he first took over the Kremlin.
The grim irony of Khrushchev’s famous threat is that he never literally meant we’d be “buried” by a tank or warhead (although rightwingers loved to claim it did).
The Russian phrase “My vas pokhoronim” was a Marxist taunt lifted from Marx’s line about the proletariat being capitalism’s gravedigger, and what Khrushchev was actually saying — as he later explained at length in Yugoslavia — was that history itself would do the work because socialism would outlast and replace what he called the rotting capitalist order.
He was wrong on the substance, of course, since the Soviet Union itself collapsed in 1991, buried by its own corruption and by the open society it had spent half a century trying to subvert. But he may have been right about something deeper than ideology: a great power can absolutely be killed from the inside by people who pretend to govern while methodically removing every load-bearing wall in the structure just to enrich themselves.
That’s the project Trump’s Cabinet is executing in plain sight right now, and the only force on earth capable of stopping it is the same force that both beat back fascism in 1945 and, after the Republican Great Depression, built the very institutions we’re watching get demolished: ordinary Americans deciding we’ve finally had enough.
So, pick up the phone today and call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your senators and your representative that you want hearings, subpoenas, and roll-call votes on the troop withdrawal from Germany, the lifting of Russian oil sanctions, and the anti-American behavior of every cabinet officer named above.
Check your voter registration at vote.org because next year’s midterms are the last reasonable opportunity to take Congress back before this administration finishes the job it’s started.
Look up your state legislative races and your secretary of state at openstates.org, because the firewall against rigged 2028 results is going to be built, or not built, in our statehouses.
And support independent journalism wherever you find it (and share this newsletter), because Voice of America is gone, public broadcasting is on the chopping block, and the legacy press is already in capitulation mode as anti-democracy billionaires buy up one outlet after another.
Khrushchev never managed to bury us. Let’s make damn sure Trump, Putin, and America’s right-wing billionaires don’t either.
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Scandal alone won't bring Trump down — but this will
Everyone is well aware of the Trump administration's well-earned "TACO" problem — the only catchy, and desperately needed, malicious Trump branding yet to seep into the general electorate. And if Trump has taught us anything, it is that branding matters. Fine. Here is some branding. How is life going now that we're all having to pay the "Trump Tax"?
No one likes taxes, but Americans take hatred of taxes to Hall of Fame levels — especially conservatives. But usually, we at least buy things with our taxes. We buy roads, schools, and aircraft carriers, all of it through taxes. What do we "buy" with the Trump tax? More pure, untethered, unbothered, near opulent, chaos and ineptitude. More. More. And more.
The Trump Tax is the price liberals pay for living under an administration that exists to hate liberals and destroy anything perceived as a liberal establishment — from the Department of War to the Kennedy-Trump Center. Real liberal hatred, and yes — they "voted for that."
But MAGAs never wanted to have to actually pay for it. Indeed, there was a point that MAGAs saw the cruelty and destruction as value-added. Trump "cut taxes" and made life cheaper. True or not, it's definitely not true now. In fact, the Trump tax is hitting middle America harder. Try driving 17 miles to Walmart or a movie.
A dollar fifty a gallon more on gas? A bag of Doritos at $5.99? A Red Robin cheeseburger at $16.50? Come on, that's quite the surcharge to get a newly named "War Department," especially when you also have yet to pay for the actual war Trump started. At least when Democrats tax things, people get a few tidbits, maybe a bridge, high-speed internet, or doctors' visits out of the deal.
Not Trump. With the Trump tax, you get half a Cabinet fired before midterms, Epstein, inflation, and less healthcare. Government under Trump has a "Hegseth-Patel" aura, and that gets expensive. True, there's a chicken-and-egg problem there, but we're branding now. Details matter little, only the end result matters. And the end result is the Trump tax.
Making the brand even stronger, Trump's "true north," his only truly reliable element, is "things only get worse." It is not like Trump is going to solve the Trump tax problem. Even the MAGAs probably don't expect that. The only light at the end of the Trump-tax tunnel is blue light, and every Democrat better invest in bulbs, because it's not just a winning message — it's what will bring Trump down.
This column has spent the last two months pointing out — hopefully in ways as colorful as meaningful — that scandal alone cannot bring Trump down, but a troubled economy can, even on its own. The chaos causing the problem is that bad.
Ask the guy who just filled the F150 to drive twenty-six miles to Home Depot and then paid $12.78 for a Number Two at Chick-fil-A, ask that guy what he thinks of the Trump tax. It sucks. Ask him, "Did you vote for that?"
Hand him a blue flashlight, ask if he can now "see a provider," and if the answer is no, ask if he can see the problem, not that an eye doctor is an option. Suddenly, that voter might find himself asking why Trump is so afraid of the Epstein files. (Not exactly a MENSA test.) Maybe he asks why Trump needs the IRS to pay him a few billion dollars in pure grift, or why he must have the never-to-be-damned enough ballroom. It all starts to matter a bit.
Branding can be kind of fun, but this is actually starting to matter a lot; because the real tax is only beginning to settle in. Most Americans don't fully appreciate the "costs" associated with the damage to America's international reputation, tariffs and treaties, the real economic damage wrought by the masochistic machete taken to public health, the lack of investment in science, roads, and rails, and no adults around to monitor A.I. as it monitors you. It all adds up and will take two generations to fix. If it's ever fixed. That price is real, but the total is subtle. Nothing about Trump, nor the needed Blue Wave, should be subtle. Best to focus on the Trump tax here and now.
And that's good because it is here, it is now, and even MENSA members can't get around it.
"No tax on tips." Here's a tip for "real America," how much higher is the tip at Olive Garden now? Please do factor in the gas to get there, it's only fair - the pasta wholesaler sure did. You used to get good fun out of "owning the libs." What do you get now? You get Pete Hegseth, and not at a discount, no — not at about a billion a day in Iran.
Democrats better get used to the Trump tax, too. It is far more intellectually satisfying to try to appeal to voters' sense of right and wrong, duty, Trump depravity, and yet this is about branding, and branding comes from the gut, not the mind. So hit them where the Trump tax hits, right in the gut.
In that sense, there is good news. Branding matters; no one knows it more than the master. And it's never been easier. The Trump tax buys a lot of things, none of which feed, educate, or medicate a family.
Run a Blue light special. Cut the Trump tax, and make our money work by having our government work. God knows, Trump just tried to brand himself as Jesus. This really can't be that hard.
Jason Miciak is a Rawstory Columnist at Large, former Associate Editor at Occupy Democrats, an attorney, author, single-parent girldad. He can be reached at jasonmiciak@gmail.com, or followed here on Bluesky.
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