Opinion
Unelected right-wingers want to give Trump's GOP yet more power — here's how we stop them
The 2026 election will take place in a political system that is divided, discordant, flagrantly gerrymandered, and marked by widening racial discrimination. Thank Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues on the Supreme Court. And the supermajority of highly activist justices seems poised, even eager, to make things appreciably worse.
In 2019, in Rucho v. Common Cause, the Court refused to adopt any standard to police partisan gerrymandering and even prevented federal courts from hearing that claim. Fast-forward through a census, six years of line-drawing, and a flurry of lawsuits, and predictably, our democracy has become much less fair.
Redistricting is supposed to take place once a decade, after the census. In fact, that’s why the census is written into the Constitution. But earlier this year, Texas abruptly drew new congressional maps in a gambit to squeeze out five extra seats for Republicans. It was in the middle of the decade and at the behest of someone who doesn’t live there (President Trump) — and all at the expense of Black and Latino voters. Even though 95 percent of population growth in the state came from those communities, the map’s main feature was fewer districts where those voters can elect their preferred candidates.
Bad, right? A panel of three federal judges agreed, temporarily blocking the map from being used until a full trial could be held. Texas first resisted allegations of a partisan gerrymander, then insisted it was actually acting at the behest of the Justice Department for racial reasons, then said it was, in fact, a partisan power grab. (“I don’t see race. Just Democrats.”) Talk about a Texas two-step! Amid these gyrations, the court found it illegal.
Enter the Supreme Court. Last week it blocked the lower court’s ruling, thus allowing the election to go forward with freshly gerrymandered maps. It’s yet another brazen use of the shadow docket — the Court’s supposed emergency docket (with limited briefing and no oral argument) — to hand Trump a win with only a few sentences of explanation.
Where does that leave things? The Texas seat grab set off a partisan arms race across the country. Furious Democrats acted. California voters overwhelmingly supported drawing new Democratic-leaning congressional districts there to counter the GOP gains in Texas. Republicans in Indiana and Florida moved to redraw lines Democrats in Illinois, Maryland, and Virginia aim to do the same. Indiana ultimately decided not to act.
With all this headbutting, the gerrymander war of 2025 could turn out to be close to a wash in partisan terms. Moreover, voters may have their own ideas. If Democrats win big, as recent races have suggested is possible, the gerrymander might produce extra GOP losses. (The technical term for this, believe it or not, is a “dummymander.”)
All that sound and fury, in short, might signify … not exactly nothing, but not a decisive partisan gain.
That’s where the next big intervention by the Supreme Court would come in. And its impact could well be even more dramatic — and if possible, more harmful.
The Court seems poised to demolish the effectiveness of what’s left of the Voting Rights Act.
Two weeks ago, in Louisiana v. Callais, it heard arguments about whether the law’s Section 2 remains constitutional. For decades, that provision effectively barred states, particularly in the South, from enacting maps that dilute or cancel out the voting power of racial minorities. As our friend-of-the-court brief pointed out, the provision has transformed both Congress and legislative bodies across the country. And the disparity in registration rates between white and Black voters dropped from nearly 30 percentage points in the early 1960s to 8 points a decade later. Now the justices seem ready to wreck Section 2, if not strike it down entirely.
This would not only mark a shameful retreat from federal action to protect racial equality and fair representation. It could have a dramatic and specific impact: A bad ruling, especially early, could be followed by another wave of redistricting in coming months, maybe even in time for the 2026 election.
As my colleague Kareem Crayton writes, “The argument invites a return to the era when race was a barrier to entry for political representation — the cruel and painful experience of political exclusion that made passage of the Voting Rights Act necessary in the first place.”
Nate Cohn of the New York Times has crunched the numbers and predicts that an extreme Supreme Court ruling could allow Republican states to eliminate between six and 12 districts currently held by Democrats. That would be a margin larger than the House majority either party has had in recent years.
When politicians pick voters — whether based on race or politics — instead of the other way around, our elections become less fair and less democratic. The country would slide toward even greater division and balkanization.
Republican voters in Massachusetts (where there are no Republican members of Congress even though Trump won 37 percent of the vote) have no party representation in Congress, while Democrats in Texas (where Kamala Harris won 42 percent) would have only about seven of 38 seats. John Adams famously said that the legislature must be an “exact portrait of the people at large.” The current portrait doesn’t bear much of a resemblance.
So what’s the answer?
There must, above all, be national standards that apply to red states and blue states alike. The Constitution gives Congress that power. It should enact national redistricting rules that would ban partisan gerrymandering, bar mid-decade redistricting, and ensure fair representation for voters across the country. In 2022, it almost did: The Freedom to Vote Act would have banned mid-decade redistricting and set other standards. And the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would have strengthened protections against racially discriminatory maps. Both came achingly close to enactment.
And then the ideologues on the Supreme Court should stop meddling in elections. Over the past 15 years, the Court demolished campaign finance rules in Citizens United, wrecked the Voting Rights Act starting in Shelby County, and gave ex-presidents vast and unprecedented immunity from prosecution for crimes committed in office — thus ensuring no legal accountability for candidate, now president, Trump.
In a season when it seems increasingly clear that the justices plan to hand President Trump even more power, inexcusable rulings and interventions in partisan politics will leave a very sour taste for many voters. The Supreme Court itself, increasingly, will become an issue in American politics. That’s as it should be.
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These dismal numbers don't lie: Trouble is coming for Trump
The Bureau of Labor Statistics — which can still be trusted! — reported this week that just 64,000 jobs were added to the economy in November.
That’s not enough to keep up with the number of people looking for jobs. Hence, the jobless rate rose last month to 4.6 percent — up from 4.4 percent in September and from 4.0 percent in January.
But the bigger news is that almost no jobs have been added to the American economy since April.
In fact, 710,000 more people are unemployed now versus November 2024.
Take a look:
It would be one thing if wage gains were growing, but they aren’t. They’re slowing.
What accounts for this dismal record? Donald Trump wants to blame the Fed, which he claims has been too slow to reduce interest rates. But in addition to creating jobs, the Fed also has a mandate to fight inflation — and prices continue to rise.
The two main reasons for the dismal economy are:
- Trump’s tariffs. Employers aren’t willing to expand or add news jobs due to the added costs of the tariffs, which they have to absorb or pass onto their customers. The tariffs are also creating wild uncertainties about the future, further discouraging hiring.
- Efforts by employers to cut costs. Payrolls are about two-thirds of all the costs of doing business, so employers squeeze payrolls as much as they can. They’re doing it now just as they have over the last several decades — by outsourcing abroad (although this has become trickier, given the tariffs) and by substituting technology for labor. What’s new — and making it far easier for them to substitute technology for labor — is Artificial Intelligence.
Bottom line: Between rising prices and no new jobs, most Americans are struggling to pay their bills. Hence, the affordability crisis.
Hence, a political reckoning for Republicans, particularly if Democrats focus on affordability in next year’s midterm elections.
Key planks of such a platform should be:
- Eliminating many of Trump’s tariffs.
- Busting up monopolies.
- Giving workers more power through unions.
- Raising the minimum wage.
- Lowering the costs of healthcare, housing, and childcare.
- 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/.
- Robert Reich's 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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How the racketeer-in-chief found a dangerous outlet for his lethal disdain
As far back as the El Salvadoran Civil War and the Nicaraguan Contra War of the 1980s, the United States’ efforts to prosecute “drug wars” with Latin American cartels and traffickers have produced mixed results at best.
These efforts have been complicated by the tension between sound crime-fighting strategies and geopolitical concerns, such as regime change.
This is not because U.S. law enforcement agencies or the military are ignorant of necessary methods or incapable of lawfully taking down drug kingpins or cartels.
But the U.S. has certainly proved itself capable of acting illegally, or in morally questionable fashion at best.
This was certainly the case in the 1980s when, as the San Jose Mercury News reported, “the CIA helped finance its covert war against Nicaragua’s leftist government through sales of cut-rate cocaine to [a] South Central L.A. drug dealer.”
Further back, in the 1960s, the CIA was entangled in Asia’s drug trade and, as the author Patrick Winn showed, got American soldiers in Vietnam hooked on heroin.
Now, a former Honduran president convicted for drug trafficking has received a pardon from President Donald Trump, even as the president of Venezuela faces a potential U.S. invasion over accusations of drug trafficking made by Trump himself.
Elsewhere, the leader of the Chapitos faction of the Mexican Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquín Guzmán López, who had been accused of flooding the US with illicit fentanyl, this month reached a plea agreement.
According to court documents, it occurred when one of the sons of former cartel leader Joaquín Guzmán Loera, alias El Chapo, changed his plea from not guilty to guilty, for “two drug trafficking charges and engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise.”
As Parker Asmann writes, it all means “another judicial case … will not go to trial or expose the inner workings of organized crime in Mexico.”
Nonetheless, several things are new or different under Trump, at home and in institutions meant to fight crime abroad:
- No president since Nixon has so weaponized the democratic institutions of government and especially the Department of Justice to routinely come after their legal and/or political opponents.
- No president since Nixon has used the rhetoric of “law and order” to defund agencies of crime control while providing around $100 billion to ICE for deporting criminal immigrants, only to find immigrants with no criminal records becoming the largest group in ICE detention.
- No president since Nixon has systematically sabotaged multinational security relations, to the effect of at least 10 Caribbean nations turning against the U.S. over Trump’s neglect of natural disaster relief and his military’s terrorist-like actions causing the unlawful killings of people on boats allegedly smuggling drugs.
Nobody reading this commentary needs a recitation of Trump’s campaign of retribution on home soil. But Trump has also systemically defunded and downsized crime prevention and gun control, while decriminalizing behaviors of both criminals and social control agents.
Which takes us back to the “war on drugs,” and Trump’s unlawful killings in the name of his supposed attempt to stop dangerous substances coming into the U.S.
Of the 95 killings so far in the Caribbean, none seem to have been of actors who posed an imminent threat to anyone’s life, and would therefore have been subject to drug enforcement policies, the laws of war, and U.S. military protocol.
For a racketeering president, this is simply his way of “taking care of business.” Trump could care less whether the magnitude of crime is getting worse or better, except in terms of his own criminality or ability to exploit the crimes of others for the acquisition of power and wealth.
Selling pardons from the Oval Office was one of Trump’s earliest scams. Now, in addition to the ex-president of Honduras, three other big-time, drugs-related criminals have benefited.
On day one of Trump 2.0, he pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht — convicted of “creating the largest online black market for illegal drugs and other illicit goods,” as the Washington Post put it. Trump did so because he made deals with the Libertarian Party and the crypto community.
Subsequently, the habitually lawless, supposedly “drug-warring” president granted clemency to a longtime Chicago gang leader, Larry Hoover, and a Baltimore drug kingpin, Garnett Gilbert Smith.
And yet Trump insists Venezuela represents a drug-fueled threat to Americans and merits severe action.
Last week, he told Politico President Nicolás Maduro’s “days are numbered.” Two days later, U.S. forces seized a large oil tanker near the Venezuelan coast, a significant escalation.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said the move was warranted because the tanker was being used to transport oil from Iran, in defiance of sanctions. The AG released video showing U.S. forces descending from helicopters and searching the vessel.
Meanwhile, footage of the murder of two helpless survivors of a boat strike in the Caribbean was only one of more than a dozen such videos that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has not boastfully shown to the world.
Instead, Hegseth declared the Pentagon won’t release the video because it is “top secret” and would be in violation of “longstanding Department of War policy.”
Had these interdictions of allegedly cocaine-carrying boats been part of a real drug war, and not a pretext for a possible invasion of Venezuela, cargoes would have been seized and traffickers arrested — as a means of leveraging them to go after kingpins and cartels.
On Tuesday evening, Trump announced a blockade of all “sanctioned oil tankers” into Venezuela, alleging the country was using oil to fund drug trafficking and other crimes.
But as Trump said, this is really about ramping up pressure on Maduro and his nation’s economy, “until such time as they return to the United States all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.”
Or in the alternative, regime change occurs, with the departure of Maduro and his alleged “foreign terrorist organization” as Trump labeled the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
CBS's 60 Minutes, on the ground in Caracas to interview President Maduro but seeing the session cancelled for “security reasons,” decided to interview people in the streets instead.
The general consensus was that Venezuelans are concerned about an invasion and see three likely outcomes: Maduro packs his bags, is arrested, or is killed.
One poignant statement came from a man “wearing a hat with the insignia of a civilian-military organization,” who said Trump’s accusations about drugs made no sense, because the nation’s economy was based on oil exports.
He told CBS, “The country of Venezuela doesn’t need to rely on drugs because we are a petroleum country. We have never cultivated a drug trade here.”
- Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several award-winning books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy. The third book in this Trump trilogy, Regime Change, Authoritarian Treason, and the Outlaw-in-Chief: President Donald Trump’s Struggle to Kill U.S. Democracy & Realign American Global Power, will be published after the 2026 midterm elections.
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Another Trump lackey has failed to learn the oldest lesson of all
In her steamy Vanity Fair interview, Susie Wiles, Donald Trump’s chief of staff, painted herself as a less than quiet yet behind-the-scenes operator who deliberately keeps a low profile. That’s why you go to Vanity Fair to tell your story.
She offered an oddly literal example of her persona.
During public Oval Office functions, Wiles said, she doesn’t sit on the couch beside the president with the power players but in a chair off to the side. She even joked about repeatedly getting bonked on the head by boom mikes wielded by journalists crammed into the room.
Maybe that explains why she agreed to be interviewed in the first place? And her defensive response to the story when it came out? And the White House's ridiculous response that she didn’t know it was on the record?
This seemingly trivial boom mike detail is a perfect metaphor for Wiles’s role. She relays being questioned by Trump about why she’s leaving a meeting, and tries to make it sound like she’s in control, telling him her exit had nothing to do with him.
You tell him, Susie!
But reading closely, it’s the opposite. Wiles occupies a sidelined, marginal position, repeatedly knocked around by chaos while Trump barrels ahead, dragging the country on a reckless ride she neither restrains nor guides.
Since Trump’s November election and Wiles’s appointment as the first female chief of staff, pundits have offered a somewhat flattering portrait of her as a “different” kind of Trump lackey. The daughter of NFL kicker and legendary sportscaster Pat Summerall, she carries a halo effect, evident to the bros, that some might argue inflates her image.
Wiles is being praised for moments of candor such as calling out Vice President JD Vance as a “conspiracy theorist,” labeling Elon Musk an “odd, odd duck,” and describing budget director Russell Vought as a “right-wing absolute zealot.” She also claimed Trump has an “alcoholic’s personality.” Was that supposed to be a compliment?
Through her tenure, she’s been portrayed as a voice of reason in an administration defined by thugs and cruelty. Gen. John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, tried desperately to be a guardrail. Wiles is an orange cone Trump keeps knocking over and flattening.
Wiles is not a principled gatekeeper or a check on Trump’s excesses. She’s a defender and enabler of a grotesque, unruly and crude president who undermines democratic norms, endangers vulnerable communities, flouts laws and ethics, and prioritizes his bank account over national well-being.
She hasn’t stopped a single horrific or illegal action since Trump’s return. Instead, she rationalizes and excuses his worst impulses. She claims to “stand up” to Trump, yet the interview offers no evidence she’s ever forced him to change course. Not once do you hear Wiles say, “He told me, ‘You’re right, Susie. I was wrong, and I will keep listening to you.’”
Consider her reactions to Trump’s more egregious actions. She feigns horror at his push to cut USAID, an agency crucial for global health and democracy, yet did nothing to prevent its devastating demolition.
She tries to justify Trump’s military deployment in Washington, D.C., which a judge ruled unlawful. And she chews out Pam Bondi for her handling of the Epstein files. Really? Trump delaying, obfuscating, and forcing Mike Johnson to keep the House out was all actually Bondi?
All Wiles did was find a scapegoat.
She describes Trump’s “retribution tour” of political targets as a carefully negotiated 90-day deal. That’s laughable! It’s an attempt to frame his brutal political campaign as manageable, the kind of verbal acrobatics Trump’s Art of the Deal persona would approve of. Let’s shake hands while my fingers are crossed behind my back.
Wiles’s willingness to rationalize this conduct suggests stupidity or complicity.
The Vanity Fair profile exposes her naivety and lack of influence. Her decision to participate in a year-long interview may have been an attempt to raise her own profile, but anyone familiar with Trump’s world knows nothing good comes from trying to outshine him. It never ends well. Never.
In trying to normalize Trump, she instead highlights how abnormal everything is. Is Wiles the Trump soothsayer, the arbiter of honesty in the West Wing? Hardly. She’s just another cog.
She’s no voice of conscience or reason. She’s a Trump-patented, gold-plated political accessory, a bystander who takes the occasional hit but never intervenes to stop the damage.
The image of Wiles getting bonked by boom mikes captures this dynamic perfectly. It’s not the microphones hitting her. It’s King Donald’s metaphorical cudgel of wild and illicit ideas, comments, and Truth Social posts, pounding her into submission.
Trump’s presidency is defined by disinformation and disregard for norms. To imagine Wiles as the “voice of reason” within that madness of KIng Donald is dangerously misleading. She does not stand up to Trump. She facilitates his worst impulses.
As a woman in a position of influence, Wiles remains silent in the face of Trump’s relentless misogyny. Trump demeans women with insults, most recently “piggy,” “nasty,” and “stupid.” It’s offensive language, emblematic of a toxic culture. Yet Wiles metaphorically sits in that corner chair, silent as insults fly.
An Episcopalian who calls herself “Catholic lite,” Wiles is noted for not spewing expletives like her boss. But it would be easier to respect a swearing atheist than Wiles, who looks the other way as Trump seemingly carries on a love affair with Satan, as South Park has it.
Her silence reveals how normalized enabling Trump’s behavior has become. Wonder what she told Trump about his horrific Rob Reiner post? You guessed it. Nothing.
Finally, that everyone in Trump world, all the odd ducks, the conspirators and the zealots, have rushed to her defense only means she's one of them.
In the end, Susie Wiles getting repeatedly thumped on the head by boom mikes is more than a funny anecdote. The booming noise coming from Trump’s bully pulpit pounds everyone, beating them into submission and lunacy — especially Wiles.
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Trump's monstrous attack grew out of a viral disease — and we're all infected
I have Trump Derangement Syndrome and so does much of America and much of the world.
That’s not a confession of mental illness: it’s an indictment of a political era defined by cruelty, division, and the deliberate poisoning of democratic life.
“Trump Derangement Syndrome” is the phrase Donald Trump and his followers love to fling at anyone who dares to object to his behavior.
But the truth is simpler and far more damning: if millions of Americans and people across the globe are reacting with alarm, anger, and outrage, it’s because Trump has spent years earning that reaction.
Trump Derangement Syndrome isn’t a disease of the critics; it’s the predictable response to a leader who thrives on hate.
Just this week, after the brutal murder of filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife, Trump responded not with empathy, not with basic human decency, but with venom. He blamed Reiner’s death on what he called Trump Derangement Syndrome and implied that Reiner’s criticism of him somehow provoked the violence.
That’s a sitting president blaming the victim of murder for his own death because he was a political opponent.
That alone should disqualify any leader from public office — even Ted Cruz and Marjorie Taylor Greene were horrified. But it fits a long and escalating pattern: Trump has turned cruelty into a governing philosophy that he’s trying to spread all across America.
He goes after the press relentlessly, calling journalists enemies, liars, and traitors. He recently called a woman reporter “piggy” in a public exchange. That isn’t strength: it’s bullying from a man who can’t tolerate scrutiny and knows that undermining the free press is the fastest way to weaken a democracy that might hold him to account.
He attacks Democrats without restraint, calling them vermin, communists, and enemies of the nation. He attacks Republicans who dare to disagree with him, labeling them disloyal, corrupt, or deserving of punishment.
In Trump’s worldview, disagreement is betrayal, dissent is psychological pathology, and loyalty to him personally replaces loyalty to the Constitution.
And he’s made it clear that he believes the machinery of justice should serve his vendettas. Trump openly brags about using the Department of Justice to go after his political enemies. Not criminals: enemies. That’s the language of authoritarianism.
In a democracy, the law restrains power. In Trump’s tyrannical vision, the law is a weapon of power.
Trump’s hate isn’t abstract; it hits real communities with real consequences. Somali Americans were singled out by name, accused of stealing, of not belonging, of being a “problem” population. Immigration enforcement actions followed the rhetoric, and suddenly entire communities live under suspicion. This is collective punishment based on race, religion, and nationality. It’s racism dressed up as policy.
Trump continues to demean Black and brown countries, describing them as undesirable, dangerous, or worthless. He’s revived the same toxic worldview that says some people matter less because of where they come from or the color of their skin. That worldview has always been poison to democracy.
And then there’s the constant mockery of tragedy. After a deadly shooting at Brown University, Trump responded with a shrug and the words “things can happen.” For survivors and grieving families, that wasn’t leadership, it was indifference. It was the sound of a man so consumed by grievance and narcissism that he isn’t capable of speaking to the pain of others.
This is what creates Trump Derangement Syndrome. Not disagreements over tax policy or trade deals, but his daily assault on empathy, truth, and democratic norms.
When a leader models contempt, his followers learn it. When a leader dehumanizes others, society fractures. When a leader tells millions of people that their neighbors are enemies, eventually someone believes him enough to act.
History teaches us this lesson over and over. Democracies don’t usually collapse overnight, they erode. They rot from the inside when leaders convince people that hate is strength, that cruelty is honesty, and that only one man represents the nation and everyone else is suspect.
We’re seeing that erosion in real time today. Trust in institutions is collapsing. Political violence becomes easier to justify. The idea of a shared national identity dissolves into warring tribes.
That is not an accident. It’s the direct result of rhetoric Trump specifically intend to use to divide us against each other.
So, what do we do?
- First, we stop accepting the lie embedded in the phrase Trump Derangement Syndrome. Being alarmed by authoritarian behavior is not derangement, it’s citizenship and love of country. It’s moral clarity. It’s the immune response of a democratic society under attack.
- Second, we demand leaders who heal rather than inflame. Leaders who speak to our better angels instead of our darkest fears. Leaders who understand that democracy depends on restraint, humility, and respect for human dignity.
- Third, we show up. We vote. We organize. We defend the press, the rule of law, and the rights of those targeted by Trump’s hate. Silence is the fuel of authoritarianism; engagement is its enemy.
America doesn’t need or want a strongman. We need and crave a uniter, a president who understands that power is a responsibility, not a license to abuse.
If that means the world continues to suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, so be it. The real moral and political sickness is pretending this is normal.
Democracy survives only if we choose it. Now is the time to choose.
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An ugly truth has emerged in the breathless Epstein-Trump coverage
By Stephanie A. (Sam) Martin, Frank and Bethine Church Endowed Chair of Public Affairs, Boise State University.
The Jeffrey Epstein story has slipped in and out of the headlines for years, but in a very particular way. Most news articles ask a specific question — Which powerful men might be on “the list?”
Headlines focus on unidentified elites and who may be exposed or embarrassed, rather than on the people whose suffering made the case newsworthy in the first place: the girls and young women Epstein abused and trafficked.
Right now, the story is entering a new phase. A federal judge has authorized the Justice Department to unseal grand jury transcripts and other evidence from Epstein companion Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex trafficking case. A court in Florida has cleared the release of grand jury records from a federal investigation into Epstein himself, all under the new Epstein Files Transparency Act. Passed in November 2025, that law gives the Justice Department 30 days to release nearly all Epstein-related files. The deadline is Dec. 19.
Journalists and the public are watching to see what those documents will reveal beyond names we already know, and whether a long-rumored client list will finally materialize.
Alongside that, there has been a stream of survivor-centered reporting. Some outlets, including CNN, have regularly featured Epstein survivors and their attorneys reacting to new developments. Those segments are a reminder that another story is available, one that treats the women at the center of the case as sources of understanding, not just as evidence of someone else’s fall from grace.
These coexisting storylines reveal a deeper problem. After the #MeToo movement peaked, the public conversation about sexual violence and the news has clearly shifted. More survivors now speak publicly under their own names, and some outlets have adapted.
Yet long-standing conventions about what counts as news — conflict, scandal, elite people and dramatic turns in a case — still shape which aspects of sexual violence make it into headlines and which stay on the margins.
That tension raises a question: In a case where the law largely permits naming victims of sexual violence, and where some survivors are explicitly asking to be seen, why do journalistic practices so often withhold names or treat victims as secondary to the story?
- YouTube www.youtube.com
What the law allows
The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly held that government generally may not punish news organizations for publishing truthful information drawn from public records, even when that information is a rape victim’s name.
When states tried in the 1970s and 1980s to penalize outlets that identified victims using names that had already appeared in court documents or police reports, the court said those punishments violated the First Amendment.
Newsrooms responded by tightening restraint, not loosening it. Under pressure from feminist activists, victim advocates and their own staff, many organizations adopted policies against identifying victims of sexual assault, especially without consent.
Journalism ethics codes now urge reporters to “minimize harm,” be cautious about naming victims of sex crimes, and consider the risk of retraumatization and stigma.
In other words, U.S. law permits what newsroom ethics codes discourage.
Anonymity and #MeToo
For much of the 20th century, rape victims were routinely named in U.S. news coverage — a reflection of unequal gender norms. Victims’ reputations were treated as public property, while men accused of sexual violence were portrayed sympathetically and in detail.
By the 1970s and 1980s, feminist movements drew attention to underreporting and intense stigma. Activists built rape crisis centers and hotlines, documented how rarely sexual assault cases led to prosecution, and argued that if a woman feared seeing her name in the paper, she might never report at all.
Lawmakers passed “rape shield laws” that limited the use of a victim’s sexual history in court. Some states went further by barring publication of victims’ names.
In response to these laws, as well as feminist pressure, most newsrooms by the 1980s moved toward a default rule of not naming victims.
More recently, the #MeToo movement added a turn. Survivors in workplaces, politics and entertainment chose to speak publicly, often under their own names, about serial abuse and institutional cover-ups. Their accounts forced newsrooms to revisit assumptions about whose voices should lead a story.
Yet #MeToo also unfolded within existing journalistic conventions. Investigations tended to focus on high-profile men, spectacular falls from power and moments of reckoning, leaving less space for the quieter, ongoing realities of recovery, legal limbo and community response.
Unintended effects
There are good reasons for policies against naming victims.
Survivors may face harassment, employment discrimination or danger from abusers if they are identified. For minors, there are additional concerns about long-term digital evidence. In communities where sexual violence carries intense social stigma, anonymity can be a lifeline.
But research on media framing suggests that naming patterns matter. When coverage focuses on the alleged perpetrator as a complex individual – someone with a name, a career and a backstory – while referring to “a victim” or “accusers” in the singular, audiences are more likely to empathize with the suspect and scrutinize the victim’s behavior.
In high-profile cases like Epstein’s, that dynamic intensifies. The powerful men connected to him are named, dissected and speculated about. The survivors, unless they work hard to step forward, remain a blurred mass in the background. Anonymity meant to protect actually flattens their experience. Different stories of grooming, coercion and survival get reduced to a single faceless category.
What we think is ‘news’
That flattening is part of what makes the current moment in the Epstein story so revealing. The suspense is less about whether more victims will be heard and more about what being named will do to influential men. It becomes a story about whose names count as news.
Carefully anonymizing survivors while breathlessly chasing a client list of powerful men unintentionally sends a message about who matters most.
The Epstein scandal, in that framing, is not primarily about what was done to girls and young women over many years, but about who among the elite might be embarrassed, implicated or exposed.
A more survivor-centered journalistic approach would start from a different set of questions, including wondering which survivors have chosen to speak on the record and why, and how news outlets can protect anonymity, when it is asked for, but still convey a victim’s individuality.
Those questions are not only about ethics. They are about news judgment. They ask editors and reporters to consider whether the most important part of a story like Epstein’s is the next famous name to drop or the ongoing lives of the people whose abuse made that name newsworthy at all.
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MAGA's laughable new 'war' is an even bigger lie than DeSantis' family Bible
Remember the War on Christmas, when conservatives worked themselves into a lather over America-hating freaks wishing people “Happy Holidays,” putting on community celebrations called “Winterfest” instead of Christmas or parking a Festivus Pole next to a Manger Scene?
Or the Black Santa phenomenon, which so horrified Fox News’ Megyn Kelly she felt compelled to declare “Santa is white”?
Good times.
Right-wingers’ obsession with what they see as secular assaults on Jesus and the fiesta of capitalism with which we mark his birth are no longer confined to December.
The craziness has metastasized, blown past December into the rest of the year, expanding faster than plans for the White House ballroom.
It’s not just for Christmas anymore: According to MAGA politicians and their hangers-on, there’s now a full-blown War on Christians.
When Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier discovered a city-owned theater in Pensacola was hosting “A Drag Queen Christmas” on Dec. 23, he blew a gasket.
The show features stars from “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” one of the most popular television programs in America.
“A Drag Queen Christmas” is touring the United States, appearing in mainstream venues such as the Knoxville, Tenn., Civic Center and Atlanta Symphony Hall.
If you didn’t know better, you’d think a whole lot of regular Americans like drag shows.
Uthmeier is not among them. In a ranty and perhaps a tad prurient letter to the Pensacola City Council, the fellow who likes to call himself “Florida’s Top Cop” expressed outrage over Pensacola children taking pictures with Santa outside while “men dressed as garish women in in demonic costumes will be engaged in obscene behavior mere feet away.”
More equal
According to Uthmeier, “The show openly mocks one the most sacred holidays in the Christian faith” and must be canceled post-haste.
He goes on, noting, “A previous production featured a male performer boasting the stage name Trinity ‘The Tuck’ Taylor — a not-so subtle stab at THE fundamental doctrine of Christianity.”
The city of Pensacola has refused to shut down the show.
Perhaps Uthmeier has decided he no longer need concern himself with school shootings, environmental poisoning, and other minor inconveniences, and can devote all his energies to protecting the faith.
While he loudly threatens to throw the book at real or perceived incidents of antisemitism, really the only faith he’s most interested in protecting is his own.
Just ask the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights organization, suing Gov. Ron DeSantis over his dubious (and likely unconstitutional) attempt to designate them as “terrorists.”
Uthmeier’s chomping at the bit to defend that case.
I guess all religions are equal, but some religions are more equal than others.
Those of us attached to, say, facts, evidence, reality, that stuff, know there is no War on Christianity, any more than there is now, or ever was, a War on Christmas.
America has no Emperor Diocletian ordering the Roman army to take their axes to Christians or roast them on grates, no Boko Haram murdering Christian children, no Chinese secret police arresting pastors.
Especially in Florida.
Here we see increasing attacks on Muslims, assaults (both physical and statutory) on LGBTQ people, and out-and-proud racism: Florida leads the nation in hate groups.
Apostasy at SCOTUS?
Uthmeier is on a crusade (and I use that word advisedly).
He’s angry at the American Bar Association for investigating the St. Thomas University College of Law, a Roman Catholic insitution in Miami.
The ABA accredits law schools, making sure they’re in good financial shape, they don’t discriminate, they’re fair in hiring and retention, and they treat people equally.
Seems St. Thomas didn’t exactly ace the test.
Uthmeier could have helped STU clean up its act. Instead, he wrote one of his belligerent letters, accusing the ABA of being “woke” lefties practicing “religious discrimination” against Roman Catholics and said the organization cannot use its “accreditation monopoly to put law schools to the tortuous choice of accepting the ABA’s discriminatory, repugnant standards or suffering the fallout of withheld accreditation.”
This might be a good time to mention that Uthmeier is a product of Georgetown Law School, a Catholic institution duly accredited by the ABA.
Instead of, say, working to stop gun violence, domestic abuse, and insurance fraud (to name but a few of the state’s besetting issues), he signed on to a brief supporting a couple of Christian schools’ desire to pray over loudspeakers before their football games.
Courts pointed out the schools would be proselytizing using public spaces with publicly funded sound systems, which suggests government endorsement of a particular religion.
They said no.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal.
Uthmeier huffed, “The Constitution does not require state-sponsored hostility toward religion.”
Undaunted, he wrote a stiff note to Microsoft about the mega-corp.’s policies toward software discounts for faith-based groups.
Microsoft is, he said, “hostile” to Christian nonprofits.
The governor’s Bible
Among the nonprofits he’s referring to are so-called “Crisis Pregnancy Centers,” which claim to provide “medical care” for desperate young women who don’t want or can’t care for a child.
The young women at these places get a lot of guilt-inducing fundamentalist propaganda, but no information on how to get an abortion, even if they want one.
By the way, these CPCs are largely funded with taxpayer money.
Lately, the governor’s been going around boasting Florida has been named the No. 1 state for religious freedom.
This distinction was conferred by First Liberty Institute, a conservative legal outfit, the ones who went to the U.S. Supreme Court to save a pious Oregon pâtissière from having to make a gay wedding cake.
Hooray for the Sunshine State.
Nonetheless, DeSantis, Uthmeier, and D.C. MAGAs say the fight to save Christians from secular, indeed, Satanic, persecution remains urgent.
In 2024, Donald Trump campaigned on made-up stories of crazed heathens somehow banning the phrase “Merry Christmas” and, even weirder, destroying crosses: “They want to tear down crosses where they can, and cover them up with social justice flags.”
(Side note: Anybody know where I can buy a “social justice flag”?)
Trump added, “I’m a very proud Christian.”
DeSantis is also a “proud Christian,” so pious that for the swearing-in at his first inauguration, staff had to order a Bible from Amazon for $21.47.
He didn’t own one.
Florida Woman and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, yet another proud Christian, has established a Justice Department task force to combat “anti-Christian policies.”
Members of this task force include such noted followers of Jesus as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Perhaps the Spanish Inquisition will provide a useful model for them.
Who’s really being persecuted?
But let’s go back to Pensacola’s “Drag Queen Christmas.”
Uthmeier assumes that the very idea of a man rocking a smokey eye and glittering evening wear is so inherently sinful any exposure to such a thing imperils your immortal soul.
Why, what if a child picks up a stray, wind-borne sequin from Jewels Sparkles’ dress? Will the parents need to call an exorcist?
The attorney general and his fellow hysterics might be interested to learn some drag queens are Christian.
One, a fabulous red-headed singer sporting the splendid name “Flamy Grant,” topped the Christian music charts with the 2023 album, “Bible Belt Baby.”
Let’s smack Uthmeier, DeSantis, et al. (gently) with the reality stick:
There is no persecution of Christians in America.
The persecuted are those who belong to disfavored cultures — Afghan or Latino or Black — those who express their sexuality in a disfavored way or speak out disfavored opinions.
You can’t find anything in the New Testament where Jesus endorses cruelty or murder.
The Great Commandment (Matthew 22:39) says, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
The foreigner, the exile, the refugee should be welcomed to your country (Matthew 5:43, Hebrews 13:1, Romans 13.10).
There’s no mention of rounding them up, beating them, and sending them off to torture prisons or countries where they’re likely to be killed.
Jesus did not endorse bombing people clinging to a capsized boat.
Jesus didn’t say to torment people over their sexuality or their fashion sense.
Sure, Deuteronomy 22:5 says women shouldn’t dress as men (better lose those pantsuits, Bondi!) and men shouldn’t dress as women, but Deuteronomy also says if a wife tries to save her husband from an attacker by grabbing the guy’s genitals, she must have her hand cut off (25:11-12); you can’t eat pork, shrimp, or lobster; and if you commit adultery, you will be stoned to death.
I doubt the president and his Secretary of Defense would want to embrace that one.
The point is, what Uthmeier, Bondi, Hegseth, Kennedy, Trump, DeSantis, and their ilk espouse is performative hatred, not Christianity.
Perhaps we should all pray for them.
- Diane Roberts is an eighth-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee, which probably explains her unhealthy fascination with Florida politics. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo.
- Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
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These brave Republicans stood up to Trump — and showed how to beat him
Especially in these dark times, it’s important to salute courageous individuals who stand up to Trump’s tyranny.
My latest Joseph Welch Award (named after the courageous attorney who stood up to Joseph McCarthy in the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings) goes to the 21 Indiana Senate Republicans who stood up to Trump last Thursday.
Indiana’s GOP-controlled state Senate rejected 31-19 the map that would have gerrymandered two more safe red seats. The vote may have imperiled the Republican Party’s chances of holding control of Congress next November, but it strengthened American democracy.
The failed vote was the culmination of a no-holds-barred, four-month pressure campaign from Trump and his White House on recalcitrant Indiana Republicans. The pressure included private meetings and public shaming from Trump, along with Trump’s threats to primary them next time they’re up for election. (“They … should DO THEIR JOB, AND DO IT NOW!” Trump posted. “If not, let’s get them out of office.”)
The pressure also included multiple visits to the Hoosier State from JD Vance, whip calls from Speaker Mike Johnson, and veiled threats from Washington to withhold federal funds from the state. Republican legislators were also subjected to pipe bomb threats, unsolicited pizza deliveries to their home addresses, and swatting of their homes.
Turning Point Action, the organization founded by Charlie Kirk, pledged to spend tens of millions of dollars to primary any Republican who voted against the redistricting map.
Chris LaCivita, Trump’s 2024 campaign manager and adviser to Fair Maps Indiana, a dark-money group that blitzed the state with ads in recent weeks, also threatened retribution:
“If you don’t defend a political movement from those that stand in the way — then it’s not a movement at all — a handful of politicians in Indiana will now know what standing in the way really means.”
Heritage Action, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation, made explicit in an X post that Indiana would risk all its federal funding if the Indiana Senate didn’t vote for the new map:
“Roads will not be paved. Guard bases will close. Major projects will stop. These are the stakes and every NO vote will be to blame.”
Yet — a majority of Indiana’s Senate Republicans voted against the map. How to explain this?
Mitch Daniels, who was governor of Indiana from 2005 to 2013, blamed Trump’s bullying tactics:
“Washington-based enforcers demand maximum, sacrificial loyalty or else. In this case, each of those so threatened has a constituency of friends and supporters. It’s an odd way to build a winning party.”
Daniels also noted that the in-your-face partisanship of Trump’s effort was “not likely to improve the party’s standing with independents, or to inspire its own adherents to turn out next year.”
But there was something else that gave Indiana Republicans the courage to reject Trump’s map. This factor is profoundly important to the future of America. Let me explain.
American politics today is divided between two groups — fanatics who view politics as a form of warfare, and institutionalists who view politics as a means of implementing democracy.
To fanatics, winning is everything. To institutionalists, democracy is everything.
This divide is becoming more significant than the old political divides — conservative versus liberal, right versus left, or Republican versus Democrat. Both warfare fanatics and institutionalists can be found among Democrats, as well as Trump Republicans.
Trump and the people around him are extreme fanatics. To them, America is already engaged in a civil war. They view those who oppose them, including many who call themselves Republicans, as their sworn enemies — against whom scorched-earth tactics are entirely justified.
“We have a huge problem,” said Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, who simulcasted his War Room show live from a suburban Indianapolis hotel just before the vote. “We’ve got a net five to 10 seats [in the House of Representatives]. If we don’t get a net 10 pickup in the redistricting wars, it’s going to be enormously hard, if not impossible, to hold the House.”
But institutionalists don’t view politics as a form of warfare. They see it as a form of service — part of a civic tradition that’s older and more honorable than the win-at-any-cost fanaticism we’re now seeing.
Indiana is a deep-red state, to be sure. But it also has a strong tradition of political responsibility and civic integrity. And last Thursday, Indiana’s civic tradition won out.
Indiana state senator Spencer Deery, a Republican who opposed the redrawn map, put it clearly:
“The power to draw election maps is a sacred responsibility directly tied to the integrity of our elections and the people’s faith in our constitutional system.”
State senator Greg Goode, another Republican, contrasted that civic tradition with the warfare fanaticism threatening it. In his floor speech before voting against the gerrymandered map, Goode said:
“The forces that define [the] vitriolic political affairs in places outside of Indiana have been gradually and now very blatantly infiltrat[ing] the political affairs in Indiana. Misinformation. Cruel social media posts, over-the-top pressure from within the state house and outside, threats of primaries, threats of violence, acts of violence. Friends, we’re better than this.”
When Goode said “we’re better than this,” he was referring to Indiana’s civic tradition.
Indiana is not alone. A similar civic tradition can be found all over America. It exists in direct contrast to Trump and his warfare fanaticism. I believe America’s civic tradition will prove more powerful than fanatic political warfare.
That Indiana’s Republican senators had the courage last Thursday to stand up to the bully-in-chief is hugely encouraging for the nation. They deserve the Joseph Welch Award.
- 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/.
- Robert Reich's 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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America was mourning — and our insanely jealous leader's response was disgusting
More incomprehensible tragedy visited the United States of America when we learned that Hollywood legend Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were found dead in their Los Angeles home Sunday.
The couple’s son, Nick Reiner, 32, was arrested in connection with the deaths. He has been charged with murder.
So now we hold on tight and try to process yet more senseless pain and hurt in a world that is spinning too damn quickly, even if it has always been well out of our control.
The weekend brought horrible shootings at Brown University and on a lazy beach in Australia. Two Iowa National Guard soldiers and a civilian contractor were killed by a gunman in Syria. There will be more violent deaths and senseless suffering by the time I am done writing this piece, because there is little we can do when the most dangerous form of life on earth, men, catastrophically malfunction.
It is being reported that Nick Reiner brutally stabbed his parents to death.
It would take me 50,000 words to properly thank Rob Reiner for the joy he brought me through his multi-faceted work. He was a genius, a giant of the arts, and a constant in my life starting with his role as “Meathead” in the incomparable sitcom All in the Family in the 1970s — for my money the most brilliant show that has ever been, or will be.
Reiner was also a nonstop humanitarian, and a scathing critic of one of the most evil men the world has ever known, Donald J. Trump.
Because how could any decent and normal functioning person not be?
I didn’t always agree completely with Reiner’s politics, any more than I completely agree with anybody, but respected him enormously for using his platform to speak out against the grotesque Trump, and wish more people of wealth and privilege would do the same.
It makes me furious that Hollywood isn’t using its enormous power to highlight on the millions of screens both large and small what we are being asked to deal with right now: violent attacks on our vote; the battering of our government; innocent human beings being rounded up by masked marauders; hundreds of millions of guns everywhere; life-saving vaccines being eliminated; troops in our streets; books being burned; our air and water being intentionally poisoned; women losing more and more of their rights …
Like you, Reiner saw and felt this danger every day, as this ghastly White House tried to transform America into their inhumane and revolting image. Like you, Reiner knew that if they they were to succeed, it would all be over.
They mean to end us, and one only needs read the history they are trying to incinerate to know this …
THESE are the stakes.
For all his enormous talent in the arts, it is Reiner’s activism that I will remember most of all.
He could have sat back and hidden behind his fame, counting his money, but instead chose to use his voice to sound the warnings. He was passionate, and unyielding at a time we’ve never needed passionate, unyielding people more.
Rob Reiner was a man who knew how to make us laugh, because he knew all too well, there was just too damn much hurt in the world to make us cry — hurt that ultimately led to his terrible, terrible demise.
So of course it took no time at all for every light to shine on just how right Reiner was about the gruesome state of things, when we heard from everything that is wrong.
This was the actual public comment offered by the grotesque Trump in the wake of the Reiners’ deaths, because there has never been one, single terrible thing on earth that this lunatic isn’t incapable of making even worse:
He wrote these terrible things because he is incapable of grace, and functions from inside the darkness, lashing out at everything he can’t see or understand. He’s a broken, inadequate little man who lives in a constant state of jealousy, as he lowers the bar of humanity into the dirt, so that even he can occasionally clear it.
By Monday afternoon, Trump had descended even further, calling Reiner, “deranged” and “bad for our country.” The joyless man who has spent his miserable life grabbing things for himself at the expense of our country, was calling the man who spent his incredible life spreading joy to the world, “bad for our country.”
And while Trump was busy dealing his poison, the first-class woman, and career public servant we could have (SHOULD HAVE) had as our president, reminded us all that America will only be a truly good and decent country, when we finally start listening to our women:
While I cannot fathom how awful all this must be for the Reiners’ family and friends as yet another one of America’s broken sons has brought their unspeakable hell to wreck the lives of others, it surprises me little that its worst son of all is doing what he can to make things even worse.
- D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.
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This unforgivably hateful attack shows the true emptiness in Trump's soul
We know we shouldn’t be shocked by our president’s consistently disgusting behavior, and yet still we are.
Every. Single. Time.
This time, it surrounded the tragic murders of the great and beloved filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner on Sunday.
No one seemed to know what was happening early Sunday afternoon, only that two people at the Reiners’ home in Brentwood were dead. Within hours, it would be confirmed that it was indeed the Reiners who were deceased, and soon the speculation fell on it resulting from a double homicide.
The bodies were not yet cold when the Grim Presidential Reaper himself felt compelled to weigh in early Monday morning:
“A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”
There is just so much to unpack here, not least being the pointless and gloriously passive-aggressive kicker, “May Rob and Michele rest in peace!” But let’s acknowledge that simply shutting up so as not to intrude on a family’s grief never seems to be an option for him. Neither is allowing someone who failed to properly kiss his a-- in life to die in peace.
A lifelong vocal liberal Democrat, Rob Reiner made little secret of his disdain for Trump and all he stands for, so any semblance of class or decorum from this dude was off the table. It’s also an established fact that his wrenching insecurity won’t permit any perceived slight, real or imagined, from being immediately addressed.
With the Reiners’ son Nick having been arrested and booked on suspicion of murdering his parents, it appears that whatever issue Rob Reiner had with Trump played no role in his death. But that is naturally irrelevant to a man who has no filter and — equally to the point — no decency.
What a hopelessly appalling, wildly inappropriate, and unforgivably hateful thing to post mere hours after any person’s death, much less a figure who was so universally adored. It’s flat-out astonishing, not only for its sickening insensitivity but also the portrait of vile, malignant narcissism it paints.
But let’s back up for a moment, because the real problem isn’t with the emotional toddler who inhabits the Oval Office.
It‘s with us.
It surrounds our unreasonable expectation that Trump will at this point ever evoke a measure of empathy akin to that displayed by an actual human being. If the years have taught us anything, it’s that Trump is tragically incapable of doing so. This is meant quite literally. He completely lacks the compassion gene in much the same way he is powerless to feel shame for anything he says or does.
It was (reputedly) Albert Einstein who defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” The madness, thus, resides within ourselves.
Let’s go back into the not-so-deep past, to examine some of the recent instances in which Trump has demonstrated a driving need to sink to the occasion.
October 2017: Trump placed a call to the widow of U.S. Army Sergeant La David Johnson, a fallen soldier who died in battle in Niger. Donning his cloak of sympathy, Trump assured her that her husband “knew what he signed up for.”
It wasn’t just that it was a cold and heartless thing to say: it was totally unnecessary. All he needed to tell her was, “He was a great man, and I feel your pain,” even if he didn’t actually feel it, since he feels nothing. But even this was beyond his capacity.
September 2018: Trump disputed the official death toll from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, claiming the numbers were wildly inflated to make him look bad. Because everything, even destructive storms, are about him.
September 2019: Trump responded to a question about the death of journalist and author Cokie Roberts by responding, “I never met her” (translation: they met) and noting that “she never treated me nicely — but I would like to wish her family well.” Getting in the dig before awkwardly working to soften it with an insincere tagline is the Trump brand, merging lies and veiled hostility in a single superficial package.
September 2025: Trump gave a mind-numbingly heartless response when asked by a reporter about the death of his friend Charlie Kirk and how he was holding up less than two days after his murder.
“I think very good,” the president said energetically, adding a sprightly, “And by the way, right there, you see all the trucks? They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House … and it’s gonna be a beauty. It’ll be an absolutely magnificent structure.”
Yes, regarding that last one, it was clear Trump had no intention of permitting sorrow to intrude on his joy at the creation of a golden monstrosity in his name. People and feelings take a back seat to bucks and buildings.
The bottom line is that this person isn’t like you and me. For him, emotions matter only in terms of how he can personally benefit from their use, taking his sensitivity cues from fellow felons.
In that sense, for Trump, Rob Reiner’s life was worthless and his death meaningless, because in his world, true mourning is for suckers.
- Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.
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Trump's inconceivable botch exposes a truly frozen heart
At the White House Congressional Christmas Ball last week, Donald Trump appeared to forget he was Barron Trump’s father. Pointing to the first lady, Melania Trump, the President mused, “She's got a wonderful boy and she's very proud of her boy.”
It was an unintentionally telling moment from a man whose instinct toward children seems to extend little beyond neglect and nonplussedness.
A few nights before his White House slip, in a campaign-style rally in Pennsylvania meant to soothe worries about affordability, Trump offered what might be the holiday season’s strangest piece of shopping advice: maybe children should be happy with two or three dolls instead of 37, and only one or two pencils, instead of dozens.
It wasn’t the first time Trump showed his weird obsession with dolls and pencils. The supplicant crowd cheered. Why?
The repeat of rationing showed Trump to be as hollow as a chocolate Santa. If he can joke about skimping on pencils and dolls while claiming to care about children’s futures, imagine how little room he has in his two-size-too-small Grinch heart?
But even the plucky Grinch, he is not. Trump is a miserly, cold-hearted, selfish old man, more akin to Ebenezer Scrooge.
Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol as a moral warning: ignore children’s needs, and society withers. Trump is like the withered Scrooge. During the holidays, he’s more likely to don a pointy nose and top hat than a white beard and stocking cap.
‘If he be like to die… decrease the surplus population’
Scrooge said it, with a sneer. Trump has governed it, with a shrug.
Start with the shivering tale that he once told his own brother his developmentally disabled child should be allowed to die.
For Trump, if you sit in a wheelchair, are under gender-affirming care, or are a child from a “sh–hole country,” you belong not to man, but to Scrooge’s slums.
It’s everywhere in Trump’s policies.
LGBTQ+ teen suicide-prevention resources were removed from federal guidance. Childhood vaccine programs were targeted for elimination. Budgets for early education, child abuse prevention, foster-care support, and low-income child care were slashed or left to rot.
None of it was accidental. None of it was benign. It was the quiet arithmetic of a man convinced vulnerable kids are just line items, dragging down the bottom line.
‘Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?’
Trump doesn’t need prisons and workhouses. He had ICE.
Under Trump, migrant children are treated like problems to be managed, not children fleeing terror or poverty. The U.S. has reached record-high youth detention numbers. ICE officers menace schools, traumatizing kids in front of teachers and peers — because nothing says “ba-humbug” like traumatizing eight-year-olds.
The images that have ricocheted around the world — toddlers in chain-link pens, infants in court without parents — were not errors. They were the intended byproduct of a system engineered to be cruel enough to scare other families away.
Scrooge threatened the poor with workhouses. Trump built his modern version, and filled it with children.
‘Beware this boy — Ignorance’
Dickens personified Ignorance and Want as ghosts. In Trump’s Washington, they are budget priorities.
From day one, Trump treated children’s education like miserly Scrooge’s money ledger.
Deep cuts to low-income school programs? Check. Hollowing out the Department of Education’s ability to distribute Title I funds? Check. Using the “Big Beautiful Bill” to gut after-school programs, safety-net health services, and supports for abused or neglected kids? Triple check.
If kids stay desperate, they stay invisible. And invisible kids don’t trouble the grown-ups in the gold-plated Oval Office or a White House Ballroom for white adults only.
This Scrooge won’t change
Trump is a far lesser man than Scrooge, because at least Scrooge realized he was wrong.
Trump has spent years proving he doesn’t see a problem. His bizarre rationing examples about dolls and pencils, offered in lieu of genuine empathy or solutions, are perfect metaphors for a presidency that tells parents to tighten their belts while telling children they don’t count.
Trump’s policies toward kids — immigrant kids, disabled kids, LGBTQ+ kids, poor kids, kids with no lobbyists, no donors, no microphones — paint a portrait of a leader whose concern for the next generation ends at the edge of his own self-interest.
If Dickens wrote Trump into A Christmas Carol, the ghosts would have gone to the next house. They’d know better than to waste time trying to thaw a cold, measly heart that keeps choosing ICE.
- John Casey was most recently Senior Editor, The Advocate, and is a freelance opinion and feature story writer. Previously, he was a Capitol Hill press secretary, and spent 25 years in media and public relations in NYC. He is the co-author of LOVE: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality (Rizzoli, 2025), named by Oprah in her "Best 25 of 2025.”
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