Opinion
These are the monsters who feed Trump, the beast of bigotry
There should be absolutely, positively no confusion about what happened this week. When Donald Trump shared a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, he didn’t “make a mistake,” "instigate controversy,” or “post something offensive.”
He reached for one of the oldest, ugliest, and most dangerous racist tropes in American history. The dehumanization of Black people as animals.
And not just animals: apes. It was vulgar, vile, disgusting and unacceptable. It was seditious.
That trope Trump menacingly shared has justified enslavement, lynching, segregation, and state violence for centuries. It is not accidental. It is not humorous — at all. It is violent in its intent and impact.
When Trump was asked if he would apologize to the Obamas, he said: “No. I didn’t make a mistake.”
He’s right. It wasn’t a mistake. It’s embedded in his being. Racism boils in Trump’s blood. It festers on his lily white skin. It marinates through his demented mind. He voice croaks white power. Racism slithers out of his fingers.
This is the same man who took out full-page ads calling for the execution of the Central Park Five, teens who were later exonerated. The same man who led the racist birther conspiracy against the first Black president.
The same man who spoke of “very fine people on both sides” after white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, chanting “Jews will not replace us.” The same man who broke bread at Mar-a-Lago with Nick Fuentes, an open white nationalist.
The pattern is not subtle. It is intentional. The escalation is not surprising. And with Trump, as in everything else, it will be compounded. And it needs to stop.
Because it cannot ever be tolerated..
What is intolerable, and what must now be confronted, is the silence and complicity of those who continue to support him. The monsters who feed the beast of bigotry.
Racism does not operate in a silo. It requires enablers. It requires money. It requires whitewashing reputations. And today, some of the most powerful corporations, CEOs, and cultural figures in America are providing exactly that. They are complicit in a crime that threatens the moral fabric of our society.
Enough is enough. And these monsters need to be stopped.
If you kneel before power while that power spreads racism, you are not neutral. You are complicit.
When CEOs and billionaires line up at the White House bearing gifts, when they bankroll inaugurations, when they fund vanity projects like a $300 million White House ballroom, they are not just currying favor. They are endorsing the behavior that comes with that power. And when that power openly traffics in racist dehumanization, their money becomes an accomplice. It funds torture. It funds danger. It funds death.
Here’s a list of businesses that support Trump, courtesy of Newsweek. And, here’s how you help some of them spread racism through their association with the Beast of Bigotry:
- Buy an Apple product while Tim Cook offers his loyalty? You are supporting an accomplice to racism.
- Cheer the Patriots in the Super Bowl while Robert Kraft aligns himself, and wines and dines with Trump? You are supporting an accomplice to racism.
- Drive a Tesla while Elon Musk amplifies and normalizes Trumpism? You are supporting an accomplice to racism.
- Where does your monthly subscription to Amazon Prime go? It lines the pockets of Jeff Bezos who is an unabashed accomplice to racism.
- Do business tied to Steve Wynn? You are supporting an accomplice to racism.
- Purchase Johnson & Johnson products, whose heir Woody Johnson endorses Trump with vigor? You are supporting an accomplice to racism.
And the list doesn’t stop with individuals.
Major corporations — tech giants, defense contractors, energy conglomerates, financial firms — have poured money into Trump’s 2025 inauguration and into constructing a lavish White House ballroom. Amazon. Google. Meta. Microsoft. Apple. Palantir. Nvidia. Coinbase. Lockheed Martin. Boeing. Chevron. Comcast. And many others across tech, crypto, defense, energy, and manufacturing.
This is not passive participation. This is active sponsorship of racism. Trump is the metaphorical David Duke of American racism in 2026. These names and companies are giving money to the modern day iteration of the Ku Klux Klan, led by Grand Wizard Trump.
When corporations fund a bigot, they legitimize him. When they remain silent in the face of overt racism, they send a message louder than the crackling of burning crosses.
To them, profits matter more than the sanctity of lives. Access matters more than tolerance. Comfort matters more than harassment. We need to remove the white hoods from these white men who remain silent and supplicant in the face of tyranny and bigotry.
Not one of these donors has condemned the racist attack on the Obamas. Not one has drawn a line. Not one has said, this is unacceptable. Not one. Is that acceptable to you?
Silence, in this moment, is consent for the barbaric Neo-Nazi who spews Black hate with the press of a button.
Racism in America does not survive on hatred alone. It survives because powerful people decide it is tolerable, or at least profitable. Because they believe the outrage will pass. Because they assume consumers will keep buying, cheering, streaming, and investing.
They are wrong. Or they should be.
Boycott them.
Picket them.
Call them out by name.
Send letters.
Withdraw your money, your attention, your clicks, your brand loyalty.
Make racism expensive again. Take a stand. Collectively. Together. No one should be silent any longer. What was done to the Obamas should be a wake-up call. This is what hatred looks like when it feels invincible.
Trump is responsible for his racism. But everyone who props him up, funds him, normalizes him, profits alongside him, and shares responsibility for the damage he causes.
Racism has accomplices. And America needs to start treating them like the klansmen criminals that they are.
- John Casey was most recently Senior Editor, The Advocate, and is a freelance opinion and feature story writer. Previously, he was a Capitol Hill press secretary, and spent 25 years in media and public relations in NYC. He is the co-author of LOVE: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality (Rizzoli, 2025), named by Oprah in her "Best 25 of 2025.”
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Trump will never allow a MAGA defeat - and the implications are unthinkable
Last Aug. 18, Donald Trump sat across from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office and posed a “question” that seemed, at the time, like nothing more than Trump being Trump.
“So you say during the war, you can’t have elections. So let me just say three and a half years from now. So you mean, if we happen to be in a war with somebody — no more elections?”
Zelensky laughed nervously. Some in the media laughed too.
I cited that exchange in an Oct. 26 post titled “Why the 2026 Elections May Not Happen.” My argument: Trump simply cannot withstand Democrats regaining control of the House in the midterm elections — neither politically nor psychologically.
It follows that Trump would indeed do everything in his power to cancel or postpone elections for the first time in U.S. history, rather than succumb to defeat. My prediction wasn’t that he’d succeed, but that he’d at least try if backed against the wall.
Twice in the past week, evidence has emerged that Trump’s efforts to thwart democracy this Nov. 3 have evolved to the point of going public.
Last week, FBI agents raided the Fulton County elections office in Georgia, seizing boxes of 2020 voting records. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was present.
Gabbard is a dangerous individual, her cult wiring too easily obscured by others in the crackpot collective surrounding Trump. The DNI has no role whatsoever in the administration of elections.
The revival of seditious lies from the 2020 election — now central to Gabbard's Trump-imposed mission — deserves far more than the fleeting one-news-cycle coverage it received.
And here’s the latest: Trump has personally and publicly validated that warning. The New York Times reported:
During an extended monologue about immigration on a podcast released on Monday by Dan Bongino, his former deputy F.B.I. director, Mr. Trump called for Republican officials to “take over” voting procedures in 15 states, though he did not name them. “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” he said. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
Nationalize the voting.
Those three words have never been spoken by an American president until now. If that strikes you as nothing more than noise, you’ve lost perspective.
It does not require investigative skill to place this in context. To those who “both sides” gerrymandering — a bipartisan tradition — note that Trump’s motivations have been stated publicly, brazenly and unapologetically.
At least both political parties in the past have pretended to connect gerrymandering to a legal purpose. That Trump feels no such need speaks volumes about his confidence in having subjugated “his” U.S. Supreme Court justices.
Meanwhile, Trump’s Justice Department has sued 24 states demanding their voter rolls — lawsuits that federal judges in Oregon and California rejected as unauthorized overreach. When Minnesota refused to comply, Attorney General Pam Bondi tried outright blackmail: hand over voter data or we won’t withdraw ICE agents from Minneapolis.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon called it “an outrageous attempt to coerce” the state into violating federal privacy law. So far, he has stared down the bully.
The Times described Trump's Monday’s comments as “an aggressive rhetorical step that was likely to raise new worries about his administration’s efforts to involve itself in election matters.” That understatement bound to journalistic convention was most unhelpful in this case.
When I warned about this last October, here’s how I concluded the piece:
“It’s a critical first step to discard any notion that canceled or postponed elections cannot happen here. We’re already traveling down a dark and perilous authoritarian road with Donald Trump; this would barely represent a speed bump. We’d best not take the midterms for granted.”
Consider it warned again.
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This ridiculous plot will get Trump laughed out of court — but Fox News is salivating
Despite repeated judicial rulings rejecting Trump’s 2020 election claims, he persists. Proving that his ego burned through his prefrontal cortex and seared his last shard of reasoning capacity, after his attempt to extort Minnesota voter rolls failed, Trump’s FBI raided an election center in Georgia and seized them directly. Both acts were preludes to a dangerous fantasy, one that ends in ‘taking over’ national elections.
The illegality is glaring. Not only are U.S. taxpayers funding his well choreographed partisan theater, violating the Hatch Act, Trump is misappropriating intelligence resources by expending national security capital on political exploits. Instead of meeting escalating cyber, espionage and infiltration threats from China and Russia, Trump is spending national security resources to keep himself in power.
After snatching all Fulton County’s voter data, there’s little doubt that Trump lackeys will “find” the “missing” 11,780 votes he urged Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “look for.” Even after Raffensperger affirmed that the 2020 election was the most secure in Georgia’s history, Trump will manufacture outcome-changing evidence, “find” stolen votes, and demand that democratic poll workers be prosecuted.
Preparing allegations
The FBI procured a court order allowing them to copy Fulton County’s election records, but officials instead took physical custody of originals, including in-person, absentee, and provisional ballots, along with voter rolls. Filling a convoy of trucks, they seized ballots, tabulator tapes, digital data and voter rolls, leaving no reliable chain of custody for those materials.
In normal criminal cases, every officer who handles a physical piece of evidence signs a “chain of custody“ affidavit affirming that the item was locked, kept secure and otherwise untouched. But Trump’s FBI created no chain of custody for Georgia’s seized materials; his lawyers have been caught lying so many times such affidavits would be suspect in any event.
The upshot is that Fulton County Democrats will be unable to “disprove” the election crimes Trump’s FBI is manufacturing against them. Even though the story won’t hold up in court, it will dominate Fox News and Sinclair media-owned headlines, and the 39 percent of the country that believes Trump’s manufactured claims will become the scaffolding that supports his federal takeover.
Aspiring authoritarians
Trump has been trying to discredit U.S. elections, along with the rule of law, ever since he became financially indebted to Russia in the 1990s. Because he has relied on habitual deception for so long, he seems to toggle back and forth between lying and believing his own propaganda.
Hannah Arendt observed that, “If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer … And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind … And with such a people you can then do what you please.”
Hitler understood this too well. Before transitioning to an overt campaign of terror, Nazi power expanded through lies, propaganda, and censorship orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.
Current authoritarians do the same. Putin in Russia and Orban in Hungary butcher the truth to such an extent that the media has no credibility; everything they report is suspect. In result, dictators are free to execute rivals, silence journalists and hold sham elections as Trump aspires to do.
An obvious plan
Discussing his blunders in Minnesota, Trump recently said on Dan Bongino’s show that he had “won Minnesota three times,” but “got no credit for it. I won that state three times, but it’s a rigged state. Really rigged badly.” Minnesota hasn’t voted for a Republican president since 1972.
Continuing the delusion, Trump also expressed his hope that Republicans would “take over” national elections, saying,“We should take over the voting in at least 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
The illegality, once again, is glaring. Article I, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution vests election powers with the states, who prescribe the “Times, Places and Manner” of holding federal elections. If Trump had any grasp of U.S. history or the Constitution, he’d know the federal government has no legal authority to “take over” state-run election systems.
Trump’s overreach is galling. Federal courts have consistently ruled that Presidents have no constitutional role in administering elections. Even if there were statutory support for his takeover fantasy, Trump’s call for “Republicans” to nationalize elections ignores the separation of powers by, once again, disregarding the legislative role of Congress.
Time for arrests
Since Trump Republicans are demonstrating more affinity for power than the Constitution and their oaths to protect it, Democrats are on their own. They need to hit Trump hard and pre-emptively, before he sends tanks for their voter rolls.
It’s time for Attorneys General in all 23 Democratic-controlled states to file a class action or multistate action to prohibit Trump, his DOJ and the FBI from seizing confidential voter materials from any county election offices. Trump’s stated desire to take over federal elections establishes standing for states to sue for injunctive relief. State prosecutors should also start bringing state criminal charges against every Trump official who breaks state law, from murder to a conspiracy to interfere with elections and every state felony in between.
With his admitted intention to stop fair elections, Trump has shown his cards. Whether he serves Putin, dementia, or greed, he is an enemy to America and legal accountability is no longer optional. It’s the only way our democracy will survive.
- Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
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Trump's grim new threat has an Achilles' heel
Wisconsin was almost certainly on President Donald Trump’s mind when he said this week, “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
Our swing state was Ground Zero for the fake electors plot to overturn the results of the 2020 election after Trump narrowly lost here. Wisconsin U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson’s office was involved in the effort to pass off fraudulent Electoral College ballots cast by state Republicans for Trump. Our state Legislature hosted countless hearings spotlighting election deniers and wasted $2.5 million in taxpayer dollars on a fruitless “investigation” of the 2020 presidential results, led by disgraced former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who threatened to arrest the mayors of Madison and Green Bay.
So how worried should we be about Trump’s election takeover threats?
“I wouldn’t be overly concerned that the president could get anything done that’s directly contrary to the Constitution,” says John Vaudreuil, a former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin and a member of the nonpartisan group Keep Our Republic, which works to promote trust in elections.
Not only does Article I of the U.S. Constitution expressly delegate elections administration to the states, Wisconsin has one of the most decentralized elections systems in the country, with about 1,800 local clerks running elections in counties, municipalities and townships throughout the state.
“And they are Republicans, they are Democrats, they are independent,” Vaudreuil says. “Most fundamentally, they’re our neighbors, they’re our friends.”
Trump’s threats of a federal takeover would be both legally and practically hard to pull off in Wisconsin.
But there is still reason to worry. Sowing distrust in elections takes a toll on clerks and poll workers, who have become less willing to put up with the threats and hostility generated by Trump’s attacks. Vaudreuil urges people to support their local elections officials and poll workers and spread the word that the work they do is important and that elections are secure.
Then there’s the danger that Trump could use his own false claims about election fraud to send federal immigration agents to the polls on the pretext that it’s necessary to address the nonexistent problem of noncitizen voting.
Doug Poland, director of litigation at the voting rights focused firm Law Forward, has been involved in election-related litigation in Wisconsin for years, including a lawsuit to block the Trump administration from forcing the state to turn over sensitive voter information.
Poland sees Trump’s threats to “nationalize” elections as part of a pivot from Republican efforts to make in-person voting harder — on the dubious theory that there’s a huge problem with voter impersonation at the polls — to a new focus on stopping absentee voting after many people began using mail-in ballots during the pandemic. But really, it’s all about trying to make sure fewer people vote.
Under former Republican Gov. Scott Walker, Wisconsin passed a strict voter ID law, which one Republican former staffer testified made Republican legislators “giddy” as they discussed how it would make it more difficult for students and people of color to vote.
Like Vaudreuil, Poland sees the current threat from the Trump administration not as an actual takeover of election administration by the federal government, but as an escalation of intimidation tactics.
“Noncitizens generally don’t vote. So it’s a lie,” Poland says. “But it’s, of course, the lie that they’re going to use as a premise to send, whether it’s ICE or whomever it may be, to polling places, probably in locations with Black and brown populations, and that is purely for the purpose of intimidation. And at the same time, they’re pushing back very hard on absentee voting by mail.”
If the Trump administration is preparing to send armed federal agents to the polls to intimidate voters, absentee voting will be more important than ever in the upcoming elections.
Yet, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson recently told constituents that while he doesn’t think the federal government should take over elections administration, “I think we need to tighten up the requirements for absentee voting. I’m opposed to mail in register or mail in balloting.”
And as Erik Gunn reports, Wisconsin U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil’s Make Elections Great Again Act would restrict absentee voting, along with adding new layers of citizen verification steps while threatening to defund elections administrators who fail to comply with the bill’s onerous requirements.
“They’re going to do everything they can to try to make it harder to vote absentee by mail, to make it harder to vote absentee in person,” Poland says, adding, “They’re going to try to do it so they can put ICE agents around polling places and just try to intimidate people, to keep them away.”
So what can be done?
Voter intimidation is a crime, and specific instances can be addressed through lawsuits, Poland says. Still, he acknowledges (and Law Forward has argued in court) that once someone is deprived of the right to cast a ballot, there’s no remedy that can adequately compensate for that loss. That’s why it was so appalling when the city of Madison asserted that absentee voting is a “privilege” in response to a lawsuit brought by Poland’s organization over 200 lost ballots in the 2024 election.
Of course, in addition to worries about possible violations of individuals’ right to vote, there’s the fear that Trump could manage to subvert elections through heavy-handed tactics like the recent FBI raid to seize 2020 ballots from Fulton County. Both Vaudreuil and Poland think judges would step in to prevent such a seizure in the middle of an election, before the ballots were counted.
Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, absentee voting remains legal and many municipalities are using secure ballot drop boxes. We need to keep on making use of our right (not our privilege) to vote, using all the tools we have in place.
As for the intimidating effect of armed ICE agents at polling places, local officials and perhaps local law enforcement could have a role in protecting the polls and reassuring voters it’s safe to cast their ballots. Neighbors who have been organizing to warn people of ICE raids, bring food to immigrants who are afraid to leave their homes, and form a protective shield around schools could become self-appointed polling place protectors.
If we are going to defend the core tenets of our democracy against an administration that has demonstrated over and over again its contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law, it’s going to take massive public resistance and a flat refusal to give up our rights.
“What is it that will make them stand down from what they’re doing to break the law?” asks Poland. “I think the people of Minnesota have answered that for us better than anybody else can, which is that you have to stand up, you have to exercise your rights, First Amendment rights, the right to vote.”
Exercising our rights is the only way to make sure they are not taken away. Courage and collective action are the best protection we’ve got.
- Ruth Conniff is Editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Examiner. She formerly served as Editor-in-chief of The Progressive Magazine where she worked for many years from both Madison and Washington, D.C. Shortly after Donald Trump took office she moved with her family to Oaxaca, Mexico, and covered U.S./Mexico relations, the migrant caravan, and Mexico’s efforts to grapple with Trump. Conniff is the author of "Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers" which won the 2022 Studs and Ida Terkel award from The New Press. She is a frequent guest on MSNBC and has appeared on Good Morning America, Democracy Now!, Wisconsin Public Radio, CNN, Fox News and many other radio and television outlets. She has also written for The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times, among other publications. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her husband and three daughters.
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Big pharma's dirty secret finally met its wrecking ball
Today I want to talk about prostates. (Wait! Don’t delete this post! Give me a minute to explain why you might be interested.)
All of us are getting older, and some of us are becoming quite old.
Many old men, like Joe Biden and me and several million others in the United States, have prostates that contain cancerous cells.
But because prostate cancer grows very slowly, most of us old geezers will die with it rather than because of it.
Yet some prostate cancers will threaten our lives if we do nothing about them. (A tip-off is if a man’s prostate-specific antigen — PSA — starts rising.)
Biden’s is reported to be aggressive, prompting a wave of sympathy from normal, empathetic people. (Not surprisingly, the moment the news came out, Mr. Compassion in the Oval Office made the baseless claim that Biden had covered up his cancer while he was in the White House.)
What to do? The standard treatment is a combination of radiation and drugs to lower testosterone levels (prostate cancer needs testosterone to grow). My understanding is Biden is getting both.
Unfortunately, testosterone-lowering drugs have some unpleasant side effects — fatigue, weight gain, declining bone and muscle mass, reduced sex drive, impotence and erectile dysfunction, hot flashes, mood changes, liver damage, and greater risk of heart attack.
Think menopause for men.
Long story short, I was about to take a testosterone-reducing drug when a doctor offered a second opinion, urging me to use estrogen (estradiol) patches instead. She told me about recent research in the U.K. showing the patches to be just as effective as testosterone-reducing drugs in lowering testosterone and fighting prostate cancer — but without most of the awful side effects.
Oh, and the patches are far cheaper than the drugs.
So, you may ask: Why are testosterone-reducing drugs still being prescribed when they have all sorts of lousy side effects, and when estrogen patches are just as effective without most of those side effects, and they’re cheaper?
Answer: because pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) prefer the more expensive drug treatment.
Okay, now I need to give you a bit of background on PBMs.
PBMs rake in big profits by controlling the pharmaceutical market and siphoning off some of the profits to the biggest insurance companies, from which they extract rebates.
Ergo, they have every incentive to push for pricier drugs because that’s where the money is. (This also explains why research into cheaper remedies is so often done in the U.K. and elsewhere rather than in the United States, where the PBMs have a lot of influence over what’s researched.)
Under former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan (whom I spoke with recently), the FTC released a series of damning reports on PBMs — and filed a critical antitrust case against them for inflating the prices of insulin.
The FTC found that the big three PBMs — Caremark Rx, LLC (affiliated with CVS), Express Scripts, Inc. (with ESI), and OptumRx, Inc. (with OptumRx) — marked up generic drugs dispensed at their affiliated pharmacies by thousands of percent.
Lina Khan says these include many lifesaving drugs, such as those to treat cancer.
Which is why Pharmacy Benefit Managers have been pushing more expensive drugs to treat prostate cancer — drugs that also have worse side effects than estrogen patches.
But here’s the good news. Congress has just reined in PBMs.
Based on the work of Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mike Crapo (R-ID), Congress issued rules that prohibit PBMs from discriminating against smaller pharmacies or keeping any part of the rebates they extract, limiting them to flat dollar amounts rather than percentages of a drug’s price, and requiring them to give their customers full pricing information.
The new rules were included in the Department of Health and Human Services spending bill that Trump signed into law Tuesday. Most of these changes will go into effect in 2028.
(I don’t know how Joe Biden is doing but, should you be wondering, my patches and the radiation seem to have done exactly what they needed to do. Enough said.)
Be well, my friends. And be safe.
- 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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Bully Trump cut me out — because he couldn't scare me
There’s been a lot of support this week for CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, who got berated by the Giant Orange Snowflake Epstein Bestie for simply Doing A Journalism While Female in the Oval Office.
But it’s also a classic example of who Trump has always been, and therefore should be used as an example of how to fight back against him.
🚨TRUMP MELTS DOWN AT KAITLAN COLLINSTrump lost it when CNN reporterKaitlan Collins asked him an Epstein related question.Share this widely. linnocent people don't act like this:KEEP THE HEAT UP. HE'S PANICKING.
[image or embed]
— CALL TO ACTIVISM (@calltoactivism.bsky.social) February 3, 2026 at 5:39 PM
The vainglorious, short-fingered vulgarian bloviated loudly, steamrolled Collins’ questions, and even busted out some tired “You should smile more” misogyny that no woman in history has ever enjoyed hearing, especially from someone who’s never given any of us anything to smile about.
Bullies are the weakest people. There’s nothing strong about needing to put another person down, to feel bigger and stronger. They learn soon that no one will respect them, so the next best thing is to instill fear.
At the same time, all bullying is rooted in jealousy. In Trump’s case, it also comes with a whopping dose of self-victimization and the need to assert power over anyone who might expose him as the spineless coward he is.
As kids, we’re taught to stand up to bullies, even if they’re bigger. “Don’t let them push you around like that!” my father barked at me when I was bullied in sixth grade. Imagine if Trump had been a truck driver in New Jersey in the 1970s and '80s — that’s my dad. He bullied me for getting bullied, so I learned how to stand up and push back. That included pushing back at him. Instead of letting my abuser continue to abuse me, I cut him out of my life.
That’s not as easy to do with Trump, but it’s a problem that never should have existed. When he descended that gold escalator to launch his first bid for president in 2015, I knew exactly what he was: a smarmy, slimy, chauvinistic playboy who thought he was better looking and more powerful than he actually was.
Groomed first by Roy Cohn, then by Vladimir Putin, Donny Daddy Issues got all the attention and ego-boosting he thirsted for. The false bravado grew as he created his own legend. He famously pushed back against any woman who interviewed him — like Barbara Walters and Lesley Stahl.
When he hit the campaign trail, his attacks on the media surged. Even the most professional of journalists were taken aback by his attacks — but few were able to prevail over the tactics he learned from Daddy Vladdy: deny, deflect, and distract.
Trump was astute enough to understand how to play to his few strengths. E. Jean Carroll can attest to how he used his physicality to intimidate women, and we’ve all seen him steamroll anyone who asks questions he doesn’t like.
Guess who else asked him questions he didn’t like?
Me, that’s who.
I’m 5ft tall and weigh maybe a buck-five, so I love knowing that huge homunculus of an adjudicated rapist is scared of me.
Such a fearless leader, huh? Yell louder, Tiny. I can’t hear you because you’ve never unblocked me.
MAGA loves the “loudest person is always right” approach, because then they don’t have to hear anything that makes them feel bad. They’ve all taken on Trump’s persona in their pursuit of “owning the Libs,” a goal apparently more important than making sure they can feed their families or afford health care. And that whole Epstein files thing? Just a “Democrat hoax” pushed by the “fake news media.”
I’ve already written about Trump’s favorite way to scapegoat the media and any others who dare challenge him. But that certainly wasn’t the first time I tried to get their attention.
Trump’s abusiveness left the mainstream media (MSM for short) incapable of covering Joe Biden accurately. While he and VP Kamala Harris were undoing the damage of the first illegitimate Trump regime, the MSM was all, “Will Trump run again?”
When Biden pulled us out of Trump’s pandemic depression and lifted all other global economies with us, the MSM breathlessly covered Trump’s FOUR DIFFERENT ARRESTS, simply watching as MAGA turned his mugshot into a badge of honor instead of yet another Hall of Shame moment.
“The MSM has PTSD from TFG,” I wrote in October 2023. Remember when Biden called Trump “The Former Guy”? Dark Brandon should’ve been the media’s darling, not the convicted felon rapist who fomented an insurrection and stole classified documents from the White House. It’s still true. Ironically, I submitted that as an op-ed to the Washington Post, which has now fully capitulated to Putin’s puppet. Its new masthead should read “Trumpism Over Journalism,” as it helps our democracy die, drowned in Dark Money.
But if I can stand up to the bully, so can Kaitlan Collins and anyone else he targets. Trump will continue to abuse anyone who asks him about Epstein, but that can’t mean no one asks him about Epstein.
My advice comes from my GenX experiences and every '80s movie where the bullies finally lose, after a montage where the nerds build a clubhouse or something, all set to “New Song” by Howard Jones.
Just ask Trump why he’s never released the full and unredacted Epstein files, to exonerate himself. When Trump goes after that person — and he will — the next person should ask the same question. And the next. Use your voices together. Be louder than him. Say it’s your job to get the truth to the people. He won’t know what to do with a united front like that, and you’ll be exposing his weakness live on camera.
Give it a try. It’s only our democracy at stake. Use the truth as a shield instead of letting him hurt us with his lies.
- Tara Dublin is a political writer/commentator based in Portland, OR, who has been blocked by Donald Trump on Twitter since August 2015 and can occasionally be heard as a fill-in host on SiriusXM Progress. She is also the author of The Sound of Settling, a rock ‘n’ roll love story available at taradublinrocks.com
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Trump may never answer for his crimes — but these people will
Dear Trump Administration Official,
I’m writing to you not as a political opponent, but as a historian who’s spent a lifetime studying what happens when democracies flirt with strongmen and otherwise decent people convince themselves that loyalty to Dear Leader today will be rewarded by safety and protection tomorrow.
It almost never is.
You’re out there defending Donald Trump’s lawbreaking, cheering his attacks on judges, prosecutors, immigrants, journalists, and even the Constitution itself. You defend his bribe-taking, the jet from Qatar, the violence of ICE, and his hotel and crypto grifts. You say it’s necessary for him to abuse power to “get things done,” that the other side is worse, that he’s strong and that’s what the American people need.
History is littered with people who believed the same things: let’s start close to home.
Richard Nixon didn’t go to prison: his loyalists did.
His attorney general John Mitchell did hard time in a federal prison. His chief of staff H.R. Haldeman did hard time, as did John Ehrlichman, Charles Colson, and his White House attorney John Dean. The burglars did time, as did the fixers. The 40 Nixon officials who went to prison even included two members of Nixon’s cabinet, Mitchell and Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans.
The people who “just followed orders” or egged Nixon on — like you’re doing now with Trump — were the ones who went to jail, while Nixon walked away to a quiet retirement.
That’s the pattern history shows us over and over, all the way back to the Roman Republic: the boss either dies or escapes while his helpers become the long-term fall guys.
Every authoritarian system runs on the same fuel you’re today giving Trump: people who believe that by protecting the leader they’re protecting themselves and their families. Tragically, at least for them, it never works out that way.
When Hitler’s regime collapsed, he was dead but his inner circle faced tribunals, prison cells, and even the gallows.
The men who signed orders, ran ministries, moved trains, seized property, and “made it all legal” discovered that when corrupt administrations fall, their paperwork trail lasts longer than their leader’s loyalty. Their defense of “I was serving my country” or “just taking orders” didn’t save them: it convicted them.
Mussolini’s story is even darker. As his own crimes caught up with him, his own allies turned and ran. He was executed by people horrified by his excesses. His son-in-law, once his foreign minister and a loyal insider, was put up against a wall and shot after a show trial. Dictators never go down alone: they take their flunkies with them and it’s typically the flunkies who bear the harshest punishments.
Chile’s Pinochet managed to dodge some justice himself, but the men who ran his torture chambers and death squads didn’t. Years later they were dragged into court, convicted, and sent to prison. Time didn’t save them, and neither did politics or the loyalty they expected from the good general. And it won’t save you.
The same happened after Saddam Hussein fell; his henchmen were tried and executed or died in prison. In Romania, the Ceauşescus were hunted down and shot but their senior officials faced courts, disgrace, and decades in prison. Across history, when the music stops, the people closest to the guy at the top inevitably find there aren’t enough chairs.
Here’s the uncomfortable (for you) truth: authoritarian leaders like Trump and Putin treat loyalty like a disposable resource. Just look at all the Republicans who served in Trump’s first term and he’s now trying to throw into prison. Loyalty, for narcissists and authoritarians like Trump, is always a one-way street.
So long as you’re useful, you’re protected, but the moment Dear Leader no longer commands power you’ll become a liability, an offering to be thrown out to appease the angry mob.
And when the prosecutors come calling for you after Trump’s gone, they won’t start with your elegant speeches or proclamations that Renee Good and Alex Pretti were “domestic terrorists.” They start with your memos, phone calls, pressure campaigns, documents, and quiet threats; they’ll go after your “find the votes” activities, the cooked reports, the arrests without cause, the orders that violated others’ civil rights.
They’ll start, in other words, with the people who made Trump’s crimes happen: people like you. That’s how conspiracies are proven in a court of law: not by vibes, but by nailing the insiders.
Right now you may feel powerful. You’re on TV, retweeted, and praised by Trump. The base cheers, the fundraising money pours in, the billionaires are chummy, and it feels like history is being written by your side.
But history has a funny way of circling back:
- Nixon’s aides told themselves they were protecting the presidency, but they destroyed their own lives instead.
- The seniormost Nazis told themselves they were saving Germany, but they were prosecuted as war criminals.
- Mussolini’s ministers told themselves they were stabilizing Italy, but they ended up dead or disgraced.
- Pinochet’s enforcers told themselves they were fighting communism, but they ended up in prison.
There’s a simple and perennial reason why prosecutors always say, “Follow the money” and “follow the paper trail”: abusive power always leaves fingerprints.
And there’s no statute of limitations on some of the crimes you’re now waving away.
Obstruction of justice. Conspiracy. Civil rights violations. Election interference. Murder under color of authority. Bribery. Abuse of power. False statements. Unlawful detention. Retaliation against whistleblowers. Collusion with foreign enemies.
These aren’t political talking points that I’m trying to wave around to score with public opinion or scare you, they’re criminal statutes.
You may tell yourself — like all those people before you told themselves — that Trump will protect you. But Nixon didn’t protect his people; he left the White House and never looked back to watch his underlings fall. History’s strongmen never look back. When the heat gets intense enough, they point at others, not themselves.
Already we’re seeing this pattern with dozens of people who’ve left Trump’s first term employ, from his Attorney General, CIA director, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Defense Secretary, and FBI Director all the way down to functionaries in the Oval Office:
“I didn’t know he was that crazy.”
“They acted on their own.”
“I was advised incorrectly.”
“They went too far.”
Every authoritarian uses the same script and Trump has already proven that he’s no different. Do you think he’s suddenly going to decide to protect you rather than run off with the goodies? If so, I have a bridge to sell you.
Seriously, here’s the part nobody in the cheering crowd has bothered to tell you: when regimes fall — or even just lose power, like Nixon did — the leader’s efforts become solely about his own personal survival. Your life, as a disposable underling, becomes a tool he can use to redirect blame and avoid accountability.
The courts won’t ask whether you believed in the cause: they’ll ask what you did.
Did you pressure an official? Did you sign that order? Did you participate in killing those fishermen with a missile? Did you move the funds? Did you authorize those deportations to foreign torture centers? Did you look the other way? Did you help cover up the child rapes?
That’s when you’ll discover the very real difference between a political appointee and the defendant you’ll become.
I’m not asking you to become a Democrat, to abandon your “conservative” principles, or even to leave your party. Instead, I want you to realize that the Constitution is older than Donald Trump and far more durable than any cult of personality.
There’s a reason the Founders feared concentrated power and split it among three branches of government: like their advisor Montesquieu, they’d also studied history.
Strongmen always promise protection to the people they con into doing their dirty work. What they deliver to those folks, though, is always collateral damage.
Right now you’re standing close to a light that feels bright and powerful. History suggests, however, that it’ll end by burning the people nearest to it. Including you.
Presidents can walk away, but staffers, lawyers, deputies, agency heads, cabinet officials, and enablers can’t.
You still have time to choose which side of history you’re on, and which side of a courtroom you never want to sit in.
Because the lesson of every fallen strongman is the same: abusive power-by-association today becomes criminal liability tomorrow.
- Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.
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Trump just proved this powerful group is a bunch of dangerous hypocrites. They don't care
Yesterday I watched, horrified and spellbound — which is becoming a regular thing — as an event purportedly built on prayer, humility, and the teachings of Jesus Christ dissolved into a Trump rally, complete with guffaws, applause, and a bizarre reverence for every absurd turpitude that tumbled out of the President’s trashy mouth.
It was supposed to be the National Prayer Breakfast: a moment for spiritual reflection and interfaith unity, a morning convocation with a rich history of presidents offering words about the importance of faith.
In 2022, for example, an actual Christian, President Joe Biden, said: “Rather than driving us apart, faith can move us together.”
He urged Americans to see one another not as enemies, but as neighbors.
When the demonic Donald Trump takes the microphone and begins ghoulishly speaking in tongues, words dripping with his ever-present turpitude, such sentiments get crunched to bits.
This year’s gathering became a one-man show. Trump spent nearly an hour rambling, preening, lying, insulting allies and enemies, and praising himself as the savior of American religion.
He claimed he did more for religion than any president in history. He was right. He heaved heaven to hell in a handbasket.
I watched his senselessness unfold on CNN, and what still stuns me is why networks continue to broadcast these so-called speeches. Trump doesn’t care where he is or who he’s addressing. It’s always the same unhinged refuse. Prepared remarks are abandoned or never even exist — he just presents nasty, confused riffs. So why analyze what he’s saying? It surely serves no purpose.
But here we are. Trump’s audience lapped it up. That should tell us everything we need to know about the state of “Christian” political allegiance.
Right out of the gate, Trump called a fellow Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a “moron.” Remember, this was a prayer breakfast. He babbled about Speaker Mike Johnson calling him at 3 a.m. To what end, no one could decipher. The audience leaned in like it was gospel.
Johnson deserves special mention. This is the man who recently scoffed at Pope Leo XIV’s biblical critique of Trump’s immigration policies, delivering a smug theological rebuttal that insulted just about every religious tradition on earth.
The man who once lawyered for a Noah’s Ark amusement park attempted to explain scripture to the Pope, arguing that borders and assimilation — capitulation, really — are biblical, all while defending cruelty as policy. It was surreal, and it laid bare how in certain corners of American Christianity, politics has now devoured faith.
Back to Trump. He boasted about Republican victories, disparaged Democrats, and lashed out — again, and it is getting as old as he is — at Former President Biden. At a prayer breakfast, remember. The audience smiled as Trump rambled about Biden’s supposed inability to understand what Trump was saying, which would actually be proof of Biden’s solid cognitive state. He’s just like the rest of us.
Trump lied about the recent racist arrest of former CNN anchor Don Lemon, who was exercising basic journalistic freedom while livestreaming a protest at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota.
The protesters were confronting a pastor believed tied to ICE. Trump called Lemon’s actions “horrible” and labeled him the protesters “bad people.” The room applauded. Yes, because a gay Black journalist doing his job is “bad people,” to them. That’s three strikes against him. No doubt many in attendance consider Lemon the Antichrist, or at least his emissary.
Thankfully, Trump didn’t linger on his belief that Jesus saved him from assassination so he could turn America into a despotic nation. He did, however, joke about how grateful he was that his hair was unharmed. This from a man whose ludicrous combover tells a different story.
The point is that Trump’s diatribe was utterly unsuitable for the setting but perfectly suited for the audience, which appears to believe that atop his freaky follicles sits a halo.
Trump drew laughter and applause more appropriate for a comedy club or campaign rally than a gathering to contemplate humility and sacrifice. This wasn’t a prayer breakfast. It was an ego-worship service.
And they didn’t just laugh. These deplorable excuses for Christians hung on every word as if it were scripture. That is the truly unsettling part: a supposedly Christian audience choosing nonsense, vanity, and resentment.
Amid this spectacle of sanctified idolatry, one man briefly reminded the room what prayer is supposed to look like.
Rep. Jonathan Jackson (D-IL) rose not to flatter Trump, but to pray for his soul. With Trump standing behind him, Jackson asked God to forgive the president, to soften his heart, and to make him mindful of the poor, the suffering, and grieving families — including those mourning in Minneapolis.
The audience response was tepid. Compassion rarely plays well in rooms full of superiority, arrogance, and white power, especially when it comes from a Black Democrat.
Still, Jackson’s invocation was the lone moment that resembled Christianity.
He did not genuflect, as Trump expects Black people to do. He did not confuse nationalism with faith. He spoke truth to power and centered the vulnerable — precisely what Christians are called to do. That took courage.
How far political figures will go to weaponize religion in service of cruelty. In the hands of Speaker Johnson, the Pope’s basic appeal for compassion toward migrants was reduced to ideological idiocy, the gospel warped to match Trump’s inhumanity.
Johnson is publicly devout but his spiritual leader is Trump. That devotion guarantees him a one-way trip to hell.
It’s one thing for politicians to be cynical. It’s another for self-identified Christians to celebrate the subversion of Jesus’s teachings, turning sacred tradition into a platform for seething self-promotion.
If the core of Christianity is love of neighbor, mercy, and humility, what are we to make of a crowd that cheers a man for whom empathy is weakness, humility a disease?
If American Christianity hopes to reclaim its moral spine, it must confront a simple truth: kissing up to Donald the Demon is not the same as following the Prince of Peace.
- 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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These states avoided ICE as Trump eyes a bigger prize
Last month it was Greenland. This month it’s Nevada’s election. Donald Trump’s always trying to grab something he has no right to grab.
One way Trump could help assure Republicans retain their grasp of both the House and Senate would be to do something about the cost of living.
But affordability obviously bores him.
So instead of focusing on that, Trump has been bloviating about how he wants to “nationalize the voting” and take charge of elections in multiple states.
“We should take over the voting in at least 15 places,” he said.
He hasn’t named all of them. But you know Nevada’s on his list.
It always is.
Trump began trying — by lying — to undermine democracy in Nevada and discredit the state’s election procedures (and workers) during the 2020 campaign, when it dawned on him that Joe Biden would beat him in Nevada, just as Hillary Clinton beat him in Nevada in 2016.
Trump’s been attacking Nevada voters and their elections ever since, most infamously by organizing an attempted smash and grab on Jan. 6, 2021. The criminal assault on the Capitol was an attack on democracy and the rights of voters in the entire nation. But the voters most directly violated by Trump’s insurrection were voters in Nevada and the six other states where Trump ordered fake electors to send fake certificates to Congress. It was the votes from those states that Trump tried to nullify.
Currently Nevada is one of the states Trump’s weaponized and paradoxically named Department of Justice is suing and badgering to obtain confidential data about voters. It’s part of Trump’s effort to intimidate officials into disenfranchising voters who might be deemed not reliably MAGA by Trump minions.
In the hands of the Trump administration, the data of course would also be bitterly twisted through lies and deceit into false allegations built around one of Trump’s favorite fictional characters, the mythical non-citizen voter.
In addition to whipping up fear and loathing among one part of America for the other, DOJ harassment of Nevada also is a malicious effort to throw more shade on an election system Trump has spent years trying — and lying —so hard to destroy.
In his bellowing this week about wanting to “nationalize” the elections, Trump is echoing a performance he gave for a few news cycles in August. Announcing he was going to get rid of mail ballots — a declaration he said was inspired by one of his flirty chats with Vladimir Putin, no less — Trump said on Truth Social:
“…the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”
Trump’s proclamation, rendered in his customary off-with-their-heads Queen-of-Hearts dramatics, prompted state election officials, including Nevada’s, to point out that the Constitution of the United States explicitly empowers states to administer elections.
You might expect a governor to be protective of rights authorized to states in the Constitution — as a former Nevada Republican governor, Brian Sandoval, was this week.
“Nevada has the capability and experience to conduct elections in every county, and I trust our state is best equipped to collect ballots, count votes and certify our elections,” Sandoval said, in his capacity as co-chair of Democracy Defense Project in Nevada.
Current Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo, by contrast, said nothing.
To be fair, for Lombardo, when it comes to protecting his state from Trump, saying nothing might be an improvement.
During Trump’s holy war against mail ballots last summer, in which Trump was declaring states “must do” whatever he says, Lombardo gushed “I would — of course — support President Trump’s efforts to end universal mail-in voting.”
“Ooh, but Lombardo must be Trump-whispering and that’s the only reason ICE isn’t going bonkers in Nevada like it has been in Minnesota,” is a thing people seem to think.
Maybe so, maybe no.
It’s worth noting there has also been no Minnesota-style ICE “surge” in Arizona, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, or North Carolina. All are battleground states like Nevada, some with substantial immigrant populations, none with a Republican governor.
Also worth noting: though the first year of Trump’s second term seems to have been very, very long, he’s got three more.
And yet another thing worth noting is a statement Tuesday by Steve Bannon, a member of Trump’s shadow cabinet of right-wing media personalities who seem to have as much sway with the president as his official cabinet of, well, right-wing media personalities:
“You’re damn right we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November.”
Trump’s role models are not just autocratic kleptocrats (or kleptocratic autocrats) but mob bosses, so he threatened to take Greenland “the easy way” or “the hard way.”
Greenland, Denmark, and the other NATO nations stood up to him, and he declared a phony victory and backed off.
Standing up to Trump can work, as Europe, China, Brazil, the Wall Street Journal, Jerome Powell, Harvard, and Minnesota, to name a few, have demonstrated.
Sucking up to Trump is pointless, because he can’t be trusted.
Not only is there no guarantee that sucking up to Trump works. It’s also unforgivable public policy.
Whatever consideration Trump gives to international relations, tariffs, interest rates, snooty universities, or whatever other shiny object momentarily attracts his diminishing faculties, the central issue that has always been dearest in his heart — a priority both overriding and underlying the actions and edicts of His Malevolence — is democracy’s destruction.
If he’s allowed to accomplish that, then destroying other things — Congress, the courts, the Constitution, the press, your freedom, your rights, your savings, your safety — and attaining supreme authority over the U.S. (or what’s left of it) comes easy.
- Hugh Jackson is editor of the Nevada Current, part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
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Dems must demand this key condition before funding Trump's terror troops
What should Democrats be demanding as a condition of releasing permanent funds for the Department of Homeland Security?
Over the last few weeks I’ve discussed several important conditions:
- agents must not undertake warrantless searches
- use racial profiling
- pick up suspected undocumented people from schools, hospitals, courts, or places of worship
- or carry lethal weapons.
Today I want to add an increasingly important condition:
Failure to obey any court order will immediately terminate all funding for ICE or the Border Patrol.
Who can be against this? It turns out, many Republicans in Congress.
Apparently Republicans don’t want to tie ICE or Border Patrol’s hands with the pesky responsibility of following court orders.
Last week, Judge Patrick J. Schiltz — a Reagan appointee and top federal judge in Minnesota — accused ICE of violating nearly a hundred court orders in January alone.
He wrote: “ICE has every right to challenge the orders of this Court, but, like any litigant, ICE must follow those orders unless and until they are overturned or vacated,” adding that “ICE is not a law unto itself.”
Judge Schiltz issued an order on Jan. 14 that the government must give an immigrant a bond hearing or release him within seven days. Seven days passed without a hearing or release.
Judge Schiltz then took what he called the “extraordinary step” of ordering Todd Lyons, the acting head of ICE, to appear at a hearing on Jan. 23 to explain why he shouldn’t be held in contempt for violating the Jan. 14 order.
“The Court acknowledges that ordering the head of a federal agency to personally appear is an extraordinary step, but the extent of ICE’s violation of court orders is likewise extraordinary, and lesser measures have been tried and failed.”
Judge Schiltz said he would cancel the Friday hearing if the government released the man by then. The government released him. Schiltz canceled the hearing.
But threatening the acting head of ICE with contempt of court is a cumbersome way to get ICE to follow court orders. A threatened loss of funding for ICE and Border Patrol is necessary.
Meanwhile, during an immigration hearing on Tuesday, a Department of Homeland Security attorney said it was like “pulling teeth” to get the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, and the Justice Department to follow court orders.
“The system sucks. This job sucks. I wish you could hold me in contempt so that I could get 24 hours of sleep,” she said.
Democrats should inform congressional Republicans who are objecting to conditioning continued funding on obeying court orders that it’s part of the job (and constitutional responsibility) of every public official — whether an agent of ICE or Border Patrol, or a member of Congress.
While they’re at it, Democrats (and the rest of us) should make sure the public knows the extent to which ICE and Border Patrol agents have been violating court orders —and are still utterly lawless.
- 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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This horror finally launched the anti-Trump insurrection — 'The time is now'
The facts are so damning that it’s unclear to me why moderate Democrats are being careful about their reaction to them.
Renee Good was shot in the face. Alex Pretti was shot in the back. Their deaths were not accidental. They were not the result of poor or insufficient training. They were the result of intent.
Why are moderates worried about seeming extreme when the context is murder by the state? In that setting, there’s no such thing as an overreaction. Call on Kristi Noem to resign. Call on Stephen Miller to resign. Call on the president himself to resign.
The real danger is under-reacting. Noem shouldn’t only be impeached and removed. She should be arrested and tried.
In addition to murder, ICE and CBP are going house to house, kicking in doors, terrorizing people. They are taking babies from mothers. They are preventing fathers from grieving their dead sons. They are letting sick kids taken from their parents die in custody.
These are crimes against humanity that everyone would recognize as such if they were taking place in Iran. It’s a sick joke to suggest they wouldn’t happen if ICE had proper “guidance.”
Sadism doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It is accepted. It is condoned. It is encouraged. It is a choice originating from the very top. Without criminal accountability, sadism as policy will continue.
Fortunately, moderate Democrats are not most Democrats. Some in the Senate are threatening to shut down the government if Donald Trump and the GOP do not accept their reforms. More important is what’s happening among House Democrats.
The leadership there is now calling on Noem to resign or face impeachment proceedings. It also seems to be bridging the gap between opposing factions within the party — between Democrats who believe they should pursue accountability and Democrats who believe they should pursue “affordability.”
I’m going to quote the full statement by Hakeem Jeffries, Katherine Clark and Pete Aguilar so you can see that, in their view, accountability and “affordability” seem to be the same.
Taxpayer dollars are being weaponized by the Trump administration to kill American citizens, brutalize communities and violently target law-abiding immigrant families. The country is disgusted by what the Department of Homeland Security has done.
Republicans are planning to shut large parts of the government down on Friday so that the DHS killing spree unleashed in Minnesota can continue throughout America. That is immoral.
Dramatic changes at the Department of Homeland Security are needed. Federal agents who have broken the law must be criminally prosecuted. The paramilitary tactics must cease and desist. Taxpayer dollars should be used to make life more affordable for everyday Americans, not kill them in cold blood.
The violence unleashed on the American people by the Department of Homeland Security must end forthwith. Kristi Noem should be fired immediately, or we will commence impeachment proceedings in the House of Representatives.
We can do this the easy way or the hard way.
Personally, I have never seen Jeffries speak so aggressively.
Neither has Jill Lawrence.
She’s the author of The Art of the Political Deal and a contributor to The Bulwark. Jill used to be an opinion editor at USA Today.
“It's inspirational,” she told me.
“Jeffries is using their language (‘the easy way or the hard way’), making irrefutable points, and talking about impeachment from a position of strength, given the swell of Democrats who are co-sponsoring an impeachment resolution against Noem.”
She went on.
“If you want to talk about affordability, after the GOP let health insurance subsidies expire and passed nearly $1 billion in Medicaid cuts coming next year, this is a dramatic way to make the point: ‘Taxpayer dollars should be used to make life more affordable for everyday Americans, not kill them in cold blood.’”
“I think the statement generally is an acknowledgment that people really care deeply about these abuses of power,” Jill said.
The last time Jill and I discussed accountability was in May. Back then, she said talk of impeachment was premature. In a recent piece for The Bulwark, however, she changed her mind. The time is now, she told me, not only for Trump but for his cabinet, too.
The breaking point, she said, was murder.
Moderate Democrats take note.
JS: Last time we talked about impeachment, you said the key is timing. You were concerned about the Democrats moving too quickly, risking the appearance of playing politics. In a recent piece, you say the time has come. What changed your mind?
JL: The breaking point for me was the ICE killing of Renee Good, and the pile-up of impeachment articles filed against Trump and members of his cabinet. Impeachment talk was growing, and even as I was working on the piece, Illinois Congresswoman Robin Kelly announced she would file articles of impeachment against Kristi Noem.
In part, I thought it was time to stop ridiculing and dismissing people who, quite justifiably, thought Donald Trump should be impeached for any one of many, many reasons. In truth, I found those articles – against Trump and against several cabinet members – to be interesting and clarifying reading. I liked the idea of publicizing them in formal investigatory hearings, like January 6, and decided to make a public argument for that.
What do you say to those who say there's no point in impeaching Trump if he can't be convicted by the Senate?
I don't think Democrats should try to impeach Trump right now, and maybe not even this year. The idea would be to build up to it after making cases against several cabinet members who have earned impeachment by any objective standard. My thought was that Democrats should lay the groundwork for an impeachment proceeding against him next year, when they seem likely to control the House. And by then, who knows who will control the Senate, or how many Republicans will have had it.
I suggested starting out with Robert Kennedy Jr, because his policies are literally deadly, and he's nowhere near finished unspooling our progress on public health. But Noem seems more urgent at this point. It was reported that at least 145 Democrats have co-sponsored the impeachment resolution against her. And Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin says he will hold investigatory hearings to fill in and expand the articles.
I agree with your view that there's no need to pick between accountability and "affordability." That, however, is not the view of influential Democratic strategists. They believe winning means picking "a kitchen table issue." Yet there are people out there saying golf becomes political when an agent of the state can murder you. What are these strategists not getting?
I am as puzzled as you are. I don't think the strategists get how deeply these killings and tactics have penetrated into the public consciousness. Or how intensely people feel them. Or how it's obvious to the public that Trump is not prioritizing prices, he cares about Greenland and ICE and the ballroom and the Board of Peace charade. I wrote last year and still believe that the most important thing is for candidates to be true to themselves, their beliefs, their communities. There is no reason not to talk about the dangers we face now, as well as all the idiotic Trump policies that are raising prices, from food to health care to electricity.
The people of Minneapolis have proven something important — attention moves public opinion and public opinion moves the Democrats. Even Chuck Schumer seems to be growing a spine (threats to cut DHS funding). It seems to me impeachment hearings, whether official or not, can do the same thing.
I totally agree. And Raskin agrees as well. He just said today that unless Noem resigns or is fired, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan needs to launch impeachment proceedings against her. And if he doesn't, Raskin said he will do it to create a record of "fact-finding, public hearings, and committee reports."
One commenter on my original story suggested an interesting way Democrats could proceed: Work with legislators in a state Democrats control so the hearings can be part of an official record. Minnesota would be a perfect place to start.
I'm seeing a lot of talk among prominent liberals about how something deep is shifting. The suggestion is that the American people are moving away from Trump and toward something better. The skeptic in me says hold on. We said the same thing after George Floyd's murder. Then came the elite backlash. Then came Trump's reelection. What do you say to that?
First, I'll mention another suggestion from a commenter, who said House Democrats should start an impeachment website that publishes all the articles of impeachment filed against Trump and his administration to date. Other material could be added as necessary. The popularity of such a site would be one gauge of public interest. I think it would be high.
I think this could really be a hinge point for a few reasons. Tragedies breaking through. Trump's age and massive overreach. The lower federal courts. Younger Democrats in the Congress and White House pipeline. And one more thing.
I feel like I'm a pretty mainstream center-leftie, and fiscally conservative on debt, but I have changed. I am interested in a lot of fundamental change geared not only to guarding against a repeat of this awful period, but also to getting done some of the business that Americans want done on issues like health and gun safety.
So, curb the dependence on presidential character in our system, because it's a demonstrable and tragic failure. And end the legislative paralysis, in the Senate in particular. Sorry about the soapbox. You did ask!
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Terrible history shows what Trump's migrant 'camps' really are — and what comes next
As people testified before Congress on Tuesday about the brutality and violence they’d suffered at the hands of ICE, that massive paramilitary organization was shopping for giant warehouse-style facilities they can retrofit into what they euphemistically call “detention centers.”
Cable news people call them “prison camps” or “Trump prison camps,” but look in any dictionary: prisons are where people convicted of crimes are held. As Merriam-Webster notes, a prison is:
“[A]n institution for confinement of persons convicted of serious crimes.”
Jails are where people accused of crimes but still waiting for their day in court are held, as Merriam-Webster notes:
“[S]uch a place under the jurisdiction of a local government for the confinement of persons awaiting trial or those convicted of minor crimes.”
But what do you call a place where people who’ve committed no criminal offense (immigration violations are civil, not criminal, infractions)? The fine dictionary people at Merriam-Webster note the proper term is “concentration camp”:
“[A] place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard.”
The British originated the term “concentration camp” to describe facilities where “rebel” or “undesirable” civilians were held in South Africa during the Second Anglo‑Boer War (1899–1902) to control and punish a rebellious population.
They were facilities where the “bad elements of society” were “concentrated” into one location so they could be easily controlled and would lose access to society and thus could not spread their messages of resistance against the British Empire.
The Germans adopted the term in 1933 when Hitler took power and created his first camp for communists, socialists, union leaders, and, by the end of the year, Hitler’s political opponents. They Germanized the phrase into “Konzentrationslager” and referred to the process of their incarceration as “protective custody.”
The first camp was built at Dachau just weeks after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, and by the end of the year there were around 70 of them operating across the country.
When Louise and I lived in Germany in 1986-87, we visited Dachau with our three children. The crematoriums shocked our kids, but even more so because this was simply a “detention facility” and not one of Hitler’s death camps (which were all located outside Germany to ensure deniability).
The ovens at Dachau were for those who had been worked to death or killed by cholera or other disease, much like the 35+ people who’ve recently died in ICE’s concentration camps.
When American friends would visit us and we’d take them to Dachau (we lived just an hour up the road) they’d invariably be surprised when I told them that by the time of the war there were over 500 substantial camps and an additional few hundred very small ones all over the country.
“How could the people not know what was going on?” they’d ask.
The answer was simple: the people did know. These were where the “undesirables,” the “criminal troublemakers,” and the “aliens” were held, and were broadly supported by the German people. (It wasn’t until 1938, following Kristallnacht, that the Nazis began systematically arresting and imprisoning non-political Jews, first at Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.)
By the end of his first year, Hitler had around 50,000 people held in his roughly 70 concentration camps, facilities that were often improvised in factories, prisons, castles, and other buildings.
By comparison, today ICE is holding over 70,000 people in 225 concentration camps across America, and Trump, Homan, Miller, and Noem hope to more than double both numbers in the coming months.
In Tennessee, the Guardian reports that Miller has been coordinating with Republican leaders to create legislation that would turn every local cop, teacher, social worker, and helper in the state into an official agent of ICE and criminalize efforts by cities to refuse cooperation. It also makes it a felony crime to identify any of ICE’s masked agents or disclose conditions within the concentration camps to the public.
Germans didn’t have the benefit of warnings from a fascist history they could look back on; much of what Hitler did took them by surprise, as I’ve noted in previous articles.
In 2026 America, however, operating with the benefit of historical hindsight, entire communities are rebelling at Trump’s effort to beat Germany’s 1933-1934 prisoner numbers.
In city after city, Americans are organizing to deprive ICE of their coveted spaces, putting pressure on companies not to sell and on cities and counties not to permit any more concentration camps.
Because immigration violations are labeled “civil,” people in ICE concentration camps are stripped of many of the normal constitutional protections that apply to people in criminal incarceration. This has created a legal black hole that ICE and the Trump regime exploit, where indefinite imprisonment, abuse, and medical neglect flourish with little to no oversight or accountability.
Human rights organizations like the ACLU describe pervasive patterns of abuse in ICE detention: hazardous living conditions, chronic medical neglect, sexual assault, retaliation for grievances, and extensive use of solitary confinement.
Detainees who have committed no crime other than being in the United States without documentation report being shackled for long periods, packed into freezing, overcrowded cells under constant fluorescent light, and denied hygiene and timely care. Meanwhile, GOP-aligned private prison companies are making billions off the program.
Inspections and oversight are inconsistent: one recent investigation found that as detentions and deaths surged in 2025, formal inspections of facilities actually dropped by over a third. ICE regularly refuses to allow attorneys, family members, and even members of Congress to access their concentration camps; the issue is now being litigated through federal courts.
History shows us that once a nation builds a mass detention apparatus, it never remains limited to its original targets. Future generations of Americans — our children and grandchildren — won’t ask us whether ICE followed civil detention statutes: they’ll want to know why we allowed concentration camps to exist in America at all.
Germany’s concentration camps didn’t start as instruments of mass murder, and neither have ours; both started as facilities for people the government’s leader said were a problem. And that’s exactly what ICE is building now.
History isn’t whispering its warning: it’s shouting.
- Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.
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