Opinion
The scream heard around the world: Trump's cruelty has a new face
A five year old child — Liam Conejo Ramos — was taken from his home and sent hundreds of miles away to a detention facility, or for-profit concentration camp, in Texas. He was never accused of a crime, didn’t cross our southern border alone, and is so young he barely understands what’s happening to him. Odds are he has no understanding of why he’s being treated with such brutality.
Nobody told little Liam about Tom Homan and Stephen Miller being so eager to punish brown-skinned immigrants, delighting in their pain, rationalizing it as a “deterrent” to “illegal immigration” that’s “poisoning the blood” of white America, as Donald Trump himself pointed out on the election trail.
Liam is confined to a cell in a cold, concrete facility where the lights are kept on day and night.
There’s no school for him to attend, nobody to hold him and reassure him, his medical care limited, and the food is so bad he’s struggled to keep it down.
His lawyer says his health has declined while in government custody.
But this isn’t really about immigration; it’s about power. And how stories and language facilitate the exercise or restraint of that power. It’s about what happens when a nation starts talking about its own people (and the people seeking refuge here) as if they’re enemies in a war.
As Radley Balko noted on BlueSky:
“I’m coming to Boston and I’m bringing hell with me.” — Tom Homan in February
”Do I expect violence to escalate? Absolutely.” — Tom Homan in March
”I actually thought about getting up and throwing that man a beating right there in the middle of the room…” — Tom Homan in July, referring to a Democratic congressman who’d offended him.
This week, during a press briefing, Homan again used the language of war to describe immigration enforcement against brown-skinned people, and resistance from blue states. Words like “fight,” “battle,” “theater,” and “invasion.” When asked how many of his masked goons were still in Minneapolis, he said:
“3,000. There’s been some rotations. Another thing I witnessed when I came here, I’ll share this with you, I’ve met a lot of people, they’ve been in theater, some of them have been in theater for eight months. So there’s going to be rotations of personnel.” [emphasis added]
“In theater”?!? That’s how Gen. Eisenhower used to talk about taking on the Nazis in Europe. That’s not how law enforcement talks; it’s how invading armies speak of invading the territory of their enemies.
That’s no accident by Homan, nor is it the mere use of “colorful phrasing.” When he uses that kind of language, he does it explicitly as a political weapon. And history tells us exactly where that leads.
Richard Nixon taught us this lesson when he declared a “war on drugs” and then used it to spy on and persecute antiwar and civil rights leaders: the language of warfare changes the moral rules.
Dan Baum chronicled how it works — and why — in 1994 when he interviewed Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, about Nixon’s “war on drugs” effort, and Ehrlichman said:
“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying?
“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.
”We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
In war, suffering is normal. In war, collateral damage is unfortunate but socially acceptable. In war, the people caught in the middle stop being human beings with rights and start being obstacles to be managed, broken, or, as in the cases of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, killed.
Five-year-old Liam, one of hundreds of children Trump and Homan have shipped off to Texas, is now living inside the consequences of that shift in language, that “war” rhetorical frame.
This is absolutely unnecessary.
The United States has laws for immigration enforcement. We have courts, due process and longstanding legal standards for the treatment of children in government custody.
I recently wrote about a friend who was deported during Barack Obama’s administration by ICE agents in windbreakers with badges and ID, who politely gave him a month to get his affairs in order. Obama actually deported more people than Trump in any given year, including 2025, and nobody had their window smashed in or took 10 bullets in the back.
We’ve been enforcing immigration laws since 1924 when the Border Patrol was created, and never before have we needed an armed force with a larger budget than the FBI or the Marine Corps to pull it off. And we’ve deported a hell of a lot of people:
Syracuse University’s TRAC data attribute more than 3.1 million deportations over Obama’s eight years, with a peak of over 407,000 removals in FY 2012.
By comparison, the first Trump administration (2017–2020) carried out fewer than about 932,000 deportations total, peaking at roughly 269,000 removals in 2019.
After Trump’s return to office last year, ICE reported about 290,000 removals through late 2025 and mid‑FY 2026, which is still far below Obama’s cumulative total.
In other words, Obama deported more “illegals” than Trump in any year, including last year with ICE going full force, and he did it with courtesy and the law. No masks or guns, no people being shot, no cars being chased and rammed.
As you can see, today’s ICE violence is more about the skin color of the deportees than about enforcing the immigration laws or ridding the country of undocumented persons.
None of those systems require keeping children locked in facilities where the lights never go off. None of them requires denying a child a hug or an education. None of them require the conditions that lawyers and doctors have repeatedly warned cause physical and psychological harm to both children and adults but that Miller, Homan, Trump, et al insist on using.
The conditions of this child’s confinement aren’t a bureaucratic accident; they’re the predictable result of a system designed around the use of violence, isolation, terror, and pain directed at people with nonwhite skin as a brutal way of enforcing “deterrence” to Make America White Again.
A system designed to transfer hundreds of billions of dollars to private prison operators on the assumption they’ll recycle a good chunk of that back as campaign contributions and “gifts” to Republican politicians.
For years now, Republicans and rightwing media figures have described immigrants as if they’re part of an invasion. A “flood,” or a “threat” to be repelled. When leaders and the press talk about human beings that way, people find it easier to treat them as less than human. It becomes easier to cut corners, ignore the suffering, and to look away when a child gets sick or even dies behind locked doors.
And — like Nixon’s war on drugs — it doesn’t stop with migrants.
Trump’s war on immigrants is as phony as was Nixon’s War on Drugs. Blacks are again the victims, but now instead of the young white men and women who took LBJ and Nixon down, he chose brown-skinned children. This is a sickness.
When that same war language is turned against Blue states, states that disagree with grandstanding politicians and brutal, inhumane agendas, something even more dangerous happens. Political disagreement becomes treason. Federalism becomes defiance. And America itself starts to look like a battlefield.
If we accept that it’s normal to treat migrant children this way because we’re at war during an invasion, what else becomes acceptable? What happens the next time a governor refuses to comply with a federal directive? What happens the next time protesters take to the streets, or a reporter chronicles a demonstration? Who gets labeled the enemy then?
This is not hypothetical. We don’t even have to reach back to the 1930s in Europe; we’ve seen this movie before right here in America.
The “war on drugs” gave us mass incarceration and militarized police. The “war on terror” gave us torture, secret prisons, and ongoing surveillance.
Every time we let wartime language redefine our domestic policy debates, the result is the same. Rights shrink, power concentrates, and dissidents, members of the media, and the most vulnerable alike pay the price.
Children are supposed to be the line we never cross: they’re the moral stress test of any society. If a system refuses to protect its children, it isn’t a system worth defending.
Little Liam locked up in that Texas facility behind concrete and razor wire is not a symbol: he’s a child who should be in school. Who should be sleeping in his own bed at home, tucked in by a loving parent. Who should be held by people who see him as a human being, not a person with brown skin to be exploited to satisfy the racist blood-lust of the MAGA base.
Supporters of these policies will say that enforcement is necessary. That the private, for-profit facilities they use meet legal standards. That Homan’s rhetoric is just “tough talk.”
But it’s all bulls--t: enforcement doesn’t require cruelty. Following the law doesn’t require dehumanization. And words are never just words when they come from people with power.
Language shapes policy. Policy shapes systems. Systems shape societies.
That’s the through line from Homan’s bizarre press briefing filled with war talk to a small child lying awake hungry, shivering, and crying under fluorescent lights.
A nation that truly believes in liberty and justice doesn’t have to declare war on children to enforce its laws. It doesn’t need to turn sovereign states into enemies in order to govern effectively, or imprison reporters for doing their jobs. And it doesn’t need to abandon its humanity to keep its citizens safe.
The question this regime confronts us with isn’t one of how to enforce or not enforce immigration law; it’s what kind of society we’re willing to become in the process.
- 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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Dems can beat Trump on this key issue — they need to believe it
Ever since Donald Trump rode down the escalator in 2015, attacking immigrants as drug smugglers and rapists, immigration has been his signature issue, often putting the Democrats on the defensive.
During his first term, Trump's cruel policies of separating families at the border and his BS about Mexico paying for the wall contributed to his defeat in 2020. But the Biden administration had no answer for the flood of immigrants who then crossed the border, which Trump used as a cudgel during the 2024 campaign. Once again the issue was Trump’s and in his second term he’s decided to play hardball by, in effect, totally shutting down the border and deporting record numbers of immigrants.
It was working. While his handling of the economy tanked his poll numbers, immigration enforcement remained strong … until Minneapolis.
There, Trump overplayed his hand and did not stick to his argument to deport undocumented felons. Instead, he allowed the psychotic Stephen Miller to round up undocumented immigrants, non-felons and felons alike, with even some darker-skinned citizens (literally) tossed into the ICE detention centers.
Not only is this a cruel and inhumane policy, but it’s also not what the American people, including the white working-class, want.
For different reasons, Trump and the Democrats seem oblivious to the fact that nearly two-thirds of the American people support “granting legal status to all illegal immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least three years and committed no felony crimes.”
Trump doesn’t give a damn about these hard-working immigrants. He’s quite happy to support the MAGA “replacement theory” that calls for the protection of a white America from people of color. For Democrats, a pathway to citizenship is too hot to handle, making them look as if they support “illegals,” even if these undocumented immigrants are not felons. They fear Trump’s cudgel and ignore what the American people want.
According to our YouGov survey of 3,000 voters in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, 63 percent support the “granting legal status” statement and only 37 percent oppose it.
In urban areas in these four states the support is massive:
- Democrats: 91 percent
- Independents: 73 percent
- Republicans: 47 percent
Looking at urban and non-urban areas combined, 36 percent of those who voted for Trump in 2024 supported this path to citizenship. And 81 percent of Hispanic voters supported it.
We also have 2020 data on the support of the white working class throughout the country, which shows that 62 percent supported this same exact “granting legal status” statement, up from 32 percent in 2010.
It’s as if Trump and the Democrats are stuck in 2010 and don’t realize that the working-class has great sympathy for hard working undocumented immigrants, especially in urban areas where day-day contact is greatest. That’s where nearly everyone comes into contact with immigrants who do so much of the hard labor that makes our economy function. Just 20 metro areas account for 60 percent of all undocumented immigrants.
It is politically explosive to send thousands of ICE and border agents into urban areas to randomly round up undocumented workers. Unless you are trying to foment an urban rebellion so you can send in troops to crush it in the name of law and order and cancel the midterms.
What about the dangerous felons?
The Trump administration has deported each month approximately 1,100 undocumented immigrants with prior violent convictions, according the New York Times. I have no doubt that many Americans support their deportation if it is done in a reasonable way. But at the same time Miller’s shock troops have deported 2,100 immigrants with no criminal records per month. Per month!
That’s what happens when thousands of heavily armed mask-wearing troops invade an urban area, stopping people on the street and raiding houses of worship, businesses, and hospitals without court-approved search warrants. That’s not how you catch felons, that’s how you round up undocumented non-felons. That’s how you get away with stopping people based solely on their skin tone, not on any investigative information about criminal activity. And it shouldn’t be surprising that that’s not OK with much of the American people, something Trump slowly is realizing.
Will Democrats come to the defense of undocumented workers?
You couldn’t ask for a better political moment given that Miller’s goons have killed two protesters in the last two weeks. This would be the perfect time to demand that ICE be prohibited from conducting any and all random stops throughout the country, and refrain from arresting any undocumented immigrants who have not committed a felony crime. And this is the time to call for a clear path to citizenship for hard working, non-felonious, undocumented workers.
Undocumented workers need political champions, those with enough guts to call for an end to the dual labor market system in which undocumented workers live and work in the shadows and are exploited again and again. That’s not grandstanding. That’s setting a principled agenda for justice and fairness...
But there’s little indication that the Democratic Party is willing to go there. The political calculous is obvious: let Trump overplay his hand and hope the anger against him crests into a massive blue wave flooding the midterms. Why risk supporting a path to citizenship, which only will be thrown back at the Democrats declaring they are weak-kneed on immigration? Stopping Trump, the thinking goes, is more important than grandstanding about paths to citizenship given that the Democrats don’t have the votes to deliver. And besides, undocumented workers can’t vote, angry protestors can and will.
But here are two problems with this strategy. The first is that Trump will adjust the ICE invasions between now and November. He has to realize that rounding up felons requires a different, less visible approach that refrains from random searches and street brawls in urban areas. It should be obvious to Trump that Miller’s masked goons will cost the Republicans the midterms if the shock troops continue to roam the streets. White House border czar Tom Homans already is in Minneapolis, saying the shock troops will stand down, in some way, soon.
The second problem is that undocumented workers need political champions, those with enough guts to call for an end to the dual labor market system in which undocumented workers live and work in the shadows and are exploited again and again. That’s not grandstanding. That’s setting a principled agenda for justice and fairness, something that working people of all shades can connect with.
The anti-ICE protesters are leading the charge with the backing of a few state and local Democrats. But nationally the Democrats seem more comfortable talking about Jeffrey Epstein than protecting terrorized immigrants.
The Democrats may not have the nerve, but Dan Osborn, a working-class independent in Nebraska running for the U.S. Senate, sure does. Here’s how he put it:
“I believe that undocumented workers, there should be a clear path for them to become documented or become legal status.”
We need some meaningful immigration reform. These people are our friends. They’re our neighbors. A lot of them have been here 30 years or more, and I think it’s time they get into Social Security already. There’s 80,000 open jobs in Nebraska that we can’t fill, that we can certainly use immigrant labor for.
Did that kill Osborn's chances in his 2024 race? He lost by six points but ran 15 points ahead of Kamala Harris and he’s running again in 2026. He deserves our support.
And, as Bruce Springsteen sings in the song he wrote last weekend, so do the people who are protecting “the stranger in our midst.”
Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
We’ll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
Here in our home, they killed and roamed
In the winter of ‘26
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
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The FBI elections raid was political theater — but something far more sinister too
If you thought that President Donald Trump and Georgia Republican candidates for higher office have left the 2020 election in the rearview mirror, think again.
Federal agents on Wednesday were seen seizing records from Fulton County’s election center warehouse as the president continues echoing false claims surrounding his 2020 loss to Democrat Joe Biden. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department have not provided a reason for the raid, but a U.S. magistrate judge signed off on a warrant allowing agents to access a trove of information from ballots to voter rolls.
It doesn’t appear that county or state officials had advanced notice of Wednesday’s raid at the 600,000-square-foot facility in Union City, which is used as a polling place, a site for county election board meetings and a storage facility for ballots and information about Fulton voters.
Concerns about election security are not new in Georgia’s most populous county, which includes Atlanta and routinely gives overwhelming support to Democratic presidential and statewide candidates. But this week’s raid is a major escalation in a years-long battle over election integrity — one that appears to be emerging as more of a political litmus test.
“This is a blatant attempt to distract from the Trump-authorized state violence that killed multiple Americans in Minnesota,” said Democrat Dana Barrett, a Fulton County commissioner who is also running for Secretary of State.
“Sending 25 FBI agents to raid our Fulton County elections office is political theater and part of a concerted effort to take over elections in swing districts across the country.”
The raid comes as the 2026 Republican primary for governor, which features many of the same Republicans who sparred over that year’s election results, is starting to heat up. Both Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Attorney General Chris Carr have repeatedly vouched for Georgia’s 2020 tally and refused to join any attempts to subvert it, putting them on a collision course with MAGA world over their loyalty to President Donald Trump as they campaign for the state’s top job.
Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who is running with the president’s endorsement, praised Wednesday’s raid and offered us a preview of what we will likely soon see in his doom-and-gloom campaign commercials.
“Fulton County Elections couldn’t run a bake sale,” Jones said on social media Wednesday. “And unfortunately, our Secretary of State hasn’t fixed the corruption and our Attorney General hasn’t prosecuted it.”
In the months and weeks leading up to the November 2020 vote, Trump’s repeated warnings of potential nefarious activity in that year’s election became part of his rhetoric. Georgia would emerge as the epicenter of the president’s claims of election fraud, even after multiple hand recounts and lawsuits confirmed Biden’s ultimate victory.
His allies in the state Legislature urged leaders to call a special session to reallocate Georgia’s 16 electoral votes. Some Republicans, including Jones, signed a certificate designating themselves as the “electors” who officially vote for president and vice president. And Trump’s January 2021 phone call to Raffensperger, where he urged the secretary to “find” enough votes to erase his defeat, was at the heart of Fulton County’s election racketeering case against Trump and his allies.
The case was dismissed late last year.
Nevertheless, Trump’s claims of fraud have become a key pillar in his party’s political identity: More than half of Republicans in Congress still objected to the certification of Trump’s defeat in the hours following the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. A 2024 national poll from the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that roughly three in ten voters still had questions about the validity of Biden’s win three years prior, a glaring sign of just how mainstream that belief has become among the general public.
Six years later, Trump’s return to the White House hasn’t helped him move on. He continues to say in remarks and at campaign events that he carried the Peach State “three times.” His now-infamous Fulton County mugshot hangs right outside the Oval Office. And he warned of prosecutions against election officials during a speech in Davos this month.
“[Russia’s war with Ukraine] should have never started and it wouldn’t have started if the 2020 U.S. presidential election weren’t rigged. It was a rigged election,” Trump said. “Everybody now knows that. They found out. People will soon be prosecuted for what they did. That’s probably breaking news.”
It’s clear that the past is still very much shaping the present in Georgia Republican politics. This week’s federal raid on the Fulton elections center just adds more fuel to old grudge matches, and a politician’s role in the 2020 election could ultimately determine their political standing.
For candidates like Carr and Raffensperger, the primary could be a test of whether or not there is a political price to pay for defending Georgia’s election results against the barrage of attacks and conspiracy theories. And for Jones, it’s a test of whether election denialism is still an effective political attack for MAGA-aligned candidates to use.
- Niles Francis recently graduated from Georgia Southern University with a degree in political science and journalism. He has spent the last few years observing and writing about the political maneuvering at Georgia’s state Capitol and regularly publishes updates in a Substack newsletter called Peach State Politics. He is currently studying to earn a graduate degree and is eager to cover another exciting political year in the battleground state where he was born and raised.
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This Trump claim is so absurd it deserves only absurdity in reply
In his recent Davos speech to world leaders in Switzerland, President Donald Trump chastised European countries for falling for the climate-change hoax and wasting billions of dollars on green-energy scams.
Trump sees himself on a crusade to disabuse the world of the greatest environmental con in history, having singlehandedly uncovered the Chinese climate-change hoax intended to undermine democratic countries’ economies. Countries around the globe began developing green-energy sources, reduced their reliance on fossil fuels, and undermined their countries’ energy stability. Now, Trump claims to be wisely moving the US in the opposite direction and taking the world with him.
A very nervous, twitchy fly on the Oval Office wall provided the following plausibly reliable information on Trump’s fever-dream aspirations for the next 100 days:
Beginning his crusade in the US, Trump will sue any newspaper spreading misinformation harmful to Americans that climate change fuels terrible natural disasters. As a case in point, Trump will sue any newspaper that has falsely linked the deadly winter storm currently gripping the US to warming temperatures in the Arctic caused by climate change.
“So warmer Arctic weather is causing frigid temperatures in the US,” Trump allegedly guffawed. “What kind of fools do the newspapers and their pseudo scientists take us for?” All newspapers will be forced to publicly retract every word linking the deadly storms to climate change to avoid a $10 billion lawsuit. “Lying to the American people is one thing I won’t tolerate,” said Trump.
Trump is also scrubbing false climate-change propaganda from America’s educational system, where he believes an entire generation of young Americans are being fed lies that climate change is this huge existential threat to the planet.
A recently enacted executive order requires that all units on climate change be deleted from public-school science textbooks and replaced by an EPA-provided unit entitled, “The Anti-Science Climate-Change Hoax.” In addition, wherever the term “climate change” may appear in any textbook across the curriculum, it must be referred to as “natural climate change,” Mother Nature’s climate change,” or “God-given climate change.”
Any school district not complying with the executive order will lose all federal funding and not be allowed to name any school after President Trump. In addition, board members will be investigated by FBI director Kash Patel for possible ties to the Chinese government.
Evidence of such ties may include a board member’s abnormal frequenting of Chinese restaurants, an unusual preoccupation with karaoke singing, or large amounts of made-in-China toys and appliances discovered through FBI search-and-seizure operations of board members’ homes.
“We will evaluate the evidence,” said Patel, “and never rush to judgment unless examples must be made.”
States will also feel the brunt of increasing green-energy production and/or reducing their reliance of fossil fuels. Executive orders will remove all federal funding for states’ green-energy programs, “cap” the amount of green energy-produced Kilowatt hours to 2025 levels, and cut off all green-energy heating in governors’ mansions.
In addition, oil-producing states will lose federal funding that don’t increase their oil production and refinement output by 15 percent annually. To ensure compliance, teams of federal agents may be sent to oil-drilling and refinement sites with the power to arrest protestors but without authority to shoot unless provoked by violence or unendurable humiliation.
Countries that continue to increase green-energy production will be slapped with additional US tariffs up to 50 percent. However, countries that increase fossil fuel-produced energy will be given “very generous terms” according to President Trump. For replacing green-energy sources with US-purchased oil, countries will receive a 15 percent reduction in established rates for US oil recently produced in Venezuela or confiscated by the US military from Venezuelan tankers.
President Trump is taking these critical steps for two reasons: to defeat China’s plan to weaken the democratic world through its climate-change hoax and to ensure the US’s energy independence through greater production and usage of fossil fuels.
According to Trump, “America and the rest of the world must dramatically increase our production and reliance on dependable, environmentally enriching fossil fuels or we’ll all be wearing Mao suits tomorrow, which doesn’t flatter my body type. It’s either ‘drill, baby, drill’ across the globe or Chow Mein and fortune cookies three meals a day.”
Trump’s crusade to expose man-made climate change as an abominable Chinese hoax is essential to changing worldwide public opinion and rescuing countries from self-inflicted destruction. If Trump is successful, he says, “The time will come when electric cars, wind turbines, solar panels, and hydroelectric plants are as popular universally as Crooked Joe Biden’s “Cup O’ Joe” coffee mugs.”
As Trump prophesizes, “The day will come when oil proudly rules the energy world once again, and no one’s in a better position to make a killing than the US. Take that to the bank.”
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This Trump onslaught is a betrayal of all I fought for. I won't stay silent
Given the fear and chaos that currently has a chokehold on my home state, Minnesota, around the murder by federal agents of two innocent people, I had to think outside of the box — of a way for me to beg folks to see just how wrong this is.
I readily admit I've never written an op ed, and am certain this will be my last. So when I sat down to write about my response to the ICE murders of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, I had to ask myself, why would anyone listen?
Here is my advantage. I've had the privilege to live and experience things a lot longer than most.
Fear and I are old acquaintances. As I am a 76-year-old Black man who has lived long past his predicted expiration date, fear has been a long-time nemesis too.
As a child of the South, I knew others who wore hoods. Those were the masks of the day. I remember the vitriol, the epithets, the "strange fruit" meant to cause fear, to intimidate, to subjugate an entire race. Such fear induces trauma, and that leaves life-long scars.
Fear followed me all the way to Vietnam. Not just fear of the designated enemy. Fear of the enemy within, too. The same hateful, divisive scarring sentiments, from so-called brothers.
Now, as a senior citizen, an elder who for a long time has felt, "I've done my part," I have been forced to reinvent myself.
I have to do so to make my voice heard, in opposition to ICE and their brutal operations. I spoke out first after the killing of Good. I continued to speak out after Pretti was shot dead too.
I have to do so in order to make it clear: fear and hate are insidious and infectious, multiplied by racial hatred.
Kidnapping children, separating families, and spreading fear are not the values that myself and many just like me fought for.
If this continues, we will no longer be the self-proclaimed Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.
If that moment comes, every soul that has made the ultimate sacrifice will have been shown to have died in vain.
- Ronn Easton, former Specialist 4th Class, United States Army, served in Vietnam. He is a participant in the Home of the Brave campaign, amplifying the voices of brave Americans speaking out against the Trump administration.
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Here's how Trump is tipping the world into economic chaos
America’s economic system has never been fair or perfect but for more than a century it rested on basic guardrails that kept instability in check and allowed us to fight for progress and win. Those guardrails are now being stripped away by policies that favor wealth and power over accountability and long-term stability.
For over a hundred years, the United States has been the cornerstone of international economic stability. The independence of our central bank (the “Fed”) has been a part of it, as has the strength of the dollar, which comes about in large part because the rest of the world relies on our currency as the default for international trade.
And now Donald Trump and the GOP are threatening it all.
Trump has added $2 trillion to our national debt in the past 12 months, and he’s on course to do it again (or worse) this year. While our entire GDP — the entirety of all goods and services produced in America every year — is roughly $31.1 trillion, our national debt stands at $38.4 trillion.
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell pointed out on Wednesday:
“Right now we’re running a very large deficit at essentially full employment and so the fiscal picture needs to be addressed, and it’s not really being addressed,” adding, “the path is unsustainable and the sooner we work on it, the better.”
When Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981, our national debt was less than $1 trillion, because every president from FDR to Truman to Eisenhower to Kennedy to Johnson to Nixon to Ford to Carter had worked to pay down the roughly 140 percent of GDP debt we ran up fighting World War II.
Across those same presidencies, America had also built a broad and strong social safety net for its citizens, primarily through the New Deal and Great Society programs. And Republicans hated it all, particularly because it’d been paid for with a 74 percent to 91 percent income tax on billionaires and a 50 percent income tax on corporate profits.
They were desperate to find a way to force Democrats to gut their own “Santa” social welfare programs, so, Republicans reasoned, if they just cut taxes on rich people and then ran the debt up hard and fast enough it would freak out Democrats and force them to dial back social spending.
They called it their “Two Santas” strategy, which I detail here, and over the course of the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts and two illegal wars, four Republican presidents managed to add over $37 trillion to our national debt.
The grimmest consequence of this is that we’re spending $1.2 trillion every year on interest payments on our national debt. That’s money that could otherwise have gone to create a national healthcare system, provide free college education, or help people buy their first homes but, instead, is going to payments to wealthy investors here and abroad who hold US Treasuries.
Up until recently, we were able to pull this off because the US Dollar has been the world’s reserve currency for the better part of a century. All sorts of international transactions (especially oil) are denominated in dollars, so there’s a huge worldwide demand for our currency because you can’t trade without them; that keeps the dollar’s value strong and lets us borrow at what would otherwise be absurdly low rates.
That, in turn, is essentially a subsidy for Americans of all stripes: lower mortgage rates, lower car loan rates, easier credit, and US-based companies can more easily finance growth and new product development.
It also gives our government more power on the international stage because we control the dollars everybody must use, so we can exploit that leverage to seize other countries’ dollar-denominated assets, enforce embargos, and freeze economic activity.
But twice in the past twelve months the value of the dollar has taken a huge hit, in both cases because the world freaked out at Trump’s insanity and started to sell dollars.
The first was in April of last year (a 6 percent drop in value) when Trump announced his bizarre worldwide tariffs; the second was last week when he went to Davos and blithered through a semi-coherent speech that left international leaders wondering about his sanity, his judgement, and his reliability. And, by inference, the judgment and reliability of the United States itself.
Trump’s own economic illiteracy and impulse-driven tariff policies, in other words, have damaged the value of our currency and may have put the status of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency at risk.
The most visible consequence of this collapse in the dollar’s value are spikes in the prices of gold (now over $5,000/ounce, up from $1,077 in 2015) and silver, and how much more expensive foreign travel has become. Three years ago, the euro was at parity with the dollar (one dollar buys one euro), but today a dollar only buys €0.84 (84 cents).
As the dollar drops in value, that’s ultimately reflected in everything imported becoming more expensive (which drives inflation), although it does help companies that export things as it makes their goods and services cheaper.
The big impact, though, could come if international investors and other countries conclude it’s unlikely that the US will be able to repay our debts.
Ever since the Bush Crash of 2008 revealed how deregulation had corrupted our banking system, foreign investors holdings of US debt have steadily declined.
For the rest of the world to have “full faith and confidence” in the US and our currency, they must be convinced we operate with economic transparency and consistently abide by the rule of law.
Trump’s willy-nilly tariffs, often used to extort other nations into giving his family a new hotel or golf course, his constant lies on the international stage about everything from renewable energy to our “right” to invade a foreign country and capture its leader, to his killing fishermen off the coast of Venezuela and his current threats against Iran, all argue against trusting us.
Trump’s already destroyed our soft power by gutting USAID, ruined our relationships with our allies by embracing Putin and trash-talking NATO and the EU, and now is shaking the confidence of our remaining democratic allies by imposing police-state tactics on Blue cities.
The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) countries are on the move, with Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the UAE having joined recently in an agreement to use their alternative currencies instead of dollars. China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) is now also challenging our SWIFT system, and South Africa and Brazil are the most recent countries to integrate it into their own financial systems. They’re using the real and the yuan to trade things like soybeans, going entirely around the dollar.
India and the UAE are now trading in rupees and the dirham, and China is using yuan to buy natural gas from the UAE. China has almost entirely abandoned the dollar for their trade with Russia, the UAE, and Iran. Like South Africa, Brazil has increasingly been using the real and the yuan to settle bilateral trade with China, bypassing the US dollar.
Thus, in recent years, alternatives to the greenback are gaining traction. Even Trump’s good buddy Javier Milei in Argentina is now trading with China in yuan instead of dollars.
We still have enormous momentum and a collapse of the dollar or the international system based on it is unlikely to happen in the near term, but if Trump continues to badger our Federal Reserve or appoints a toady to its chair, and continues with his erratic, illegal, and unconstitutional behavior here and abroad, there’s a good chance that a concerted international effort to de-dollarize will pick up even more steam than it already has.
Economic collapse isn’t inevitable, but it becomes more likely when demagogues choose inequality, debt, and instability over responsibility and shared prosperity.
Whether this era is remembered as a turning point or just a warning from our Fed chief will depend on whether we ignore those choices Republicans have made for 45 years, or if we finally confront and reverse them.
Hang on, keep your eyes open, and follow these trends. Forewarned is forearmed.
- Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.
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This law is a death sentence for ICE agents — and Republicans love it
The Fourth Amendment protects you from tyranny. It protects you from government agents busting down your door without probable cause. It says you are secure in your home “against unreasonable searches and seizures,” which means no warrants shall issue without “probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation.”
The Fourth Amendment didn’t materialize in a vacuum, but was the pained outcome of a despotic King’s overreach that brutalized early American colonists. It sprang from British officials using “general warrants,” or “Writs of Assistance” they ginned up themselves to search and seize colonists and their property whenever they got the urge.
Such “writs” gave officials unfettered power to violate anyone in their crosshairs. Like Trump’s immigration enforcement raids, “Writs of Assistance” were ostensibly aimed at enforcing the law — today it’s immigration, then it was smuggling — but quickly morphed into government brutality.
Colonists grew enraged as they watched British officials ransack the homes and businesses of their neighbors searching for “smuggled goods without specific evidence.” Community outrage spread across state lines and eventually became the Bill of Rights. Over 250 years later, the Fourth Amendment requirement of a judge’s signed warrant of probable cause remains the lynchpin of our criminal justice system.
ICE thinks it can issue its own warrants
That 250-year-old requirement is apparently news to ICE. Last week, a whistleblower disclosed an internal Department of Homeland Security memo advising federal ICE agents that they have unlimited power to enter people’s homes — by force — without a judge’s signed warrant.
On Jan. 21, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) sent an internal ICE memo and whistleblower complaint to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. The memo authorizes ICE agents to rely only on administrative warrants, rather than judges’ warrants, to bust into peoples’ homes.
The whistleblower complaint does more than allege — it attaches a written memo dated May 12, 2025, signed by Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, authorizing ICE agents to forcibly enter people’s homes without a judicial warrant, consent, or an emergency. In Exhibit 1 attached to the complaint, Lyons directs ICE agents to use Form I-205, Warrants for Removal, in order to enter places of residence.
Form I-205 warrants are administrative warrants signed only by ICE officials, not judges.
The complaint also details the steps ICE has taken to hide the directive. Because it is blatantly illegal, DHS allows the memo to be read only in person; it was disseminated to select DHS officials who were directed to read it and return it to their supervisors. Newly hired ICE agents are also instructed to “disregard any written training material” that contradicts instructors’ verbal directives.
Surely White House Deputy Chief of Staff and anti-immigration zealot Stephen Miller knows his warrantless directives could trigger more violence under Stand your Ground laws.
Breaking down doors
The Framers liked to say “a man’s house is his castle.” A phrase that’s been around since the 17th century, the “castle doctrine” is a foundational pillar of both the Fourth Amendment and Stand Your Ground laws now in effect in over 31 states.
Such legislation varies by state, but overall, in cases of self-defense, such laws remove the legal duty to retreat before using force, including deadly force. In the 1980s, states enacted similar "Make My Day" laws to provide immunity from prosecution for individuals who use deadly force against someone who unlawfully enters their residence.
It comes as no surprise that Republicans in general, and the National Rifle Association in specific, were aggressive proponents of such laws. As long as the person invoking the defense is in a place they have a legal right to be, if someone busts into their home illegally and they reasonably feel their life is in danger, they may be able to shoot first and ask questions later.
Making ICE agents sitting ducks
How those laws will play out between ICE agents and immigrants with valid visas, green cards, or specific legal statuses — in other words, people who have the legal right to be in their homes, is not yet known. But just as it was only a matter of time before ill-trained ICE agents shot innocent people on the streets, it’s only a matter of time before frightened victims shoot first when masked agents with flash bangs bust into their homes.
At least one state attorney general has come under fire for suggesting that Stand Your Ground laws could apply in these situations. But now that the whole world has watched ICE murder people, and everyone knows that people in ICE custody are dying in record numbers, even Trump must understand that people will reasonably fear for their lives when masked agents bust down their door.
It’s clear Trump and Miller are setting us up for accelerating violence. Pitting warrantless ICE home entries against Stand Your Ground laws presents another unwanted question of law that will only be settled after someone else needlessly dies.
DHS is putting ICE agents squarely at risk by ordering them into homes without legal warrants. They surely know that people in Stand Your Ground homes will be triggered, and that, sooner or later, victims will start shooting. No one, except an authoritarian who thinks more violence will lead to more power, wants to see that.
DHS needs to rescind the memo immediately and revert to legally issued warrants to save its own officers’ lives.
- 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 ICE attack on Minneapolis points to a less visible but dangerous threat
The nation has been convulsed by the shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Millions now see with sickening clarity a lawless assault by federal officers on an American city and its people. As the Wall Street Journal editorialized, it is a “moral and political debacle for the Trump presidency.”
The videos were followed by a fusillade of lies from senior government officials. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Pretti had engaged in “domestic terrorism.” White House aide Stephen Miller called Pretti an “assassin” who tried to “murder federal agents.” Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino declared, “This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” The instant impulse by these high officials was to bully and smear.
Another outrageous statement by a cabinet official has not gotten enough attention.
On Saturday, Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, linking the violence in Minneapolis to a demand that the state give the Justice Department complete access to the state’s sensitive voter rolls, among other things. There’s no explicit quid pro quo offered — but anyone familiar with Grade B gangster movies won’t miss the implication. Certainly that’s how state officials have read it.
Let that sink in: Federal agents have killed innocent civilians in cold blood. And the response of the attorney general of the United States is to use it as leverage to illegally access voter data. That is an unambiguous abuse of power.
As my colleague Wendy Weiser has written, “What do voter rolls have to do with ICE? Nothing. But they have a lot to do with the administration’s ongoing efforts to meddle in elections.”
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon provided Bondi with the only legal and responsible answer (a simple “no”), describing her offer as “an apparent ransom.”
Make no mistake: The federal government has no authorization to demand confidential voter information from the states. In our constitutional system, states are responsible for maintaining and protecting voter rolls. Indeed, various state and federal laws limit how much data the federal government can collect.
But that hasn’t stopped it from trying. Bondi’s Justice Department has demanded access to the voter records of 44 states and Washington, D.C., and it has sued more than 20 states for not complying. Two courts have already ruled on the side of the states.
Why would the administration want to hoover up this data? It would give election deniers new ammunition to push false claims of voting by people who are not U.S. citizens. It would help the federal government pressure states into reckless voter purges, which would kick eligible citizens off the rolls just as November rolls around.
Plainly, it’s all part of a broader strategy to meddle with our elections. Last weekend, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) said Republicans are looking into yet another version of the unpopular SAVE Act — the bill that would require American citizens to produce a birth certificate, passport, or similar document to register to vote. At least 21 million Americans lack ready access to those documents, according to our research. The bill narrowly passed the House but stalled in the Senate last year after massive public pushback.
Bondi’s letter is a gross escalation of this effort — an explicit abuse of this moment to coerce Minnesota to step into line.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT.) worries that this escalation is by design. Last weekend, he warned that the “Trump administration is creating this mayhem, particularly in cities in swing states, in order to take control of the election.”
When Donald Trump took office the first time in 2017, he talked of “American carnage.” Shooting of bystanders, squads of masked armed men, terrorized immigrants, clouds of tear gas, vague claims of conspiracy, and more — all bring that “carnage” to life. That sense of crisis, consciously instigated, can create opportunities to undermine the election and sow doubt and division.
To be clear (and I get asked this a lot): Donald Trump cannot cancel the midterms. Presidents have no power to do that.
But this armed assault on a major American city, coupled with a thuggish offer implying that the bully boys might be pulled back if state officials will betray their voters, shows the damage that can be done nonetheless.
The dignified and angry public response from around the country to the latest killing suggests maybe something has snapped. It would not be the first time in our history that government violence kindled an even more powerful reaction.
It’s not only the safety and sanity of people in Minnesota that’s at stake. As we are reminded once again, our democracy is on the line.
- Michael Waldman is President of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, a nonpartisan law and policy institute that focuses on improving the systems of democracy and justice.
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Trump is like this fascist dictator — it isn't Hitler
By Rachelle Wilson Tollemar, Adjunct Professor of Spanish, University of St. Thomas.
Minneapolis residents say they feel besieged under what some are calling a fascist occupation. Thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been swarming a city whose vast majority in 2024 did not vote for Donald Trump — or for a paramilitary roundup of its diverse population.
Tragically, two residents have been killed by federal agents. Consequently, social media is aflame with comparisons of Trump’s immigration enforcers to Hitler’s Gestapo.
While comparisons to Hitler’s fascist regime are becoming common, I’d argue that it may be even more fitting to compare the present moment to a less-remembered but longer-lasting fascist regime: that of Francisco Franco, dictator of Spain from 1936 until his death in 1975.
In 2016, critics warned that Trump’s campaign rhetoric was grounded in textbook fascism, exhibiting signs such as racism, sexism and misogyny, nationalism, propaganda and more. In return, critics were met with intense backlash, accused of being hysterical or overly dramatic.
Now, even normally sober voices are sounding the alarm that America may be falling to fascist rule.
As a scholar of Spanish culture, I, too, see troubling parallels between Franco’s Spain and Trump’s America.
Putting them side by side, I believe, provides insightful tools that are needed to understand the magnitude of what’s at risk today.
Franco’s rise and reign
The Falange party started off as a a small extremist party on the margins of Spanish society, a society deeply troubled with political and economic instability. The party primarily preached a radical nationalism, a highly exclusive way to be and act Spanish. Traditional gender roles, monolingualism and Catholicism rallied people by offering absolutist comfort during uncertain times. Quickly, the Falange grew in power and prevalence until, ultimately, it moved mainstream.
By 1936, the party had garnered enough support from the Catholic Church, the military, and wealthy landowners and businessmen that a sizable amount of the population accepted Gen. Francisco Franco’s coup d'etat: a military crusade of sorts that sought to stop the perceived anarchy of liberals living in godless cities. His slogan, “¡Una, Grande, Libre!,” or “one, great, free,” mobilized people who shared the Falange’s anxieties.
Like the Falange, MAGA, the wing of the Republican Party named after Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again,” repeatedly vilifies the left, who mostly live in cities, as godless anarchists who live like vermin.
Once in power, the Francoist regime commissioned a secret police force, the Political-Social Brigade — known as the BPS — to “clean up house.” The BPS was charged with suppressing or killing any political, social, cultural or linguistic dissidents.
Weakening resistance
Franco not only weaponized the military but also proverbially enlisted the Catholic Church. He colluded with the clergy to convince parishioners, especially women, of their divine duty to multiply, instill nationalist Catholic values in their children, and thus reproduce ideological replicas of both the state and the church. From the pulpit, homemakers were extolled as “ángeles del hogar” and “heroínas de la patria,” or “angels of the home” and “heroines of the homeland.”
Together, Franco and the church constructed consent for social restrictions, including outlawing or criminalizing abortion, contraception, divorce, work by women and other women’s rights, along with even tolerating uxoricide, or the killing of wives, for their perceived sexual transgressions.
Some scholars contend that the repealing of women’s reproductive rights is the first step away from a fully democratic society. For this reason and more, many are concerned about the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent overturning of Roe v. Wade.
The #tradwife social media trend involves far-right platforms echoing Francoist-style ideologies of submission, restriction, dependence and white male dominance. One of TikTok’s most popular tradwife influencers, for instance, posted that “there is no higher calling than being a wife and a mother for a woman.” She also questioned young women attending college and rebuked, on air, wives who deny their husbands sexual intimacy.
Weakening the economy
Economically, Franco implemented autarkic policies, a system of limited trade designed to isolate Spain and protect it from anti-Spanish influences. He utilized high tariffs, strict quotas, border controls and currency manipulation, effectively impoverishing the nation and vastly enriching himself and his cronies.
These policies flew under the motto “¡Arriba España!,” or “Up Spain.” They nearly immediately triggered more than a decade of suffering known as the “hunger years.” An estimated 200,000 Spaniards died from famine and disease.
Under the slogan “America First” — Trump’s mutable but aggressive tariff regime — the $1 billion or more in personal wealth he’s accumulated while in office, along with his repeated attempts to cut nutrition benefits in blue states and his administration’s anti-vaccine policies may appear to be disconnected. But together, they galvanize an autarkic strategy that threatens to debilitate the country’s health.
Weakening the mind
Franco’s dictatorship systematically purged, exiled and repressed the country’s intellectual class. Many were forced to emigrate. Those who stayed in the country, such as the artist Joan Miró, were forced to bury their messages deeply within symbols and metaphor to evade censorship.
Currently in the U.S., banned books, banned words and phrases, and the slashing of academic and research funding across disciplines are causing the U.S. to experience “brain drain,” an exodus of members of the nation’s highly educated and skilled classes.
Furthermore, Franco conjoined the church, the state and education into one. I am tracking analogous moves in the U.S. The conservative group Turning Point USA has an educational division whose goal is to “reclaim" K-12 curriculum with white Christian nationalism.
Ongoing legislation that mandates public classrooms to display the Ten Commandments similarly violates religious freedom guarantees ratified in the constitution.
Drawing comparisons
Trump has frequently expressed admiration for contemporary dictators and last week stated that “sometimes you need a dictator.”
It is true that his tactics do not perfectly mirror Francoism or any other past fascist regime. But the work of civil rights scholar Michelle Alexander reminds us that systems of control do not disappear. They morph, evolve and adapt to sneak into modern contexts in less detectable ways. I see fascism like this.
Consider some of the recent activities in Minneapolis, and ask how they would be described if they were taking place in any other country.
Unidentified masked individuals in unmarked cars are forcibly entering homes without judicial warrants. These agents are killing, shooting and roughing up people, sometimes while handcuffed. They are tear-gassing peaceful protesters, assaulting and killing legal observers, and throwing flash grenades at bystanders. They are disappearing people of color, including four Native Americans and a toddler as young as 2, shipping them off to detention centers where allegations of abuse, neglect, sexual assault and even homicide are now frequent.
Government officials have spun deceptive narratives, or worse, lied about the administration’s actions.
In the wake of the public and political backlash following the killing of Alex Pretti, Trump signaled he would reduce immigration enforcement operations] in Minneapolis, only to turn around and have Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth authorize the use of an old military base near St. Paul, suggesting potential escalation, not de-escalation. Saying one thing while doing the opposite is a classic fascist trick warned about in history and literature alike.
The world has seen these tactics before. History shows the precedent and then supplies the bad ending. Comparing past Francoism to present Trumpism connects the past to the present and warns us about what could come.
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This superb film deserves its awards but in Trump's America it must be a cautionary tale
After sweeping the Golden Globes and other awards, Paul Thomas Anderson's film One Battle After Another has 13 Oscar nominations. Given the film’s clear relevance, if it does end up a winner, those who created it will probably do more than thank their agents, publicists, partners, and pets. They’ll likely talk about the times we’re living in, as every creative artist or public figure should, given the stakes. We hope they’ll present the film as a cautionary tale, not an endorsement of violent resistance.
It’s easy to see why One Battle has been so successful. It’s gripping, funny, and wonderfully acted. It’s a satire of political madness, left and right. But parts of it also feel real in ways that most movie satires or political thrillers don’t. Although it was completed before Donald Trump’s reelection, its images of vicious immigration raids and out-of-control police now echo America’s daily reality.
When the film played in theaters, audiences cheered for those fighting the forces trampling human dignity. But emulating the movie’s violent resisters would be a trap, confirming the justifications President Trump and his enablers give for brutalizing ordinary Americans and shredding the law.
In the movie, Leonardo DiCaprio’s lead character is part The Dude (complete with ratty bathrobe), and part follower of the 1960s-era radical group, the Weathermen. But one of us, Mark, cofounded the Weathermen after helping lead successful student protests at Columbia — and now sees the group’s embrace of violence as a destructive trap.
I remember the moral rage I felt when I realized how many innocent Vietnamese we were killing every day. Along with millions of others, young and old, I joined the anti-war movement under the banner “Bring the troops home now!” That powerful movement was fundamentally nonviolent.
But then, having helped organize increasingly powerful protests, some of us grew impatient, fueled by anger, guilt, machismo, revolutionary delusions, and the need to prove ourselves true to the cause. We convinced ourselves that only “revolutionary violence” would stop the greater violence of the war. Calling ourselves the Weathermen, we began fighting the cops sent to control our protests. We adopted a new slogan, “Bring the war home!” Eventually, some in the group escalated to planting bombs in government buildings. Our heroic actions, we thought, would wake even more people up.
The results, instead, were disastrous. Many people left the movement because of our violence and that of others who emulated us. Because of all the patient and nonviolent organizing, public opinion gradually turned against the war. But it also turned against “the radical students,” who Richard Nixon made a prime scapegoat. In doing so, those of us who embraced “revolutionary” violence played into every aspect of the fear that Nixon and his administration worked to exploit and severely damaged the movement we’d once helped build and expand. This in turn helped Nixon prolong the war, even as the broader movement eventually forced withdrawal.
That history shapes how we both see the present moment. Now, as in the movie, Trump and his regime are violently attacking immigrants and those who support them. They label even nonviolent resistance as “terrorist.” Given the brutality, it’s tempting to respond with violence. But think of the political boost Trump got from the assassination attempts, or how he and his allies weaponized the killing of Charlie Kirk — even though both were perpetrated by lone and disconnected individuals.
Global research shows that violent movements lose when facing dictators and would-be dictators, while nonviolent ones have far greater chances of winning. Nonviolence takes discipline and persistence, but we’ve seen exactly that from the courageous citizens who’ve nonviolently resisted masked men taking their neighbors in cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, and Los Angeles. And that resistance has helped shift American public sentiment.
Let’s reject revolutionary mythologizing and hope that the creators and stars of One Battle make clear that what authoritarians fear most is disciplined nonviolence, not out of control rage.
- Mark Rudd was a founder of the Weathermen, spent seven years underground, and then became an organizer and community college math instructor in Albuquerque, NM. He’s the author of Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen. Paul Rogat Loeb was kicked out of Stanford University for nonviolent anti-war activism, and is the author of Soul of a Citizen and The Impossible Will Take a Little While.
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The same dark figure lurks behind everything Donald Trump does
When I think of America’s so-called president and the way he goes about his job, the same phrase pops into my head: “Nice little country you got there. It’d be a shame if something were to happen to it.”
Trump speaks the language of mobsters. He threatens, bullies and makes deals pretty much the same way as do the Corleones and Sopranos. Justice flows one way. If we don’t like it, tough.
The MAGA universe appears to view this uncivilized behavior as brute strength to be admired. The rest of us see it as boorish and beastly. But whatever you want to call it, it seems to have been ripped from the pages of a manual for organized crime.
As a huge fan of The Sopranos, I immediately recognized this White House gang’s style. In fact, having written a 2024 companion book, The Sopranos: The Complete Visual History, I feel uniquely qualified to compare methods — and to outline how Trump steals from Tony Soprano.
Here are the parallels I see:
- Loyalty over competence: Loyalty is prized over all else. Tony rewards people who are loyal first and effective second. In the mob, you back the boss, even when he’s wrong. Trump rules in much the same way, valuing fealty, whether someone is with him, over anything approaching expertise. One moment of disloyalty and you’re radioactive.
- Family as power structure: Tony’s belief system is inseparable from the interests of his extended mob clan. Trump has obliterated the line between government and family business, creating a vibe more New Jersey than D.C. Blood — or brand — outranks institutions.
- Public bluster, private grievance: Both Tony and Trump project dominance while obsessing over even the tiniest supposed slight. Tony stews. Trump posts. Different mediums, same psychology. Respect is currency. The boss is always the victim. The mob boss sees himself as persecuted even while dominating the room. To Trump, investigations are “witch hunts,” losses are “rigged,” criticism is “abuse.”
- Omertà over transparency: Tony’s people simply don’t talk to outsiders, especially authorities. Trump’s inner circle treats the media, investigators, even Congress as hostile forces. Silence, stonewalling, and counterattacks carry the day. Truth isn’t denied so much as deemed irrelevant.
- Titles are cover stories: In organized crime, everyone has a job title that obscures what they really do — mostly, protecting the boss and the family. In Trump’s second term, aides hold official roles while functioning as enforcers (Secretary of War Pete Hegseth), propagandists (Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt), or validators (Chief of Staff Susie Wiles).
- Threats are vague, but targeted: In both the Jersey and D.C. mobs, there is constant talk of investigations, prosecutions, or retaliation without specifics, so as to diminish accountability while ratcheting up fear. The result is that targets self-censor and retreat without the boss having to act.
- Enemies linger round every corner: Critics are reframed as enemies, traitors, or criminals. Tony always believes he’s under siege from rival families and the FBI, while Trump blames “radical left Democrats” and the press while allies not considered loyal enough are “RINOs” (Republicans In Name Only). Institutions that resist are deemed corrupt.
- Constant internal jockeying: Mob crews are rife with paranoia. Today’s favorite is tomorrow’s rat. Trumpworld thrives on chaos: aides competing for favor, testing boundaries, signaling loyalty to avoid suspicion. Confusion itself is a strategy.
- Morality is transactional: Right or wrong are flexible if it benefits the boss. Tony calls it “business.” Trump calls it “deals.” Principles are useful until they aren’t.
- Retaliation is the point: In Tony’s world, punishment isn’t just about correction; it’s a matter of sending a message. Trump and his people often seek vengeance openly, against critics, prosecutors, journalists, former allies, everyone. Even symbolic punishment is enough as long as everyone gets the message. Fear subs for governance.
- Public performance of strength: Tony and his minions are all about showcasing dominance: expensive suits, loud bravado, exaggerated confidence. Trump’s circle exhibits strength through rallies, social media posts, press appearances, and absolutist rhetoric. Setbacks are reframed as triumphs. Admitting weakness would be a grievous, unforgivable sin.
- The mess left behind is massive but somebody else’s problem: With both “families,” the boss must outlive the institutions surrounding him. People, norms, and the system take the hit while Tony and Trump insist it is they who were treated unfairly.
- Bullying beats diplomacy: The expectation that people at the top of the mob food chain will behave honorably is wielded as a good cop/bad cop negotiation strategy. In Trump’s presidency, a “might makes right” mentality works to both bludgeon opposition and intimidate foes into compliance.
- Bottom line: The Sopranos is about power without accountability pretending to be family. Trump and his aides are about power without accountability pretending to be adored by the masses.
It should also be noted that for all the unabashed criminality and institutional corruption of the characters on The Sopranos, its community nonetheless had a moral center the Trump-o-sphere lacks: Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco,) the empathetic, supportive, ethical, and principled psychiatrist struggling to help Tony look himself in the mirror.
Dr. Melfi did her best to analyze and contextualize. She was attacked and/or dismissed when the truth became untenable, but at least she tried. And her work often exposed some form of self-professed honor at the root of Tony’s behavior.
There is no such voice of conscience or sanity in Trump’s circle today. Therein resides a problem that has been examined ad infinitum over the last year: the lack of any adult voice in the room.
You know we’re in serious trouble when a fictitious mobster carries a more urgent sense of integrity and accountability than a real-life American president.
- Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.
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The latest turning point in America's civil war
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
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