Trump gets icy reception as he readies State of the Union boasts
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
Clear evidence shows Trump is in steep decline — but we should still fear worse to come
I’ve always been a cup-half-full kind of guy, even when the cup is a tenth full.
So I’m delighted that federal troops are leaving Minneapolis. Also that communities across America are mobilizing to block ICE warehouses. And that Democrats have temporarily stopped the funding of the Department of Homeland Insecurity.
I’m pleased that the Supreme Court has struck down Trump’s tariffs.
And that some Republicans in Congress have stopped doing whatever Trump tells them to do.
And I couldn’t be happier that Trump’s approval rating continues to plummet. More voters now disapprove than approve of his job performance in all of the seven swing states he won in 2024!
So, I’d like to believe the worst is over. I wish I could tell you (and myself) to relax.
But I have to be honest with you: I fear worse is to come.
Why? Because ICE is recruiting like mad in a massive $100 million effort targeting military and gun enthusiasts, NASCAR attendees, and users of tactical gear, while utilizing “wartime” rhetoric and neo-Nazi imagery in its advertisements.
Because Trump’s billionaire backers and sicko sycophants know they have only 11 months to do their worst before Democrats might take control of at least one chamber of Congress and stop them.
Because Trump also knows this and will do whatever he can do to intimidate Democratic voters in the midterms, fiddle with ballots, change results, or prevent certifications to avoid a Democratic takeover. He has already demonstrated he has no compunction about trying to destroy electoral processes to get his way.
There is also the U.S. armada now stationed in the Middle East. Although Trump lacks congressional authorization to go to war, he told reporters on Friday that he was considering a “limited” military strike to pressure Iran into a deal.
But mostly I fear worse to come because time and again — especially when he feels like he’s losing — Trump doubles down on stupid. (He just announced, for example, that in light of the Supreme Court’s tariff decision, he’s imposing a 15 percent tariff on every country we trade with around the world.)
And his toadies — Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — double down on their cruel mindlessness, if only to demonstrate to Trump their kindred stupidity.
ICE has left downtown Minneapolis but has reportedly increased its activities in the suburbs of the Twin Cities. “As far as Homan’s announcement of a drawdown, there’s no difference,” said Alex Falconer, a Democratic state representative for Minnetonka and Eden Prairie. “In fact, it’s become a little worse.”
Due to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vax campaign, the U.S. is experiencing a surge in measles. South Carolina is the epicenter of the outbreak, with over 960 confirmed cases, and the virus continues to spread, with 26 states reporting new cases this year. Last year, two children in the U.S. died from measles. Both were unvaccinated.
The United States continues to strike small fishing boats in waters around Central America, alleging without proof they are smuggling drugs into the United States. Three people were killed Friday in the eastern Pacific.
Trump continues to use racist memes, as he did two weeks ago when posting an AI-generated depiction of former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as apes.
The corruption, too, is worsening.
This means you and I and all sane Americans cannot relax our vigilance. In fact, we must mount an even more powerful resistance to this ongoing calamity.
We are in a de facto war for freedom and democracy, and Trump and his regime have shown themselves to be a bunch of gangsters — racists, misogynists, nativists, traitors, and murderers.
As Abraham Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural: “The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation … We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth.”
Be well. Be safe. Hug your loved ones.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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Trump was caught pulling off the biggest heist of the 21st century
On Friday, the Supreme Court struck down Donald Trump’s tariff scheme, because the power of taxation goes to the Congress, not the president. “The Framers did not vest any part of the taxing power in the Executive Branch,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court’s majority.
The news was framed as a loss.
“The 6-3 ruling is a major blow to the president’s signature economic policy,” NPR said.
It “represents a stinging political setback,” the Washington Post said.
“The first major piece of President Trump’s broad agenda” has been upended, the AP said.
In truth, the court probably saved Trump from himself.
Hours before the court’s ruling came news of the US economy slowing down to a degree much greater than economists expected, because consumers pulled back so sharply. They did so, of course, because Trump’s tariffs scheme amounted to the biggest tax increase of the last three decades, according to the Tax Foundation. (JP Morgan Chase, in an assessment published last April, said it’s the biggest since 1968.)
The New York Times said the government collected nearly $290 billion in custom duties last year, triple what was collected the year before. Last week, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York issued a report saying more than 90 percent of that came out of the pockets of American consumers. (This quarter was shaping up to be worse than the last, as consumer confidence “collapsed” last month to its lowest level since 2014.)
So the court probably stopped Trump from burning up the rest of the American middle class, and sparking a broad-based backlash against him in this year’s midterms, threatening to take his party down with him. (Even people who do not pay attention to politics, indeed, who know almost nothing, rated his handling of prices at -40 percent.)
Still, in saving Trump from himself, the court made something clear to Americans that may not have been clear before Friday morning’s ruling — tariffs are taxes. Not only that, thanks to the court, everyone now knows the biggest tax hike since the Clinton administration was illegal.
So you could say the court saved Trump, but you could also say it gave his enemies strong grounds for accusing him of pulling off the biggest heist of the 21st century, and, because of the massive scale of the burglary, the economy came to a crawl. Again, we’re talking about nearly $290 billion, almost all of it paid for by you, me and everyone we know. (I’m using that figure. Others estimate upwards of $1 trillion.)
Even Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested, though without meaning to, that there’s been a robbery and victims are entitled to just compensation. In his dissent, the associate justice said that Trump’s tariff scheme is too complicated to unwind, with the primary complication being “refunds.”
“The court’s decision is likely to generate other serious practical consequences in the near term,” Kavanaugh wrote. “One issue will be refunds. Refunds of billions of dollars would have significant consequences for the US treasury. The court says nothing today about whether and if so how, the government should go about returning the billions of dollars that it has collected from importers, but that process is likely to be a ‘mess,’ as was acknowledged at oral arguments.”
Of course, Kavanaugh is talking about refunds to importers, which deepens the injustice of it all. They didn’t ultimately pay! We did!
I think Democratic leaders should make a deal with voters: Give us the Congress in November and we’ll pass a law forcing Trump to give back the money he stole from you. Moreover, I think the Democrats should dare their GOP counterparts to codify Trump’s tariffs and risk the allegation, entirely justified, that not only did the president pick the people’s pocket but his party now wants to make pickpocketing legal.
The Republicans probably won’t have to go that far given that Justice Kavanaugh, in his dissent, actually suggested ways for the president to get around today’s ruling, and wouldn’t you know it, that’s what Trump is going to do. In his press conference, during which he said he was “absolutely ashamed” of the high court, Trump announced a new set of global tariffs under a different law that restricts levies to 150 days.
It’s often said Trump doesn’t understand how tariffs work, but he does. He gets what they really are: leverage against rich people, corporations and countries he’s seeking to extort. It was reported today that he was angry with the court, but it wasn’t because it “set back his agenda.” It was because it took away his most powerful tool for seeking bribes.
The president’s criminal intent snapped into focus during the presser, though it was so subtle that it went mostly unnoticed. A reporter asked why Trump didn’t work with the Congress to establish import taxes, rather than pursuing another round of tariffs that will end up being challenged in court again. Trump’s reply: “Because I don’t have to.”
“I have the right to do tariffs,” he said. “I’ve always had that right to do tariffs. It’s all been approved by Congress. There’s no reason to do it.”
Rewind: The Supreme Court had just said he can’t do tariffs unilaterally, that “the Framers did not vest any part of the taxing power in the Executive Branch,” and that actions to the contrary are illegal. (Plus: Congress has not, and almost certainly will not, approve new taxes.)
Even though the Supreme Court ruled Trump’s tariffs are illegal, the criminal intent behind them hasn’t changed. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, in so many words, that the theft of the American people will continue through 2026. As for the money already stolen from us, he said: “I got a feeling the American people won’t see it.”
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Trump's fervent obsession lifts the veil on a grim reality
Stephen Colbert joked that Donald Trump wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about him on television because “all Trump does is watch TV.” It was a punchline, but it also revealed something darker: when political power becomes obsessed with controlling the screen, the most effective way to silence dissent isn’t through raids or arrests. It’s through ownership.
In today’s America, the battle over free speech isn’t happening in courtrooms, it’s happening in quiet White House dinners with greedy billionaires. And it’s following an old script.
When Viktor Orbán — the Hungarian strongman who Marco Rubio visited this past weekend to tell him how much Trump loves him and supports him — wanted to crush opposition media in his country he didn’t need police, courts, regulatory agencies, or even threats. He didn’t even need the Hungarian mafia to break the knees of Budapest media owners or threaten reporters.
Orbán simply invited a few morbidly rich Hungarian oligarchs over for dinner and told them that if they’d buy out the big media outlets and spin the news in his favor, he’d make sure their government contracts and business opportunities in other non-media areas would more than compensate them for their hassle and expenses.
Orbán let Republicans in on the strategy in May 2022, when he spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest and told the American Republican crowd:
“Have your own media. It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left.”
It’s a pretty straightforward business proposition that we see Trump embracing right now: “Give me good media coverage and I’ll make you additional billions; use your media to crap on me and I’ll have the FCC harass you and my billionaire friends buy you out.”
And, sure enough, check how it’s working out for the non-media companies (rockets, AI, data, web services, etc.) owned by media moguls Elon Musk (Twitter/X), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta/Facebook), Larry Ellison (Paramount/CBS/TikTok), and Jeff Bezos (Washington Post) that now get hundreds of billions of dollars every year in contracts from the federal government. No doubt it’s just a coincidence that their media outlets have all become cheerleaders for Trump.
Putin did the same thing in Russia, and the media in most other autocratic nations is similarly all or mostly owned by regime-friendly oligarchs on similar terms.
This model, pioneered in Germany in the 1930s, is now used to keep in power strongman regimes in the Czech Republic, Serbia, Slovenia, Turkey, India, Brazil, the Philippines, Colombia, Tunisia, Turkey, Peru, and Ghana, among dozens of others. It’s rapidly spreading across the world.
It’s produced headlines like these:
- “How oligarchs seized Central Europe’s media”
- “Serbia: State Influence on Media Ownership: Igor Žeželj and Telekom Srbija”
- “Media in the Balkans: the rise of oligarchs”
- “Media Oligarchs Go Shopping”
- “The Media in Indonesia: Journalism Between the State and Oligarchs”
- “Slovene Media Owned by Oligarchs, Corrupt Politicians”
And now, here in the United States:
- “When Billionaire Government Contractors Are Also Media Moguls”
- “Musk and Bezos Get Their Billion-Dollar Federal Contracts After Sucking Up to Trump”
- “Meta Gains Approval To Supply AI Services to US Government Departments”
- “Paramount Has a Secret Plan to Buy Hollywood Before the Cops Arrive”
To be fair, Republicans didn’t just suddenly adopt this strategy when Orbán suggested it to them. They’ve been doing it since the days of Ronald Reagan; it just went on steroids with Trump.
We used to have laws and rules to prevent this sort of thing. But in 1985, Reagan greased the skids for Rupert Murdoch to become a citizen so he could buy US media outlets. In 1987 Reagan repealed the Fairness Doctrine, and in 1988 Rush Limbaugh debuted on 56 major radio stations.
In 1996, Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act, overturning laws dating back to the 1920s that prevented any one oligarch or company from owning multiple newspapers or radio or TV stations, leading to an explosive consolidation that today gives us 1,500 oligarch-owned rightwing radio stations and hundreds of rightwing oligarch-owned TV stations across the nation.
Republican screams of a “liberal media” dating back to the 1980s notwithstanding, there isn’t a place in America where you can’t get a large daily dose of pro-fascist, pro-Trump media. Drive from the East Coast to the West Coast, from the Canadian border to the edge of Mexico, and you’ll never be without a rightwing radio companion telling you how wonderful Trump, Vance, Putin, et al are.
As Colbert joked this week:
“Let’s just call this what it is: Donald Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV because all Trump does is watch TV.”
And now, Matt Stoller is reporting that the Ellisons — who now own CBS — have a “secret plan” to acquire CNN as well, a goal that Trump has explicitly and publicly gushed about. As the network itself reported, Trump said, “It’s imperative that CNN be sold” and David Ellison recently “offered assurances to Trump administration officials that if he bought Warner, he’d make sweeping changes to CNN.”
But the Putin/Orbán/Trump strategy to end all media independence in America may be facing headwinds if Democrats can take control of the House, Senate, or both this fall.
Axios and Raw Story report that:
“DC insiders and partners Matthew Miller and Tucker Eskew have issued warnings that Democrats will aggressively pursue corruption allegations against the president and Trump administration officials.”
Miller and Eskew added:
“The subpoenas are coming. The only question is whether companies will be ready.”
State attorneys general also have real power over media concentration. In 2015 a coalition of state AGs joined federal regulators in challenging Comcast’s proposed takeover of Time Warner Cable, and Comcast abandoned the merger rather than face trial.
In 2018 several state attorneys general urged regulators to block Sinclair Broadcast Group’s acquisition of Tribune Media, after which the FCC moved to reject the deal and it collapsed. And in 2019, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Virginia attorneys general sued to limit Nexstar’s purchase of Tribune stations, forcing major divestitures before the merger could proceed. History shows that when states intervene, consolidation often fails or is dramatically reduced.
Citizen activism has also repeatedly changed the behavior of partisan media without any hint of government involvement or censorship. For example, after the 2012 Limbaugh Sandra Fluke controversy, dozens of national advertisers left his program and many never returned.
And following Trump’s January 6 attack on our Capitol, advertiser boycotts and viewer pressure led companies to suspend advertising on certain Fox News opinion programs, and several cable carriers reconsidered their carriage agreements. Organized brand-safety campaigns have also pushed social media platforms to demonetize rightwing and fascist extremist content.
In each case the speech itself remained “legal,” but because of public outrage the economic incentives changed, showing how average citizens in a market-based democracy can reshape media behavior by influencing the revenue that sustains it.
If ever there was a time ripe for revisiting the laws and rules that gave us the relatively unbiased media landscape — that vigorously supported American democracy — between the 1930s and the 1980s, it’s now. And the same is true of the immediate need for citizen activism, like we saw in awake of Trump’s attempt to use pressure on media owners to silence Jimmy Kimmel.
Hopefully, Democratic politicians and citizen activists are paying attention, because the crisis — and the opportunity — has never been more urgent.
- 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 weekend of lunacy was just another shining example of Trump's unfitness for office
On Sunday, news broke that an intruder had been shot and killed at Mar-a-Lago. Donald Trump wasn’t there. He was at his gilded northern chalet.
While wintry weather blanketed 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the atmosphere inside was less “let it snow,” more Overlook Hotel. Less festive cheer, more psychotic crisis.
The White House, already cavernous, creaky, and drafty, felt even more so given the gaping hole where the East Wing used to be. And Trump’s habitually gaseous state helped keep that cold breeze flowing.
The “people’s house,” as it was called before a dictator turned it into a gold-plated casino, can feel isolating on weekends. Especially because Melania wouldn’t be caught dead there at any time of year.
Add a looming State of the Union address, sagging poll numbers, mounting legal setbacks, and Trump’s deteriorating health, delusion, and dementia, and you have the makings of a Stephen King novel, filmed by Stanley Kubrick.
Any normal president would be huddled with speechwriters and strategists, pacing through SOTU drafts, testing applause lines, ensuring messaging. That’s how presidencies work.
But Trump isn’t a normal president, or a normal human being. He doesn’t do rehearsals. He prefers improvisation, impulse, the dopamine rush of a crowd laughing while he mocks a disabled person or singles out a Black attendee.
Roaming the White House hallways, left to his own devices, Trump spent the weekend giving us his best impression of Jack Torrance, Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining.
The symmetry was uncanny.
The most surreal moment was the re-emergence of a voice from the past. A caller identifying himself as “John Barron” called into C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, to rail against the Supreme Court.
To most, it sounded like a prank call. To anyone who has followed Trump since the 1980s, it sounded familiar. C-SPAN said it wasn’t Trump but in this era, when it comes to Trump, nothing is to be believed.
It was surely Trump. It had to be, at least to those of us who know the lengths Trump will go to to create a distracting media narrative by resorting to old tricks.
Trump has a long and oddly committed history of role-playing as his own publicist. In his tabloid heyday in New York, he would ring up reporters posing as “John Miller” or “John Barron,” fictional spokesmen whose sole purpose was to explain how staggeringly wealthy and romantically irresistible Donald J. Trump was.
All these years later, like Jack Torrance chatting with Lloyd the ghost bartender in an empty ballroom at the Overlook, Trump appeared to be talking to himself through the media, pacing the imaginary gilded expanse of his own soon-to-be ballroom, conjuring an advocate who reassured him in his wildest imaginations.
Now do you believe it wasn’t Trump?
The psychological hedge maze at the center of Trump’s mania is, of course, the Supreme Court. After SCOTUS bludgeoned his tariff authority on Friday, the bloodied Trump didn’t just bristle. He swung Jack Torrance’s ax.
Tariffs are Trump’s wildest obsession, his panacea for everything. His blood boiled.
In a fit of “all work and no play,” Trump swung-out on Truth Social, slicing out posts with the rhythm of someone typing the same sentence over and over, taking whacks at the justices, battering them as “fools and lap dogs.”
Instead of recalibrating, he doubled down. Gobsmackingly, most likely illegally, he raised global tariffs to 10 percent on Friday, in the wake of the ruling, then on Saturday absurdly increased them to 15 percent.
It was less about moderation and negotiation, more in the vein of, “I’m not gonna hurt ya, I’m just gonna bash your brains in.”
But this impulse to rip apart isn’t confined to trade statutes, international agreements or wayward justices. It has found a home within White House walls razed and bulldozed, like the East Wing, or spattered in gauche gold.
In the newly renovated aureate bathroom within the Lincoln Bedroom suite, one pictures Trump’s heirs, Don Jr. and Eric, playing their own version of the Grady twins, scrawling “REDRUM” on newly polished mirrors.
You can almost hear drafty corridors and vestibules echoing with whispered conspiracies while the Trump boys hover at the end of the hallway, chanting, “Come play with us. Come play with us.”
But Trump was busy with another game. Moving on from Barron and tariffs, the president wandered to the first floor and the White House Green Room.
In a move both berserk and bonkers, he announced he was sending a “great hospital boat” to Greenland. Greenland and Denmark responded that they did not need or request any such nautical mercy mission.
Classic Jack Torrance logic: if they won’t accept your offer, insist they’re too sick to know what’s good for them. Even Trump, whacked as he is, must have thought, “I must be losing my mind.”
That may be validated on Tuesday, when Trump finally escapes the White House and wobbles on wide ankles to the lectern in the Capitol, to give his SOTU speech.
He will declare the state of the union strong, the economy unparalleled, the tariffs transformative. It will go on and on and on, a loop of alternative facts, line after line, page after page, until the words lose meaning and only the churlish cadence remains:
“All work and no play makes Donny a dull boy. All work and no play makes Donny a dull boy. All work and no play makes Donny a dull boy…”
Finally, he may lean into the microphone and, with a more predatory grin than Jack Torrance could hope for, chillingly leer: “Heeeeere’s Donny.”
- 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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Minneapolis resonated more than past outrages. Why?
By Gregory P. Magarian, Thomas and Karole Green Professor of Law, Washington University in St. Louis.
The president announces an aggressive, controversial policy. Large groups of protesters take to the streets. Government agents open fire and kill protesters.
All of these events, familiar from Minneapolis in 2026, also played out at Ohio’s Kent State University in 1970. In my academic writing about the First Amendment, I have described Kent State as a key moment when the government silenced free speech.
In Minneapolis, free speech has weathered the crisis better, as seen in the protests themselves, the public’s responses — and even the protest songs the two events inspired.
Protests and shootings, then and now
In 1970, President Richard Nixon announced he had expanded the Vietnam War by bombing Cambodia. Student anti-war protests, already fervent, intensified.
In Ohio, Gov. James Rhodes deployed the National Guard to quell protests at Kent State University. Monday, May 4, saw a large midday protest on the main campus commons. Students exercised their First Amendment rights by chanting and shouting at the Guard troops, who dispersed protesters with tear gas before regrouping on a nearby hill.
- YouTube www.youtube.com
With the nearest remaining protesters 20 yards from the Guard troops and most more than 60 yards away, 28 guardsmen inexplicably fired on students, killing four and wounding nine others.
After the killings, the government sought to shift blame to the slain students.
Nixon stated: “When dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy.”
Minneapolis in 2026 presents vivid parallels.
As part of a sweeping campaign to deport undocumented immigrants, President Donald Trump in early January 2026 deployed armed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection agents to Minneapolis.
Many residents protested, exercising their First Amendment rights by using smartphones and whistles to record and call out what they saw as ICE and CBP abuses. On Jan. 7, 2026, an ICE agent shot and killed activist Renee Good in her car. On Jan. 24, two CBP agents shot and killed protester Alex Pretti on the street.
The government sought to blame Good and Pretti for their own killings.
Different public reactions
After Kent State, amid bitter conservative opposition to student protesters, most Americans blamed the fallen students for their deaths. When students in New York City protested the Kent State shootings, construction workers attacked and beat them in what became known as the “Hard Hat Riot.” Afterward, Nixon hosted construction union leaders at the White House, where they gave him an honorary hard hat.
In contrast, most Americans believe the Trump administration has used excessive force in Minneapolis. Majorities both oppose the federal agents’ actions against protesters and approve of protesting and recording the agents.
The public response to Minneapolis has made a difference. The Trump administration has announced an end to its immigration crackdown in the Twin Cities. Trump has backed off attacks on Good and Pretti. Congressional opposition to ICE funding has grown. Overall public support for Trump and his policies has fallen.
Protests, recordings and songs
What has caused people to view the killings in Minneapolis so differently from Kent State? One big factor, I believe, is how free speech has shaped the public response.
The Minneapolis protests themselves have sent the public a more focused message than what emerged from the student protests against the Vietnam War.
Anti-war protests in 1970 targeted military action on the other side of the world. Organizers had to plan and coordinate through in-person meetings and word of mouth. Student protesters needed the institutional news media to convey their views to the public.
In contrast, the anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis target government action at the protesters’ doorsteps. Organizers can use local networks and social media to plan, coordinate and communicate directly with the public. The protests have succeeded in deepening public opposition to ICE.
In addition, the American people have witnessed the Minneapolis shootings.
Kent State produced a famous photograph of a surviving student’s anguish but only hazy, chaotic video of the shootings.
In contrast, widely circulated video evidence showed the Minneapolis killings in horrifying detail. Within days of each shooting, news organizations had compiled detailed visual timelines, often based on recordings by protesters and observers, that sharply contradicted government accounts of what happened to Good and Pretti.
Finally, consider two popular protest songs that emerged from Kent State and Minneapolis: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Minneapolis.”
- YouTube www.youtube.com
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young recorded, pressed and released “Ohio” with remarkable speed for 1970. The vinyl single reached record stores and radio stations on June 4, a month after the Kent State shootings. The song peaked at No. 14 on the Billboard chart two months later.
Neil Young’s lyrics described the Kent State events in mythic terms, warning of “tin soldiers” and telling young Americans: “We’re finally on our own.” Young did not describe the shootings in detail. The song does not name Kent State, the National Guard or the fallen students. Instead, it presents the events as symbolic of a broader generational conflict over the Vietnam War.
Springsteen released “Streets of Minneapolis” on Jan. 28, 2026 — just four days after CBP agents killed Pretti. Two days later, the song topped streaming charts worldwide.
The internet and social media let Springsteen document Minneapolis, almost in real time, for a mass audience. Springsteen’s lyrics balance symbolism with specificity, naming not just “King Trump” but also victims Pretti and Good, key Trump officials Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem, main Minneapolis artery Nicollet Avenue, and the protesters’ “whistles and phones,” before fading on a chant of “ICE out!”
Critics offer compelling arguments that 21st-century mass communication degrades social relationships, elections and culture. In Minneapolis, disinformation has muddied crucial facts about the protests and killings.
At the same time, Minneapolis has shown how networked communication can promote free speech. Through focused protests, recordings of government action, and viral popular culture, today’s public can get fuller, clearer information to help critically assess government actions.
- Gregory P. Magarian has written and taught for 26 years about constitutional law, specializing in the freedom of expression and with secondary interests in gun regulation, law and religion, and regulations of the political process. He wrote Managed Speech: The Roberts Court's First Amendment (Oxford University Press, 2017) and has published dozens of academic articles, book chapters, and general audience essays. He has taught at Washington University since 2008 and previously taught at Villanova University. He clerked on the U.S. Supreme Court for Justice John Paul Stevens and on the U.S. District Court (D.C.) for Judge Louis Oberdorfer, and earned his law degree magna cum laude from the University of Michigan, where he was editor-in-chief of the Michigan Law Review. He received his undergraduate degree summa cum laude from Yale.
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This key factor is fueling rampant inequality under Trump
I was secretary of labor 30 years ago when the U.S. economy was producing an average of 200,000 new jobs a month.
I remember holding news conferences on “jobs days” each month. I felt confident about the strength of the economy. What worried me then was that the new jobs didn’t pay well. (A disgruntled worker once called out to me, “Sure, Mr. Secretary, lots of new jobs. I’m doing three of them to make ends meet!”)
Last Wednesday, the Labor Department reported that the United States produced an average of just 15,000 new jobs per month last year — a record low. And most paid sh--.
January showed an uptick in jobs, but almost all of the new jobs were in health care and construction. The rest of the economy seems to be shrinking. And wages are still stuck in the mud.
Profits of big corporations have soared. The stock market values attached to these profits have risen even more. Yet average workers are barely making it.
The U.S. economy is more distorted than ever.
The widening gap between corporate profits and average workers — between capital and labor — helps explain the disconnect between a buoyant economy and pessimistic households. Consumer confidence is in the basement.
The gap was widening before Donald Trump was elected. It explains in part the rise of MAGA and why Trump won in 2016 and again in 2024.
But Trump hasn’t done a thing to alter these trends. In fact, since he became president again, corporate profits (and the stock market) have done even better than before, while average workers have seen almost no gains in jobs or wages.
“I think we have the greatest economy actually ever in history,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business’s Larry Kudlow that aired Tuesday.
That’s not what most Americans think. Even most young men — central to Trump’s wins in 2016 and 2024 — now believe they were better off under Joe Biden.
We’re not powerless to alter these trends. The “free market” doesn’t run on automatic. The rules of the economy depend on political decisions — such as tax laws, antitrust laws, and labor laws.
Since Ronald Reagan was president, the nation has lowered taxes on the wealthy and raised them (especially Social Security and state sales taxes) on average Americans.
America has also allowed big corporations to monopolize the economy — which has given them the power to raise prices without worrying that a competitor will grab consumers away.
And what about labor laws?
Take a look at this chart.
The blue line represents the percentage of the national income going to the richest 10 percent — that is, how much of every dollar earned in the United States goes into the pockets of the wealthiest tenth of Americans.
The red line represents the percentage of workers that belong to a union.
Notice a pattern?
The 1940s and 50s saw a dramatic rise in union membership. Laws and public policies encouraged unionization.
That was also a time when a growing portion of the nation’s income went into the pockets of ordinary working people instead of the pockets of the richest 10 percent.
That’s because unions give workers more bargaining power to get a larger share of the profits they helped generate. The benefits of unions helped nonunion workers too. In order to attract workers, corporations that didn’t have unions had to increase the pay of their workers, too.
As a result, by the mid-1950s, America’s economy was powered by the biggest middle class this nation had ever seen. Racial and gender disparities were still a big problem, but America was making progress on them as income inequality trended downward.
So what happened?
As you can see, union membership started to decline in the 1970s.
That was after Lewis Powell — soon to be a justice on the Supreme Court, then an attorney in Richmond, Virginia — urged the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the leaders of American corporations to pour great wads of money into American politics.
Corporations doubled-down on busting unions, while their allies in government weakened labor laws.
Then, starting with Reagan in the early 1980s, corporate attacks on unions got turbocharged. Reagan fired the striking air-traffic controllers. Legally, they had no right to strike, but Reagan’s move legitimized a far broader assault on American unions.
Since then, unions have steadily shrunk, and the gap between the rich and everyone else has taken off. I saw it when I was secretary of labor in the 1990s. I was worried then. I’m far more worried now.
Today, the top 10 percent are doing okay, largely because they own 92 percent of the value of all the shares of stock owned by Americans, and the stock market is doing just fine. The real wealth of the nation has now concentrated in the richest one-tenth of 1 percent.
And the bottom 90 percent are barely holding on.
My friends, this is not bad only for the bottom 90 percent. It’s also bad for the economy and dangerous for our democracy. If unaddressed, it could lead to more demagogues like Trump as far as the eye can see.
As the great jurist Louis Brandeis is reputed to have said: America has a choice. We can have great wealth in the hands of a few, or we can have a democracy, but we cannot have both.
If we want to make sure our economy works for everyone, not just the super-rich, we need to build back union power.
A resurgence of labor unions would go a long way toward fighting inequality, rebuilding a large and vibrant middle class, and making life better for all Americans.
Which is why it’s vital that we support unions.
Please take a look below, and share:
- YouTube www.youtube.com
- 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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These clownish villains may actually bring down Trump
President Donald Trump stumped with promises to rescue the forgotten man, telling his MAGA base he'd bring down the globalist "left" by exposing the Epstein empire and destroying the pillars of domestic democracy, one at a time, all in accord with Project 2025. That process is ongoing — fortunately for the rest of us, Trump's problem is that he couldn't and still can't find the cast to ensure it all gets done before his own implosion creates a historic mile marker in American self-government.
Similarly, Trump promised a strong economy, only to reliably set that aside and focus instead almost solely on remedying personal grievances and shockingly clear fraudulent enrichment.
The pursuit of such a contradictory agenda requires the assistance of true loyalists — and in Trump's case we're lucky that means people so closely tied to him as to ensure abject incompetence (think Pete Hegseth), such that their own ultimate destruction is also baked in.
Over at the Department of Justice, Attorney General Pam Bondi stands ready for her own inevitable implosion. Hot off one of the worst performances in a congressional hearing in memory, Bondi oversees an operation still suppressing half or more of the total Epstein files. Perhaps that's understandable. Congress has already used files disclosed to bomb Bondi and light up a scandal encompassing such obvious cover-ups that it would have long since brought down a normal administration.
Bondi's DOJ has so incompetently suppressed thousands of references to Trump that even absent evidence Trump committed any crime in the world of Jeffrey Epstein, the scandalous and utterly inexplicable decision to not investigate and prosecute any possible Epstein co-conspirators, Democrats or otherwise, remains as one of the leading indicators that Trump and/or his friends are vulnerable to something in those Epstein files.
Bondi doesn't possess the tools to dance through this delicate situation.
A truly qualified attorney general would know he or she would be far better served by overreach without regard to the president, than by no reach at all.
Bondi has never seemed more out of her depth than when failing even to do anything to advocate for Epstein victims present at her own hearing.
Such laughable ineptitude would ensure she someday faces charges in a criminal conspiracy, were it not for the ever reliable “get out of jail free” card that is the presidential pardon.
But one cannot pardon self-destruction.
Meet Kristi Noem. Predictably, this situation appears to need no Democratic nudge to help it into the abyss. The Homeland Security Secretary is so hapless that she doesn't even know to avoid attention by setting aside her own personal luxury jet while traveling the world with her alleged boyfriend, Corey Lewandowski. (Both are married but reports regarding the plane reference a "private cabin" in the back, nearly begging the reader to appreciate the pair's, uh, dedication to their mission.)
Noem's one gift seems to be unleashing her wildest instincts, untamed. But even in the wild, the survival instinct usually "trumps" the reproductive.
Ironically, though the plane and the boyfriend present the most shocking display of overt political malpractice among Trump's sidekicks and henchmen, that failure is also the least important among Noem's own shortcomings. This is a woman who oversees agencies that shoot non-violent protesters in the face and back, while leading a department tasked with federal intervention in less predictable disasters such as weather events, earthquakes, or even terrorist attacks: the kinds of events that always expose incompetence.
She's ready, for sure.
The travails of Noem and Bondi are just two recent cases among so many examples of egregious Trump administration ineptitude. The drumbeat of scandals and failures continues, further testing Trump's hold on the right.
And thank God for that.
Sometime this year, prior to the November elections, the nation will have to navigate one of two paths, both of which lead to destruction.
One path involves a demolition of the Trump administration through a combination of mounting Epstein evidence, relentless inflation, rising unemployment and other economic woes, all mixed with a foreseeable cluster of errors by incapable loyalists like Hegseth, Noem, Bondi, Kennedy, Patel, Gabbard, and others. This path ends with the administration unable to hold on, calls for Trump to resign reaching a deafening pitch.
The other path leads to a point where Trump succeeds in breaking American democracy for good, through a mix of comprehensively despotic moves that render elections indistinguishable from those held in Russia: pre-ordained, Republican wins brought about by a Republican-only vote.
The man who brought about a literal mob attack on democracy after losing in 2020 will not allow the next election to bury him in intensive investigations. But he will only be able to take such drastic destruction if he is led by a team of capable soldiers, able to pull off the mechanical and emotional steps that serve as a predicate to an unarmed takeover.
Lucky for us, we can be sure that his actual aides and advisors will press on, doing everything possible to put their utter incompetence in the face of every American.
Trump promised MAGA he alone could lift them above the elite. In fact he never prioritized his own voters' needs, and appointed a cabinet that collectively provides his opponents with their greatest hope.
The clock is ticking, elections are looming, Trump's self-enrichment is expanding, his grievances are growing, his cast of incompetents stand unready. Bondi, Noem, Hegseth, the whole gang, operating in a cloud of self-interest, moderated only by breathless inability.
- Jason Miciak is a past associate editor of Occupy Democrats, author, attorney, and single parent girldad to a teen, seeking serious beta readers of his soon-to-be published novel. Contact at jasonmiciak@gmail.com, follow on X @JasonMiciak, and please now follow on Bluesky.
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Every Trump accusation is a confession. This tantrum showed he knows he's cooked
Donald Trump’s tariff tantrum in front of the entire world should set off a massive MAGA migration. It was like watching your extra-drunk racist uncle on Facebook who didn’t get the right flavor of Jell-O for Thanksgiving dessert at the Mar-A-Lago Memory Care Center. This is what the alleged leader of the free world did when the Supreme Court wouldn’t let him keep grifting American taxpayers.
- YouTube www.youtube.com
This is just so cringe. Such immaturity. A Democrat would NEVER.
I’ve spent far too much time thinking about what the world would look like if Trump’s parents had only loved him, or at least taught him how to handle loss (like most of us are taught at a young age, but maybe not Republicans). Hillary Clinton would’ve won and had two amazing terms. She would’ve been followed by another amazing Democrat who also understood how to run the government, not run it into the ground.
Instead, we’ve got a cheating, thin-skinned, convicted felon snowflake bully deliberately tanking the global economy out of spite and jealousy.
The history MAGA would love to erase (yet keeps dooming us to repeat because they refuse to learn from it) shows the kind of “woke math” that will always be true. Trump tanked Barack Obama’s economy. Joe Biden lifted us out of Trump’s pandemic depression to the point where all other global economies were booming with ours. Nobody knew that because the media had PTSD from covering Trump and didn’t know how to properly cover a successful administration.
Trump is now undoing all of that, because he’s a dumb bully who can’t stand looking like the loser he is next to the successful and beloved Democrats he inserted himself between. It’s like if you bought a great loaf of bread and a bunch of fresh veggies to make your favorite sandwich, only to find the meat you got from the deli is completely rancid and inedible. I’m tired of not getting my favorite sandwich, but I can’t afford it now anyway, thanks to Trump tanking our economy.
Trump, the self-proclaimed “successful businessman” who bankrupted multiple casinos, just doesn’t understand how tariffs work. He can’t ever be seen to self-correct, so he can’t tell his cult the truth about what tariffs are, which is a tax on them, the consumers. It’s something any of the “Do Your Own Research” Cult could learn for themselves if they ever did their own research.
“I can ruin everything for everyone,” is the same maturity level as a kid throwing a fit at another kid’s birthday party because he didn’t get a present too. It’s mortifying to see this latest display from Sundowning Paw Paw on the global stage. He’s clearly unhealthy, physically and mentally. He’s yelling at SCOTUS like Grandpa Simpson yelling at clouds because he’s freaking out over the Epstein Files. He’s going to bomb Iran and charge everyone 10 percent more to live while awarding his made-up “Board of Peace” $10 BILLION of OUR grifted tax dollars so he can have his stupid Epstein Ballroom. And by the way, did anyone log those historical artifacts from the East Wing before he bulldozed it, or is our history just … gone? Are the Epstein Files buried under there, or what?
No wonder Canada is all “I don’t know her” when it comes to being our ally. You can’t blame them for not wanting to hang out when Trump bullied a woman into giving him her Nobel Peace Prize, then dropped her country like a hot empanada.
This is a great time to remind everyone that former Vice President Kamala Harris, who also served as a Senator, was an economics major endorsed by 23 REAL Nobel Prize-winning economists. Why no, the media never covered it, plus it would’ve “looked bad” if anyone challenged the results of an election that Trump and Elon Musk couldn’t stop bragging about stealing.
BRB, I have to scream into a pillow because screaming into the abyss isn’t quite enough.
Even though I try to avoid false equivalence when making a point, there’s just no way a Democratic president would ever behave like a spoiled child. Biden had a rough debate, but at least he didn’t stand there and whine about destroying the world because SCOTUS wouldn’t let him rip off Americans. The man is living with Stage 4 Prostate Cancer, which he doesn’t deserve for more reasons than I can say. We can only imagine what that must be like for his family after enduring so much tragedy, but have you seen him holding pity parties in the form of press conferences?
Nope, Biden is hanging out on beaches with his family, riding his bike (which Trump can’t do because no one ever loved him enough to teach him how), and eating all the damn ice cream he wants, because he’s earned it.
When Trump shared that racist video of the Obamas, did our Coolest Ever President and First Lady retaliate in any similar way? Of course not. They do what they can to never use Trump’s name, but in this case, they each made statements that showed their iconic class and dignity, while putting Trump in his place in the Smart Kids Way.
Trump has often said how much he “hates losers” but his every accusation is a confession, so what Trump is saying is he hates himself. His toxic narcissistic ego can’t allow him to be wrong about anything, so he overcompensates on his feet. And that’s never gone well for him, because have you seen those swollen ankles?
Dumb bullies always sound the weakest when they’ve been backed into a corner of indisputable losing. But this dumb bully needs to be stopped before he can do any more damage to our country and our planet.
- 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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A key Epstein associate quit her job but evades real scrutiny. Why?
Working in corporate America for nearly three decades, I learned that the most feared person in any organization isn’t necessarily the CEO. It’s the chief counsel. They’re the ones who know where the bodies are buried.
That’s why one name in the Epstein files has consistently given me pause. Perhaps more than anyone besides Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's convicted sometime partner, this person may know where the proverbial bodies are buried. Certainly her association with the late financier and sex offender has proved close enough that she was prompted to quit as chief counsel to one of the most powerful financial firms on the planet — though shockingly, she will still serve until June.
For years, the Epstein narrative has centered on men: a parade of shielded billionaires, aging politicians, and pampered royals pretending they didn’t know the man was a child predator. Their excuses would be laughable if the subject weren’t so serious.
No one enabled Epstein like Maxwell, chief architect of his evil. But the latest — and shockingly, perhaps final — tranche of released Department of Justice files revealed a more sophisticated adjunct to Epstein’s depravity: Kathryn Ruemmler.
Ruemmler wasn’t a fringe associate angling for a free ride on a private jet. She was Barack Obama’s White House Counsel, the lawyer for the office of the presidency, charged with safeguarding the constitutional integrity of the executive branch. After that, she became Chief Legal Officer at Goldman Sachs, arguably the most influential investment bank in the world.
By any measure, Ruemmler reached the pinnacle of the American legal establishment.
Yet emails from a period between those posts, when she was in private practice, show her gushing over “Uncle Jeffrey” and his gifts: luxury handbags, Fendi furs, Bergdorf Goodman cards.
Though she has insisted the connection was strictly professional, the emails paint a different picture.
She said Epstein was “like another older brother.” They exchanged dozens of messages, ranging from dating advice to crude jokes.
This was not cold legal counsel to a problematic client. It was a high-powered attorney cozying up to a convicted sex offender. For what? Social access? Designer goods? Proximity to power? She had all of that. It is beyond belief that a lawyer of her stature would associate with someone she knew to have pled guilty to a state charge of soliciting prostitution from someone under 18.
It gets worse.
A Wall Street Journal report details a 2016 episode involving French modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel. Brunel was reportedly prepared to cooperate with federal authorities and testify against Epstein. Epstein alerted Ruemmler that a friend of Brunel was seeking $3 million to keep him quiet.
Ruemmler, the Journal reported, asked Epstein to explain, then when he did, said she was about to talk to an Epstein lawyer in Washington, D.C.
Brunel soon went “dark.” He would die in jail in France. Epstein remained free for three years, before dying while jailed himself.
David Boies, a lawyer for Epstein’s victims, told the Journal the Brunel episode “set us back a couple of years.”
“We know from our lawsuits that there were more than 50 girls that were trafficked after this,” Boies said.
A spokesperson for Ruemmler told the Journal: “This was another instance of Epstein attempting to engage Ms. Ruemmler on a matter about which she had no knowledge, and she appropriately directed him to his legal counsel.”
Ruemmler, the Journal added, “has said she never represented Epstein and regretted her association with him.”
Epstein’s D.C. lawyer told the paper he never talked to Ruemmler or Epstein about Brunel, though he did say he scheduled a call with Ruemmler on the day in question to talk about “quash[ing] a subpoena directed at Epstein.”
So many questions remain. Why would a former White House Counsel even respond to a convicted sex offender seeking the silence of a key witness? Why has Ruemmler not faced questioning herself?
The concerns don’t end there. While serving in the White House, Ruemmler shared non-public information with Epstein about the 2012 Secret Service prostitution scandal and even allowed him to review draft responses to journalists.
A convicted sex offender as a sounding board on ethics breaches. Let that sink in.
The DOJ has long known about Ruemmler’s association with Epstein. Yet she is untouched, bar announcing her resignation from Goldman Sachs. If anyone needs an example of how the rich and powerful evade scrutiny in this saga, look no further.
This represents a staggering betrayal of public trust. For elites, the law often appears less a boundary, more like a lever, something a ridiculously meticulous and unscrupulous person can manipulate.
Now comes what might be called the “Goldman Sachs Golden Pass:” a carefully timed resignation, effective months from now. She says media attention has become a “distraction” — that familiar phrase that signals an implication of guilt.
The Epstein case has always raised disturbing questions about accountability. Ruemmler’s role adds another layer. When you’ve served as White House Counsel, you aren’t being asked to fix parking tickets. You’re consulted because you understand systems of power, how to navigate them at the caller's behest.
Ruemmler may have been among the most consequential figures in Epstein’s orbit. She operates at the intersection of law, politics, and finance. She knows where secrets reside and how to keep them buried.
The emails we have, the “Uncle Jeffrey” familiarity and the gifts, suggest closeness that demands scrutiny. Her involvement in the Brunel episode should be investigated too.
If she were compelled to testify, she might well invoke the Fifth Amendment, as Maxwell recently did. In such a situation, she would prove cut from the same cloth as Maxwell and Pam Bondi, women who defy every fiber of human decency by ignoring the hollowed-out lives and desperate pleas of Epstein’s victims.
The DOJ needs to stop treating Ruemmler like a prestigious colleague and start treating her like what the Epstein files suggest: an associate of a monster, maybe also an advisor.
- 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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This absurd spectacle provided a brief respite from Trump's horror show
Last week I watched the Attorney General of the United States sneer at the rule of law, and felt sick. I’ve been a federal trial lawyer for decades, and there was the titular head of American law defecating on it to applause from Fox News, who called Pam Bondi’s performance “entertaining.”
Our legal system has never been perfect, but pre-Trump, it was the best in the world except for the Scandinavians (who passed Americans on the evolutionary chart years ago). Stuck where we are on our slow-moving timeline, watching Bondi serve up contempt as surrogate for legal accountability, trashing the only thing I’ve ever believed in, instilled a grief I haven’t been able to name or shake.
Bondi’s refusal to answer basic questions from members of Congress who have a statutory duty to ask them confirmed that, through Trump, we have entered a state of wholly performative politics. A curated reality show played exclusively for Fox and right-wing media, there is no government accountability under Trump, only deflection. There is no substance, only content.
The administration refuses to address necessary questions, instead ambushing anyone who asks them, or delivering fanciful fiction. Hair, makeup and volume matter, substance doesn’t. This is the same fraudulent strategy that Trump, an economically illiterate man, used to sell his economics acumen to gullible Americans despite six corporate bankruptcies.
Reaching back to a better world
What Americans are experiencing as a result of Trump’s conman reality — extreme distrust, polarization, vicious cruelty meted out as content, is not normal. We can’t let it become normal, or we’ll start to believe this is who we are. It isn’t.
After watching Bondi’s congressional “testimony,” in search of a palate cleanser, I looked for comic relief in, of all places, the very uncomedic state of Florida. I was in Wilton Manors, the celebrated gay mecca of the south, and went to see a play written and directed by Ronnie Larsen, the celebrated king of gay theater.
The New York Times clocked Larsen’s rare talent for mixing raunch with research, while other critics praise his genius at balancing comedy with deep pathos. I was drowning in pathos, searching for an antidote, and I found it.
Only truth can deliver us from despair
Larsen did not disappoint. His absurdly funny semi-autobiographical story of a young gay man searching for connection made me forget all about Bondi and the s--t-show playing out across Trump’s America.
It harkened back to The Actors, the first Larsen play I saw in New York, one that turned me into a fawning fangirl. In The Actors, also autobiographical, a middle-aged man had recently lost both his parents and was estranged from his brother. He was so devastated by the loss, fighting despair and emotional isolation, that he hired three actors to come to his home several times a week to act out simulations of family life. He paid them to play games with him, share meals, and tuck him into bed, allowing him to remember feeling loved and the comforts of his childhood.
As heartbreaking as the plot itself was, parading our searing human need for love and connection, Larsen served it up with such soul-baring honesty it caught in my throat. Just when I was ready to break down from the familiarity, the recognition that we are all so vulnerable and at times desperately lonely, he’d break out a visual absurdity for relief: a kitchen cabinet stocked only with children’s cereal, a balding man in a Superman onesie. At all times, Larsen played himself as himself. At ease bearing his decidedly non-washboard belly, Larsen constantly says this is who I am. Unadorned.
The through line of a Larsen play is that when we reach soul-baring honesty with each other and with ourselves, flaws and all, a better and more dignified reality emerges.
Lies destroy; truth heals
After watching Bondi smack down the rule of law with deflection and snide dishonesty, Larsen was the medicine I needed. While this administration employs lies and obfuscation to dehumanize others, truth allows us to do the opposite, to see ourselves in strangers, to recognize their suffering.
Bondi delivered performative dishonesty where integrity was expected, while Larsen delivered integrity through honesty.
Bondi’s incompetence and failure — her sneers, her jabs, her dishonest refusal to acknowledge mistakes in her disastrous handling of the Epstein files, re-injured women who were trafficked and raped as children, commodities to a wealth class that will not protect them. It also dealt a severe blow to the American justice system, advancing Trump’s goal of dismantling it.
In his play, using only unvarnished honesty and humor, Larsen modeled a better way. He demonstrated the binding power of truth and reminded us that even in this hour of darkness, our better angels are still here.
Bondi’s performance marked how low we’ve fallen; Larsen’s showed us how to fly above it. Critics call Larsen a prolific stalwart of queer theatre; I call him a national treasure.
- 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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Bernie and AOC wouldn't be known without this American giant
By Bert Johnson, Professor of Political Science, Middlebury College.
Jesse Jackson’s two campaigns for president, in 1984 and 1988, were unsuccessful but historic. The civil rights activist and organizer, who died on Feb. 17, 2026, helped pave the way for Barack Obama’s election a generation later as the nation’s first – and so far only – African American president.
Jackson’s campaigns energized a multiracial coalition that not only provided support for other late-20th-century Democratic politicians, including President Bill Clinton, but helped create an organizing template – a so-called Rainbow Coalition combining Black, Latino, working-class white and young voters – that continues to resonate in progressive politics today.
Vermont, where I teach political science, did not look like fertile ground for Jackson when he first ran for president. Then, as now, Vermont was one of the most homogeneous, predominantly white states. But if Jackson seemed like an awkward fit for a mostly rural, lily-white state, he nonetheless saw possibilities.
He campaigned in Vermont twice in 1984, buoyantly declaring in Montpelier, the state capital, “If I win Vermont, the nation will never be the same again.”
He did not win Vermont, taking just 8 percent of the Democratic primary vote in 1984 but tripling his share to 26 percent in 1988. Appealing to voters in small, rural New England precincts was a remarkable achievement for a candidate identified with Chicago and civil rights campaigns in the South.
Jackson’s presidential ambitions coincided with a pivotal moment in Vermont politics: The state’s voting patterns were shifting left, with new residents arriving and changing the state’s culture and economy. In 1970, nearly 70 percent of Vermonters had been born there. By 1990, that figure had dropped by 10 percentage points.
The Vermont Rainbow Coalition, which was formed to support Jackson’s first campaign, organized a crucial constituency in a fluid time, establishing patterns that would persist for decades.
Setting the standard
Jackson created a “People’s Platform” that would sound familiar to today’s progressives, calling for higher taxes on businesses, higher minimum wages and single-payer, universal health care.
In light of Jackson’s efforts, Vermont activists saw the potential for a durable statewide organization. Rather than disband the Vermont Rainbow Coalition after the 1984 primary, they kept the group going, endorsing candidates in campaigns for the legislature and statewide office in each of the next three election cycles. The coalition also endorsed Bernie Sanders’ failed bid for Congress in 1988.
Sanders served eight years as mayor of Burlington as an “independent socialist,” cultivating a core collection of local allies known as the Progressive Coalition who sought to wrest power away from establishment members of the city’s Board of Aldermen.
In 1992, the Vermont Rainbow Coalition merged with Burlington’s Progressive Coalition to form the statewide Progressive Coalition.
Jackson-Sanders lineage
Sanders eventually went on to win election to the House as an independent in 1990, serving in the chamber until winning his Senate seat, also as an independent, in 2006. His presidential runs in 2016 and 2020 made him a prominent national figure and a leader among progressives.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who unseated a member of the House Democratic leadership in a stunning 2018 primary upset in New York, had been a Sanders campaign organizer and remains his close ally. On Jan. 1, 2026, Sanders swore in Zohran Mamdani – like Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic socialist – as mayor of New York City.
Sanders had endorsed Jackson for president in 1988. Years later, Jackson returned the favor.
Sanders paid tribute to Jackson at the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
“Jesse Jackson is one of the very most significant political leaders in this country in the last 100 years,” Sanders said. “Jesse’s contribution to modern history is not just bringing us together – it is bringing us together around a progressive agenda.”
Not just Vermont
In Vermont, Jackson performed surprisingly well in unlikely places – taking nearly 20 percent of the 1984 primary vote in working-class Bakersfield and Belvidere, for example.
Today’s Vermont Progressive Party, which emerged out of the old Vermont Progressive Coalition, is one of the most successful third parties in the nation, winning official “major party” status in the state shortly after its official founding in 2000. The party has elected candidates to the state legislature, city councils and even a few statewide offices, including that of lieutenant governor.
Vermont was not alone in experiencing the catalyzing effect of Jackson’s presidential runs. Jackson had a significant mobilizing impact on Black voters nationwide. In Washington state, the Washington Rainbow Coalition started in Seattle and spread across the state between 1984 and 1996. New Jersey and Pennsylvania had their own successful and independent Rainbow Coalitions. In 2003, the Rainbow Coalition Party of Massachusetts joined the Green Party to become the Green Rainbow Party.
In my own research, I’ve investigated the durability of the “Jackson effect” in Vermont. There is no better test of what differentiates the Vermont Progressive Party from the state’s Democratic Party than the 2016 Democratic primary race for lieutenant governor, which pitted progressive David Zuckerman against two prominent, mainstream Democrats.
Zuckerman beat the Democrats most handily in towns that had voted the most heavily for Jesse Jackson in 1984, an effect that persisted even when controlling for population, partisanship and liberalism.
Many people would point to Sanders as the catalyst for Vermont’s continuing progressive movement. But Sanders and the progressives owe much to Jackson.
- Bert Johnson has taught American politics at Middlebury since 2004. His research and teaching interests include campaign finance, federalism, and state and local politics. Johnson is author of Political Giving: Making Sense of Individual Campaign Contributions (Boulder: FirstForum Press, 2013), and coauthor (with Morris Fiorina, Paul E. Peterson, and William Mayer) of The New American Democracy (Longman, 2011). His articles have appeared in Social Science History, Urban Affairs Review, and American Politics Research. He is owner and author of Basicsplainer.com.
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This almighty blow to Trump is about much more than tariffs
A 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court decided yesterday that Donald Trump cannot take core powers that the Constitution gives Congress. Instead, Congress must delegate that power clearly and unambiguously.
This is a big decision. It goes far beyond merely interpreting the 1997 International Emergency Economic Powers Act not to give Trump the power over tariffs that he claims to have. It reaffirms a basic constitutional principle about the division and separation of powers between Congress and the president.
On its face, this decision clarifies that Trump cannot decide on his own not to spend money Congress has authorized and appropriated — such as the funds for USAID he refused to spend. And he cannot on his own decide to go to war.
“The Court has long expressed ‘reluctan[ce] to read into ambiguous statutory test’ extraordinary delegations of Congress’s powers,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for himself and five other justices in the opinion released yesterday in Learning Resources vs. Trump.
He continued: “In several cases involving ‘major questions,’ the Court has reasoned that ‘both separation of powers principles and a practical understanding of legislative intent’ suggest Congress would not have delegated ‘highly consequential power’ through ambiguous language.”
Exactly. Trump has no authority on his own to impose tariffs because the Constitution gives that authority to Congress.
But by the same Supreme Court logic, Trump has no authority to impound money Congress has appropriated because the Constitution has given Congress the “core congressional power of the purse,” as the Court stated yesterday.
Hence, the $410 to $425 billion billion in funding that Trump has blocked or delayed violates the Impoundment Control Act, which requires Congressional approval for spending pauses. This includes funding withheld for foreign aid, FEMA, Head Start, Harvard and Columbia universities, and public health.
Nor, by this same Supreme Court logic, does Trump have authority to go to war because Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution grants Congress the power to "declare War … and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water" — and Congress would not have delegated this highly consequential power to a president through ambiguous language.
Presumably this is why Congress enacted the War Powers Act of 1973, which requires a president to notify Congress within 48 hours of deploying troops and requires their withdrawal within 60 to 90 days unless Congress declares war or authorizes an extension. Iran, anyone?
The press has reported on yesterday’s Supreme Court decision as if it were only about tariffs. Wrong. It’s far bigger and even more important.
Note that the decision was written by Chief Justice John Roberts — the same justice who wrote the Court’s 2024 decision in Trump v. United States, another 6-3 decision in which the Court ruled that former presidents have absolute immunity for actions taken within their core constitutional powers and at least presumptive immunity for all other official acts.
I think Roberts intentionally wrote yesterday’s decision in Learning Resources v. Trump as a bookend to Trump v. United States.
Both are intended to clarify the powers of the president and of Congress. A president has immunity for actions taken within his core constitutional powers. But a president has no authority to take core powers that the Constitution gives to Congress.
In these two decisions, the Chief Justice and five of his colleagues on the Court have laid out a roadmap for what they see as the boundary separating the power of the president from the powers of Congress, and what they will decide about future cases along that boundary.
Trump will pay no heed, of course. He accepts no limits to his power and has shown no respect for the Constitution, Congress, the Supreme Court, or the rule of law.
But the rest of us should now have a fairly good idea about what to expect from the Supreme Court in the months ahead.
- 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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