Trump clearly learned nothing from history
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
GOP's dirty secret: There's no such thing as a 'moderate' Republican anymore
In the middle of December, a “grateful” John Sununu shared a list of new endorsers for his U.S. Senate campaign, through which he plans to “bring New Hampshire common-sense” to Washington.
Among those new supporters, as the memo’s headline trumpets, is New Hampshire House Majority Leader Jason Osborne.
Despite the Sununu family’s persistent desire to be embraced as moderate conservatives in this immoderate age, and Osborne’s entrenched position in the far right of the state’s Republican Party, the two aren’t exactly strange bedfellows. With Osborne’s endorsement, Sununu will receive a necessary primary bump with New Hampshire right-wingers and, in return, Osborne gets to dip a toe in the mainstream and gain a direct line of communication to a potential U.S. senator. Maybe the fringe, anti-government, Free State Project philosophy of a transplant from Defiance, Ohio, is what passes as “New Hampshire common-sense” these days.
Ain’t politics grand?
A review of Osborne’s sponsored bills for 2026 sheds some light on his political commonality with former Gov. Chris Sununu’s big brother. The House majority leader would love to see, for example, another rate reduction for the business enterprise tax and the repeal of the communications services tax. I suspect Sununu would be on board with both bills if he had his sights set on the State House rather than the Capitol. And because of the overall Republican fervor for any and all methods of dismantling public education, it’s not hard to imagine Sununu nodding his approval of Osborne’s efforts to “establish a local education freedom account program,” launch a study committee for “transitioning all public schools to public charter schools,” and create a system of open enrollment that would almost certainly close countless community schools in property-poor districts.
But what about some of Osborne’s other pieces of proposed legislation, such as his jingoistic outline for how teachers should be directed to talk about inequality, race, and sexuality, or a bill to repeal the refugee resettlement program? Or how about Osborne’s use of racial slurs and his general callousness?
It almost certainly doesn’t matter to Republican voters. To be a modern Republican is to declare that there is very little you won’t endorse, whether through applause or silence, to accomplish whatever it was that made you a conservative to begin with.
What’s a little violent persecution of certain immigrant populations, based on skin color, if it means the furtherance of “school choice”?
What’s a bit of brazen profiteering by the nation’s First Family if it means tax breaks for corporations and the wealthiest Americans?
What does a clear violation of foreign sovereignty and another plunge into the morass of nation-building matter if it means cheaper fossil fuels in the short term for Americans?
Around the same time Sununu sent out his memo of new endorsements, I received an email from a reader who disagreed with something I had written about the state’s approach to taxation. It was a critical but cordial letter, but in a follow-up, the writer reprimanded me in a way that has been sloshing around in my brain ever since: “I would prefer that you refer to Republican Leadership rather than Republicans,” he wrote. “There is a difference. Not all Republicans agree with the Leadership.”
That Republican voters would consider politicians that they elected to serve and lead to be somehow disconnected from their own political desires is remarkable to me. It’s one thing if a politician pulled a 180 after an election, in which case the voter is a victim of fraud, with restitution to be paid in the form of an election defeat the next time around. But nothing that’s happening now at the hands of Republican majorities is a surprise, here in Concord or in Washington. The administrations in power never missed an opportunity on the trail to articulate just how black and white they viewed the world, nor did they underplay the inhuman lengths to which they would go to prosecute and punish the people they consider unworthy of an American existence.
The slowly unraveling narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man asks, amid his deep disillusionment in a postwar America incapable of bridging its violent divisions, whether politics could ever be “an expression of love.” I’m not sure how readers answered that question in 1952, but here in 2026, a “hell no” echoes through policy after policy drafted by a ruling party that is fully committed to broadly inflicting love’s opposite.
I get the sense from Republicans like Sununu and my letter writer that many in the party still see the president as some kind of an outlier, a useful but impermanent disfigurement of the party’s core principles. But this president’s role isn’t as some kind of singular architect but rather as a performer who effectively channels the many currents that electrify his party. That job is a walk in the park for a man who desires power above all else and pays no mind to the means by which that power is acquired, secured, and exercised. To believe that Republican leaders will return to some level of restraint once he’s gone is to disregard the historic allure of unfettered control of political levers.
Do the moderate Republicans and right-leaning independents who are quietly riding out the present darkness (while privately celebrating any ideological victories that darkness has delivered) really believe that things will eventually snap back to some kind of more palatable centrism? Do they think the president’s personal ambition is somehow unique, that others aren’t lined up to grasp the same reins in exactly the same manner the very second this president releases them, by fate or by force?
Or maybe I’m overthinking it and the key to living as a modern old-school Republican in these cold days is just to pocket what you can while disavowing the sins of the motley coalition it took to get it. And then maybe a small prayer, of fluctuating urgency, that the genie will put itself back in the bottle before things go too far.
If that’s the case, I’m afraid I have some bad news.
- Dana Wormald, a lifelong resident of New Hampshire, has been a newspaper editor for more than 25 years. He began his career on the Concord Monitor’s news desk in 1995 and later spent more than a decade at the New Hampshire Union Leader. In 2014, he returned to the Monitor to serve as opinion editor, a position he held until being named editor of New Hampshire Bulletin, part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
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Another day, another horror, another grim step in Trump's war on humanity itself
It seems appropriate right now to try to clarify one of the most basic questions America is (or should be) struggling with: What does it mean to be a human being?
The confusion is mounting.
Three illustrations:
1. Corporations
Corporations are not human beings. That should be self-evident.
But in 2010, the Supreme Court ruled (in its Citizens United case) that corporations are the equivalent of “people” under the First Amendment to the Constitution, with rights to free speech.
This ruling has made it nearly impossible for the government to restrict the flow of money from giant corporations into politics. As a result, the political voices — and First Amendment rights — of most real human beings in America are being effectively drowned out.
But in coming years, states will have an opportunity to circumvent Citizens United by redefining what a “corporation” is in the first place.
Absent state charters that empower them to become “corporations,” business organizations are nothing more than collections of contracts — between investors and managers, managers and employees, and consumers and sellers.
In the 1819 Supreme Court case Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, Chief Justice John Marshall established that:
“A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible [that] possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it …. The objects for which a corporation is created are universally such as the government wishes to promote.”
Montana is now readying a proposition for its 2026 ballot that would empower organizations that sought to be corporations there to do many things — except to fund elections. (I’ve written more on this, here.)
2. Artificial Intelligence
AI is not human, although it’s becoming increasingly difficult for many real people to tell the difference between “artificial general intelligence” and a real person.
As a result, some real people have lost touch with reality — becoming emotionally attached to AI chat boxes, or fooled into believing that AI “deepfake” videos are real, or attributing higher credibility to AI than is justified — sometimes with tragic results.
In his typically ass-backward pro-billionaire way, Donald Trump has issued an executive order aimed at stopping states from regulating AI. But some governors — most interestingly, Florida’s Ron DeSantis — have decided to establish guardrails nonetheless.
DeSantis is calling on Florida’s lawmakers to require tech companies to notify consumers when they are interacting with AI, not to use AI for therapy or mental health counseling, and to give parents more controls over how their children use AI. DeSantis also wants to restrict the growth of AI data centers by eliminating state subsidies to tech companies for such centers and preventing such facilities from drying up local water resources.
In a recent speech, DeSantis said:
“We as individual human beings are the ones that were endowed by God with certain inalienable rights. That’s what our country was founded upon — they did not endow machines or these computers for this.”
I never thought I’d be agreeing with Ron DeSantis, but on this one he’s right.
Corporations are legal fictions. Human AI is a technological fiction. Neither has human rights. Both should be regulated for the benefit of human beings.
3. Non-Americans and suspected enemies
The third illustration of our current confusion over what is a human being is endemic in Trump’s policies toward immigrants and many inhabitants of other nations, now especially in and around Venezuela.
On Wednesday, a federal agent shot and killed a 37-year-old woman during an immigration raid in Minneapolis. Despite what Trump and Kristi Noem say, a video at the scene makes clear that the shooting was not in self-defense.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said: “We have been warning for weeks that the Trump administration’s dangerous, sensationalized operations are a threat to our public safety,” adding that it cost a person her life.
ICE agents are arresting and detaining people on mere suspicion that they are not in the United States legally — sometimes deporting them to foreign nations where they’re brutalized — without any independent findings of fact (a minimum of “due process”).
Meanwhile, Trump and Stephen Miller, his assistant for bigotry and nativism, are busy dehumanizing immigrants. For example, Trump describes Somalian-Americans as “garbage.”
Last weekend, the U.S. killed an estimated 75 people in its attack on Venezuela, as it abducted President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. The U.S. has been bombing and killing sailors on small vessels in the Caribbean and off the coast of Venezuela on the suspicion they’re smuggling drugs into the United States — on the vague pretext that they’re “enemy combatants,” although Congress has not declared war.
Trump’s justification for all such killings has shifted from preventing drug smuggling to “regaining control” over oil reserves that Venezuela nationalized 50 years ago.
In all these cases, the Trump regime is violating fundamental universal human rights considered essential to human dignity.
Corporations and AI are not human beings, but people who come to the United States seeking asylum indubitably are human. So too are undocumented people who arrived in the United States when they were small children and have been here ever since. As are our neighbors and friends who, although undocumented, are valued members of our communities.
As are the Venezuelans who have been murdered by the Trump regime.
So, what does it mean to be a human being?
It means the right to be protected from the big-money depredations of giant corporations, and from the emotional lure of AI disguised as a human.
And it means to be treated respectfully — as a member of the human race possessing inherent, inalienable rights.
These are moral imperatives. But America is doing exactly the reverse.
- Robert Reich is a emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
- Robert Reich's new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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There is a remedy for the madness of King Donald — are we too cowardly to use it?
When Louise and I lived in Germany in the 1980s, we visited Neuschwanstein Castle, the fantasy palace perched on a Bavarian cliff that looks like it escaped from a fairy tale. Tour guides will tell you about its beauty and its role as an inspiration for Disney, but they’ll also share a more unsettling story that today echoes Donald Trump.
Neuschwanstein was built by King Ludwig II, a ruler who withdrew from reality, governed through spectacle instead of policy, ignored his ministers, and bankrupted Bavaria by indulging his own grandiosity and a never-ending stream of construction and renovation projects. (Neuschwanstein was only one of three castles he built.) Bavaria eventually dealt with Mad King Ludwig: his own government declared him mentally unfit to rule and removed him from the throne.
That memory of Ludwig and his architectural obsessions has been haunting me lately, and it’s frankly astonishing that more people in the media aren’t asking the same question I’m bringing up here (and people are constantly calling into my radio/TV show about): “Is Trump losing his sanity?”
I’m not talking about his well-documented lifelong narcissism, his sociopathic inability to feel or even understand the pain of other people, his bullying, or even his compulsive lying, greed, and lechery. This is about whether he’s fit for the job he’s holding or is losing his touch with reality in a way that endangers both our nation and world peace.
When Trump held his press conference announcing the invasion of Venezuela and the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, a reporter asked the most basic question imaginable: Who is running Venezuela now and going forward?
Trump first claimed that he was in charge, but then when other reporters asked for details he waved his hand toward the men standing behind him and said, “They are.”
Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, Gen. Dan Caine, and Pete Hegseth.
The expressions on their faces told the real story: Surprise, confusion, and even alarm. This was clearly, visibly news to them. Shocking news, even.
Did he just decide to BS his way through the press conference like he’s done so much of his life? Didn’t he realize this was a violation of both international law and the U.S. Constitution? Did he think for a moment that he’s the king of the Americas? Or the world?
The next day we discovered the truth their expressions revealed; there was no plan for governing Venezuela, or even trying to via an occupation Iraq-style. There was no congressional authorization; in fact, he told the oil companies before the raid but didn’t bother to inform Congress. (Although the oil companies now say he’s lying.)
There was no public debate and no involvement of any visible constitutional process involved in this invasion and body-snatch. Under our federal system, the president doesn’t get to just improvise an occupation or administration of a foreign nation from a podium.
Even Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Bush didn’t try to pull that off; all sought congressional authorizations for their wars and each gave explanations that at least gave a hat-tip to the traditional American values of democracy, peace, and the rule of law.
Congress, after all, declares war under our Constitution, as well as controlling the purse that makes that war possible. Even the idea of “running” another country would require massive legal, diplomatic, and military frameworks, and now we discover that none of that stuff existed. Instead, apparently, Trump had an impulsive thought or idea and just blurted it out.
That moment should have set off loud alarms throughout Washington and should have shot across our media like a meteorite. Instead, it drifted by as simply another strange episode in a presidency that’s taught us to pretend the abnormal is now normal.
Democrats (and a few Republicans) condemned Trump’s claim that he was running Venezuela; Republican politicians are now twisting themselves into pretzels to try to justify it. Reporters were simply confused. It’s nuts.
And in just the few days since then, Trump has openly threatened to seize Greenland, Cuba, Colombia, even Mexico. These aren’t policy proposals. They also aren’t rooted in American or international law, military or political strategy, or diplomacy.
They are, instead, Mad King Ludwig-like expressions of personal fantasy, of imperial imagination, of a man who appears increasingly convinced — who actually believes — that all power in America and perhaps around the world flows from his will alone.
And then there’s Trump’s bizarre online behavior, like posting over 100 times a night, and promoting a tweet saying that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz hired a hit on State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, close personal friends of Walz’s.
Or his refusal to consider the last Venezuelan election winner, María Corina Machado, to run the country because she “stole” the Nobel prize from him.
Rachel Maddow on her television program suggested the real reason Trump invaded Venezuela was simply because he could. Like a child, or a mad king, he wanted to play with his soldiers, watch them kill people and blow things up, and he doesn’t want anybody to tell him that he can’t.
And, I would add, eventually he plans to turn them on people like you and me. Once he’s made sure they’ll do anything he demands, no matter how bizarre, no matter how wrong, no matter how illegal. That’s why he’s now going after Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and other members of Congress for telling soldiers they don’t have to follow illegal orders.
Lev Parnas, who once worked closely with Trump and still hears from people inside his orbit, writes that Trump is receiving regular intravenous infusions of a new Alzheimer’s medication, administered through veins in his hands, whose known side effects include “sleepiness” during the day, “poor judgment,” and “impaired impulse control.” It could explain the bruises, the CT scans and MRIs, and the regular cognitive tests that the medication requires.
Not to mention the increasingly bizarre and grandiose behavior.
I’m not diagnosing Trump, but I am watching — a shocked world is watching — a pattern of behavior that is becoming more erratic, more impulsive, and more detached from constitutional reality week by painful week.
This also isn’t a partisan observation; I’m describing precisely the scenario the Framers and a later Congress worried about when they designed safeguards for presidential incapacity. The 25th Amendment wasn’t written for removing villains but rather for those moments when a president can’t or won’t reliably discharge the duties of his office but doesn’t have the good grace, insight, or ability to step down himself.
But constitutional tools are only as strong as the people willing to use them.
Bavaria in the 19th century had fewer options than we do. It had no elections to depose Mad King Ludwig, and no amendment laying out a clear procedure for replacing him.
For years, Ludwig had ministers serving him who watched how crazy he’d become but nonetheless delayed, rationalized, and hoped the problem would solve itself. It wasn’t until the damage became so great, as the state trembled on the verge of bankruptcy, that it was impossible to ignore any longer.
Modern America, on the other hand, has elections, courts, and a theoretically independent Congress. And we have the 25th Amendment. What we lack right now, however, is courage in the GOP and Trump’s cabinet.
Republican members of Congress know that a president can’t unilaterally invade or administer foreign nations on his own whim or impulse. They know that threatening annexation destabilizes the entire world, and Trump’s handed both Putin, Netanyahu, and Xi the rationalizations they all crave to expand their own empires.
Even Republicans know that governing by impulse isn’t strength but, instead, represents a very real danger to our republic. And yet they remain silent, calculating that confronting Trump is riskier to their careers than indulging him is to the country.
That GOP calculation is the real threat.
Trump’s love of military spectacle also fits perfectly — and dangerously — into this pattern. Like Ludwig staging operas and medieval fantasies in his version of the Kennedy Center, Trump treats America’s armed forces as props in his own pathetic personal drama. Rallies, salutes, parades, flyovers, and dramatic announcements substitute for deliberation, applause substitutes for legitimacy, and the human costs, the constitutional limits, and the long-term consequences are all fading into the background.
Neuschwanstein still stands today, beautiful and empty, a monument to what happens when fantasy replaces governance. Bavaria survived despite Ludwig, not because of him. Twenty-first century America, however, doesn’t have the luxury of turning its current ruler into a picturesque lesson (complete with a Ludwig-style ballroom) after the damage is done. A nuclear-armed superpower can’t afford indulgence that’s pretending to be patience.
The Constitution isn’t self-enforcing and doesn’t rise up on its own when norms are trampled. It instead relies on people in positions of authority to choose responsibility over fear; that’s why federal officials and our soldiers pledge their allegiance to our Constitution rather than to our government or any particular administration or person.
We hold the rulebook sacred, not the rulers.
If Republicans continue to refuse to even acknowledge the danger in front of them, history suggests the reckoning will come anyway, just at a far higher cost.
Bavaria eventually acted, not because it was easy but because delay had become more dangerous than dealing with a psychologically incapacitated and emotionally stunted ruler. The question facing the United States today is whether we’ll learn from that history or insist on repeating it.
Mad kings rarely stop themselves: they’re stopped when the people around them decide the country matters more than the crown.
Let your elected officials, particularly the Republicans, know your thoughts on the issue. The phone number for Congress is 202-224-3121. And pass it along…
- Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and radio host. His Substack can be found here.
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This day of Trumpist darkness and violence told us something awful about our future
I grew up in Pittsburgh. When I was a kid, my father brought home the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette every evening. He carried it under his arm as he walked into the house, and handed it to me. He knew, even at a young age, I was enthralled by the news.
I spread it out on the living room floor and read about the world. I learned how a free press reported about democracy, how the stories were always grounded in facts. I never imagined that one day I’d be lucky enough to write, on occasion, for that paper.
I also never imagined I’d live to see the day it went dark. My hometown is without a newspaper.
The news that the Post-Gazette is closing isn’t just personally heartbreaking. It’s chilling. Because media outlets don’t vanish in isolation. They disappear alongside something else, something far more dangerous. When the press goes dark, democracy surely follows.
Astonishingly, it seems that the press and American democracy are folding almost simultaneously, withering and suffocating together.
On Wednesday, the confluence of this darkness came into horrifying focus. We watched a venerable American newspaper shut its doors while the country absorbed acts of authoritarian violence, deception and hegemony, any one of which would have dominated the national conversation at any other time.
Instead, they competed with one another for dwindling space and attention. The last of the grand finale fireworks of democracy descending, leaving a blackened sky.
As the media shrinks, power grows more reckless. Across the country, ICE agents are being sent into cities, to detain people without transparency, without accountability, often without cause.
Yesterday, that recklessness turned lethal. Agents opened fire on an innocent woman as she drove through her neighborhood in Minneapolis. Witnesses said she was warning others ICE was nearby. Early reports and video made clear she posed no threat. She was trying to protect her neighbors.
As she pulled away from the aggressive agents attempting to enter her car, she was shot at, at least twice, and died. Her airbag soaked with the blood of tyranny.
And yet, almost immediately, the President of the United States declared, without evidence, that the agents acted in self-defense. The Secretary of Homeland Security, dressed up in a cowboy hat, lacking seriousness or law enforcement background, quickly echoed the claim. She said the woman "attempted to run [the agents] over and rammed them with her vehicle.”
It was a lie. They were both lies. Lies told in the face of video evidence. Lies delivered reflexively, because this administration has learned it no longer needs to wait for facts. The untrue narrative materializes instantly, corrections never follow.
This is what happens when there are fewer reporters to ask hard questions, fewer editors to slow the spin, fewer institutions left to insist on truth before being subsumed in falsity. Fewer newspapers to report the facts.
As if this weren’t enough, political talk shows were debating whether Donald Trump might invade, forcibly take over or buy Greenland, against the will of its people. It is territory governed by Denmark, one of America’s closest allies.
These conversations were treated as policy discussions, and yes, they came with warnings about the danger of such action. But imperialism pertaining to the U.S. government was being hashed-out in the U.S. media. And, our allies in Europe were intertwining imperialism and the United States in the same menacing sentence.
Over the weekend, Americans got a crash course on what all this means when the U.S. invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president. Now we’re openly entertaining the seizure of land from a NATO ally. The implications are bewildering.
In Trump’s first term the theft of Greenland was bandied about as a joke. No more. Trump will carry through on his commination because he feels emboldened. Seizing Greenland will fracture NATO, and shatter alliances that have defined global stability for eight decades.
It will recast the U.S. not as a defender of democratic norms, but as a predator willing to discard them.
Any one of these stories — the death of a major newspaper, state agents killing a civilian, a president lying about it, open talk of territorial conquest — would once have been a five-alarm fire. Yesterday they arrived all at once. And because they arrived together, none fully broke through.
Democracy doesn’t usually collapse in a single coup or one dramatic announcement. It erodes when its guardrails fail concurrently, when the press dries up, when violence becomes routine, when truth is wiped away, and when despotic ambition is discussed without shame.
It erodes when citizens are forced to absorb too much horror at once, until outrage gives way to exhaustion. We are watching that erosion in real time.
America once prided itself on a free and vibrant press that restrained power, on law enforcement meant to protect rather than terrorize, on leaders who valued democratic ideals abroad. Today, newspapers disappear. Armed agents patrol cities like occupying forces. And the language of conquest replaces the language of freedom.
When the lights of democracy go out completely, when there is no newspaper to hand to the next child in Pittsburgh, and when accountability disappears, who will be left to tell us what’s being done in our name?
- 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 Trump loyalist's shocking decision put your family in the crosshairs
By Jake Scott, Clinical Associate Professor of Infectious Diseases, Stanford University.
The Trump administration’s overhauling of the decades-old childhood vaccination schedule, announced by federal health officials on Jan. 5, 2026, has raised alarm among public health experts and pediatricians.
The U.S. childhood immunization schedule, the grid of colored bars pediatricians share with parents, recommends a set of vaccines given from birth through adolescence to prevent a range of serious infections. The basic structure has been in place since 1995, when federal health officials and medical organizations first issued a unified national standard, though new vaccines have been added regularly as science advanced.
That schedule is now being dismantled.
In all, the sweeping change reduces the universally recommended childhood vaccines from 17 to 11. It moves vaccines against rotavirus, influenza, hepatitis A, hepatitis B and meningococcal disease from routine recommendations to “shared clinical decision-making,” a category that shifts responsibility for initiating vaccination from the health care system to individual families.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has cast doubt on vaccine safety for decades, justified these changes by citing a 33-page assessment comparing the U.S. schedule to Denmark’s.
But the two countries differ in important ways. Denmark has 6 million people, universal health care and a national registry that tracks every patient. In contrast, the U.S. has 330 million people, 27 million uninsured and a system where millions move between providers.
These changes follow the CDC’s decision in December 2025 to drop a long-held recommendation that all newborns be vaccinated against hepatitis B, despite no new evidence that questions the vaccine’s long-standing safety record.
I’m an infectious disease physician who treats vaccine-preventable diseases and reviews the clinical trial evidence behind immunization recommendations. The vaccine schedule wasn’t designed in a single stroke. It was built gradually over decades, shaped by disease outbreaks, technological breakthroughs and hard-won lessons about reducing childhood illness and death.
The early years
For the first half of the 20th century, most states required that students be vaccinated against smallpox to enter the public school system. But there was no unified national schedule. The combination vaccine against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, known as the DTP vaccine, emerged in 1948, and the Salk polio vaccine arrived in 1955, but recommendations for when and how to give them varied by state, by physician and even by neighborhood.
The federal government stepped in after tragedy struck. In 1955, a manufacturing failure at Cutter Laboratories in Berkeley, California, produced batches of polio vaccine containing live virus, causing paralysis in dozens of children. The incident made clear that vaccination couldn’t remain a patchwork affair. It required federal oversight.
In 1964, the U.S. surgeon general established the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, to provide expert guidance and recommendations to the CDC on vaccine use. For the first time, a single body would evaluate the evidence and issue national recommendations.
New viral vaccines
Through the 1960s, vaccines against measles (1963), mumps (1967) and rubella (1969) were licensed and eventually combined into what’s known as the MMR shot in 1971. Each addition followed a similar pattern: a disease that killed or disabled thousands of children annually, a vaccine that proved safe and effective in trials, and a recommendation that transformed a seemingly inevitable childhood illness into something preventable.
The rubella vaccine went beyond protecting the children who received it. Rubella, also called German measles, is mild in children but devastating to fetuses, causing deafness, heart defects and intellectual disabilities when pregnant women are infected.
A rubella epidemic in 1964 and 1965 drove this point home: 12.5 million infections and 20,000 cases of congenital rubella syndrome left thousands of children deaf or blind. Vaccinating children also helped protect pregnant women by curbing the spread of infection. By 2015, rubella had been eliminated from the Americas.
Hepatitis B and the safety net
In 1991, the CDC added hepatitis B vaccination at birth to the schedule. Before then, around 18,000 children every year contracted the virus before their 10th birthday.
Many parents wonder why newborns need this vaccine. The answer lies in biology and the limitations of screening.
An adult who contracts hepatitis B has a 95 percent chance of clearing the virus. An infant infected in the first months of life has a 90 percent chance of developing chronic infection, and 1 in 4 will eventually die from liver failure or cancer. Infants can acquire the virus from their mothers during birth, from infected household members or through casual contact in child care settings. The virus survives on surfaces for days and is highly contagious.
Early strategies that targeted only high-risk groups failed because screening missed too many infected mothers. Even today, roughly 12 percent to 18 percent of pregnant women in the U.S. are never screened for hepatitis B. Until ACIP dropped the recommendation in early December 2025, a first dose of this vaccine at birth served as a safety net, protecting all infants regardless of whether their mothers’ infection status was accurately known.
This safety net worked: Hepatitis B infections in American children fell by 99 percent.
A unified standard
For decades, different medical organizations issued their own, sometimes conflicting, recommendations. In 1995, ACIP, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Family Physicians jointly released the first unified childhood immunization schedule, the ancestor of today’s familiar grid. For the first time, parents and physicians had a single national standard.
The schedule continued to evolve. ACIP recommended vaccinations for chickenpox in 1996; rotavirus in 2006, replacing an earlier version withdrawn after safety monitoring detected a rare side effect; and HPV, also in 2006.
Each addition followed the same rigorous process: evidence review, risk-benefit analysis and a public vote by the advisory committee.
More vaccines, less burden
Vaccine skeptics, including Kennedy, often claim erroneously that children’s immune systems are overloaded because the number of vaccines they receive has increased. This argument is routinely marshaled to argue for a reduced childhood vaccination schedule.
One fact often surprises parents: Despite the increase in recommended vaccines, the number of immune-stimulating molecules in those vaccines, called antigens, has dropped dramatically since the 1980s, which means they are less demanding on a child’s immune system.
The whole-cell pertussis vaccine used in the 1980s alone contained roughly 3,000 antigens. Today’s entire schedule contains fewer than 160 antigens, thanks to advances in vaccine technology that allow precise targeting of only the components needed for protection.
What lies ahead
For decades, ACIP recommended changes to the childhood schedule only when new evidence or clear shifts in disease risk demanded it. The Jan. 5 announcement represents a fundamental break from that norm: Multiple vaccines moved out of routine recommendations simultaneously, justified not by new safety data but by comparison to a country with a fundamentally different health care system.
Kennedy accomplished this by filling positions involved in vaccine safety with political appointees. His hand-picked ACIP is stacked with members with a history of anti-vaccine views. The authors of the assessment justifying the change, senior officials at the Food and Drug Administration and at HHS, are both long-time critics of the existing vaccine schedule. The acting CDC director who signed the decision memo is an investor with no clinical or scientific background.
The practical effect will be felt in clinics across the country. Routine recommendations trigger automatic prompts in medical records and enable nurses to vaccinate under standing orders. “Shared clinical decision-making” requires a physician to be involved in every vaccination decision, creating bottlenecks that will inevitably reduce uptake, particularly for the more than 100 million Americans who lack regular access to primary care.
Major medical organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, have said that they will continue recommending the full complement of childhood vaccines. Several states, including California, New York and Illinois, will follow established guidelines rather than the new federal recommendations, creating a patchwork where children’s protection depends on where they live.
- Portions of this article originally appeared in a previous article published on Dec. 18, 2025.
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These cowardly 'leaders' are bending to Trump and selling out the American people
While Trump and his henchmen are stripping Americans of our constitutional rights and illegally taking over other nations, America’s supposed leadership class is silent. Or worse, they’re helping Trump.
Too many university presidents are silent or caving to Trump’s demands. Too many senior managers of law firms have surrendered to his tyranny. Too many directors of large nonprofits are remaining silent. Almost all Republican leaders are rubber stamping his authoritarianism. Too many Democratic leaders are barely putting up a fight.
The worst offenders are the CEOs of some of America’s most powerful and influential corporations.
Some stood up with the rest of America against Trump when he tried to overturn the 2020 election. Now they’re silent about what Trump is doing to our democracy and international law. Or they’re actively enabling him in order to protect and pad their bottom lines.
Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, recently said that he “fully supports” Trump and would welcome National Guard troops in San Francisco. (He later walked back his comments on the National Guard but continues to back Trump.)
Follow the money: Salesforce’s biggest customer is the federal government. Trump has shown how eager he is to use federal contracts to reward his friends — and Benioff doesn’t want to piss him off.
Benioff is also seeking even more massive federal contracts to help ICE hire thousands of agents at a time when ICE is disappearing people off the streets and violating due process.
Or look at Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, who recently gave Trump a plaque with a 24-karat golden base and then showered him with praise at a convening of Big Tech billionaires at the White House.
Apple followed up by removing an ICE tracking app from its app store at the request of Trump’s Department of Justice.
Why would Cook suck up to Trump? Because Trump has given Apple special exemptions from his tariffs. And of course, both Cook and Apple benefit substantially from Trump’s latest round of tax cuts.
Then there’s Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta.
Zuckerberg has ended Facebook and Instagram’s fact-checking policies, parroting Trump’s claims that the practice censored conservative views. And Meta shelled out $25 million to Trump to settle a lawsuit claiming the company censored him when it removed his accounts. Facebook has also removed an ICE tracking page.
Why? Meta is investing billions in AI and the power-hungry data centers that fuel it, and the company needs a friendly White House to ramp up development.
And whatever happened to Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorganChase, the largest bank in the United States, who relishes his position as “spokesman” of the American business community? What has he said about Trump’s lawlessness?
He’s nowhere. He’s said nothing.
In October, Dimon and JPMorgan announced what they called the Security and Resiliency Initiative, with the bank pledging $1.5 trillion to “facilitate, finance and invest in industries critical to national economic security and resiliency.”
Pure fluff and corporate PR — a repackaged set of aspirations. Just like Dimon and his bank’s $2.5 trillion Sustainable Development Target, unveiled with much self-gratulation in 2021 — a package of hoped-for environmentally related investments that, as The Wall Street Journal recently noted, “the bank doesn’t talk about that much anymore.”
Dimon also used to talk about the wide-ranging benefits of diversity and inclusion. No longer. His bank basks in Trump’s good graces — and the tax cuts and financial regulatory rollbacks that accompany them.
You see the pattern.
Benioff, Cook, Zuckerberg, Dimon, and all the other billionaires and CEOs selling out to Trump are happy to back his anti-democracy agenda as long as their businesses keep raking it in.
They get tax cuts, federal contracts, and deregulation, and Trump gets to trample on our fundamental rights and on the basic tenets of international law with no pushback from America’s so-called “leaders.”
They’re showing us a reality we should have known years ago, but many of us didn’t want to see: America’s leadership class no longer leads. It hides. It enables. It sucks up.
If they were true leaders, they’d speak out and speak up against Trump. But they won’t and don’t. They go along with Trump’s authoritarian agenda so they can enlarge their wealth and power.
How do we fix this?
Courageous politicians would call out this ugly alliance between the so-called “leadership class” and Trump’s anti-democracy agenda.
But too many politicians eagerly take money from billionaires and big corporations to keep winning elections. Yet what’s the point of winning if they’re in the pockets of the powerful?
We must support only politicians who swear off big money and fight for the people who don’t have power.
Some politicians are already doing this, but too few.
What else can we do to fix this?
We don’t have to wait around for politicians or other formal leaders to grow spines. We can be that spine.
You can run for office.
Even if you don’t hold a formal office or have official authority, you can still organize your community, your workplace, or your campus.
Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King Jr., Dolores Huerta, and countless others who have moved the world held no official authority or formal position of power. They had moral power to tell the truth and mobilize others to fight back.
At a time in our nation’s history when America desperately needs leaders but too many official leaders are intimidated or have been bought off — it’s up to the rest of us to step up.
We are the leaders we’ve been waiting for.
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- Robert Reich is a emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
- Robert Reich's new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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Trump's attack on Venezuela is linked to the Epstein files — but not the way you think
If you’re like me, it seems unclear why the president ordered the illegal and unconstitutional bombing of Venezuela, the kidnapping of its head of state, and the theft of its oil. As soon as we were given one reason, the White House came up with another, usually contradicting the first.
Ditto for what the US is going to do now. Donald Trump said we’re now going to run Venezuela, as if colonizing a foreign nation was something any of us voted for. Apparently, however, what he really meant is that Venezuela’s new leader, the former vice president, had better do what he tells her to do or face another illegal and unconstitutional attack.
In a sense, this extortionist attitude toward Venezuela is the same extortionist attitude that Trump has toward blue states: Do as I say, not for any particular or compelling reason, but because I said so — or else. The president believes his word is law. Foreign leaders can be held accountable for their crimes, but he can’t be for his. He also believes might makes right. “We have to do it again [in other countries],” he said. “We can do it again, too. Nobody can stop us."
On hearing news of the Venezuela attack, some liberals said it was to distract from the Epstein files. Some cited Trump’s own words. He once said Barack Obama was getting so unpopular that we should expect him to bomb the Middle East to boost his poll numbers.
But “distraction” assumes that one thing is worse than another, and the fact is, everything Trump does is corrupt, meaning everything is a potential liability. Withholding Epstein files is illegal. Invading a sovereign nation is illegal. (Impounding congressional funding to Democratically controlled states is illegal). It’s all illegal. And defenders of liberty don’t have to decide which is more corrupt.
I interviewed Noah Berlatsky about a recent piece of his arguing that Trump’s corrupt handling of the Epstein files could backfire on him. We discussed an array of things, including the seeming impossibility of holding Trump accountable. Our conversation took place before last weekend’s attack, but Noah connected the two subjects. He said MAGA infighting over Epstein eroded Trump’s polling. MAGA infighting over Venezuela — a betrayal of “America First” — could do the same.
That, among other things, offers hope for justice.
“War with Venezuela is about as unpopular as Trump's handling of the Epstein files!” said the publisher of Everything Is Horrible, a newsletter about politics and the arts. “I think the idea of ‘distraction’ in general isn't very helpful. Trump does lots and lots of horrible things; they're all horrible in themselves, and we should pay attention to and oppose them all. I don't think one horrible thing distracts from another.”
JS: In your piece for Public Notice, you say that Trump's corrupt handling of the Epstein files could backfire on him. He has escaped scandal before. What makes this different in your mind?
NB: I don't think he really does escape scandal. His rhetoric and actions do harm him in many ways. He's always been an extraordinarily unpopular president, and he's always suffered a lot of losses because of that, and because he's bad at his job. Partisanship is just a very powerful force, as is white supremacy and bigotry, so his many losses and failures, and his unpopularity, don't necessarily destroy him the way people often think they should, which leads to this myth of invulnerability — even though there's a lot of evidence that he's not invulnerable.
Having said that, I think the Epstein files are particularly dangerous for him because Epstein's real crimes became conflated with Qanon anti-Democratic conspiracy theories. A lot of people in Trump's base — like Dan Bongino, for example, or Marjorie Taylor Greene — have invested a lot of energy in the idea that exposing Epstein would bring down the Democratic Party, and so when Trump says that Epstein is a hoax, that seems to be targeted at them and they don't like it.
Basically, Trump's usual strategies to contain the damage, which is claiming it's an entirely partisan attack, are not very effective when the right is also very invested in this scandal. It's a case where Trump's interests are very much out of sync not just with the Republican mainstream, but with the far-right base. So that creates unusual dangers for him.
If there is accountability in the future for Trump, it will be because the Democrats insisted on it. But the Democrats have a lot of incentive to just move on once they regain power. That would set up future tyrants for success. How do we change that?
Yeah, it's a tough question.
I think that the Democrats have incentives to move on, because antifascist actions — expanding the Supreme Court, for example — are difficult and may not be super-popular with the electorate as a whole, which is often more focused on things like lowering inflation. This was Joe Biden's approach. He figured that a good economy would allow him to win the next election and that was the best way to fight fascism — just win elections. Electoral parties are hyper-focused on winning elections, so this is an appealing approach for Democrats.
However, Democrats, of course, lost in 2024, because you can't win every election or control the economy entirely. And you'd hope that would be a warning to Democrats and create some incentives the other way. And of course fascists actually want to arrest and murder the opposition, which you'd hope would encourage Democrats to be aggressive in containing and crushing fascism when they're in office.
I think there are some signs that some Democrats at least are thinking about this — and there's also evidence that you can move the party through advocacy. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — poster child for appeasement — moved from immediate capitulation in the first budget showdown to leading a very extended and in many ways successful budget shutdown at the end of the year. Impeachment votes have garnered more and more support in the House, and GOP leadership has moved from outright opposition to refusing to vote.
This is not enough, obviously, but it suggests that as Trump's approval craters and as people demand better, representatives do react.
I think continued pressure will help. I also think it would probably help if there were some high-profile mainstream losses to fighters in the midterms. Brad Lander beating Dan Goldman would be a big deal. Kat Abughazaleh winning in IL-9 would be a big deal. A couple more wins along those lines would help a lot.
Accountability will require sustained attention from the press corps, but the press corps allows its agenda to be set by the rightwing media complex, as I call it. Are the divisions we are seeing among MAGA media personalities the only hope we have?
Again, it's a tough question. I think that the current fissures on the right do help in terms of eroding Trump's approval and making it more difficult for the right to create sustained propaganda talking points. There hasn't been any consistent rightwing pushback on Epstein for example. The right has been notably unable to make a convincing sustained case for war in Venezuela; I think that's polling at 11 percent or something ridiculously low.
I think people can also underestimate the extent to which resistance can create effective propaganda. [Editor-in-chief of CBS News] Bari Weiss attempted to kill the story about El Salvador's horrific prison conditions for US deportees, but it got bootlegged and distributed by independent media and just interested people, and the result is it was seen I believe millions more times than it would have been if it just aired. Democratic politicians like Chris Murphy also talked about it. So I thought that was all pretty hopeful.
So I guess the answer is … yes. MAGA infighting helps, but I think we're able to take advantage of it in part because there's just a ton of resistance to the regime, and that creates opportunities for counter-messaging through both formal and informal channels.
Liberal hope is often rooted in belief in the American character, which is that we the people believe in liberty and justice for all. Trump has exposed that as problematic. He's also convinced people that such beliefs are fraudulent. What do liberals do?
Well, there's no one American character. The US has always been really racist and authoritarian. It's also fostered pioneering antiracist and liberatory movements. The "truth" of the country isn't one or the other. It's just what we choose to do.
I think that the belief in American exceptionalism and in some sort of inborn virtuous American character has always really been a tool for fascism and repression, so liberals are better off without it! I think that liberals and leftists and people of good will in general are best off acknowledging that the country has always had grotesque fascist traditions, but highlighting that there have also been people who have fought against those — Frederick Douglass, Ida B Wells-Barnett, MLK, Alice Wong, and on and on. The fight's the same as it ever was, which is grim, but hopefully a source of sustenance as well.
I have never seen a Democratic base as divided and disillusioned as I see it today. Not even the post-9/11 years were this bad. I suspect it's because of dashed hopes. There seemed to be so much promise in the wake of George Floyd's murder. America seemed to reject conservative orthodoxy. Then came the radical centrist backlash and Trump's reelection. Thoughts?
I think there's a lot of reason to be depressed for sure. And I think despair and a real uncertainty about tactics will lead to a certain amount of infighting. But, I mean, I don't exactly see the base as divided and disillusioned. There's a lot of coordinated and effective resistance. People are turning out to vote in massive numbers, and winning major victories everywhere from New Jersey to Miami to Oklahoma. Protests against ICE in the streets are ubiquitous and have been quite effective. The consumer boycott against Disney to restore Jimmy Kimmel was massive and victorious. I mentioned the circulation of the 60 Minutes segment in defiance of CBS.
I don't mean to say it's all good. Obviously, we're in a dire and ugly situation. But I think despite differences and understandable despair, a lot of people are pushing back in a lot of ways. I think that Trump's position, and the radical centrist position, is much, much more precarious than it was at the beginning of the year because of this pushback. Victory is very much not guaranteed, but I think there's reason to hope that continued resistance can continue to gain ground.
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Of all Trump's toadies, this one is the wettest — and littlest
Marco Rubio has a drinking problem.
It first showed up years ago, under klieg lights and national scrutiny, when a shaky hand reached for a sip from a bottle of water, all caught on camera as he gave the GOP response to President Barack Obama's 2013 State of the Union address. It became a national joke but it was also a metaphor: a man parched for power, exposed as he tried to drink on his own.
A decade later, the thirst remains. Only now, Rubio isn’t sipping nervously. He’s chugging obediently from the firehose-in-chief.
Last Saturday, standing at a podium to explain the U.S. invasion of Venezuela and extrajudicial kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro, Rubio looked like what he has spent his entire career trying not to be — small.
Small in stature, small in independence, infinitely small in courage. Puffing himself up with half-assed talking points while a slouched and sleepy Donald Trump loomed behind him, Rubio strained to sound like a statesman but came off like a little tike, gulping excitedly from the well of sycophancy.
Poor little Marco. Still trying to drink his way into relevance.
As Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, Rubio has presided over a hollowing out of American diplomacy, all while insisting the pipes are flowing. Career diplomats have been sidelined or purged. Experts have been replaced with loyalists. Longstanding diplomatic programs like USAID and PEPFAR have been washed out. And that’s only the beginning.
No longer the parched junior senator clutching a Poland Spring, Rubio has become a different joke.
He once argued that strong diplomacy was America’s first line of defense. Now he acts as if diplomacy is a weakness, to be flushed away in favor of blunt threats and cable-news bravado.
He used to come off polished, in his days heading the Senate Intelligence Committee. Some Democrats even appreciated his moderation and modulation. Not anymore. On Sunday, speaking on CBS’s Face the Nation, Rubio tied himself in knots trying to explain why the U.S. invaded Venezuela, and whatever the hell comes next. He was drowning in doublespeak.
The Venezuela debacle — that’s what it will eventually be called — is the clearest example yet of Rubio’s transformation from policymaker to tongue-tied mouthpiece. For years, he has framed Latin America as a simple morality play, strongmen versus freedom. But he used to resist calls to take up arms. On CNN in 2019, he said, “I don’t know of anyone who is calling for a military intervention.”
At the podium at Mar-a-Lago on Saturday, Little Marco changed his tune. He turned, looked up at his dictator, and foamed at the mouth: “The 47th president of the United States is not a game player. When he tells you that he’s going to do something, when he tells you he’s going to address a problem, he means it … Don’t play games when this president’s in office, because it’s not going to turn out well.”
What’s not going to turn out well, Little Marco, is the illusion that you can play war games abroad, invade a country, then manage it without paying a steep price.
The invasion appears to have violated international law, bypassed congressional authorization, and detonated whatever credibility the U.S. had in the region. Allies were blindsided, adversaries emboldened. The Maduro regime remains in power. God knows what comes next.
Little Marco says he knows. He is boasting that oil companies are going to save the day, as everyone swims in riches. But oil companies are saying, “What?” They are balking, unwilling to put businesses and employees at risk.
Rubio’s most consistent role is no longer architect or strategist. Instead, it’s trying to be Trump’s favorite. When Trump slurs out a threat, Rubio stammers out a water-down. When Trump contradicts himself, Rubio contradicts the contradictions. When Trump bungles foreign policy, Rubio says he’s “Going to address a problem.”
He absorbs it all like a sponge.
What makes Rubio especially diminished is how openly competitive his loyalty has become. He isn’t just supporting Trump — he’s pining to be the golden child among all the acolytes. If Pete Hegseth is the warrior and Kristi Noem is the beauty queen, that makes Rubio the court jester, because most of what he says is laughable.
And the kicker is that Rubio most likely thinks that kow-towing to Trump, and wrestling with Hegseth, Stephen Miller, and Kash Patel, will help him usurp the equally inept JD Vance as the GOP frontrunner in 2028. Little Marco has big dreams.
There were high hopes for him once, but rather than acting as a moderating force or principled voice he surrendered his autonomy and dignity, enthusiastically advocating for policies that are abjectly inhumane and harmful.
His shift from Trump critic to cheerleader is nothing short of mindnumbing. It is gutless capitulation at its worst, loyalty to Trump outweighing any commitment to independent judgment or diplomatic norms.
Trump’s penchant for third-grade nicknames shows the very essence of an infantilist. But occasionally his nicknames land, because they expose something true. “Little Marco” stuck because it captured a person who wants power so badly he keeps making himself smaller to get it. In the wake of Venezuela, Rubio has become Tom Thumb.
The only thing large about Rubio are his ears, now full of Trump’s grating, slurred, and sinister corrosiveness, tidal-waving over Rubio like a full-service car wash.
Rubio thinks he is preparing to man the faucets of our country. But Little Marco has diminished himself by drowning in Trump’s poisonous Kool-Aid. A pint-size bottle of Poland Spring couldn’t wash that away.
- John Casey was most recently Senior Editor, The Advocate, and is a freelance opinion and feature story writer. Previously, he was a Capitol Hill press secretary, and spent 25 years in media and public relations in NYC. He is the co-author of LOVE: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality (Rizzoli, 2025), named by Oprah in her "Best 25 of 2025.”
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Trump is now a cornered animal — and the worst is still to come
Yesterday I ran into a friend who expressed relief that “the worst is over” from Trump.
I asked him why he thought so.
He became animated. “The courts are stopping him! Republicans are in shambles! His MAGA base is furious with him! The Epstein scandal is growing! His polls are in free fall. Dems are winning elections! It’s over!”
I told him that all of that was true, but the worst is not over. In fact, this year is likely to be even worse than the last.
Trump’s real base of support — the billionaires, Big Oil, Big Tech and AI, Big Crypto, defense contractors, and Wall Street — know that the midterm elections may limit what they and Trump can get away with starting a year from now.
So, 2026 could be the last year they can cash in. This means they’re likely to loot America even more this year than in 2025.
Big Oil just cashed in big. By taking over Venezuela, Trump effectively gave America’s biggest oil companies the world’s largest proven oil reserves — estimated at around 303 billion barrels, roughly one-fifth of total global oil reserves.
It’s part of the deal he struck with Big Oil in the 2024 campaign, when it agreed to back him in return for his rolling back environmental regulations.
Big Oil has continued the gusher — contributing to his ballroom, his PAC, and his investments. Ditto Big Tech and AI, Big Crypto, the biggest banks, biggest defense contractors, and so on.
The pattern we observed in 2025 is ramping up: Trump destroying public institutions, preventing and rolling back regulations and public protections, privatizing public functions, and siphoning off big profits to wealthy individuals and industries from which he extorts huge sums of money.
I say this not to depress or alarm you but to warn you against the kind of complacency I heard in my friend yesterday.
Yes, the courts are limiting him, the Republican Party is cracking up, his MAGA base is disillusioned, his polls are dropping, Democrats are winning elections.
All true, but these have made Trump and the oligarchs behind him even more determined to loot America.
These have also made Trump even more dangerous — like a cornered animal. He views the political backlash as challenges to his power. So he’ll seek to display even more power — lashing out at perceived enemies, foreign and domestic.
This means it’s more important than ever for us to be vigilant, to protect democracy and the rule of law, and to fight back against his authoritarianism (including the steps I outlined a few days ago).
I know it’s exhausting. I know it’s stressful and time-consuming. I know you’re sick to death of Trump. I am, too.
But as he revealed early Saturday morning when he had the president of Venezuela and his wife dragged out of their bed, arrested, sent to the United States and put in the Municipal Detention Center in Brooklyn to await trial — there is no limit to what Trump will do to assert his power.
Your activism and courage are needed.
- Robert Reich is a emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
- Robert Reich's new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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Trump set off a chain of events that will end in disaster
During rambling remarks on Jan. 3, President Donald Trump announced that the United States had bombed Venezuela, “captured” President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and gained control of that country’s oil reserves.
Now what? Trump has no idea, but historical precedent portends disaster.
Dubious legal basis
As with his bombing of alleged drug-smuggling boats that have killed at least 115 civilians, Trump offered no justification under international law for his actions:
- The operation was not “self-defense” because Venezuela did not “attack” the United States.
- Calling Maduro a “narco-terrorist” did not render him or his country an “imminent” national security threat. In fact, Venezuela is a relatively small player in the international cocaine market and has no role in fentanyl — the primary killer in overdose deaths.
- Trump used the word “oil” more than 20 times in his speech. Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Fifty years ago — in 1976 — it nationalized US companies’ oil assets and facilities through a negotiated legal process that netted the firms more than $1 billion. Reversing that nationalization is an absurd — and dangerous — hook on which to hang the military attack in 2026.
Repeatedly, Trump invoked the Monroe Doctrine, saying that he had expanded it “by a lot.” But in fact, Trump has stood President James Monroe’s 1823 seminal proclamation on its head while emboldening China’s President Xi Jinping and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to follow Trump’s lead in dictating the affairs of sovereign countries.
Monroe vs 'Donroe'
In 1823, President Monroe announced a new defensive principle: The United States would object to Europe’s further colonization of the western hemisphere as “dangerous to our peace and security.” The US would not interfere with existing European colonies, but it would regard future attempts to determine the destiny of these independent nations “as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.”
In 1904 and 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt’s Corollary expanded the Doctrine, permitting the US to act as an “international police power” to prevent “some civilized nation” from intervening to assure a struggling country’s financial solvency.
Rather than a defensive warning to would-be foreign interlopers, Trump has transformed the Monroe Doctrine into an offensive weapon to invade, conquer, and control independent nations.
Trump calls it the “Donroe Doctrine.” It stems from his 19th-century worldview that the United States, China, and Russia are each entitled to operate within their own spheres of influence — kings carving up the world: China gets the Far East; the United States gets the western hemisphere (and Greenland!); Russia gets whatever it wants that’s left.
China’s designs on an independently democratic Taiwan are well known. Russia started a war to absorb Ukraine into the new Russian empire. And now Trump has conquered Venezuela.
Pottery Barn rule
Before the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Gen. Colin Powell warned President George W. Bush that the strategy was fraught with risk.
“If you break it, you own it,” Powell said, invoking the “Pottery Barn rule.”
Powell meant that if the US intervened militarily and destabilized a country, it bore long-term responsibility for rebuilding, governing, and managing the consequences. Bush would “own” Iraq’s 25 million people.
Venezuela’s population is 28 million.
Trump said that he, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine will “run” that country for the indefinite future. But what does that mean?
For starters, Trump is picking its next president. Maduro’s scandal-ridden vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, is subject to U.S. and E.U. sanctions and has been a central player in the corrupt regime. But she will serve for as long as she does Trump’s bidding.
“She really doesn’t have a choice,” he said.
An alternative, María Corina Machado, is a former lawmaker and the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner who led the opposition to Maduro. She would've won the presidential primary by a landslide in 2023, but Maduro’s government disqualified her from running. Her successor still won the general election. Maduro refused to recognize the outcome.
But Trump declared that Machado can’t be president because she “doesn’t have the support within or respect within the country.” What he probably meant was that she won the Nobel Peace Prize that he coveted.
But what if the Venezuelan people want Machado? Things can turn ugly quickly, especially if Trump makes good on his threat to put “boots on the ground.”
Searching for monsters
In 1821, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams delivered the most memorable speech of his career, saying:
“Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”
To do otherwise, he cautioned, the “fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.” America would become “an Imperial Diadem, flashing in false and tarnished luster the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”
When the United States has departed from Adams’s principle, it has turned out badly.
Coup attempts and more than 500,000 “boots on the ground” for years could not secure victory in South Vietnam.
Nearly 15 years after the US led the ouster of Libya’s dictator, it remains a fractured state.
President Bush’s “pre-emptive” war in Iraq over non-existent weapons of mass destruction became a decade-long quagmire.
America’s 20-year struggle in Afghanistan ended in disaster and the Taliban’s return to power.
Worst president ever
Trump himself made opposition to foreign entanglements a central issue in his “America First” presidential campaigns. But words spoken to win elections ring hollow today — just like his campaign promises to release the Epstein files and strengthen the economy.
Maduro is a despicable person. But it’s a dangerous quantum leap to bomb a country and kidnap its leader in violation of international law. Trump suggested that Colombia’s president could be next. Secretary of State Marco Rubio hinted that Cuba might be on the target list. And Mexico is in Trump’s crosshairs.
Trump has no knowledge of history, much less respect for its costly lessons. And with the “Donroe Doctrine,” he has created new danger for the nation and the world.
For all mankind, surviving the final three years of his term will be a daunting challenge.
- Steven J. Harper is an attorney, adjunct professor at Northwestern University Law School, and author of several books, including Crossing Hoffa: A Teamster's Story and The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis. He has been a regular columnist for Moyers on Democracy, Dan Rather's News and Guts, and The American Lawyer. Follow him at https://thelawyerbubble.com.
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January 6 was a day of horror in DC — but we must remember where it came from
Five years ago today we were transfixed by the surreal spectacle of the attack on the U.S. Capitol. The violence and horror of that day was made more bearable when the insurrectionists were arrested and the election results they tried to overturn were certified.
But now they’re back, pardoned by President Donald Trump and released from prison and planning to parade triumphantly today through the streets of Washington, D.C.
Among the people convicted and later pardoned by Trump, at least 33 have been arrested and charged with new crimes, according to the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Their alleged continuing criminal behaviors include rape, illegal possession of weapons, firing on police officers, and, in the case of Christopher Moynihan, threatening to murder House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
Some of the most violent offenders are back behind bars. But the most powerful proponents of the Big Lie, including Trump himself, the enablers who staff his administration and the Wisconsin Republicans who hatched the fake electors scheme to try to overturn the results of the 2020 election, continue to work to undermine our democracy.
“We must continue to defeat election deniers and the threats they pose,” the Wisconsin-based progressive firm Law Forward declares on its website, in a section devoted to a timeline of the fake electors scheme.
Law Forward brought the first class-action lawsuit against Wisconsin’s fake electors, and forced the release of documents, text messages and other evidence showing how the plot unfolded. They present the timeline “as a call to action for every American to see how close our democracy came to toppling and how the freedom to vote must continue to be protected, not taken for granted.”
For a few years it seemed as though we had dispelled the nightmare of Jan. 6. But the lawless, emboldened second Trump administration has dragged us back to that scary, dangerous time.
The brave work of people like Jeff Mandell, founder of Law Forward, and the other lawyers, judges and investigators who continue to struggle against the agents of authoritarianism trying to destroy American democracy is still making a difference.
Last month, Dane County Judge John Hyland found probable cause to continue the trial of Wisconsin attorney James Troupis and Trump campaign aide Mike Roman, charged with felony forgery by Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul in connection with the fake electors scheme. Hyland rejected Troupis’ desperate effort to scuttle the case by claiming another judge had a personal bias against him.
Wisconsin attorney Ken Cheseboro, the originator of the fake electors plot, is also facing felony charges.
As Trump and his gang openly defy the U.S. Constitution, pursue baseless, vindictive prosecutions of their political enemies, launch military actions without the consent of Congress, threaten to seize other countries and use their positions to enrich themselves while destroying the public welfare, it feels as through that dark moment on Jan. 6 when American democracy was under physical attack was just the beginning.
But as Mandell told me last year, a few months after Trump took office, “I think building a stronger, more resilient democracy in Wisconsin is its own form of resistance.
“When things feel most shocking and unstable at the federal level,” at the state and local level, Mandell said, “we can show our institutions still work and provide some reassurance.”
We need that reassurance today more than ever.
“We are slow to realize that democracy is a life and involves continual struggle,” said Robert M. La Follette, the great governor and senator from Wisconsin and founder of the Progressive movement. I’m grateful for the Wisconsinites today who, like La Follette, are committed to that life and willing to continue the struggle.
- Ruth Conniff is Editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Examiner. She formerly served as Editor-in-chief of The Progressive Magazine where she worked for many years from both Madison and Washington, DC. Shortly after Donald Trump took office she moved with her family to Oaxaca, Mexico, and covered U.S./Mexico relations, the migrant caravan, and Mexico’s efforts to grapple with Trump. Conniff is the author of "Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers" which won the 2022 Studs and Ida Terkel award from The New Press. She is a frequent guest on MSNBC and has appeared on Good Morning America, Democracy Now!, Wisconsin Public Radio, CNN, Fox News and many other radio and television outlets. She has also written for The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times, among other publications. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her husband and three daughters.
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This direct line links Jan 6 to Trump's attack on Venezuela
Donald Trump’s domestic and foreign policies — ranging from his attempted coup against the United States five years ago today, to his incursion into Venezuela last weekend, to his current threats against Cuba, Colombia, and Greenland — undermine domestic and international law. But that’s not all.
They threaten what we mean by civilization.
The moral purpose of civilized society is to prevent the stronger from attacking and exploiting the weaker. Otherwise, we’d be permanently immersed in a brutish war in which only the fittest and most powerful could survive.
This principle lies at the center of America’s founding documents: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. It’s also the core of the post-World War II international order championed by the United States, including the UN Charter — emphasizing multilateralism, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.
But it’s a fragile principle, easily violated by those who would exploit their power. Maintaining the principle requires that the powerful have enough integrity to abstain from seeking short-term wins, and that the rest of us hold them accountable if they don’t.
Every time people or corporations or countries that are richer and more powerful attack and exploit those that are not, the fabric of civilization frays. If such aggression is not contained, the fabric unravels. If not stopped, the world can descend into chaos and war. It has happened before.
We now inhabit a society and world grown vastly more unequal. Political and economic power are more concentrated than ever before. This invites the powerful to exploit the weaker because the powerful feel omnipotent.
The wealth of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Charles Koch, and a handful of others is almost beyond comprehension. The influence of Big Tech, Big Oil, and the largest aerospace and defense corporations extends over much of the globe. AI is likely to centralize wealth and power even more. The destructive power of the United States, China, and Russia is unmatched in human history.
Trump — enabled by cowardly congressional Republicans and a pliant majority on the Supreme Court — has turned the U.S. presidency into the most powerful and unaccountable agent of American government in history.
Put it all together and you see the threat.
A direct line connects Trump’s attempted coup five years ago to his capture of Nicolas Maduro last weekend. Both were lawless. Both were premised on the hubris of omnipotence.
That same line extends to Trump’s current threats against Cuba, Colombia, and Greenland.
You see much the same in Putin’s war on Ukraine. In Xi’s threats against Taiwan. In global depredation and monopolization by Big Tech and Big Oil. In Russian, Chinese, and American oligarchs who have fused public power with their personal wealth.
But unfettered might does not make right. It makes for instability, upheaval, and war.
History shows that laws and norms designed to constrain the powerful also protect them. Without such constraints, their insatiable demands for more power and wealth eventually bring them down — along with their corporations, nations, or empires. And threaten world war.
Trump’s blatant lawlessness will haunt America and the world — and civilization — for years to come.
- Robert Reich is a emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
- Robert Reich's new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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