Trump gets a look at who isn't bending the knee
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
The GOP has handed us the tactic to bring down Trump
Standing in the Oval Office last week, Donald Trump declared that the war with Iran — a war he started without a declaration of Congress, apparently at the urging of MBS and his son-in-law who takes $25 million a year from Saudi Arabia — is “won,” and then added that “the only one that likes to keep it going is the fake news.”
Iran, for its part, flatly denied that any negotiations are even taking place. And the network news covered it just like that: Trump says the war is won, Iran says it isn't, here's the weather.
Nobody on camera yesterday morning even bothered to ask why Jared Kushner, who was simultaneously soliciting a fresh $5 billion from the Saudis who lobbied hardest for this war, was one of the people at the table in Geneva when the last chance for a deal collapsed.
That omission isn't an accident. It’s the result of a thirty-year Republican strategy to bully the press into docility, and it’s long past time for Democrats to fight back using the exact same playbook.
An old friend dropped me a note this week with a complaint that, once you hear it, you can’t stop noticing everywhere you look in our nation’s media. He’d been watching one of the three major network TV evening newscasts and noticed that Trump and other Republicans are on every single night, almost always without serious pushback or fact-checking, while Democrats are rarely featured at all.
When a Democrat does show up, it’s usually to react to something Trump just did or said, a process that reinforces the Republican frame of the news even when it pushes back against it (see: George Lakoff).
I’ve been in the media much of my life; was a radio news reporter for a top station in the 1970s and have been writing books and articles about democracy and politics regularly for the past three decades. What my friend is describing is neither an accident nor a coincidence.
It’s the fully ripened fruit of a successful strategy Republicans have been running to get the media to spin stories for them since the early 1980s. And it’s long past time for Democrats to stand up and fight back hard with exactly the same playbook.
Back during the 1992 Clinton/Bush Sr. presidential race, Rich Bond, then chairman of the GOP, explained his party’s media strategy with unusual candor:
“There is some strategy to it,” he said of their habit of bashing the so-called liberal media. “If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is ‘work the refs.’ Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one.”
Lee Atwater had been running a version of this strategy for years before Bond said the quiet part out loud. The genius of it was that they never needed to prove that the media was actually infected with “liberal bias.”
Which was good for them, because the mainstream media’s never really had any sort of political bias other than status quo; it’s just that the GOP has relied on so many lies over the years like “trickle down,” “murderous immigrant invasion,” “evil union bosses,” “non-citizens voting,” “queer predators,” etc., etc., that when they get confronted with reality it seems to them like bias.
All they needed was for the accusation to be repeated often enough that journalists and producers would end up sufficiently intimidated to lean over backward to prove they weren’t pushing a liberal line. And it worked.
Media scholar Eric Alterman documented the phenomenon in detail at the Center for American Progress: conservative columnists like George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and Bob Novak had prominent perches all over the allegedly “liberal” media showing up on major TV programs weekly, while genuinely progressive voices like Paul Krugman and E.J. Dionne almost never got television slots.
A study comparing Sunday morning talk shows during Obama’s first two years versus Trump’s first two years (first time around) found that by the Trump era, every single major Sunday show, including NBC’s Meet the Press and CBS’s Face the Nation, was featuring more Republicans than Democrats. And a FAIR analysis found Republicans outnumbering Democrats 56% to 40% in Sunday show appearances during Trump’s first post-election transition period.
Here’s how effectively this strategy worked: When Bush was president, the networks said they “needed more Republicans” on television because “Republicans are in power.” When Obama was president, they said they “needed more Republicans” on TV “because Democrats were in charge,” and “it’s important to hear from the opposition.”
Heads Republicans win, tails Democrats lose, every single time, under almost every conceivable circumstance and on pretty much every topic. That’s not journalism. That’s genuine media bias. In favor of the GOP.
And while that particular scheme was playing out, the billionaires on the hard right were simultaneously building media empires of their own that now include roughly 1,500 rightwing radio stations, Fox “News,” Newsmax, One America News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, more than half of America’s local newspapers, and now, CBS itself.
Meanwhile, CNN may soon land in the hands of the same billionaire nepo-baby buyer, reportedly eager to move it in a similar direction. Just ask Pete Hegseth, who recently said, “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”
Even the White House and Pentagon press pools, once home to credentialed reporters from established outlets, are now packed with “reporters” from fringe rightwing websites and sketchy podcasts, while serious journalists and representatives of progressive outlets often find themselves locked out.
The hypocrisy here, particularly since the media now either ignores or treats Trump family and cabinet corruption as something normal, is breathtaking.
For example, Jared Kushner has been simultaneously acting as Trump’s Middle East “peace envoy” while raising a new $5 billion round of investment from the same foreign governments he’s supposedly negotiating with.
Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which is controlled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), already pumped $2 billion into Kushner’s private equity firm right after he left the first Trump White House, and pays him $25 million a year in management fees.
According to reporting in The Washington Post, MBS was making private phone calls to Trump for weeks before the bombing of Iran started, urging him to strike, since Iran is Saudi Arabia’s chief regional rival.
Kushner himself met with Iran’s foreign minister in Geneva just before the bombs fell. Iran’s foreign minister later said a deal “was within reach,” suggesting Kusnher may have been playing them for suckers on behalf of MBS and/or Netanyahu (an old Kushner family friend).
Senators Ron Wyden and Jamie Raskin have called for investigations into whether Kushner violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act and the Constitution’s emoluments clause. Not to mention policies against nepotism. And that’s Trump’s peace envoy. That’s the person steering American foreign policy toward a war that explicitly benefits and may even be being fought — at the cost of American lives and treasure — on behalf of his biggest client.
At the same time, Qatar handed Trump a $400 million luxury Boeing 747 jumbo jet to ultimately keep for himself and you and I are now paying a billion dollars to outfit it. Multiple constitutional law scholars have called it a textbook violation of the Foreign Emoluments Clause, which prohibits presidents from accepting gifts from foreign governments without congressional approval.
The New York Times has reported that Trump has already personally pocketed at least $1.4 billion from the presidency through his family’s various business deals; other investigations suggest the number could be well over $4 billion.
The administration has also been killing people on boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean — at least 151 people killed in 45 strikes since last September — including at least one Colombian fisherman, all without a declaration of war or congressional authorization. And then they bombed and invaded Venezuela, killing more than 80 people including civilians, seizing its president without any legal authority whatsoever under international law.
Now, consider what would have happened if Barack Obama or Bill Clinton had done any of this? What if Clinton’s son-in-law had taken $2 billion from a foreign government and then whispered in Clinton’s ear to start a war that benefited that same foreign government? What if Obama had accepted a $400 million jet from Qatar? What if a Democratic administration had been killing people on boats in international waters without congressional authorization?
Republicans would have been incandescent, holding news conferences and hearing after hearing after hearing. Fox “News” would have run wall-to-wall of outraged coverage for months. The Sunday shows would have featured nothing but Republicans demanding impeachment or worse.
And the mainstream media would have covered those hearings seriously and continuously, because they’d have been terrified of being called “liberal” if they didn’t.
That’s the mechanism. That’s how it works. Republicans institutionalized the accusation of “liberal media bias” so thoroughly that the media now polices itself on their behalf, even when the corruption on the other side is jaw-dropping.
The solution to this media crisis that’s so damaging to our democracy is straightforward, and Democrats need to do it now.
Every senator, every congressperson, every governor, every mayor, every Democratic surrogate who goes on television needs to be trained to say the words “rightwing media bias” early and often, not occasionally, but constantly, institutionally, the same way Republicans “worked the refs” for thirty years.
It means pressuring the networks directly. It means holding hearings — even if they have to be unofficial “shadow” hearings — right now about media consolidation and the capture of the press corps by rightwing interests. It means pointing out, loudly and specifically, every single time a network gives a Republican five minutes of uncontested airtime and then gives a Democrat thirty seconds to “respond.”
Republicans didn’t spend forty years bleating about the “liberal media” because the liberal media actually existed. They knew it didn’t but were relentless about the accusation nonetheless, and they had the infrastructure to amplify it everywhere, all the time.
Democrats can do the same thing today, and unlike the GOP, they have the truth on their side.
This starts with you. Call your Democratic senators and representatives today and demand they raise this issue publicly and loudly, in press conferences, in hearings, in every television interview. Share this article. Talk with your neighbors about it.
The refs change their calls when the voices get loud enough. It’s time to start speaking out loudly.
Keep reading...
Show less
Triggered MAGA had a full on melt down — while claiming not to care about No Kings
I don’t know when being wrong on the internet became the worst thing in the world, but nothing sets off the MAGA cult more than being confronted with the truth about Donald Trump that they’ve been ducking for a decade.
One of their favorite ways to troll liberals is to say things like “prove it” when you tweet things from the Epstein Files or remind them that Trump still owes E. Jean Carroll nearly $84 million. It’s one of the many ways they move the goalposts when going after us, thinking that sending someone on a Google chase will make the truth go away, too.
Even when they’re shown things like court documents, verified statistics, and live video feeds, they’ll cry “Fake news!” They copy Trump’s bullying, attacking the messengers so that they never have to admit they were ever wrong. None of them seems to grasp that the truth is always true, no matter where it comes from, or whether anyone likes it or not. When Trump holds a press conference in the Oval Office, every camera captures him doing the same thing at the same time. CNN’s cameras aren’t any different than Fox’s, NBC’s, or the BBC’s. You get my point.
But MAGA never does. The truth is usually something we don’t like, but somewhere along the line, someone taught us to buck up and deal with it.
But not the Boss Baby playing at being the President.
Since no one loved Donald Trump enough to teach him how to accept difficult truths or accept loss like most people, he throws toddler tantrums while being a giant bully baby.
And MAGA acts just like him. It really doesn’t take much to trigger these thin-skinned self-victimizers, but they especially hate it when someone makes them confront things about Donald Trump that they don’t want to believe are true.
MAGA hates anything good, so when they see the world literally uniting against them, as they did on Saturday when they saw the videos from the global No Kings protests, they lost their collective IQ point and responded in the only way they could:
By telling us exactly how triggered they were.
Elon did what he could to suppress the No Kings posts on Twitter, and the Trump-controlled media may not have given it the coverage it merited. But the March 28th No Kings was the biggest one thus far. Over 8 million Americans were in the streets, and millions more were holding their own protests worldwide. Trump himself was shocked by the turnout, even as he mocked the protests.
I protested in Portland, Oregon, with an estimated crowd of 40,000, on a stunningly beautiful day. Thanks to Trump’s Gestapo installed at our ICE facility--which takes up all of one city block--most people think all Portland protests are violent, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. There was no ICE presence at the big downtown protest, no violence, and no arrests. But even before I walked out the door, I managed to set off the MAGA kids who were Big Mad about our big day.
Despite how suppressed my account is, that tweet has gotten a ton of engagement. If you’re inclined to peruse the comments, I need to warn you that they really embrace bodyshaming the woman holding the sign. If they can make her into the topic, they don’t have to address what her sign says. It’s so painfully obvious, and I called a couple of them out who tried it.
Shaun didn’t like it. Trump is the only reason we even began talking about the Epstein Files in the first place. MAGA doesn’t like to be reminded of how many times Trump promised to release them, and then kept changing his story about them, and now all of his excuses about the Epstein Files have come with a body count. That meme is all of MAGA, and I can tell you how much it sets them off based on how many fake accounts always reply to it.
MAGA also didn’t like this one. Sad!
It only hurts you if it’s true, Snowflakes.
This MAGA Mean Girl deployed a favorite Trumpian tactic: basic weak bullying followed by the weak semantics argument.
Oh, no, MAGA Mean Girl did a mean! I’m so not hurt at all. Astonishingly, they think any of this upsets me, when it’s just pathetic. Plus, none of them can spell. Not a single one of them.
And there’s the resurgence of the R word. All of these are fake accounts--and one of these days I should really write up a primer on how to spot them so you don’t waste your time if you’re still on Twitter. But every so often, an actual carbon-based one uses it, and my response to that is the only proper response, which is that anyone who uses the R word is immediately discredited and is barred from adult conversations.
This is all Elon’s doing, btw.
As I’ve written before, bullying is the ultimate display of weakness. It’s been Trump’s and MAGA’s default setting forever.
They can’t accept the deepest truth about Trump, which is that he thinks they’re all losers. And he’s told them repeatedly, from calling them “the Poorly Educated” to reprimanding them as “stupid’ for asking about the Epstein Files that he promised to release, but was never going to release, because he knows the truth about them.
That’s what happens when people don’t respect themselves.
None of them can cope. Just watch CNN’s smug Scott Jennings try to minimize the global protests and massive unified crowds. And quit nodding your head, Nancy Mace. You won’t even say Trump is in the Epstein Files.
TRIGGERED.
It’s just so satisfying for me on a very deep level to know just how scared they all are. That’s how we’re going to win.
Keep reading...
Show less
Trump just made a dreadful admission
The Minnesota Star Tribune reports that ICE thugs have been following anti-ICE state legislators around in their cars and standing in front of their homes taking pictures, clearly intimidating threats. “They made a big show of pointing a camera way out their window so that I could see them taking pictures of my house,” three-term State Representative Brad Tabke told the newspaper. His child was home alone at the time, and the action, according to Tabke, frightened him. In an article written by Allison Kite, the newspaper added: “Tabke said he saw what appeared to be federal immigration agents outside his home at least a half dozen times, sometimes with binoculars. “Tabke is one of several Democratic lawmakers who said they were targeted or harassed during the Trump administration’s months-long immigration crackdown in the state. One DFL lawmaker told colleagues that federal agents hurled misogynistic epithets at her, even after she informed them she was an elected official. Another DFL legislator said an agent — with whom she had never interacted — greeted her by first name, while another said agents walked around her home taking photos. “‘It was all a way of threatening and being very menacing in a way that perhaps would inhibit us from advocating the way that we had been,’ said Sen. Mary Kunesh, DFL-New Brighton.” One of the things I’ve written about both here and in several books over the years is how authoritarian movements don’t suddenly stand up and announce themselves. They never pop up with a manifesto that says, “Hello, we’re here to end your democracy!” Instead , they typically arrive on the scene complaining about a problem, one they’ve often manufactured or at least exaggerated themselves, and then offer a solution that — just by coincidence — happens to require them to have a little more power, a little more reach, and a little more presence in places they weren’t before. Then they do it again. And again. Until one day, the country’s people look around and discover the institution that was supposedly fixing a temporary crisis has become a permanent, unaccountable force operating everywhere, terrorizing the populace, and answerable to no one but the guy at the top. You could call it “creeping fascism”. That’s exactly what’s happening with ICE at America’s airports right now. And when Donald Trump told reporters this Monday, with evident pride, “ICE was my idea,” he wasn’t just taking credit for solving a sudden logistical crisis. He was telling us what kind of country he’s building and what kind autocratic of leader he’s become. A five-week Republican-caused partial government shutdown has left nearly 50,000 TSA agents working without pay. More than 480 have quit, thousands more call in sick daily, and airport security lines at Atlanta, Houston, and JFK have stretched to five hours or more. It’s a genuine crisis affecting millions of ordinary American travelers. And it’s a crisis Trump has had the power to end every day since it started by simply demanding and signing a clean funding bill, which Democrats have repeatedly presented to Congress and Republicans have repeatedly blocked. Instead, Trump and shadow-president Stephen Miller sent in their ICE thugs. ICE agents were deployed to more than a dozen airports on Monday, according to the New York Times, wearing vests with their agency’s name, standing near identification processing locations, walking through terminal halls, generally scaring and intimidating people. The Times notes that there was an obvious alternative if Trump actually wanted airport security help: U.S. Customs agents are already in airports doing security checks and passport verification, they’re trained for the environment, and deploying them to ID checkpoints would have been, as former ICE official Darius Reeves told the Times, “a less politically charged decision.” But Trump didn’t want a less politically charged decision: he wanted ICE, which has become, essentially, his own private army, as he told us himself. That’s because, as the Times makes clear in its reporting, Trump has been openly using ICE to pursue goals that go far beyond immigration enforcement. This past year, he’s sent officers into large Democratic-run cities like LA and Chicago in highly visible operations to wreak havoc and terrorize those communities. He most recently rushed teams to Minneapolis specifically to pursue Black Somali immigrants he’d been trash-talking in comments widely denounced as nakedly racist. And in a June directive he posted on social media, he told his masked, heavily armed ICE thugs that targeting Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York would “help Republicans” electorally, describing those cities as “the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State.” That’s not immigration policy: that’s political warfare. And it’s a project the world has seen repeatedly in the past, one that has never, ever turned out well. This is, in fact, a fascist playbook with an astonishingly well-documented history. When Heinrich Himmler took over the Schutzstaffel or SS in 1929, it had fewer than 300 members and its official job was protecting Hitler at his rightwing political events. The word itself simply means “protection force.” Himmler, however, built it into something else entirely: an elite armed force whose members were screened personally for absolute personal loyalty to Hitler. Not loyalty to Germany, not even to his political party as an institution, but to the man. Similar to the way the Trump regime is now asking job applicants who they voted for and if they agree that Trump won the 2020 election. And then, whenever a crisis arose, real or manufactured, the SS expanded into that vacuum. Hitler rewarded the SS by letting it operate in a way that was largely independent, effectively subordinate to no law except his personal authority. It could shoot down a man or woman on a city street, for example, and simply seize the evidence with no obligation to share it with local authorities. It’s officers and executives routinely ignored the law, local official objections, and even court orders. Very much like how ICE is now doing with the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, refusing to give Minnesota or Minneapolis police and prosecutors access to evidence. From that point forward, as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum documents, Himmler received authority directly from Hitler to carry out “ideological policies that the laws of the state might not permit.” Within two years, the SS was completely immune from control by any normal police force in Germany. It had its own separate funding. It ran the detention camps, had full access to all domestic intelligence on immigrants and protestors, and operated in any city it wanted with no regard to the desires or complaints of local law enforcement. It became, as historians describe it, a state within a state, answerable only to one man. The parallels to what Trump is doing with ICE aren’t incidental. They’re both intentional and shockingly structural. UCLA immigration law professor Hiroshi Motomura identified two sweeping changes to ICE under Trump’s second term: first, the agency now operates under rules traditionally lawful and accepted only at the border, not inside the USA. Now they’ve gone national. Second, ICE has been given a separate $75 billion budget, specifically insulated from the shutdown that’s starving the TSA. The legitimate airport security institution, TSA, was deliberately defunded. But Trump’s personal enforcement force is flush with cash and expanding its footprint daily. Himmler ran the SS on a separate budget track too, precisely to keep it outside the legal and constitutional constraints that bound every other German institution. And then there’s the matter of the masks. Trump told reporters Monday that he’d suggested ICE agents at airports not wear the face coverings that have become standard in their domestic operations over the past year. The masking, he said, “was not good for travelers coming off planes.” So now president of the United States is personally directing the aesthetic presentation of what appears to be his own personal federal “protection force” law enforcement agency to calibrate how intimidating its presence should be in any particular given context. He wants the masks on when ICE is smashing in doors and dragging people out of their communities in the middle of the night. But he wants the masks off when ICE is standing in airport terminals full of spring break families. It’s the same force. But the performance changes based on the political effect he’s going for. That is not how a law enforcement agency in a constitutional democracy is supposed to work. But it is how a personal army like the SS worked. Former senior ICE official Deborah Fleischaker, who served in the Biden administration, told the Times flatly: “President Trump cannot help himself and is using ICE as a political battering ram.” And former Baltimore ICE office head Darius Reeves, no liberal, predicted it will become “the most hated federal law enforcement agency.” Or, I’d add, like the SS, the most feared. The Times notes that even within ICE, something has shifted: “[T]he swing in the second Trump administration has aligned the agency with Mr. Trump himself.” Not with the law, Congress, or the Constitution. With one man, Donald Trump. That’s the SS model. That’s precisely what “My honor is my loyalty” meant when Himmler put it on the SS’s belt buckles as the organization’s motto. The loyalty wasn’t to Germany; it was personal, to the Führer (absolute leader), and it placed the organization categorically above and outside of the normal rule of law. As I’ve written before, historians who study how democracies become dictatorships point out that the most dangerous moment is always when the authoritarian leader’s moves are still “just barely” within the range of what people can rationalize away. The TSA crisis is real, for example, albeit manufactured by the Republicans in Congress. People want their airports to work. Trump says ICE is “just helping out.” All of that is arguably true, and yet it’s precisely what made the SS’s early expansions into various security and “helping police” situations so easy for ordinary Germans to rationalize. You don’t see the 40+ deaths in Trump’s prison camps so far this past year when you’re watching orderly men in uniforms keep a crowd moving. It just seems like order is being restored. But look at what’s actually being built here. ICE has a $75 billion budget that insulates it from democratic accountability through the normal, constitutional appropriations process. It’s deployed against Democratic cities to create terror for explicit political purposes, according to the president’s own words. It’s directed by a “border czar” who reports personally to Trump. Its agents are being sent, at the president’s personal instruction, into the country’s most public spaces, now including America’s most high-profile airports. And its most visible recent operations have included killing American citizens in Minneapolis with zero accountability, collecting DNA from protesters it’s arrested, and smashing car windows and front doors to make arrests without the warrants the Constitution requires. This isn’t an immigration agency anymore, any more than the SS was a bodyguard unit by 1938. It’s now a personal enforcement force, and the president just told you so himself. “ICE,” he said, “was my idea.” The solution here is straightforward: Congress must pass a clean funding bill to pay TSA agents today. And Democrats have been trying to do exactly that for weeks. And then, when the spineless Republicans are out of office, the agency needs to be eliminated or reformed from top to bottom. Tomorrow’s No Kings 3 protests are our opportunity to let our opinions be known; show up in the streets. They’re working hard to build a force that doesn’t have to answer to voters at all and the next nine months or so may be our last chance to stop it from becoming a full-blown American version of the SS. This is the moment they’re counting on you to stay home. Don’t. |
Keep reading...
Show less
This catastrophe unmasks the real reason Trump wanted to be president
Remember those innocent days when people were actually asking the question whether or not Donald Trump would use his second term as president to enrich himself and just how much profiteering would be acceptable to the American public?
It’s like we’re living not just on a different planet but a different solar system today. It turns out that Trump’s whole reason for craving the Oval Office again had nothing to do with governing or power or, really, not even necessarily avenging his enemies.
Instead, it’s just about making a buck — or billions of them, as it turns out. In other words, entirely on brand for this guy.
Trump has made a mockery of the emoluments clauses of the U.S. Constitution, the anti-corruption ones that serve to restrict exploiting federal office for personal gain. Fourteen months in, his entire presidency has been one giant scheme. The grift that keeps on taking.
Shameless doesn’t even begin to describe it. The man didn’t take an oath to serve, protect and defend the United States and its people, but to make a fortune off of their backs.
For starters, take a trip over to the Trump Store (trumpstore.com) and check out the capitalist catastrophe that’s waiting there for you. There’s a Trump 250 blanket ($200), a Trump Chocolate Gold Bar ($86), a Trump Straw Hat ($69), a Mar-a-Lago Pickleball Paddle (Trump Sneakers (149.99) and literally hundreds of other products designed to separate you from your cash and line the pockets of our dough-driven chief executive.
That’s merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
What Trump has done that so singularly crooked has been to use his position of power to push individuals, corporations and other nations to give him money and expensive gifts in exchange for favorable treatment by his administration. He hasn’t even tried to hide this. It’s right out there in the open.
One estimate had Trump’s financial benefit from exploiting his presidency at $4 billion during his first year in office ending in January. But of course, that was two months ago. It’s liable to be closer to $5 billion by now, vaulting him to a possible net worth exceeding $9 billion. The truth is we don’t know exactly how much he’s earned because he’s good at concealing it (along with his tax returns).
How has he done it? Besides his massive Trump-emblazoned merch bonanza, here’s where it’s come from:
- Cryptocurrency: After rolling back regulatory enforcement of crypto and signed legislation favorable to the industry, Trump invested in ventures like World Liberty Financial and a “$TRUMP” memecoin – earning him an estimated $900 million and hundreds of millions more to his other family members in 2025 alone.
- Foreign Licensing Deals: He sells his name to developments abroad both that he builds himself or his nothing to do with constructing in places like the UAE, Vietnam and India.
- Lawsuit Settlements and Financial Arrangements: He basically extorted millions in settlements from CBS, ABC News and Meta/YouTube to both buy peace and curry favor from a leader whose litigious nature knows no limits.
- Real Estate, Golf Resorts and Hotels: These generate hundreds of millions in revenue annually for Trump, and the amount he earns is directly proportional to his position as the most powerful man on earth.
It has been proven time and again that this is a man who can be bought and bought many times over. Trump has never met a moneymaking opportunity he didn’t like, ethics be damned. He gleefully squeezes American corporations, flaunts gifts from foreign leaders and celebrates the massive growth of his own fortune.
Fittingly, it was announced on Thursday that Trump’s signature will adorn U.S. currency – a first for a sitting president – beginning later this year. In other words, he isn’t just money-obsessed; he’s literally going to have his name on it.
This isn’t even to take into account the powerful, well-heeled influencers who make donations that benefit Trump politically, including to his planned White House renovation and ballroom monstrosity. In short, everything in his life and presidency surrounds dollars – the acquisition of them, the spending of them, the use of them to generate domination over everything and everyone.
And of course, we all got a valuable lesson in just how far Trump would go to benefit those whose financial interests he supports early this past week when Trump announced his “productive” peace talks with Iran. The price of oil dropped sharply after the announcement, some 14 percent in a matter of minutes.
Questionably, mere minutes before Trump made that morning post on Truth Social, there was a gigantic spike in oil futures trading with a value of nearly $600 million.
What did these traders know and when did they know it? We can all hazard a pretty good guess. It would surprise no one if it could be proven that Trump was in on this seeming market manipulation scheme. Unfortunately, it can’t. But the suspicion will long remain.
This is unfortunately the man who is our president. He puts financial interests over all else, certainly above country. His loyalty is to greenbacks, yesterday, today, and as long as he lives.
Trump is the wealthiest person to serve as president of the United States as well as the most morally bankrupt. This is a horrifying combination.
When the man who is supposed to be setting an example at the top of your country is solely concerned with reaping maximum benefit from his position, that impacts the citizens who purportedly look to him fore guidance. The way he runs his job influences them to put materialism over personal accountability, as the aim of the nation shifts from public good to private gain.
America is now an empty shell of what it was before Trump got his greedy paws on it. I’m just hoping our democracy can survive this man whose craven instincts and kingly ambitions have served to grievously transform the country into a place we no longer recognize.
Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.
Keep reading...
Show less
This tiny town just sent Trump a massive message
I live in Weehawken, New Jersey, directly across the Hudson River from Manhattan, where I spent 30 years of my life, and where, on any given Saturday, most of the action is. Normally, I’d hop on the ferry, cross the river, and join the hundreds of thousands marching through the streets of Manhattan.
But today, for No Kings 3, I decided to go local.
More than 3,300 events were planned across all 50 states as part of what organizers are calling the largest day of domestic political protest in American history. I knew Manhattan would be electric. What I didn’t expect was that tiny Weehawken, with a population of roughly 15,000, perched on the Palisades high above the river, would be electric too.
I walked up to Hamilton Park, with its postcard view of the Manhattan skyline, expecting maybe 100 people. What I found was several hundred, local elected officials standing shoulder to shoulder with their neighbors.
We marched down JFK Boulevard, framed by one of the most spectacular backdrops of any protest in the country.
If Donald Trump thinks the No Kings movement is “a joke,” as he’s said, then what I saw in Weehawken should give him serious pause. The message was “No Kings,” but virtually everyone I talked to had a different reason for being there, war, grocery and gas prices, ICE, grifting, airports, and more.
In other words, more reasons why there should be no King Trump.
“I am 62 years old, and I can’t remember the last time I’ve been involved in a protest of any kind,” a gentleman named Al said. “I sit in an office all day. I’m not a political guy. But I’m angry enough that I’ve gotten up off my chair, because I really think our country is going in the wrong direction in a big way.”
He paused, looking at the crowd gathering behind him. “It must be really bad if it got me and all of these other people out here on a really cold day.”
Karen Brady and Gayle Humphrey have been building North Hudson Resistance, one of the local organizers of No Kings, for a year. In that time, they’ve organized four marches, worked to protect immigrant communities, fought cuts to Medicaid and social services, and coordinated “Know Your Rights” trainings for residents who fear ICE.
“We’re doing everything we can to fight the Trump regime,” Gayle told me. “All the ineptitude, the cynicism, the cruelty, the corruption, the chaos. No strategy except getting rich.”
Karen noted the group is growing. “We’re getting stronger in our numbers,” she said. “A lot of people are outraged.”
Weehawken Mayor Richard Turner was there too, not just as a figurehead, but walking the route.
“I’m here for two reasons,” he told me. “One, to express what everyone’s expressing, to put an end to what’s going on in this country, especially with immigration. There are better, safer ways to do things. And secondly, to make sure everybody’s safe.”
Attending his third No Kings event, Turner praised the peaceful nature of the demonstrations and their national impact. “All these demonstrations across the country have an effect,” he said.
New Jersey State Representative Gabriel Rodriguez was also in the crowd, marking his first No Kings march in Weehawken. “There are some strong feelings, lack of safety, lack of protocol and process,” he told me. “That’s not very American.”
He pointed to recent legislation signed by Governor Murphy protecting immigrant communities in Hudson County. “We’re happy that people are on board in the name of safety and for our communities,” he said.
His colleague, Assemblyman Larry Wainstein, was equally direct.
“Everybody deserves to be treated with respect and dignity,” he said. “We’re working very hard to stand up against Trump and ICE because they’re treating our community with a lack of respect.”
What struck me most wasn’t just the anger, though it was real and palpable. It was how many people told me this was their first protest.
Ever.
A woman originally from my hometown of Pittsburgh stopped to talk with her husband.
“This is my first one,” she said. “Me too,” her husband added. “We are not the type of people to protest. But things have gone too far.”
Nearby stood Kathy, who told me she was “almost 80” and had been to “many, many, many” protests over her lifetime, as if passing a torch. Mario, a younger marcher, put it plainly: “We’re tired of the circus. We need this country to get back to what it used to be, a country of freedom. No fascism, no oligarchs.”
Dale, from neighboring West New York, had attended the previous No Kings events in Manhattan but chose Weehawken this time. “I can’t believe what he’s done, not only to us but to the world,” she said, her husband John nodding beside her. “We are the laughingstock of the world. People need to wake up.”
On my walk home, I texted a friend who had been marching in Manhattan.
“Where are you?” he wrote. “Want to meet up?”
He assumed, naturally, that I was in the city.
“I attended the march in Weehawken,” I replied.
“Weehawken had their own rally?” he shot back.
And that’s the point.
If a lifelong Manhattanite is surprised that Weehawken turned out in force, imagine how it looks from places like Indianapolis, Indiana, where upwards of 60 events were held across that red state.
This is not a big city phenomenon. It is now local. Like Weehawken.
What I saw Saturday in Hamilton Park - first-time protesters marching alongside veteran protestors, a mayor walking his own streets, state legislators showing up on a Saturday, and organizers who a year ago had never run a rally now building a real grassroots movement.
That’s not “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
It’s called democracy, and metaphorically, it’s now playing at a theater near you.
Keep reading...
Show less
These 4 cowards are living in luxury — and throwing the nation to Trump
What should the American people, especially the hundreds of millions of their voters, expect Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden to do against the vicious, serial law-violating, violent, corrupt, agency-dismantling Donald Trump and the crony Trumpsters who are wrecking our government and our economy?
These former presidents should mobilize the citizenry from the grassroots to the Capitol and take on the unpopular Tyrant Trump. Having sworn to uphold the Constitution and "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” they should strongly uphold their patriotic duty to resist tyranny and save our Republic and our besieged democratic institutions, and stop the assault on our civil liberties and civil rights.
Our former presidents all get along with each other. They have the stature to:
- Get mass media;
- Raise immediately large amounts of funds for strong IMPEACH TRUMP citizen groups in every congressional district to increase and expand the present majority of Americans wanting to FIRE TRUMP;
- Stay the course as Trump keeps worsening his criminal dictatorship and destruction of our democracy; and
- Highlight the many programs they initiated that Trump has illegally destroyed or is dismantling.
Instead, they are living luxurious lives and are largely AWOL from connecting with the existing but overwhelmed civic opposition to Trump. Bush is painting landscapes as Trump has destroyed his AIDS program in Africa, and the Bush wing of the Republican Party. Obama has campaigned for Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill as governors of Virginia and New Jersey, satirizing Trump in some of his speeches. His present passion, however, is the March Madness basketball championships. Clinton has left it up to Hillary, who wrote a guarded New York Times op-ed back on March 28, 2025, taking Trump to task for jeopardizing our national security and not “preparing for real fights with America’s adversaries.”
Then there is Joe Biden, who received then President-elect Trump and Melania on the morning of January 20, 2025, with the gracious “welcome home.” In return, Biden got that afternoon and every day since hundreds of foul epithets from Trump, scapegoating him for almost everything he could fabricate, including solar energy and wind power projects. Delaware Joe managed a few critical replies at a Democratic Party dinner in Nebraska on November 7, 2025. “Trump has taken a wrecking ball not only to the people’s house but to the Constitution, to the rule of law, to our very democracy.” Unfortunately, Biden has mostly been silent.
Credit these retired presidents with knowing the historic dangers and existing damages of the TRUMP DUMP in Washington and around the country. They also know their supporters would be very receptive to their organized, persistent leadership from them to send Trump back to Mar-a-Lago. Why are they AWOL?
First, they fear Trump’s retaliation, upsetting their comfortable lives. Trump is now deep in the QUICKSAND of the Middle East. He is being pilloried by a million stickers at gas pumps picturing Trump pointing to the booming price per gallon and saying, “I did that.” He is openly declaring there should be no elections in November and continues to send or keep his storm troopers in America’s cities. An expanding police state is not exactly a credible perch for effective profanity. Show a modest bit of moxie!
A second excuse is that they have done some of what Trump is doing:
- Bush’s mass murder in the illegal war on Iraq.
- Clinton’s distracting raids abroad against innocents and his womanizing.
- Obama’s “signature strikes,” killing over 300 mostly young men in places like Yemen.
- Biden’s illegal co-belligerence with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza, which has taken over 600,000 civilian lives.
True enough. But people live in the present and are most worried about what Dangerous Donald is doing NOW to their livelihoods, freedoms, health and safety, and the consequences in casualties and their tax dollars of another endless war.
Our former presidents have no excuses. They simply lack a modicum of courage. Remember Aristotle declared, “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.”
The current political climate demands the powerful emergence of the four previous presidents of our country. The federal district courts are ruling heavily against Trump’s “Injustice Department,” though Trump retains a slightly weakening claim on six Supreme Court Injustices. People of all backgrounds are marching and demonstrating in huge numbers. This weekend, the “No Kings” rallies (he’s already a dictator) anticipate 10 million people nationwide.
The business community, particularly small businesses, are feeling serious harm from Trump’s tariffs, wars, cancelled contracts, and inflationary policies. The labor unions have never been under such attack (notably the federal employees’ union members whose contracts he has torn up), and they are simmering with anger. The universities are also under His illegal shakedown attacks.
What explains the mainstream media’s virtual ignoring of this ABDICATION by these ex-presidents? The reporters mostly despise Trump, who has slandered them (calling them “deranged and demented” for starters) and has extortionately sued news organizations and journalists for millions of dollars and coerced settlements.
The media have reported that some ex-agency officials under the former presidents have excoriated Trump, such as Samantha Power, for closing the major lifesaving Agency for International Development. The formidable Rohit Chopra, who directed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under Biden, is not reticent to verbally defend his nearly closed-down agency, which had saved consumers many billions of dollars.
However, they are not covering the abdication by BIG GUYS—our former presidents. I have tried in vain to find out why by calling reporters and editors. Maybe you’ll have better luck. Try calling these numbers: The Washington Post: 202-334-6000; The New York Times: 800-698-4637; Associated Press: 212-621-1500; NPR: 202-513-2000; The Wall Street Journal: 212-416-2000.
You may break through and help save our Republic!
Keep reading...
Show less
Naive Trump has blown this war — no matter what he does next
Friends,
Sorry to intrude on you again, but as we reach the fourth week of Trump’s war with no end in sight, I want to make sure you are aware of what he said this week, and its implications.
After Tehran dismissed his 15-point ceasefire plan, Trump claimed today that Iran is “begging to make a deal,” and that he wasn’t the one pushing for negotiations. (Earlier, he told Tehran to “get serious soon” about negotiating an end to the war.)
“They’ll tell you, ‘We’re not negotiating,’” Trump said. “Of course, they’re negotiating. They’ve been obliterated.” He said Iran is allowing some oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz as a “present” to show how serious it is about negotiating to end the war.
He rejected reports that he was looking for an exit ramp. “I read a story today that I’m desperate to make a deal,” Trump told reporters. “I’m the opposite of desperate. I don’t care.”
Is he naive? Ignorant? Stupid? Or does he think we’re so stupid as not to see that he’s making this up as he goes, that he has no plan, no exit strategy, no way out?
Trump — and Pete Hegseth and anyone else who may be advising him — have already blown this.
They thought the Iranian regime would fall as easily as the capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. They assumed they could use air power alone. Wrong on both counts.
They overestimated the capacity and desire of Iranians to overthrow the regime.
They underestimated the regime’s resilience. They didn’t count on it expanding the conflict through the use of cheap drones aimed at closing the Strait of Hormuz, disrupting supply chains throughout the region, and raising oil prices — thereby putting mounting political and economic pressure on the United States.
They didn’t anticipate that they’d have to lift sanctions on Iran, delivering the regime a huge windfall. Nor that they’d deliver vast oil profits to Vladimir Putin.
To the extent they engaged in any planning at all, they focused on America’s military might rather than the consequences of what might happen next. But as we should have learned years ago from bombing North Vietnam, political outcomes cannot be achieved solely from the skies.
Wars are judged by how they end, not how they begin. It is still possible, although highly improbable, that America will come out of this more secure than we went into it. But wars started without clear political objectives have rarely ended well.
The Trump regime now faces the task of trying to reopen Hormuz to prevent even worse economic chaos.
Either it prolongs the war and puts boots on the ground at a significant cost of human life, or it walks away and risks further economic chaos, major damage to America’s image and influence, and an Iranian regime more committed than ever to building a nuclear bomb.
Meanwhile, the costs of this war are accelerating rapidly. The price of oil has resumed its upward trajectory and the stock market, its downward drift.
The American public is paying in many ways — not just for more expensive gas but soon for more costly food due to pricier fertilizer.
The average rate on a 30-year mortgage has now hit 6.38 percent, the fourth increase since the war began.
The Pentagon is requesting an additional $200 billion to fund the war. This comes to more than $1,400 per American household.
More costs will emerge. The George W. Bush administration in 2003 put the cost of the Iraq war at $40 billion; it ended up costing about $3 trillion.
Soldiers who develop medical disorders or aggravate existing ones, for example, will receive lifelong benefits and medical care, as they should. If today’s troops claim such benefits at the same rate as those who participated in the 1990-91 Gulf War, this cost alone would eventually total at least $600 billion, not counting the human toll.
So far, the war has cost us more than $1.3 million per minute.
At this rate, as Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has calculated, for a bit more than two weeks of this war we could offer free college education to every American family earning less than $125,000 annually.
For less than three weeks of this war, we could run a nationwide pre-K program for 3- and 4-year-olds. For less than 13 hours of this war, we could screen all uninsured women for cervical cancer, saving several hundreds of lives.
For four hours of this war we could get glasses to all 2.3 million low-income schoolchildren in the United States who need them but don’t have them. For less than three weeks of this war, we could restore health insurance subsidies that the Trump administration let expire last year, preventing an estimated 8,800 deaths.
For a bit more than five hours of this war, we could deworm all children worldwide. For less than five hours of this war, we could provide vitamin A supplementation for the 190 million children around the world who need it, preventing up to 480,000 child deaths each year and virtually eliminate blindness from vitamin A deficiency.
For about one day’s worth of war spending we could save more than 350,000 lives worldwide from malaria.
Most Americans oppose this war. Congress did not authorize it. It is one man’s war: Donald Trump’s. He alone decided to put us into this horrific, bloody, hugely expensive, bind.
I hope and pray we come out of it without even more deaths and higher costs, but that seems improbable. The war is a deepening tragedy, a horrific waste of life and money, a mounting bill we will be paying for years to come.
Focus on this stark reality: One man has put us in this Middle East quagmire. One man is wrecking our economy. One man’s immigration agents have terrorized our neighbors and neighborhoods. One man has ridden roughshod over our system of government.
That man is not our king. He did not even win a majority of the national popular vote in 2024. (He won with a plurality of 49.8 percent, or just 32.5 percent of all eligible voters.)
He’s the only former or sitting president to have been impeached twice, the only former or sitting president have been convicted of criminal charges (34 felony counts), the only former or sitting president to have sought to overturn an election to remain in office.
So far he has gotten away with all of this.
We will march against him Saturday as a prelude to organizing and mobilizing to take over Congress in the midterm elections.
Someday, I sincerely hope, we will hold him accountable for the wreckage he has made of our country and much of the rest of the world.
- 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
Keep reading...
Show less
Trump guaranteed never-ending ridicule with this stupid gambit to immortalize himself
When the news popped up on our phones during an early dinner with friends on Thursday night that Donald Trump’s signature will go on U.S. paper currency, it drew guffaws, grrrs, and plenty of expletives around the table.
As someone who worked in PR for 30 years, I usually view Trump’s stunts through the lens of perception. So when I read the breaking news that his pubic-hair-like John Hancock will start appearing later this year on dollar bills, that’s when I laughed.
Only Donald Trump could think he’s doing something that will immortalize him, when in the end it will bring him scorn and shame. Not since the illegal fraud of Trump University have we seen something so destined to cause pain, humiliation, and trigger thoughts of ruin.
Trump’s stupidity about money will now extend to his failed attempt to brand it.
He has always had a pathological need to put his name on entities and things that end up “losers,” as he might say: buildings, steaks, that spurious university, bottled water, airlines, casinos - too many collapses to list here. All of them failed. All of them.
And now, in the most ominous act of authoritarian vanity since Saddam Hussein put his face on the dinar, Trump is putting his signature on American currency.
He ignorantly thinks this makes him immortal. He’s right about that! It’s just not in the glorious way he imagines.
In all likelihood, by the end of this year, right around the time those freshly signed bills start circulating through American wallets, cash registers, and proverbial pocketbooks, the American economy will be facing serious and significant headwinds, causing visible, undeniable pain.
It will also be around the holiday shopping season, where early predictions are already sluggish. That means perhaps even fewer dolls and pencils for kids this year.
Grocery store pain. Heating bill pain. Gas pump pain. Health care pain. Pencil-and-dolls pain.
The economic indicators are already moving in the wrong direction. They started shifting the moment Trump idiotic, brazen tariff whack-a-mole game began. Now the Iran war is pushing fuel costs higher, and they’re likely to stay elevated for months, even if the war ends relatively soon.
By the time consumers start seeing Trump’s pubic hair like scrawl on their money at the start of winter, home heating oil prices are likely to be exorbitant. Groceries like eggs, meat, bread, and the basics, will eat deeper into paychecks that aren’t growing fast enough to keep up.
The adverse effects on health care costs from the “Big Beautiful Bill” will be fully realized. Weak job numbers, which have worsened since the start of the year, are unlikely to improve. The war isn’t ending cleanly. The tariffs aren’t going away. And every one of these pressures compounds over time.
By December, at the confluence of these menacing trends, when Trump’s signature starts appearing on the dollar, Americans will already know something is deeply, deeply wrong.
And there it will be, in all its infamous glory, his name stamped on the very thing Americans don’t have enough of.
Trump wants to own money, and now he’s about to own what money can’t buy anymore. He’ll own the heating bill you can’t pay. He’ll own the embarrassment at the grocery line when you have to put something back. He’ll own your sickness because you’re rationing medication. He’ll own the humiliation of collectors coming after your unpaid credit card balance (Ask TSA agents about that.).
Every transaction, every crumpled and precious bill handed across a counter for something that cost less a year ago will carry his signature. It will be a metaphorical receipt for all the damage he’s done.
Narcissists who chase legacy never think about the long-term consequences. History, however, offers one example of success: Augustus Caesar put his face on coins during an era of relative peace and prosperity. His image conveyed stability.
Trump’s signature, on the other hand, will debut during an era of self-inflicted economic chaos. It will say something entirely different.
Think about that in the context of how we remember failed currency. Germany’s Weimar Republic marks were a miserable failure, as were Confederate bills. Currency can become a time capsule of the era that produced it.
With that in mind, future Americans, really meaning your kids and grandkids, may hold a bill with Trump’s signature one day and learn in history class about the rot of the Trump era: tariff wars, exploding deficits, a health care system gutted for tax cuts, grocery inflation, and a government run by a self-obsessed authoritarian fixated on seeing his name and visage on everything.
By signing the “check,” Trump’s dooming, disastrous loser-legacy of a name will live forever on American money.
The egomaniac genuinely believes his signature elevates him. We don’t have to assume that because we know how highly Trump feels about Trump. He thinks his signature on a bill places him alongside George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Andrew Jackson, whose faces appear on paper currency.
But those men built things meant to last, and things that still stand the test of history.
Trump has spent both of his presidencies tearing things down including institutions, relationships, alliances, and now the economic stability of ordinary American families.
Every Trump-signed dollar that passes through a working American’s hands this coming winter will tell the same story: this is what he did, and this is what it cost you, in an immediate, visceral way, the kind that makes people say, “I can’t believe how much this costs now.” It will change how they vote, think, and remember.
Donald Trump wanted his signature to be glorious. It will be inglorious. By the time his scrawl makes its debut, it will be a symbol for every American who reaches into their wallet and discovers they don’t have enough paper currency to pay the bill.
Keep reading...
Show less
Look who's cashing in on Trump's war
Far be it from me to suggest that Russian President Vladimir Putin owns Donald Trump.
So let’s call this just a happy coincidence.
According to new reporting from the Telegraph in London, analysts estimate Putin is raking in roughly $760 million a day as the war in Iran drives global oil prices higher. That figure — drawn from analysis by the Kyiv School of Economics and maritime tracker Vortexa — points to something larger than another oil price spike.
It reveals a mechanism.
War in Iran disrupts shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Oil prices jump. Then comes the part that should cause heads to spin.
The United States issues a “temporary” sanctions waiver on certain Russian oil shipments — initially described as a narrow allowance for cargo already at sea. But in global commodity markets, perception is reality.
The waiver doesn’t just move a few shipments. It changes the risk calculation across the entire market — effectively rehabilitating Russian crude from a sanctioned commodity back to something buyers can treat as ordinary market oil.
And that risk is everything.
As the reporting reveals, Russia was still selling oil for much of the past two years—but at a steep discount. Buyers were willing but cautious. Legal exposure, financial friction, and reputational cost all forced prices down. India, for example, was buying Russian crude at a $9-per-barrel haircut. China was taking a $15 discount.
Those discounts are now happily gone—or sharply reduced. According to KSE analyst Borys Dodonov, Russian oil is sometimes commanding a premium at Indian ports. Vortexa reports India has increased Russian oil imports by 72 percent since the war began.
One needn’t possess the chops of an international economist to understand the basic outcome here: Same barrels, same destinations, much higher price. All to the benefit of Trump’s benefactor.
The sanctions weren’t lifted. They were just made easier to ignore.
Kremlin oil and gas revenues are projected to nearly double this month alone. If the conflict drags into fall, annual Russian energy revenues could reach $386 billion — nearly triple pre-war projections.
As Simon Johnson, the Nobel laureate and former IMF chief economist, said, “It just increases what Russia can receive per barrel, by a lot, putting cash in the pocket of our enemies.”
There’s no diplomatic way to dress that up.
The waivers eased political pressure on gas prices at home—a short-term reprieve for an administration managing an unpopular war. The long-term invoice gets paid in the strengthening of a dictator’s war chest.
Everyone wins. Well, not quite everyone.
Americans paid for it at the pump. Putin banked it.
Just a happy coincidence.
- Click here to subscribe to Ray Hartmann's Soapbox
Keep reading...
Show less
Trump’s great talent: Breaking many things at once
Maybe you’re reading this article while listening to a podcast. Or you’re participating in a dull Zoom meeting. Or you’re talking on the phone with a relative.
Maybe you’ve just read the first three lines of this article three times without really registering them because your attention is absorbed elsewhere.
You’re not alone.
The modern age, with its multiple demands on a person’s time, seems to require multitasking. It’s not the kind of activity you read about in the classics. Surely that fellow who ran from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens in 490 BC didn’t carry along a couple papyrus scrolls to read along the way. Leonardo da Vinci didn’t paint Mona Lisa’s smile, stop to conduct a scientific experiment on gravity, and simultaneously jot down his thoughts on anatomy, going back and forth among those activities like a whirling dervish.
Trump has been released in the FAO Schwarz of military toy stores, and he wants to use all the gadgets. This time around, the generals aren’t holding him in check.
Though it promises greater productivity, multitasking is not a wondrous invention. Shifting between tasks, according to a number of psychological studies, actually reduces productivity and generates more errors. The result can be banal, as in, “I’m sorry, could you repeat what you just said to me?” Or it can be fatal, as in the thousands of deaths caused by drivers looking at their phones.
It’s hard to imagine President Donald Trump multitasking, unless you count sleeping during cabinet meetings, lying and walking at the same time, or eating Whoppers while dispersing them on social media. And yet, his administration has been extremely effective its first year doing multiple things at the same time, if you define “effective” in terms of lives lost, reputations ruined, and institutions destroyed.
Don’t mistake all this destruction for multitasking. The effort to keep all the spinning plates aloft is something pursued, however spuriously, in the service of greater productivity. Instead, let’s call what the Trump administration is doing “multitrashing.” Imagine a bully that pushes the magician out of the way so that all the plates come crashing to the ground. Now multiply that a thousand-fold. Trump and his cohort are busy destroying things on multiple fronts, like a bull in a shopping mall full of fragile wares.
Just look at what the Trump team has done to the federal government: programs gutted, agencies disbanded, regulatory frameworks diluted to the point of disappearance. Just look at the destruction of science funding, the rollback of civil rights, the wrenching apart of immigrant families. Trump has approached domestic policy as if it were an axis of resistance—Bureaucrats, Academics, the Woke, and the Undocumented—that requires a multifront war of assault and attrition.
Let’s face it: The frog of America is not in a pot of water coming to a slow boil. The frog of America is in the middle of a pile of rapidly accumulating rubble. What the poor frog can’t perceive is how high and how wide this pile of rubble actually stretches. The frog thinks: Maybe it’s not a lot of damage and I can soon jump my way clear. Poor, deluded frog.
If multitrashing has been so egregiously successful at home, it pales in comparison with Trump’s actions in the international arena. The trash-talking and trash-acting president has discovered, in his second term, that the US military arsenal is not just for deterrent purposes. Trump has been released in the FAO Schwarz of military toy stores, and he wants to use all the gadgets. This time around, the generals aren’t holding him in check.
The itinerary of destruction so far this term has involved the US military in Venezuela, Nigeria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and Syria, along with two excursions to Iran. It’s been only a year, but what a long, strange, vindictive trip it’s been.
The Iran War
The Iranian government still stands. This is remarkable given the sheer amount of money and firepower the United States and Israel have devoted to toppling it. If Trump had focused on one task, rather than being engaged in multitrashing, he might have at least avoided some of the worst consequences of this war. Convinced of an easy victory, he did nothing to shockproof the US economy by, for instance, arranging for naval escorts in the Strait of Hormuz.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, for all his similar hubris, nevertheless prepared the Russian economy for the expected sanctions after his full-scaled invasion of Ukraine. Trump, by contrast, is the Alfred E. Neuman of presidents: “What, me worry?”
Other presidents have been vengeful, violent, imperialist. But their destructive campaigns were usually in the serve of constructing something.
Iran, meanwhile, is focused on one thing: regime survival. It has caused destruction in turn, in multiple locations, but this has all served the purpose of increasing the pain for Israel and the United States. Closing down the Strait of Hormuz, bombing energy infrastructure throughout the Gulf, selecting hardliners to lead the new government: Iran wants not just to force a ceasefire but to win concessions such as a reduction in sanctions.
Trump, frustrated by a conflict that exceeds his attention span, has moved onto other tasks, like assisting drug operations in Ecuador, threatening NATO countries, and pursuing regime change in Cuba. There is method in his madness. All of this furious activity keeps Trump in the news cycle and in the hearts of his supporters. It keeps Congress out of the loop and adversaries (as well as putative friends) guessing.
Most importantly, it keeps potential successes rather than obvious ongoing failures in the public eye.
The Ultimate End
Other presidents have been vengeful, violent, imperialist. But their destructive campaigns were usually in the serve of constructing something. George W. Bush imagined a new democratic order in the Middle East. Richard Nixon dreamed of an anti-communist bloc in Southeast Asia. Most presidents from Teddy Roosevelt on have attempted to position the United States as the world’s policeman atop a rules-based order that disproportionately benefits America.
In a recent New Yorker piece, Daniel Immerwahr notes that Trump has “liberated himself from the burdens of empire.” Ironically, horribly, this disburdening has freed the president to destroy at will.
Indeed, it seems that Trump is multitrashing for the sheer malicious joy of it. He didn’t build something new in Venezuela, simply destroyed his rival. He is planning something comparable for Cuba. As for Iran, he is not even sure what constitutes victory, other than a display of epic fury.
Multitrashing is the opposite of bureaucracy. It destroys without a thought to order, efficiency, results, consequences. Only the strong can survive the harrowing process of such destruction.
As in his domestic campaigns, Trump is up against what he imagines to be a global axis of resistance: the United Nations, all Europeans to the left of Nigel Farage, any rival autocrat who refuses to bend a knee. The international order is the creation of his hated liberals, so it too must go. He has absolutely no idea of what to replace the rules-based system with other than, perhaps, a reality TV show in which countries must submit to humiliating tasks while a single judge, Trump, decides who rises and who falls.
It is the nature of bureaucracy to break a task down to its smallest components, like a Ford assembly line, in order to produce things more efficiently. It is, in theory, a process of focus. In practice, as anyone who has had to deal with the Department of Motor Vehicles knows, bureaucracy is diffuse and unfocused. But again, in its way, bureaucracy has been created to keep a modern society functioning. It is the skeleton of order that keeps everything in place.
Multitrashing is the opposite of bureaucracy. It destroys without a thought to order, efficiency, results, consequences. Only the strong can survive the harrowing process of such destruction. Billionaires thrive in Trump’s America; superpowers dominate in TrumpWorld. Meanwhile, in a rage room of his own devising, Trump continues to flit from one activity to another, using a sledgehammer to destroy computers, a chain saw to cut through furniture, a howitzer to blow up heavy machinery.
It is theater of a sort, and Trump delights in performing on the world stage. But it’s not kabuki. It’s a visceral one-man show that reveals the sickening highs and lows of this new theater of cruelty.
Keep reading...
Show less
This massive error handed MAGA a blue state — and California is set to do the same
Will California’s gubernatorial candidates realize that they could split the vote enough in the primary to create a Republican victory?
The 2016 Washington State Treasurer’s race offers a cautionary tale. All candidates competed together in the primary under similar rules to California. Three strong Democratic candidates split their vote nearly evenly, totaling 51.6%. But because there were only two Republicans to divide their smaller 48.4% share, the November ballot was Republican vs Republican. Washington got a Republican state Treasurer despite Hillary Clinton beating Donald Trump by 16 points in the state.
The same could happen this year in California, where eight Democrats are running for governor. All three Democrats running to succeed a highly-respected Washington State treasurer were smart and capable, with strong endorsements and relevant experience. I remember my own struggle to decide between them. But when they and the two Republicans all split nearly evenly, the November election ended up being Republican vs Republican even though the Democrats drew more total votes.
The reverse happened in 2022, in California’s solidly Republican 4th State Senate district. Six Republican candidates split 59 percent of the vote. But because there were only two Democrats running, two Democrats faced off in November.
In the California governor’s race, Republicans Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco are even or ahead of leading Democrats in recent polls, despite combining for less than a third of the vote. In a recent Los Angeles Times poll, former Fox News host Hilton is at 17% Riverside County Sheriff Bianco at 16%, Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell and former Congresswoman Katie Porter both at 13%, and progressive philanthropist and former hedge fund head Tom Steyer at 10%. Former California Attorney General Xavier Becerra follows at 5%, and former LA mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and San Jose mayor and tech industry favorite Matt Mahan at 4%. Former state controller Betty Yee and former state Superintendent of Public Education Tony Thurmond draw 1%, with the rest undecided.
With candidates this tightly packed, it’s easy to see how the Democrats could divide the vote just enough to make the Republicans the sole candidates on the November ballot, even though both are strong Trump supporters in a state where Trump has just 28% support.
Were these Arnold Schwarzenegger Republicans, the stakes would be different. But both Hilton and Bianco are full MAGA Republicans, who would make it far more difficult for the largest state in the country to resist the administration’s programs and policies. California Democrats can’t take those risks.
The dilemma comes from a flawed top-two primary where everyone runs simultaneously. Ranked choice voting is vastly more democratic, encouraging candidates to run positive campaigns and collaborate with competitors who share their values, while entirely eliminating the division or spoiler effects. Even traditional partisan primaries avoid the possibility of a majority party being excluded from the November ballot. But because California’s current system passed as a constitutional amendment (backed by major Republican donor Charles Munger Jr.), the legislature would need a two thirds majority to place it on the ballot for potential repeal, and can’t do so in time for the 2026 elections.
It makes the situation harder that this is such a highly qualified Democratic group, as was true with the Washington State Treasurer candidates. So it’s up to them and to the voters to solve the situation. State Democratic chair Rusty Hicks has encouraged lower-polling candidates to drop out so they wouldn’t be on the ballot. But only one did before the filing deadline. Hicks is now commissioning a series of six polls to show where voters stand and pressure lower-polling Democrats to leave the race, even as he says there’s a bit more time for them to try to make the case and raise their standings.
If California is to avoid risking a Republican governor, most of the lower-polling candidates will need to do this well before ballots arrive at the beginning of May, for the June 2 primary. And voters, donors, and endorsers will need to heed the standings to make sure this happens. Given Washington State’s lesson, the first step is recognizing the danger.
Paul Loeb’s books on citizen activism, like Soul of a Citizen and The Impossible Will Take a Little While, have over 350,000 copies in print, with a new edition of The Impossible coming out this Sept. See paulloeb.org.
Keep reading...
Show less
These blue states are a massive target — and Trump may let Iran pull the trigger
I’ll tell you what’s unsettling, ladies and gentlemen: waking up every morning in a country where we know the monster running things is lying to us about everything.
Trump says there have been “very good and productive conversations” with Iran about ending the war. Iran says no such talks have taken place and are a mere figment of his imagination. It should fill us with dread that it’s far easier to believe the enemy than our own president, because Trump lies as easily as he breathes.
Easier, actually.
If he says he had eggs for breakfast, you know it’s pancakes. If he claims the price of gas is beginning to drop, you know it’s skyrocketing. We can, in fact, reliably count on the precise opposite of what he declares to be true at every turn.
In fact, I invite you to print out the Wikipedia section labeled “False or misleading statements by Donald Trump (second term).” It stretches for 56 pages. And that’s only covering the past 14 months. By contrast, there are no such pages for Barack Obama or Joe Biden, or any other president, for that matter.
It emerged on Tuesday that Trump’s tall tale about talks (productive or otherwise) with Iran having taken place sent oil prices tumbling and the stock market briefly surging — with traders betting hundreds of millions on the spike in oil futures mere minutes before Trump’s announcement. Then, upon Iran’s quick denial of the talks, stocks sank again.
Insider trading, anyone? With any other president, he would be given the benefit of the doubt. With this one? Are you kidding?
Not that this should come as the remotest shock to any of you. Even the MAGA faithful seemingly understand that Trump fails all honesty checks. They simply don’t care as long as he’s owning and infuriating the libs.
Oh right, the libs, the group that’s come to be synonymous with the last vestige of sanity in the United States. I happen to live in Los Angeles, one of those sanctuary cities in California, a largely sanctuary state. We’re 40 million strong, and we loathe the air Trump breathes – which of course drives him crazy.
And please, for the love of God, don’t call it Trump Derangement Syndrome. There is no such thing. We hate him because he takes such pleasure in destroying the country and he’s such a lying sack of squirrel vomit.
Because Trump can’t handle the idea of someone despising him, he regularly threatens the stability of my state, as he can’t comprehend presiding over a unified nation. He needs to ration out his support so it goes only to those who voted for him and/or reliably kiss his shiny golden ring.
If you’ve been following the way he “governs,” you know that he’s threatened to cut off federal funding from states that don’t align with his unconscionable policies. He’s frozen billions in child care, social services and infrastructure funding, prompting lawsuits from Democratic-led states like mine. He attaches political conditions to all of it, like the requirement to withdraw support for DEI.
And Trump has again singled out blue states and cities explicitly for his focus of investigations and enforcement, because he doesn’t see himself as president of all the United States, but exclusively the red states. His response to the blue states is to wield financial leverage and deny support in emergencies.
With this in mind, I’d like you all to imagine a frightening but plausible scenario, one that has been bandied about since the launch of the Iran War.
Let’s say that Iran successfully launched retaliatory drone strikes from vessels off the U.S. coast that make it through our interception defenses sometime in the next few weeks. At the same time, envision that these drones are carrying sufficient explosive material to cause significant destruction in, say, Southern California.
If you’re Trump, given his penchant for pettiness and payback, his strategy is to stand down and not retaliate because, after all, we’re a state that collectively hates him. Since he has neither the desire nor the necessity in his mind to defend California, he decides it’s in his own best interests to force the state to manage this profound emergency without the U.S. military’s intervention.
Sound unbelievable? Think again, because this is precisely the kind of subhuman creature we are dealing with.
You know that Trump’s first instinct would be to leave California twisting in the wake of any attack, much as he left the U.S. Capitol Police to fend for themselves and the Capitol itself unsupported for hours on January 6, 2021. He thinks about retribution first and actual assistance never. The idea of doing the right or essential thing never even occurs to him.
What’s that I hear you saying? A deliberate refusal to defend any part of the homeland would trigger accusations of dereliction of duty and abuse of power?
Yes, it would.
But would that matter in the slightest to a man with no conscience whose power appears at the moment to be absolute?
No, it would not.
I can already see how this might play out. An emergency action demand from Democrats could be overruled by the Republican-controlled Congress, claiming that they “trust our president to do what’s right for our country.” What initially seems unfathomable could quickly make perfect sense to Trump’s sycophantic supporters, as this would merely be California, an area unworthy of defense.
The process of normalizing even a nuclear strike on the American mainland could happen quicker than you might imagine. The California National Guard would be deployed, possibly in defiance of the federal government. We would be left all alone to deal with unimaginable destruction and mass casualties.
Trump, you see, wouldn’t care. All he would see is that this is precisely the kind of attack that would afford him an easy opportunity to cancel the midterms. Plus, he achieves revenge on a despised foe. In this guy’s diseased mind, it’s win-win.
I’d be surprised if Trump and his team weren’t secretly hoping for something almost exactly like this to occur, as it perfectly aligns with their goals.
While I understand that this may sound too cynical and sinister even for a president and a party with absolutely no scruples, I say never underestimate their propensity for malice.
We are, after all, living in unprecedented times – a moment when our president is the biggest liar in the land, capable of any evil the mind can conjure.
Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.
Keep reading...
Show less
Copyright © 2026 Raw Story Media, Inc. PO Box 21050, Washington, D.C. 20009 |
Masthead
|
Privacy Policy
|
Manage Preferences
|
Debug Logs
For corrections contact
corrections@rawstory.com
, for support contact
support@rawstory.com
.