Trump MRI scans bare all — with some privacy protections
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
This staggering move just made Trump a global supervillain
Last week, President Donald Trump cemented his standing as the greatest environmental criminal among world leaders, a mantle of which he couldn’t be prouder.
Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officially became the Environmental Pollution Agency. The EPA was established in 1970 to protect human health and the environment. Under Trump stooge Lee Zeldin, its mission today is to endanger human health and devastate the environment.
The EPA has overturned its long-held position that greenhouse gas pollution poses a danger to human health and thus requires regulation.
Gosh. It turns out that since 2009, the EPA had it all wrong. Greenhouse gas emissions actually never hurt anyone and require no federal regulation.
In reality, for more than half a century, scientists have provided irrefutable evidence of man-made climate change caused by burning fossil fuels, and its adverse impact on humans. The EPA’s change in position is pure bunk, laying the treacherous groundwork for Trump to end all federal greenhouse gas regulation and increase oil and coal production.
As to the EPA’s claim that greenhouse gas pollution poses no danger to human health, perhaps it overlooked the 178,000 people who died worldwide in the 2023 heatwave, 54 percent – or 96,120 – such deaths attributable to human-induced climate change.
Perhaps it scrubbed the EPA files of the 4,000 Americans who died as a result of extreme heat from 2010 to 2020, a 53 percent increase in deaths from 2000 to 2009 due to ever-increasing temperatures caused by climate change.
In a recent speech at the White House, Trump proudly announced "the single largest deregulatory action in American history,” including repealing all federal greenhouse gas emission standards for gas-fueled vehicles and engines. Trump also ordered that the Pentagon purchase large amounts of “beautiful, clean coal” — a laughable oxymoron even by Trump's standards.
The US is the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, behind China. China has significantly reduced its reliance on coal, using clean-energy sources for more than 50 percent of electricity generation.
Trump has gutted clean-energy programs and encouraged greater reliance on fossil fuels, shamelessly increasing the US carbon footprint at an incalculable human cost.
Greenhouse gases released in the next decade as a result of Trump’s policies are expected to lead to 1.3 million more temperature-related deaths worldwide by 2115. The Environmental Protection Network (EPN) concluded that Trump’s EPA rollback of environmental regulations will lead to nearly 200,000 deaths by 2050.
The Environmental Defense Fund estimates that the EPA repeal of the 2009 “endangerment finding” regarding climate change could cause up to 58,000 deaths and 37 million additional asthma attacks through 2055 due to increased pollution. The federal repeal of climate pollution controls on vehicles and power plants could lead to 184,000 deaths over time.
From these multiple studies on the impact of Trump’s deregulation policies, one thing is clear. The human cost of Trump doing everything possible to make climate change worse is staggering, his crime against humanity beyond reprehensible.
How could one man contribute to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, present and future, and not be held accountable? How could Trump care more about enhancing his sordid relationship with Big Oil and burnishing his anti-climate-change credentials with the MAGA crowd than about the horrendous human suffering he is causing?
The answer is Trump doesn’t care how many people die. During his first presidency, Trump’s irresponsible, dismissive, anti-science response to the COVID-19 pandemic led to the unnecessary deaths of more than 100,000 people, with Americans dying at a much higher rate than in other countries.
Trump took no responsibility, shed no tears, and said callously of the huge death toll, “It is what it is.”
Trump also doesn’t care that his criminal response to climate change is completely at odds with the vast majority of Americans, 72 percent of whom believe climate change is a serious problem. Authoritarians have absolutely no interest in carrying out the will of the people unless it furthers their own destructive agenda.
Trump also doesn’t care what effect his climate change-worsening policies have on future generations of Americans or the environmental health of the planet. He could leave office in 2028 with the lasting legacy of creating an environmental Armageddon with an indifferent shrug of his shoulders.
If a Democratically controlled Congress is elected in November, it could help prevent Trump from doing even further harm. By using aggressive oversight, budgetary pressure, and litigation, Congress could test the legality of Trump’s “arbitrary and capricious” environmental regulatory rollbacks and block funding for any future deregulations or fossil fuel-friendly policies. Legislatively, it could send critical climate-change bills to the White House that Trump would surely veto, frustrating and angering a majority of Americans and mobilizing voters for the 2028 election.
States also must continue to take the lead by reducing greenhouse gas emissions through clean-energy policies, using every means possible to repulse Trump’s attempts to scuttle such plans.
Individually, Americans can reduce their carbon footprint by buying electric vehicles, installing solar panels, weatherizing homes, reducing food waste, replacing gas furnaces or water heaters with electric heat pumps, and practicing the 3 R’s: reduce, reuse, and recycle.
Trump’s assault on the environment is an assault on the welfare of every American present and future. On Nov. 3, Americans can send a clarion message that we will fight Trump tooth and nail, so that our children and grandchildren won’t be left with an increasingly unlivable environment.
For the 72 percent of Americans who consider climate change a serious problem, our actions must speak louder than our words.
- Tom Tyner is a freelance editorialist, satirist, political analyst, blogger, author and retired English instructor.
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Guess who this top Trump ally tried to recruit to target gays in the Catholic church
Frédéric Martel, the author of the 2019 international bestseller, In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy, told me over the weekend about the time he was invited to lunch by Steve Bannon, who asked him to come to Bannon’s palatial Paris hotel suite shortly after his book was published.
“I didn’t know why he asked me to come,” he said.
The meeting was arranged via one of Martel’s right-wing Catholic sources who was allied with Bannon. Martel, a journalist who covers the far right in Europe and is working on a new book focused on it, certainly had a professional interest in meeting Bannon.
“It was at the Hotel Bristol,” he explained to me by phone from Paris, “in a suite that costs 8,000 euros per night.” Per the exchange rate at that time, that would have been about $8,950 per night. Forbes reports suites at the hotel begin at $3,200 per night and go up to as high as $46,000 per night.
It was “March or April” of 2019, Martel recalled. And he was surprised about what Bannon wanted from him.
“He said during the lunch that he wanted to make a movie about my book,” Martel explained, noting that he “wouldn’t have ever given that [permission] to Bannon.” But he offered Bannon a more polite truth. “I don’t have the rights to the book [for a film],” Martel said he told Bannon, as his publisher had already sold those rights.
That was the end of the discussion on the book, and Martel was perplexed because, as he explained, the book is “probably the most pro-Francis” book, and Bannon, a Catholic “traditionalist” connected to all of the most extreme radical right elements of the church, was working with his allies to take down Francis because of his progressive reforms and his criticism of populist right-wing governments, including Donald Trump’s.
In the Closet of the Vatican exposes the hypocrisy of a church hierarchy built up over many decades — including under the virulently homophobic Pope Benedict — which included many powerful closeted gay priests, monsignors, and cardinals who were publicly working against gay rights while privately leading lives counter to their pronouncements and harmful actions.
While exposing all of that might bring down some of the very people on the Catholic right Bannon was courting — many inside the church itself, among the clergy and the hierarchy — he clearly didn’t see the nuance. Bannon is all about chaos and destruction, and was laser-focused on hurting Francis’ leadership and influence. He asked his good friend Jeffrey Epstein for help in his project.
In the Epstein files there are thousands of text message exchanges between Bannon and Epstein, as Bannon sought the help of Epstein — a true globalist within the uber-wealthy elite — to promote his faux populist, supposedly anti-globalist movement across Europe.
As CNN reports:
Bannon had been highly critical of Francis whom he saw as an opponent to his “sovereigntist” vision, a brand of nationalist populism which swept through Europe in 2018 and 2019. The released documents from the DOJ appear to show that Epstein had been helping Bannon to build his movement.
Bannon, after being pushed out as Trump’s national security adviser, was living in Rome, traveling to Paris, London, and throughout Europe, and asking Epstein to connect him to powerful people. Epstein offered use of his jet and homes for Bannon’s travels, while Bannon offered media training and advice for Epstein to grotesquely help clean up the convicted pedophile’s reputation. And Bannon recorded many hours of interviews, 12 hours of which have been released among the files, for a documentary film he was making on Epstein, the aim of which no doubt was to promote a media makeover for Epstein.
Epstein’s jet, per the files, was unavailable when Bannon asked if he could use it to fly from Rome to Paris in one instance, but there is evidence in the files that Bannon stayed at a grand apartment where Epstein was living near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris on that trip. Epstein invited Bannon to stay in a March 29th text; Bannon said he was “Enroute,” and then Epstein texted someone else the next morning: “Steve Bannon is here with me.”
Bannon’s spokesperson told the New York Times that Bannon didn’t stay there (and that he never stayed at Epstein’s homes or flew on his plane) and decided to stay at a hotel instead. But the Times noted the spokesperson didn’t provide a receipt. My question would have been, even if that’s so, who paid for the hotel — again, Bannon’s spokesperson didn’t show the Times any receipt — and was it in fact the lavish Hotel Bristol suite where he met Martel (which would have been at around the same time)? After all, per the files, Epstein did offer to pay for a charter flight for Bannon when Epstein said his jet was unavailable. (There’s no evidence of whether he did or didn’t pay for a charter flight.)
Around that same time, Bannon expressed to Epstein his interest in making Martel’s book into a film and having Epstein fund it as executive producer.
“Have you read ‘in the closet of the vatican’ yet,” Bannon wrote , to which Epstein appears to reply ‘yes,’ amid chats about getting Bannon connected to global players.
“You are now exec producer of ‘ITCOTV’ (In the closet of the Vatican),” Bannon continued. “Will take down (Pope) Francis.The Clintons, Xi, Francis, EU — come on brother.”
It’s not clear whether Epstein was taking seriously the idea of the film — which Martel had already told Bannon was not going to happen — but Epstein, on April 1, 2019, did email himself “in the closet of the vatican,” and later, in June of 2019, he sent Bannon an article headlined, “Pope Francis or Steve Bannon? Catholics must choose.”
The two were planning to meet in New York weeks later, on the first weekend of July. But on July 6th, 2019, Epstein would be arrested on sex trafficking charges in New York. On Aug. 10th he’d be found dead in his jail cell. And obviously no film was made.
Bannon continued in his war against the pope, but a split developed that very summer of Epstein’s arrest and death between Bannon and some of his far-right allies. Cardinal Raymond Burke, an angry American MAGA foe of Francis’ (whom Francis would eventually kick out of his massive Vatican apartment, in 2023), had collaborated with Bannon in an organization working against Francis, Dignitatis Humanae Institute, a Rome-based think tank that aimed to create a “populist academy” in a monastery in Trisulti, Italy.
But Burke broke with Bannon in June of 2019, after he learned that Bannon wanted to make a film out of Martel’s book. Martel had gone public about his lunch with Bannon, and it didn’t sit well with Burke, who is portrayed in an entire chapter as a scheming and unrepentant nemesis of Pope Francis.
Burke and many of his allies in the church had much to fear about any film outing prominent homophobic closet cases in the church, bringing the book to a much wider audience. Burke put out a statement, resigning from DHI, where he’d collaborated with Bannon:
I have been made aware of a June 24 LifeSiteNews online article…entitled ‘Steve Bannon hints at making film exposing homosexuality in the Vatican’…
I do not, in any way, agree with Mr. Bannon’s assessment of the book in question, Furthermore, I am not at all of the mind that the book should be made into a film.
But other Bannon compatriots would later appear to draw both on the information in Martel’s book and on his research methods. In In the Closet of the Vatican, Martel discussed gay dating and sex apps like Grindr, Scruff, and Tinder, and how prevalent users were in and around the Vatican, even carrying out his own experiments with his researchers, using Grindr and other apps.
“According to several priests, Grindr has become a very widespread phenomenon in seminaries and priests’ meetings,” Martel reports in the book.
It may be a coincidence, but two years later, in July 2021, in a story I covered extensively, a right-wing Catholic site on Substack, The Pillar, used geolocation data from Grindr to force the resignation of Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, the General Secretary of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
As I wrote at the time, the right-wing editors of The Pillar…
… “obtained” geolocation data of Grindr interactions from his phone — even claiming to have located him in a bathhouse in Las Vegas at one point — over a period of time going back to 2018.
And then they went to the Catholic bishops with the information — dates and times of Burrill allegedly connecting with various men on Grindr, and locations, including the bathhouse. Soon after, the USCCB announced Burrill had resigned because of “impending media reports alleging possible improper behavior.”
There was much speculation about where The Pillar got its funding and also about who purchased the geolocation information for it — information that would cost a lot of money. Grindr had previously sold information to third parties for advertising purposes (and stopped after it was criticized), believing there was no identifying information. But as I explain in my piece of the time in depth, technology experts say there’s a way for that identifying information to be found, and there’s no guarantee that third parties don’t turn around and sell geolocation data to more nefarious entities.
Almost two years after The Pillar’s actions, in March of 2023, the Washington Post indeed revealed that it was wealthy Catholics on the far right, the people in the same circles as Bannon, who paid for the geolocation data that The Pillar had “obtained.” They also sent the information to Catholic bishops:
A group of conservative Colorado Catholics has spent millions of dollars to buy mobile app tracking data that identified priests who used gay dating and hookup apps and then shared it with bishops around the country.
The secretive effort was the work of a Denver nonprofit called Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal, whose trustees are philanthropists Mark Bauman, John Martin and Tim Reichert, according to public records, an audio recording of the nonprofit’s president discussing its mission and other documents…
…The Post has seen copies of two different reports presented to bishops. One is from the Renewal group to a diocese and the other is the one that the Pillar presented to the USCCB about Burrill. The information in both is mostly about Grindr, although the reports also say they have used data from other gay dating apps Growlr, Scruff and Jack’d, as well as OkCupid.
Reichert is a former GOP congressional candidate. Jayd Henricks, executive director of the group Reichert and his rich buddies founded and which bought the geolocation information it gave to The Pillar, had, like Bannon, been a fierce critic of Francis.
All of these men are aligned in efforts against church reforms, whether working directly or not. Hendricks has written for the orthodox World Catholic Report, which has also written glowingly about Bannon and his “populist nationalism” effort in Europe, describing it as “renewed appreciation for the nation-state and national sovereignty — and growing suspicion of the managerial elites in Washington, London, and Brussels.”
It’s not a stretch to believe that the Colorado wealthy right-wing Catholics got their ideas on using Grindr to help bring down church leaders from the attention brought to In the Closet of the Vatican. Nor is it a stretch to believe that they even worked directly or indirectly with fellow traveler Bannon, who was very much focused on the book and who had by then lost the convicted pedophile billionaire he was hoping would bankroll weaponizing the ideas within the book in the way The Pillar outrageously did.
- Michelangelo Signorile writes The Signorile Report, a free and reader-supported Substack. If you’ve valued reading The Signorile Report, consider becoming a paid subscriber and supporting independent, ad-free opinion journalism.
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Stop coddling these selfish elites — they're bluffing
On Tuesday, New York City’s new mayor Zohran Mamdani proposed raising property taxes in the city by nearly 10 percent — if he can’t persuade New York Governor Kathy Hochul to raise income taxes on the wealthy. She’s been reluctant.
In California, meanwhile, Google co-founder Sergei Brin along with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and other billionaires are financing several voter initiatives to limit the creation of a new billionaire tax in California. California Governor Gavin Newsom is also against it.
Why are the governors of the most progressive and richest states in America so unenthusiastic about raising taxes on the wealthiest of the wealthy?
The kindest answer is they’re worried that the rich will abandon their states. (The unkinder is that they’re in the pockets of said rich.)
Governors Hochul and Newsom: Don’t worry about raising taxes on the rich.
True, a few rich people may abandon New York or California if taxes on them are raised, but evidence suggests the vast majority will stay put.
When billionaire New York mayor Mike Bloomberg faced a budget deficit in his first term, he raised property taxes by 18.5 percent. Rich New Yorkers threatened to leave. Most did not.
A graph from the “Citizens Budget Commission” (financed by rich New Yorkers) purports to show New York’s “shrinking share” of the nation’s millionaires — from 12.7 percent in 2010 to 8.7 in 2022 — as evidence New Yorkers are fleeing high taxes.
But that “shrinking share” isn’t due to New Yorkers fleeing; it’s because a growing number of millionaires are being hatched in Texas, Florida, and California.
A study by the Fiscal Policy Institute found no significant out-migration by wealthy residents of New York state in response to tax increases in either 2017 or 2021. The latter tax increase is estimated to have raised approximately $3.6 billion annually. Since then, the number of wealthy in New Yorkers has increased.
When Massachusetts passed its “millionaire’s tax” in 2022, rich residents of the Bay State threatened to leave. They didn’t. Instead, the state has collected $5.7 billion in additional revenue, while the number of millionaires in the state has grown, according to a study by People’s Policy Project.
After New Jersey raised its top tax rates, researchers found little out-migration among millionaires. The measure generated substantial revenue.
Other research examined 45 million U.S. tax filings of families or individuals with over $1 million in income. It shows that affluent households are even less likely to move to another state than middle-income or poor households.
Why are the rich staying put, even though their taxes are being raised? Because they’re rich! They can afford to stay put.
Most people don’t want to move — either because their friends or parents or children live in the vicinity, or they don’t want to disrupt the education of their younger children, or they have networks of business associates and clients in the area, or they like the cultural amenities, or they don’t want the legal and administrative hassles of moving.
Most people move because they have to. Their employer tells them they must. Or the best job they can get forces them to. Or they they have to take care of a sick parent. Or their own aging bodies can no longer abide the cold.
But the rich don’t have to move. The Fiscal Policy Institute study previously mentioned shows that in 2023, earners in the top 1 percent migrated out of New York less frequently than those in all other income groups.
New York’s and California’s super-rich are richer than they’ve ever been; the wealth they’ve amassed is larger than any group of Americans has ever possessed; they don’t know what to do with all their money. The taxes they would pay under the proposals put forward are infinitesimally small, almost rounding errors, compared to their fortunes.
Yes, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel (who financed JD Vance’s senate run) has abandoned California, complaining about the billionaire tax. So have venture capitalist David Sacks (now Trump’s “czar” for crypto and AI), Elon Musk, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg (who reportedly bought a mansion in Miami).
But the question must be asked: is California really that much worse for losing Thiel, Musk, and Zuckerberg?
Maybe raising taxes on the super-rich not only provides critically-needed tax revenue but also acts as a kind of disinfectant, purging a city or state of a few of its most noxious and socially-irresponsible inhabitants. Another reason to do so!
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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Trump's dumb move just handed Dems a massive gift — again
Donald Trump is the worst thing to ever happen to global politics, but he didn’t get there by himself. Putin’s occasionally useful puppet also happens to be surrounded by the most inept collection of political non-savants ever assembled.
Case in point: When the COVID-19 pandemic began in February 2020, Trump secretly told writer Bob “My Publishing Date is More Important Than American Lives” Woodward how serious the virus was, but seemed to forget that minor detail every time he spoke to the public. Weird!
If Trump had been any kind of competent person, or at least had surrounded himself with competent people instead of attacking Dr. Anthony Fauci on the daily, he would have recognized the coronavirus as the political gift it was in an election year. Trump needed only to embrace measures to stop the spread and he would have —to quote Bill Murray — saved the lives of millions of registered voters.
Instead, he killed off his own voting base in the Red States. And since the surviving MAGA cultists weren’t inclined to vote by mail after he convinced them it wasn’t safe, Trump lost bigly to Joe Biden.
I don’t have enough internet space to list all the mistakes Trump has made that could have been avoided, so let’s just fast forward to Monday night, when Bari Weiss’s spineless Trumpsimps at CBS wouldn’t allow Stephen Colbert’s interview with Texas Democrat James Talarico to air.
We all — including the crack legal staff at CBS, all of whom apparently just graduated from Trump University’s Bondi School of Law — know Trump is very worried about Texas going purple.
Instead of obeying in advance, the smart thing for CBS would have been to invoke the Fairness Doctrine and get a Republican booked too. Of course, Colbert would probably have requested Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), the only sensible Republican in the House, but would have had to settle for someone super-Trumpy yet vaguely Talarico-esque, say Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX), who’s joined performative, attention-seeking Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) in pretending Trump’s name isn’t in the Epstein Files more than a million times.
The best part of this is how beautifully Colbert handled the latest bit of Orwellian FCC-ery from Trumpocrite Brendan Carr, who basically helped Streisand Effect the entire Talarico interview.
Yes, this Brendan Carr. I wonder what’s changed since he tweeted this in 2019?
Anyway, Colbert got to tell his audience the network wouldn’t let him air the Talarico interview, and to drag Trump and his protectors on the same episode they were censoring. Yay, First Amendment still in effect!
- YouTube www.youtube.com
Even better, the interview with Talarico has racked up far more views on Colbert’s YouTube Channel (over 6 million at the time of this writing, so probably at least 2 million more by the time you read this) than it would’ve if guarding Trump’s snowflake feelings wasn’t CBS’s top priority.
- YouTube youtu.be
But wait, it gets even better!
Thanks to Trump being a giant baby, Talarico’s campaign raised a whopping $2.5 million after the news broke. I’m encouraged to see that Americans are reacting appropriately to censorship and the deliberate deterioration of our First Amendment rights.
Yes, Bari Weiss of CBS follows me on Twitter. No, I don’t follow her back, and she’s never responded to me. Weird, huh? Especially since Trump blocked me forever ago, in August 2015.
If Weiss had any real sense of how to run a news network, she would offer me a gig, representing the liberal take. But again, anyone connected to Trump is terrible at whatever they do. There’s a part of me that wishes they were trying to take him down from the inside, but none are smart enough to maintain a front like that for too long.
As someone who comes from terrestrial radio, my biggest fear about the second Trump Regime arose from its intention to control the flow of information on our airwaves, as laid out in Project 2025. Now we have Carr’s Federal Communications Commission nestled in Trump’s alimentary canal, more than willing to suppress truths Trump doesn’t like.
But don’t forget Kari Lake, who’s filtering all of the truth out of the Voice of America even more than she filters her face. I’m blocked on Twitter by both her personal account and her “Kari Lake War Room.” You know, because she’s so brave and cares so much about the truth — which I suggest is that whatever she sends out from the Voice of America is translated from the Russian first.
We have the First Amendment for so many reasons. If you don’t want to watch something or listen to it, you don’t have to. Unless you’re this giant snowflake baby, then you block some five-foot-nothing lady on Twitter because you can’t handle the truth she tells about you being a convicted felon accused of doing unspeakable things to women and children.
The irony of this kind of censorship happening in 2026 is that there’s more content available now than at any other time in our history. If you don’t want to see Stephen Colbert and James Talarico chatting about politics and their shared faith, just change the channel. It’s that part that really chaps MAGA’s collective IQ point. Those Trumpocrites think they’re the only ones who get to be churchy. But that’s a whole other kind of opinion column.
- Tara Dublin is a political writer/commentator based in Portland, OR, who has been blocked by Donald Trump on Twitter since August 2015 and can occasionally be heard as a fill-in host on SiriusXM Progress. She is also the author of The Sound of Settling, a rock ‘n’ roll love story available at taradublinrocks.com
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This Trump assault shows how the end of democracy begins
Donald Trump‘s Crusade against Kilmar Abrego Garcia is “on life support” as it may finally be dismissed this week or next by District Judge Waverly Crenshaw in Tennessee. But will that be the end of this father’s and husband’s ordeal?
This week, I told you about the historic pattern associated with countries moving from democracy to tyranny. First, they start breaking the law and ignoring the Constitution in small ways, and the more they get away with it — and buy off or threaten politicians who may otherwise stop it — the more they do it. We’ve been watching Trump do this almost from the first day of his second term in office.
Then I laid out the mechanism behind that, the way men like Trump who want to become dictators co-opt the law by threatening law firms and the media, ignoring judges, and legally, verbally, or physically attacking the press, politicians, and regular citizens who speak out. Trump has done all of these things already, too, just like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán did when they were deconstructing the democracies in Russia and Hungary.
Today we look at how a country finally, fully crosses from being a self-correcting democracy into a rigid tyranny like those two countries, and how average people like us can identify that moment in time to do something about it before it is utterly too late.
Over the past few months, you may have noticed a rather strange rhythm in the news. A judge orders a man like Kilmar Abrego Garcia released and the Trump regime simply finds another way to hold or punish him. Another court blocks a deportation, and administration officials announce they’ll try again using a different legal strategy.
The result is that, as of last week, courts around the country have ruled more than 4,000 times that Trump’s ICE detentions were unlawful, and yet the detentions continue — more than 70,000 people so far, including families and children — while larger facilities are being built every day to hold still more people.
Nothing going on here in America resembles the movies we all watched as kids. Nobody announces the end of the Constitution and the rise of a new dictator or regime. The courts still appear to otherwise function, lawyers still argue their cases, and judges still write opinions explaining why the regime has overstepped its authority. Sometimes, like with the judge who just ordered Trump’s lickspittles to restore the history of George Washington’s slave-holding, their opinions are even blunt and scathing.
On paper the system appears intact, but in practice something subtler has been happening with greater and greater frequency, particularly since last summer: the rulings by the judges and the outcomes that seem to contradict them slowly drift apart. The legal system, in other words, is beginning to crack and fail under the strain of their constant “unitary executive” attacks that use the Project 2025 arguments that Trump is above the law.
This is how the end of democracy begins.
Most of us were taught a reassuring civics lesson when we were young. We were told that when our government acts illegally, we can simply go to court and the court would fix the situation. The lawsuit may take time, but once the judge decides, the matter is settled.
That belief is the quiet foundation beneath every other freedom enjoyed by the citizens of any functioning democracy. We rely on it when we speak, when we vote, and when we criticize or ridicule those in power. We assume that somewhere in the background, operating quietly but irresistibly, there exists a constitutional place where the arguments end and the court’s decisions hold those in power to account, restoring balance and maintaining our democracy.
But that’s a damn fragile assumption that hasn’t been tested in our lifetimes because we haven’t had a lawless president before, so we can easily fail to recognize it.
However, the men who wrote the Constitution — who’d actually lived under a very real tyranny — understood the fragility of that assumption through their own personal experience. They’d lived under a corrupt government that repeatedly insisted it was acting lawfully while colonists instead experienced exploitation, abuse, and brutality.
In the 1770s, history books tell us, British officials could always produce a justification for their actions. Doors were kicked in under broad and often specious warrants or no warrant at all, people were sent to prison in rigged trials, and the local judges who didn’t work for the King but stood for the rule of law were brushed aside because the King and his men said so.
Even though the British authorities always claimed a legal excuse for what they were doing, people still felt pushed around and powerless. The problem wasn’t that there were no laws, but that the regime could keep doing whatever it wanted while everyone argued about whether it was actually allowed. Just like Trump and his toadies are doing as you read these words.
Alexander Hamilton addressed this directly in Federalist 78 when he explained the peculiar weakness of courts in any republic. The judiciary, he wrote, “has no influence over either the sword or the purse… It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment.” [emphasis Hamilton’s] Courts don’t command armies or control money; they issue their decisions and depend on the rest of government — and the approval of the public — to carry them out.
That arrangement only works so long as everyone agrees that a court’s judgment ends the matter. The moment officials discover they can treat a loss in court as a temporary inconvenience rather than a binding stop sign, the character of the entire system changes from democracy to something else altogether.
Nothing dramatic needs to occur for this transition to begin. Elections continue to happen, politicians and pundits offer complaints and justifications, and the legal briefs pile up in the courthouse files. But the practical effect of a ruling weakens, because the losing side — in this case, the Trump regime — simply continues under a new rationale so the argument starts all over again, while they keep doing what they were doing before they were challenged.
We see this with ICE routinely violating the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, as I detailed yesterday. With Trump defying the law and withholding monies appropriated by Congress. With Whiskey Pete Hegseth murdering people on the open seas day after day in defiance of both American and international law. With “Blankie” Kristi Noem refusing to hand evidence in the Good and Pretti murders over to local authorities, and “Have You Looked At The Dow?!?” Pam Bondi refusing to hand evidence of Trump-aligned billionaires’ participation in Epstein’s gruesome crimes over to Congress.
And it usually begins with the emerging dictatorship going after the weakest groups among the population.
Hitler’s first victims — in his first weeks in office — were trans people, the same group Republicans whipped up hate against to seize office last year. Putin went after “outsider” Chechens, who weren’t ethnically, linguistically, or culturally Russian. Orbán campaigned and won election on a slogan of “build the wall” along Hungary’s southern border to keep out brown-skinned Syrian refugees (and he then built the wall when in office).
History tells us that tyranny invariably begins with attacks on those easiest to ignore, the marginal, the disliked, the politically powerless, like the “Mexican murderers and rapists” Trump turned into electoral gold in 2016. Most citizens simply shrug when they hear about it, because they don’t imagine themselves ending up in the same position.
But once emboldened with their early successes, within short order tyrants and their toadies always move on from the weakest to arresting and punishing those who might restrain them through legal or public pressure: lawyers, entertainers, reporters, pundits, students, professors, universities, nonprofits, media outlets, and eventually opposition politicians.
Over time, a dictatorial regime’s habit forms: act first, deal with the consequences later. Kill a few people in the streets. Jail a couple of judges and politicians. Prosecute a smattering of reporters. Defund democratic institutions like NPR, VOA, and USAID. Gut the social safety net to throw the working class into crisis so they’re otherwise occupied.
And through it all, keep ignoring the court orders and relentlessly move forward in the project of deconstructing the democracy that was carefully built and nurtured for centuries before.
Losing in court or even at the ballot box becomes mere delay instead of defeat, until eventually the public grows accustomed to seeing courts disagree with the government while the government just plows ahead anyway.
When that happens, the line between democracy and tyranny has first, quietly, been crossed. If not stopped right away, it’s all downhill from there.
Before that line is hit, elections actually change the direction of public policy because politicians and bureaucrats are committed to listening to public opinion, following the law, and obeying the courts.
After that line’s been crossed, elections merely alter political theater, as the machinery of tyranny continues grinding forward. The forms of democracy remain, but their corrective power fades, not because judges stopped ruling, but because rulings stopped controlling events.
Just ask any modern Russian or Hungarian. Or read the history of Europe in the early 20th century.
As a German professor told reporter Milton Mayer in the early 1950s of his experience living through the rise of Hitler:
“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.
“The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.
“But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.”
None of this means a democratic country suddenly flips into tyranny on some particular, identifiable day, whether proclaimed or not. It means that freedom depends on whether citizens, officials, and institutions stand up to the wannabe tyrant and demand that legal decisions have real-world consequences.
In other words, public opinion is the last wall a tyrant must shatter. It’s where, when it prevails, tyranny is finally stopped. And that is you and me.
The founders’ ultimate safeguard of our democracy was neither heroism nor violence (Second Amendment nuts notwithstanding), but the shared expectation that the law binds the leader even when he protests. When that expectation falls apart, when the judiciary’s orders are routinely ignored, Hamilton’s warning becomes more than a theory and the nation’s democracy only survives if the public loudly demands its judgments be honored.
Understanding this tells us what we must do now and next.
- We must pay attention when courts order the government to change course, and raise hell when the Trump regime ignores those orders.
- We must regularly call our elected officials and demand that they require legal rulings be followed, particularly if they’re Republicans and such a position may be politically costly to them.
- We must support local and national leaders who defend our court’s decisions instead of treating them as optional obstacles.
- And we must participate in the civic pressure between elections that keeps the constitutional machinery honest, because voting alone can’t overcome a regime that’s learned it can disregard the referee whenever it wants.
A free republic doesn’t depend on its leaders never overreaching; it depends on overreaches producing immediate and painful consequences. The danger moment arrives quietly, however, when a nation gets comfortable with the idea that the leader and his sycophants can keep breaking the law even after courts and public opinion told them they must stop.
Hamilton warned us the courts possess judgment but neither sword nor purse, and Jefferson told us our government exists solely by “the consent of the governed.”
Whether those judgments still govern events in America has always been up to us.
- Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.
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This maniac's obsession is poison to MAGA
As a writer, people assume you’re never at a loss for words. But here we are. All I can think of is Caroline Kennedy’s warning about her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and how “he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks.”
From this whack-a-doodle comes a gobsmacking, utterly inexplicable, surreal display of stupidity that upends both the seriousness of American public health policy and confirms RFK Jr., somehow become U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, as the country’s number one health destroyer.
Kennedy teamed up with Kid Rock for a 90-second “BawitMAHA” workout video that showcases two absolute buffoons attempting to do God only knows what.
I say attempting because even as a fitness fanatic for 30 years, I genuinely have no idea what to call what they are doing. The bizarre clip features the duo shirtless in a sauna — Kennedy in his customary jeans — biking, stretching, flexing, and plunging into a cold pool.
Then comes the truly stomach-churning moment: the two of them, drinking raw milk in a hot tub.
I’m sorry, but the thought of consuming unfiltered milky mammal secretions while sweating in a hot tub is nothing short of vomit-inducing.
Cutting to the chase, the ludicrous video serves as a fittingly chaotic emblem of Kennedy’s so-called “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) initiative, which ostensibly doesn’t include eating raw chicks and mice out of a blender, but you never know.
This “campaign” — seriously, what do you call this? — appears more focused on dad-rock aesthetics, hyper-masculinity, and rank foolishness than on using evidence-based strategies to fight disease and help people live healthier lives.
Kennedy bypasses scientific rigor for viral content with an off-his-rocker partisan rocker less muscle-ripped than booze-addled. Kennedy has turned the Department of Health and Human Services into a nut-job quackery — or, in his case, chickery — that dispenses not life-saving vaccines but unadulterated idiocy. If there were a childhood vaccine for stupidity, Kennedy surely missed it.
Could MAHA be any less serious? Yes! The absurdity doesn’t end in the milky hot tub. The Hill reports that Republicans are treating RFK Jr.’s wellness crusade as an electoral asset, with strategists whispering that MAHA could stave off midterm losses.
This thought process is more ridiculous than whatever results in wearing jeans to the gym.
Over at Politico, GOP insiders are described as being as brain-wormed as their health secretary. RFK Jr. is the belt-tightening Beltway guru, a Washington fascination, endlessly debated in conference rooms and catered luncheons — and, dare I say, in unpasteurized Capitol Hill hot tubs. So much for draining the swamp.
The fact that some Republicans are pinning their 2026 hopes on a health crusade led by RFK Jr. is just bonkers. What was once — pre-Trump — a party with a coherent platform is reduced to stumping for a fringe health scheme.
It’s a scheme that has gained traction with weird online wellness influencers and conspiracy-tinged critics of Big Pharma, and which polls show does not address top concerns of most voters, like high costs and low wages.
And that’s the point: the Trump quagmire has lost its association with the MAGA base if it thinks MAHA will inspire flags, bumper stickers, placards, and lines outside polling stations.
In deep-red districts, food choices are cultural signals. Steak and beer versus salads and a smoothie. Telling MAGA voters to reject vaccines while embracing quinoa is not a strategy. It’s an electoral nightmare.
The contradiction is glaring. RFK Jr. rails against the government “telling you what to put in your body” when it comes to vaccines, yet embraces a moralizing, top-down approach to diet and wellness that feels exactly like the elitism MAGA voters despise.
Freedom, corruption, and riches for me. Discipline, disease, and raw milk for thee.
What’s more, this strategy ignores the lived reality of low-income Americans. Healthy food is expensive. Access is unequal. Food deserts are real. Time poverty is real. Equipment costs money. Transportation costs money. Groceries cost money — more and more each week.
MAGA voters are feeling the pinch, so telling them to replace boxes of mac and cheese for ninety-nine cents with one piece of daily broccoli for around $2 borders on a bum steer — and I don’t mean the sort of cow that doesn’t produce hot-tub milk.
The GOP’s Beltway brain trust can celebrate salad bars and rail against processed foods all it wants, but in many rural and working-class communities, grocery stores are miles apart, fast food is ubiquitous, and budgets are tight.
I have friends in deep-red areas who mock my plant-based diet as “liberal,” i.e., “Casey, you are now part of the far-left.” It’s not because they’ve studied science or the new upside-down food pyramid from Kennedy’s HHS, but because culture and identity shape food in ways Washington consultants misunderstand.
We’ve seen this before. When Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to regulate soda sizes in New York City, the backlash in rural America was swift and scathing, framed as nanny-state overreach, an urban billionaire telling regular people how to live.
On that note, how many people in rural America — and elsewhere — do you know who own a sauna or have access to one? There you go.
The end result is a MAHA movement that manages to insult MAGA voters who don’t want their food policed and low-income Americans who can’t afford the lifestyle being preached.
MAHA is about as far from a populist uprising as can be. MAHA is an inside-the-Beltway wellness, a grass-fed fixation being twisted into something that it is not — grassroots.
- 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 just gave the game away about his next military move
America is on the brink of a full-scale war with Iran — but no one is willing to say exactly why, including the occupant of the Oval Office.
But there are clues.
The U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, is en route from the Caribbean Sea to the Middle East. It should arrive there within days. The U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier and three guided-missile destroyers are already there.
As the world’s largest armada assembles near Iran, a second round of talks between the U.S. and Iran has just concluded, apparently without getting anywhere. Meanwhile, Tehran is conducting military drills in the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial choke point for the world’s oil.
Americans have never had exceedingly long attention spans, but the last year of Trump “flooding the zone” has further shortened them. To refresh memories:
In late June, Trump claimed that U.S. strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites had been “a spectacular military success” and that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” He told reporters that “Iran’s not going to have a nuclear weapon. I think it’s the last thing on their mind right now.”
Nearly six months later, in early January, when Iranians took to the streets, Trump warned that if Iran threatened protesters’ lives, the U.S. would “come to their rescue.” He said: “We are locked and loaded, and ready to go.”
As the reported death toll in the protests soared into the hundreds, Trump urged the protesters to take over Iranian institutions and log the names of their “killers and abusers.”
“HELP IS ON ITS WAY,” he posted in all caps. “Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before. The USA stands ready to help!!!.”
Yet despite reports that as many as 3,428 Iranians had been killed and that more executions were imminent, no help was on its way. Many Iranians said they felt betrayed and confused by Trump’s failure to act.
By the fourth week of January, Trump once again talked about Iran, saying, “We have a lot of ships going that direction, just in case.”
In case of what? By then the death toll in Iran was said to be more than 5,000 (some reports had it many times higher), but Trump no longer even mentioned Iran’s brutal crackdown.
On Jan. 28, with U.S. ships assembling in the Middle East, Trump said of the armada, “like with Venezuela, it is ready, willing, and able to rapidly fulfill its mission, with speed and violence, if necessary.”
What exactly was this “mission?” And why did Trump compare it to the mission in Venezuela? It was a clue.
Last week, Trump warned that the U.S. would attack Iran unless it made a “deal” and has “NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS.”
But the Trump regime’s apparent objectives have shifted once again.
Yesterday — after a second round of talks between Iran and the United States concluded in Geneva without any breakthrough, and Iran insisted that the talks be strictly limited to its nuclear program — U.S. officials said they’re pushing to curb all of Iran’s ballistic missiles and its support of militias across the region.
In an interview with Fox News, JD Vance said the Iranians aren’t acknowledging some “red lines” that Trump has set, but Vance didn’t say what those red lines were.
***
I wouldn’t be as worried if we had a thoughtful person in the Oval Office, a competent secretary of defense, and a secretary of state who seemed to be in charge.
But we don’t have any of them.
The United States is being represented in the talks by “Special Envoy” Steve Witkoff (whose son is the chief executive of World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company, nearly half of which was purchased last year for $500 million by an investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates). And by Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner (who’s been making private deals with the Saudis and who raised several billion dollars before Trump’s second term from overseas investors including sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates).
No one from the State Department. Nobody from the National Security Council. No one who knows much of anything about Iran.
So what’s the real goal?
On Friday, in a little-noticed remark, Trump said “the best thing that could happen” in Iran would be regime change, noting “there are people” who could take over from Iran’s Islamic ruler Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Bingo.
Trump promised his MAGA base that he wouldn’t be involved in seeking regime changes abroad. But that was before he abducted Venezuela’s Nicholás Maduro and replaced him with Maduro’s vice president.
Yet regime change in Iran would be far, far more difficult to pull off than regime change in Venezuela. The Middle East has demonstrated that it can swallow up America, even with the largest fighting force in the world. Anyone remember Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and … Iran?
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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We must attack these Trumpist election lies — or their diabolical aim will succeed
Last week, Larry Kudlow, the Fox personality and former Trump advisor, was on the TV.
You will be shocked to learn he lied.
“I vote in the state of Connecticut. You don’t need a photo ID. You could vote if you just show them a credit card or a debit card, which anybody can get their hands on. I think it’s a scam."
The context was “election integrity” and voter-ID laws. At the time, the House was debating a bill that would nationalize elections to an alarming degree. (The so-called SAVE America Act passed the following day.) Kudlow’s “commentary” primed Donald Trump to respond.
“Connecticut is an extremely corrupt voting place,” he said. “That's why a guy like [Sen. Richard] Blumenthal can keep getting elected. He admitted he cheated on the war. I went to Vietnam for a couple of days and I spent two more days than he did there. He was never there."
All but one thing above, which I will get to, is a lie.
I also live in Connecticut. I vote in Connecticut. You cannot walk into a polling station, present a credit card and vote. I don’t know if that would be illegal. I do know it would fail.
You are permitted to vote without photo-ID, but the documents you are required to produce are the same ones you are required to produce to get a Connecticut drivers license.
In other words, proof of residency.
According to the New Haven Register, those documents include …
… a utility bill, bank statement, government check, paycheck or government document that shows their name and address; a Social Security card; or any form of identification that shows the voter’s name and address, name and signature, or name and photograph.”
But Connecticut’s election laws don’t stop there.
Even if you have photo ID, or produce the same documents required to get photo ID, you still have to go through an additional process. Volunteer poll workers find your name and address on a list of voters. That list is maintained by Republican and Democratic registrars. It is created via voter registration, a process that happens in advance of Election Day.
So there are at least two stages, registration and verification.
Here’s Connecticut’s top elections official with the rest of the details:
“Every community has both a Republican and a Democrat responsible for running elections. We use paper ballots. Our voting equipment is not connected to the internet. We conduct rigorous preelection testing and post-election audits. And when an issue is identified, it is investigated and addressed through law and not rhetoric."
Here's an example of “when an issue is identified”: In 2023, the state's media was abuzz with news of an attempt to stuff mail-in vote boxes in favor of Bridgeport’s Democratic mayor, Joe Ganim. The perpetrators, all Democrats, were found, prosecuted and convicted. The state’s legislature, which is dominated by Democrats, tightened rules to prevent future abuse.
It’s safe to presume that Larry Kudlow knows the same things I know given that we both live and vote in Connecticut. I think it’s therefore reasonable to conclude not only that he’s lying, but that he knows he’s lying. And I think it's important to say that plainly.
A lot of time is put into fact-checking in a valiant effort to defend the truth, but the lies themselves are worth paying attention to, because without them, the true position of the GOP would be indefensible. Achieving their goals would be impossible without deceit.
The liars know election fraud is rare. States and localities have multi-stage verification processes. They know that rarity is due to state laws holding criminals accountable. And liars know Americans prefer tradition. We prefer states and localities be in charge of elections.
What do the liars really want?
To stop Democrats winning.
To do that, the president and his allies need to put in place a system with rules that suppress voters who favor Democrats. To do that, they need to take away voting authority from localities and states. That’s the point of the SAVE America Act. (It is also the point of a lawsuit against Connecticut and other blue states to force them to turn over voter rolls.) If successful, the effort would give the GOP a means of voiding Democratic victories.
That’s what they want, but they can’t say that. So they lie.
They ask “questions” about “election integrity,” as if manifesting the will of the American people were their highest value. They talk about “election security” as if threats by Russian or Chinese aggressors were of actual concern. They do this not to raise awareness of problems, or to search for good-faith solutions, but to sabotage trust in free and fair elections.
And they smear.
That brings me to Richard Blumenthal.
Before he ran for the Senate in 2010, Blumenthal was Connecticut’s attorney general for 20 years. He was popular. Everyone knew running for the Senate was a foregone conclusion.
In the run up to Election Day that year, the Times ran a story documenting a few times when Blumenthal seemed to suggest he served “in” Vietnam. He didn’t. He served stateside for six years in the US Marine Corps Reserve during the Vietnam War. But most Nutmeggers, as we sometimes call ourselves, were already familiar with his biography. It was widely understood what Dick Blumenthal meant to say. The allegations of “stolen valor” fell flat and he won.
Trump often comes back to this moment when Blumenthal is in the headlines criticizing him. This time, however, the president didn’t just smear Blumenthal. He smeared the whole state. After all, only an “extremely corrupt voting place” like Connecticut would keep electing a senator who “admitted he cheated on the war … He was never there."
That’s the only true thing Trump said: Blumenthal wasn’t there. Otherwise, his every word was a lie designed to project onto enemies his own criminal intent in the belief they will chose to protect themselves and the truth rather than go on the offensive against him.
Liars expect us to defend the truth.
They don’t expect us to attack them for lying.
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The wannabe fascists have a plan. They'll win if we don't fight back
This fight isn’t really about immigration. It’s about whether the Constitution still restrains government power at all.
When elected officials call it a “nonstarter” to require federal agents to get a judicial warrant before kicking in doors, to give people bail or a trial before they face long-term prison, and to allow protests, they’re not debating border policy, they’re testing whether the Bill of Rights is still binding or has become merely decorative.
The Bill of Rights was written to put friction between the state’s power to use force and the people it governs. To restrain government.
If that friction can be removed so government can attack any one disfavored group, then constitutional rights stop being universal guarantees and turn into conditional privileges. And once that shift happens, history — and Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem — show us that the groups of people who’re unprotected never stays small for long.
This week’s news which highlights this crisis is that Republicans have shut down the Department of Homeland Security because they say Democrats’ call for ICE to follow the law and the Constitution is “a nonstarter.”
Seriously. Here’s the first sentence of the Democrats’ demand that Republicans say is so unreasonable:
“DHS officers cannot enter private property without a judicial warrant.”
Right now, ICE is kicking in doors and smashing windows of cars in order to attack and arrest both citizens and non-citizens alike. They do it because they say they can. And to arrest, detain, and imprison people they claim they can issue their own phony, made-up “administrative warrants” and don’t need a judge or court to see any evidence or say a word.
This is complete bulls---, and it’s genuinely astonishing that Republicans are backing them up. The Fourth Amendment isn’t complicated. Here it is, in it’s entirety (notice it does NOT say “citizens” but says “people”):
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
That’s it. Every word. And it applies to any “person” who happens to be in the United States. Nonetheless, ignoring 250 years of American law and history, DHS General Counsel James Percival said:
“[I]llegal aliens aren’t entitled to the same Fourth Amendment protections as U.S. citizens.”
His argument is that kicking in the front doors of the homes of people where undocumented immigrants may be staying, or smashing the windows of their cars, is not “unreasonable.”
This is a classic example of how law can get twisted into gibberish by a criminal regime like we are currently suffering under. And it doesn’t even include the right to a trial by jury, the right practice journalism, or the right to protest, all guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.
Yesterday I told you about something the people who started this country learned from bitter experience and their deep reading of history: a wannabe fascist government (like Donald Trump is trying to turn ours into) doesn’t have to openly break the law to destroy liberty.
It just has to have enough sycophants in positions of power to ignore the law so it no longer restrains the government’s awesome power.
To modern Americans that may sound like an abstraction, but it’s critical. Government is the only institution that has widespread cultural approval to use violence, to imprison or even kill us, and to tear our lives apart in search of alleged criminal activity.
The whole point of a democracy is to restrain that power and prevent it from ever becoming so concentrated in a small number of hands that it can be abused for the benefit of one group over another.
Our movies and old newsreels of the Nazi era seem to tell us that we’ll recognize tyranny when there are tanks in the streets, newspapers are shut down, elections are canceled, and we see public executions of protestors.
But that’s not how tyranny usually works in its middle stages, like the one we’re in now.
At our founding, for example, the British Empire never announced, “Colonists have no rights” the way ICE’s lawyer is now proclaiming that immigrants aren’t protected by the Fourth Amendment. In fact, Parliament repeatedly insisted the opposite. Americans were British subjects, protected by British law, and the king’s officials repeated that constantly.
And yet, nonetheless, British agents kicked in doors without meaningful warrants. People were faced with almost daily violence. British agents monitored, followed, and often beat or arrested people who protested. Newspapers were shut down and writers arrested. And the courts couldn’t meaningfully restrain officers acting in the name of the Crown because their authority was both granted and limited by a single man, the King.
Everything existed inside a legal framework, and the British repeatedly insisted that it was the colonists, not their own agents and troops, who were “breaking the law.”
That’s what finally snapped the colonist’s patience. It wasn’t a single outrage like the Tea Act or the Boston Massacre — although those highlighted the oppression they experienced — but their final realization that every complaint they filed was answered with a legalistic explanation of why the abuse was justified.
Read the Declaration of Independence — which I quoted yesterday — closely and you’ll see a pattern emerge. Jefferson doesn’t just list harms. He listed systemic, undemocratic structural and jurisdictional moves: judges who were dependent on the ruler, military power that was put above civil authority, the denial of power to local courts, tax laws that only benefited the rich, and people transported for trial elsewhere.
The issue wasn’t cruelty or British abuse of power, although both were terrible. It was that the very structure of authority, the system, had been arranged so law was constantly being rewritten on the fly, tweaked to confront defiance, and abused to enhance and justify government power over people’s lives instead of limiting it.
That distinction, after the Revolutionary War, shaped the Constitution that came next.
We tend to treat the Bill of Rights as a moral document, a statement of national values, but the people who wrote it were being much more practical than philosophical. They were building a machine they believed would make tyranny as a governing method impossible.
They assumed — again, based on their own experience and their reading of history —that every government would always want to expand its own power because every government throughout history always had.
That’s why they wrote our Constitution the way they did: to establish a structure, a system, that’s bigger than any politician (including the president).
- If the government wants to arrest or imprison someone, it must first charge them with a specific crime.
- If it charges them, it must present valid evidence to an independent judge or jury.
- If it presents evidence, the accused can confront it and has a mandatory right of defense counsel.
- Before force like arrest, home invasion, or imprisonment is used, the courts must review and can even prevent it.
Those protections enumerated in the Bill of Rights and the overall three-branch structure of our government weren’t there out of kindness or to enhance public morality. They were put into the highest law of our land to produce serious friction — a proverbial “throwing sand into the gears” of our system — that would slow down any politician’s or party’s rush to destroy democracy.
They understood that when politicians and bureaucrats have to explain themselves in public, when they must justify their actions, they’re less likely to abuse people the way the King of England had done during their era.
Perhaps even more important, the Founders and Framers of our Constitution also knew from history that when any group seizes enough power to rise above the law, the republic itself is on its last legs.
Once a segment of society (like the Epstein-billionaire-class or ICE) reached that point — whether because of government employment or vast riches — they knew that the system would be distorted and democracy could die, even if the black-letter text of the law remained intact.
When that happens — as we’re seeing today with Trump having ignored more than 4,400 court orders — court’s rulings become technically binding but the government feels free to ignore them.
The British abuse of the colonists in 1773 is an ancient echo of what we see in Minneapolis today where the FBI just this week officially refused to turn over evidence in the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti to the local authorities who, under the law, have jurisdiction over murder.
Under this Trump regime federal government officials now refuse to comply with the Constitution, the law, with court orders, and with even normal American expectations for human decency. They shop around for friendly judges, laugh at court orders, and daily ignore the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments.
This is exactly why early Americans were obsessed that the due process provisions in the Bill of Rights must apply to everyone, not just citizens, not just allies, not just the respectable. The moment any government starts to decide who receives full legal protection and who the law can either abuse or elevate, it has quietly shifted into that second operating mode the King of England was asserting in 1773. What our nation’s founders called “tyranny.”
History shows what happens once the law restrains some and elevates others above itself: the category of both the abused and the exempt expands. Both always expand, because power, once exercised, becomes precedent. What began as an exception becomes “normal.”
The Founders knew republics — when corrupted by rich, unscrupulous men — drift into this new mode. Like in modern-day Russia and Hungary, elections continue, laws remain on the books, courts keep ruling and yet the poor, the workers, the dissenters, the protesters get crushed while the rich and well-connected — the Epstein billionaire class — rise above any accountability whatsoever.
Which raises the harder question we, as Americans suffering under this regime, must confront right now:
If our government can commit violence, violate the Constitution, lie to the public on a daily basis, repeatedly lose in court, and yet continue acting however they want because the structure now allows it, is there some specific point or line where we’ve officially moved from democracy to tyranny?
It turns out, history tells us that such a line exists. Political philosophers have argued about it for centuries, but the people who wrote our Constitution were quite certain they knew roughly where it lay.
History also tells us there is a line, a point where a democracy stops being a democracy. The people who wrote our Constitution believed that line is crossed when those in power can ignore the law and face no consequences.
It’s passed when rights can be denied to some, when court orders can be brushed aside, and when the government can use force without meaningful oversight. And when that happens, our republic itself is in danger.
Tomorrow I’ll walk through that threshold and explain what it means for us today, because whether we’ve crossed it or not determines whether normal political remedies like elections and legal processes can still function — or ever again function — the way most Americans still assume they do.
- Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.
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This Trump crank is less welcome — and way, way more dangerous — than a full colonoscopy
I got a colonoscopy the other day: something everyone who has one seems to complain about. They bitch about being required to drink the prep that cleans you out, then about having a tube up the nether regions, albeit while unconscious.
Quite frankly, I look forward to it. This is, after all, a medical marvel that can prevent cancer or catch it in the earliest stages. This time, I had a single benign polyp removed and was told to come back in seven years’ time.
Colonoscopy is a preventive measure every adult from middle-age onward should schedule at regular intervals, to stave off colon cancer. This is simple common sense and one of many reasons why we now live longer than ever before.
Think about this: in 1826, the average American adult could expect to live to about 38 years old. Yes, extremely high infant and child mortality was largely responsible for bringing that number down, along with rampant infectious disease and lack of sanitation. But in general, you often died pretty young.
By 1926, U.S. life expectancy had risen to roughly 58, a two-decade jump. A hundred years later, that number stands a few ticks above 78, another 20-year leap.
In other words, the average time each of us has on earth has effectively doubled over the past two centuries. All things considered, that’s not too shabby.
Enter Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Assuming the role last year, he saw not a human population doing pretty well, and a medical establishment making astonishing progress against maladies that once killed by the millions, but a toxic hellscape of death from which only he could save us.
Remember: this man has no medical background, no formal medical education, and no conventional medical expertise. His knowledge of medicine is no greater than yours or mine or that of any other layman. He’s a lawyer, specializing in environmental cases.
And yet he claims to know more than the medical and scientific establishments combined.
It’s frightening just how dangerous this guy is. His crackpot views in declaring war on vaccination have exploded into a genuine crisis, because he’s convinced a not-insignificant portion of the U.S. population that all vaccines are hazardous – considerably more perilous than the diseases they’re designed to prevent.
This is, in a word, insane. And it’s threatening us all.
Kennedy likes to believe that this is all about individual choice. In fact, it involves so much more. Misguided or irresponsible parents who listen to him and decide not to vaccinate their child may help spread a pathogen that can infect and kill other kids and adults — entire communities, even.
This makes RFK Jr. as great a menace to mankind as any we face in our actual environment. In working so diligently to fix a system that isn’t broken, he puts all our lives in danger.
Last week, Kennedy made headlines with his mind-boggling admission that he used to “snort cocaine off of toilet seats,” apparently seeking to make the point that he isn’t scared of germs and in fact sees them as his friends, key to strengthening the immune system.
That is all well and good, as are his ideas around nutritious diets, eliminating processed foods, and reducing contaminants. But then off he goes into nutzo land with things like “terrain theory” (focusing on body environment as a defense against infection) and eschewing established biomedical science and core principles as hopelessly flawed.
What RFK Jr. and those who follow his warped thinking fail to acknowledge is that America, and the world, was not too long ago caught in the grip of crippling and often deadly epidemics involving smallpox, tuberculosis, measles, and polio, events that spurred massive suffering and mortality.
Through vaccines, in tandem with antibiotics and other medical advances, we have largely defeated these sources of significant misery. Modern miracles of scientific know-how abound — vaccines very much to the fore. And yet a small but growing percentage of the population now sees them as unsafe.
I’ll tell you what’s unsafe: actually being stricken with these dreadful conditions, as those who must now endure measles as part of various outbreaks are finding.
In spring 2020, when we were all consumed with fear over COVID-19, I was one of some 40,000 people who volunteered for the Pfizer vaccine trial. Friends praised me as “courageous” but I didn’t see it that way. I felt fortunate to be jumping the line, secure in the idea that ingesting an unproven serum was likely safer than contracting the actual virus, which was killing by the thousands.
I didn’t get sick, the vaccine graduated to widespread use, and millions of lives were saved. Do you hear people quaking in fear over COVID anymore? No. The reason is the vaccines. Nonetheless, RFK Jr. seems determined to ultimately pull them off the market, as improperly tested and potentially harmful.
I know Kennedy has no use for data, but here’s some anyway. Per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2020, the first full year of the pandemic, COVID claimed an estimated 350,800 U.S. lives. In 2021, that toll peaked at 416,900, the third-leading cause of death behind heart disease and cancer.
By 2024, the last year for which statistics are fully available, the number of deaths from COVID had dropped to 31,400. That’s still significant, but the disease had fallen out of the top 10 U.S. causes of death.
You think that happens without a vaccine? Not a chance in hell.
The bottom line is, we don’t need vaccines to disappear. Quite the contrary. We need RFK Jr. to go away. Now.
- Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.
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This unscrupulous Trumper's involvement in the Georgia elections raid should worry us all
When the FBI carried out its controversial raid last month at the election headquarters of Fulton County, Georgia, it was already guaranteed to inflame partisan tensions.
What made the episode more striking was the presence of Andrew Bailey.
The former Missouri attorney general is now co-deputy director of the FBI. He traveled to Georgia to oversee an operation tied to claims about the 2020 election that have been repeatedly debunked and exhaustively litigated.
It’s worth pausing for a moment to say that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. He lost Georgia. The state conducted three statewide counts, including a hand recount, and still certified Joe Biden’s victory. Some Trump allies who made sweeping fraud claims about Georgia have since recanted, often under oath or under legal pressure. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani lost a defamation lawsuit for spreading those false claims.
For Missourians, Bailey’s involvement in Georgia is its own warning sign.
His political rise hasn’t been built on careful management or restrained lawyering. It has been driven by media visibility, aggressive rhetoric and a willingness to validate Trump’s preferred narrative — regardless of the record.
During his short tenure as Missouri attorney general, Bailey made election denial rhetoric a central feature of his political identity. After winning a full term in 2024, he hoped his loyalty would land him a new job in Washington as FBI director or U.S. attorney general.
According to multiple media reports, Trump was not impressed. Bailey did not receive either post.
He ultimately left Missouri last year after being tapped as co-deputy director of the FBI, a role that has historically been held by one person and involves managing the bureau’s day-to-day operations.
His fellow co-deputy director, Dan Bongino, later stepped down to return to podcasting. Instead of elevating Bailey into the traditional singular role, the Trump administration hired the former head of the FBI’s New York Field Office to replace Bongino.
Those who watched Bailey run the attorney general’s office weren’t surprised by the decision not to elevate him.
Bailey’s tenure in Missouri drew criticism over missed deadlines, bungled appeals and settlements that reflected disorganization rather than strategy. Under his watch, Missouri paid out record-breaking sums in settlements and judgments, including one settlement that committed taxpayers to annual payments stretching into the year 2098.
He also narrowly avoided being questioned under oath over an alleged ethics breach in his own lawsuit against Jackson County. A judge ordered his deposition, but Bailey moved to dismiss the lawsuit before it could take place. One of his deputies lost his law license in the ordeal.
Controversies accumulated. Bailey’s office missed an appeal deadline in a high-profile COVID mask mandate case. He falsely blamed a school district’s DEI program for an off-campus assault. He recused himself from a gambling lawsuit after political committees tied to gambling lobbyists donated to a PAC supporting his campaign. He accepted $50,000 from a company accused of poisoning a Peruvian town and later asked a court to move the case out of Missouri.
Which brings us back to Georgia.
Bailey’s presence at the Fulton County raid was not just a management detail. It was a signal about the kind of leadership now shaping the FBI and about how quickly the bureau’s credibility can be subordinated to political priorities.
Missouri has already seen what Bailey does when he’s in charge. The FBI is now taking its turn.
- Jason Hancock has spent two decades covering politics and policy for news organizations across the Midwest, with most of that time focused on the Missouri statehouse as a reporter for the Kansas City Star. A three-time National Headliner Award winner, he helped launch the Missouri Independent in October 2020. Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
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This ugly truth about America's rulers was unmasked in Epstein's emails
Here’s how Kentucky Republican Congressman Thomas Massie responded on ABC last weekend, to a question about the Trump regime’s handling of the Epstein files:
“This is about the Epstein class …. They’re billionaires who were friends with these people, and that’s what I’m up against in Washington, D.C. Donald Trump told us that even though he had dinner with these kinds of people, in New York City and West Palm Beach, that he would be transparent. But he’s not. He's still in with the Epstein class. This is the Epstein administration. And they’re attacking me for trying to get these files released.”
The Epstein Class. Not just the people who cavorted with Jeffrey Epstein or the subset who abused young girls. It’s an interconnected world of hugely rich, prominent, entitled, smug, powerful, self-important (mostly) men. Donald Trump is honorary chairman.
Trump is still sitting on two and a half million files that he and Pam Bondi won’t release. Why? Because they implicate Trump and even more of the Epstein class. The files that have been released so far don’t paint a pretty picture.
Trump appears 1,433 times in the Epstein files so far. His billionaire backers are also members. Elon Musk appears 1,122 times. Howard Lutnick is there. So is Trump-backer Peter Thiel (2,710 times), and Leslie Wexner (565 times). As is Steven Witkoff, now Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, and Steve Bannon, Trump’s consigliere (1,855 times).
The Epstein Class isn’t limited to Trump donors. Bill Clinton is a member (1,192 times), as is Larry Summers (5,621 times). So are LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman (3,769 times), Prince Andrew (1,821 times), Bill Gates (6,385 times), and Steve Tisch, co-owner of the New York Giants (429 times).
If not politics, then what connects the members of the Epstein Class? It’s not just riches. Some members are not particularly wealthy, but they’re richly connected. They trade on their prominence, on whom they know and who will return their phone calls.
They exchange inside tips on stocks, on the movements of currencies, on IPOs, on new tax-avoidance mechanisms. On getting into exclusive clubs, reservations at chic restaurants, lush hotels, exotic travel.
Most members of the Epstein Class have seceded into their own small, self-contained world, disconnected from the rest of society. They fly in one other’s private jets. They entertain at one other’s guest houses and villas. Some exchange tips on how to procure certain drugs or kinky sex or valuable works of art. And, of course, how to accumulate more wealth.
Many don’t particularly believe in democracy; Peter Thiel (recall, he appears 2,710 times in the Epstein files) has said he “no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Many are putting their fortunes into electing people who will do their bidding. Hence, they are politically dangerous.
The Epstein Class is the by-product of an economy that emerged over the last two decades, from which this new elite has siphoned off vast amounts of wealth.
It’s an economy that bears almost no resemblance to that of mid-20th-century America. The most valuable companies in this new economy have few workers because they don’t make stuff. They design it. They create ideas. They sell concepts. They move money.
The value of businesses in this new economy isn’t in factories, buildings, or machines. It’s in algorithms, operating systems, standards, brands, and vast, self-reinforcing user networks.
I remember when IBM was the nation’s most valuable company and among its largest employers, with a payroll in the 1980s of nearly 400,000. Today, Nvidia is nearly 20 times as valuable as IBM was then and five times as profitable (adjusted for inflation), but it employs just over 40,000. Nvidia, unlike the old IBM, designs but doesn’t make its products.
Over the past three years, Google parent Alphabet’s revenue has grown 43 percent while its payroll has remained flat. Amazon’s revenue has soared, but it’s eliminating jobs.
Members of the Epstein Class are compensated in shares of stock. As corporate profits have soared, the stock market has roared. As the stock market has roared, the compensation of the Epstein Class has reached the stratosphere.
Meanwhile, most Americans are trapped in an old economy where they depend on paychecks that aren’t growing and jobs in short supply. They’re one or two paychecks away from poverty. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York just reported that mortgage delinquency rates for lower-income households are surging.
Affordable housing isn’t a problem that occurs to the Epstein Class. Nor is income inequality. Nor the loss of our democracy. Nor the deleterious effects of social media on young people and children.
When Silicon Valley’s biggest tech proponent in Congress — Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) — recently announced his support for a tax on California billionaires, to help fill the void created by Trump’s cuts in Medicare and Medicaid (which, in turn, made way for Trump’s second huge tax cut for the rich), the Epstein Class blew a gasket.
Vinod Khosla, one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capitalists, with a net worth estimated at more than $13 billion (and who’s mentioned 182 times in the Epstein files but is no friend of Trump), called Khanna a “commie comrade.”
Khosla, by the way, is best known by the public for purchasing 89 acres of California beachfront property in in 2008 for $32.5 million, then trying to block public access to the ocean with a locked gate and signs. Despite losing multiple court rulings, including a 2018 Supreme Court appeal, he carries on with the dispute.
Not classy, but, shall we say, a typical Epstein Class move.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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