Trump moves to the next peace plan
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
This move proves how much Republicans are scared of the people
You know Trump Republicans are worried when they slam a planned protest — more than a week before it occurs.
Last Friday, Speaker Mike Johnson described this coming Saturday’s No Kings rally as the “hate-America” rally that would draw “the pro-Hamas wing” and “the antifa people.”
I’m sure these phrases have been distributed to senior Republicans by the White House. They’re all delivering the same lines.
Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN.) claims Democrats are refusing to vote to fund the government “to score political points with the terrorist wing of their party, which is set to hold ... a hate-America rally” on Saturday.
So what is the White House worried about? Why are they trying to discredit the rally before it’s even occurred?
Because it’s likely to be even larger than the first No Kings rally — which was the largest demonstration against Trump since his return to the Oval Office.
And it will happen all over America, so it’s likely to generate a huge number of news clips on local television.
Trump’s power depends on maintaining the illusion that he’s all-powerful, and that most Americans (apart from those he and his lapdogs label “pro-Hamas,” “terrorists,” and “antifa”) adore him.
But that illusion is harder to maintain if a significant part of the population of every town and city is on the streets decrying him. The Emperor has no clothes.
Rather than it being a “hate-America” rally, Saturday’s rally is an opportunity for all of us who love America to express our determination that our nation’s ideals not be crushed by the Trump regime.
It’s a chance for us to publicly rededicate ourselves to democracy, the rule of law, equal protection under the law, and our rights to believe what we want, say what we want, and choose our leaders without fear of recrimination.
I urge you to participate. (Here’s where.)
And when you do, please help make it:
1. Peaceful.
The first No Kings rally was overwhelmingly peaceful, which made it hugely effective. This one must be, too.
If you see or hear of any potential violence, please do whatever you can to discourage it. We don’t want to give the regime any excuse to characterize it as violent or to call out the National Guard or active military troops or invoke the Insurrection Act.
Over the weekend, JD Vance said Trump “has not felt he needed to” invoke the Insurrection Act right now,” but he has “not ruled it out.” Vance claimed that crime is “out of control” in major American cities.
2. Fun.
The underlying issue — the usurpation of American democracy by a tyrant — is dead serious. But it’s important that we also use satire, mockery, ridicule, parody, and humor to make our points.
Not only do these drive Trump nuts, but they show that we’re able to stand up to his hatefulness and fear with cheerfulness and wit. And they can make the event fun.
3. Clear.
This is about saving our democracy. It’s not about other issues that we may feel strongly about such as climate change, immigrants’ rights, LGBTQ+ rights, universal health care, Israel’s war in Gaza, or Putin’s war in Ukraine.
All these are important, of course, but the purpose of this demonstration is to show America and the world the extent of our determination to wrest back control of our democracy from an authoritarian regime. Please don’t give Republicans any fuel to characterize it as about anything else.
4. Relevant to the 2026 midterms.
If they’re to have a real-world effect, demonstrations need to be linked to real-world politics. The highest political priority right now is to regain control of Congress.
Saturday presents an opportunity to remind our communities about the importance of the midterm elections of 2026.
We must do what we can to stop Republican states from super-gerrymandering to eke out more Republican seats in the House. And help Democratic states offset any such gerrymanders with additional Democratic seats (hence the importance of voting Yes on California’s Proposition 50).
We have a constitutional right to demonstrate. Trump and his lapdogs haven’t yet been able to take that right away from us. Let’s use it.
Happy Columbus (Indigenous Peoples’) Day.
- Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
- Robert Reich's new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org.
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Lying Republicans just admitted their victory strategy — and it can be stopped
Last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson said there would be no votes this week. (That’s after canceling votes last week.) The White House, meanwhile, said it has begun mass firings of federal workers because the congressional Democrats haven’t caved to reopen the government.
The combined news is being reported as a “leverage,” as if these were normal rounds of negotiation between equal sides. The AP said it was an “attempt to exert more pressure on Democratic lawmakers” — the blandest possible way of saying coercion. “Take the deal or else” isn’t a reason for anyone to say yes. It’s the best reason in the world to say no.
But coercion isn’t the Republicans’ only tool.
In a call with the House Freedom Caucus, Johnson said, "We worked on rescissions, and there'll be more of that, we expect, in the days ahead." And: "Now, we would like to do another reconciliation bill this fall, before the end of the calendar year, and potentially, a third one in the spring, where we will also show more and more fiscal responsibility."
Translation: if the president has to give in to the Democrats’ demand for renewing health insurance subsidies, don’t worry. We can come back later with clawbacks (“rescissions”) that require a simple majority (“reconciliation bill”) to pass a Republican-controlled Congress.
In other words, Johnson is announcing his intention to cheat.
The Democrats are demanding a suite of concessions related to the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid (namely, restoring cuts made to it under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act). But their demands will mean nothing if the Republicans can steal back money after promising it.
The Democrats’ demands will also mean nothing if Trump later finds a way to send some health care money to people who voted for him but not to people who didn’t. This is called impoundment and impoundment is illegal. The regime, even now, is impounding money intended for cities and states run by Democrats. It’s yet another bid to extort the Democrats in the Congress into accepting Trump’s terms.
(The Republicans on the USSupreme Court know impoundment is illegal but have occasionally ruled that it’s legal if a Republican does it.)
Any deal involving the Democrats’ demands on health care must have reassurances that Trump and the GOP won’t go back on their word. I don’t see how that’s possible with the speaker of the House saying out loud that Hell will freeze over before the Democrats can trust him.
Indeed, during a presser, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was asked: “If Republicans were to commit to putting forward a vote on extending the ACA subsidies, would that bring Democrats to the negotiating table?”
His reply: "Republicans have zero credibility, zero."
I don’t know how this is going to end. Neither does Tiffany Carlock. She’s an activist who uses her newsletter, Candidly Tiff, to educate people about civics, strategy and what’s really happening in politics.
In this brief interview, we touch on whether the Democrats are “winning” the shutdown fight, the role of “the Epstein files” in their thinking, how they are breaking through a media landscape coded in Trump’s favor, and what to do in this age of rampant lawlessness.
“Democrats have truth on their side and are using it,” Tiff said.
JS: First, are the Democrats winning the fight over the government shutdown? I'm skeptical, but what do you think? And why?
TC: Democrats are “winning” on the messaging front but personally, I don’t think anyone wins when the government shuts down. Republicans went into the fight thinking Democrats would cave, but they have held strong. This has stunned the legacy media as well as some Democrats.
House Speaker Mike Johnson’s decision to keep his caucus home is a very poor strategy and he looks weak. Refusing to negotiate and swear-in Adelita Grijalva looks so bad on his part. Johnson has proven he has no idea how to govern. Even Majorie Taylor Greene, of all people, has called Johnson and John Thune out. The “clean CR” framing did not work for Republicans like they thought it would.
What do you think of the role of the Epstein files? Some Democrats are making the case that Johnson is keeping the government closed to protect Trump. How does that fit into your thinking?
I think it’s a legitimate talking point considering Congresswoman-elect Grijalva is the 218th vote needed for the Epstein file petition to make it to the House floor. Sometimes 1 + 1 = 2, so why not use Johnson’s weakness to create a Democratic advantage? This issue has been a major point of contention since right before the August recess.
Is it being done to protect Trump? I doubt it. I think Johnson is just scared of losing control of his conference and leadership. A vote on the files will be embarrassing for him. Trump has the Department of Justice to protect him, so he seems unbothered.
As you know, the mainstream news is coded in ways favorable to the Republicans. And yet the Democrats' messaging seems to be getting through to people. What's going on? How do you explain that?
Two things that are working:
One, Democrats are calling lies LIES! This is something they have never been good at because they like to play nice. But the gloves are off. Finally!
Two, the messaging is simple: healthcare costs will rise. In this economy, that message resonates and people will get premium increases in the mail soon enough. Democrats have truth on their side and are using it as leverage. Repetition matters and they are marching to the same beat. Unity is important.
How does this end? If Trump caves, what have the Democrats accomplished — protecting GOP voters from their choices?
I have no idea how this ends, but I have a few guesses. Marjorie Taylor Greene putting pressure on Johnson is a significant development. Trump will never admit to caving and even if did, he is Trump.
Letting the credits expire would hurt Republicans, but do we want to dismantle the healthcare system to get a win? I am conflicted on this.
The most likely outcome is Democrats back off the immigration language changes and get an extension of Affordable Care Act premiums for one year. That would be a win for the American people. Trump can pretend to work on a new fabulous concept of a plan.
Eventually Republicans will need to negotiate or kill the filibuster to pass a continuing resolution. This is on them.
My theory is that the Democrats should reclaim law and order, and perhaps use the lessons of the shutdown as a foundation for that. This president is lawless. His party is lawless. You want to heal our divisions? Well, enforce the law! Thoughts?
My rebuttal to that is: Who is going to enforce the law? The DOJ? They are compromised. The judiciary branch for the most part is seemingly the only non-compromised check and balance we have left. While slow, the courts are holding up the law for the most part.
Congress cannot enforce the law. Its role is to legislate. So now we have to rely on states to sue and win in court to stop the lawlessness of the DOJ, the FBI and the White House. This is why democracy is dying. The legislative branch has mostly ceded its Article 1 power. We are in hell, as I like to say, and it will take the courts and the American people to save what little of our democracy is left.
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Crucial anti-Trump protests risk failure if these key improvements aren't made
Will the Oct. 18 No Kings protests equal or surpass the 5 million who marched in June? Donald Trump’s poll numbers keep dropping with his escalating attacks on democracy. People are hungrier than ever for ways to act and resist. And the huge Jimmy Kimmel victory should create resistance momentum. But when I look at the major national days of protest since the original No Kings, I see organizing and communications breakdowns that make their impact less than it could have been. And we want them to be as large and broad as possible.
One problem is Trump opponents relying too much on self-organizing. Groups or individuals use tools like the Mobilize maps to call a demonstration, post time and location, and then assume people will show up: If you build it, they will come. But this can replace the hard work of building coalitions, engaging people to participate, and directly coordinating efforts.
It’s also hard to know which are the major events. For Oct. 18, I went to the No Kings map that all the groups link to and punched in my Seattle zip code. It came up with two neighborhood events plus two more general ones with similar enough descriptions to be largely indistinguishable.
Later I saw a utility pole flier for the one that had mentioned Indivisible peripherally, and discovered that the sponsors also included SEIU, Planned Parenthood, League of Women Voters, and three major state-wide activist organizations. That’s a major coalition. But when if first clicked to RSVP there was no way of knowing that. And even after the host group belatedly added a link to the larger list of sponsors, the only way I found that out was clicking the RSVP page again.
I then entered the zip codes for Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta. They all had just one main center-city event listed, plus suburban events, so that was less confusing. New York City had two in Manhattan and separate Brooklyn and Queens events. So again less confusion. But even if you clicked through, the main events all just said “volunteer organized,” giving no clue to the large coalitions organizing them.
If people don’t know whether an event is organized by three random friends or a dozen major groups, it’s hard to know which to attend. Friends throughout the country have mentioned a similar confusion.
I suspect that’s one reason for the drop-off since the original No Kings events. Seattle’s No Kings demonstration had over 50,000 people. But since then, no Seattle demonstration has turned out more than a few thousand, and multiple events have divided attendance — we had three different Labor Day “Workers Over Billionaires” events.
The drop-off has happened with all the subsequent national protest days, important as they’ve been.
No Kings Day had over 2,000 events, drawing over 100,000 in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, 50,000 or greater in a half dozen more, and at least 10,000 in 45 cities.
Since then, we’ve seen coordinated protests for the anniversary of John Lewis’s death, for Labor Day, and for the Sun Day renewable energy events. The John Lewis anniversary had 1600 events and Labor Day and Sun Day each had hundreds. Their breadth has been powerful, reaching into communities nationwide. But the numbers have been significantly less than the original No Kings.
From what I can find, Chicago Labor Day had 10,000 people, maybe a bit more. Austin had 5,000 people as part of a day of events challenging Texas redistricting. Others have had several thousand, although some have been highly creative, like a Portland Oregon Sun Day event that brought together 30 groups for a renewable energy festival and a parade across a downtown bridge that might have also had higher numbers.
The original No Kings numbers were larger in part because the events were a counterpoint to Trump’s military parade, which helped with advance media coverage. But while I’m seeing all sorts of notices for the new No Kings, the necessary organizing since last June seems to have been more scattershot, with fewer fully engaged coalitions, and more reliant on the maps.
When multiple competing events post without clear information on who is sponsoring them, it’s hard for people to know where to attend, or whether to attend at all. And when they list multiple recognizable sponsors then it makes it more likely for people to go, because it feels like you’re part of a movement where people are working together with power and momentum. It certainly felt that way at the first No Kings Day.
Lots of powerful resistance is going besides those major protests and rallies. More modest rallies in smaller suburbs and towns, and local neighborhoods, have underscored that opposition is everywhere. Protests at Tesla dealerships, Sinclair TV stations, and challenges to ICE have made a difference even when the numbers are modest. There are some critical fall elections and people are getting out the vote. The Jimmy Kimmel campaign was an important victory as multiple groups sent out alerts, entertainers stood in solidarity, and ordinary people pressured local stations and advertisers, including attending local vigils.
But national protest days still play an important role for building a sense of common power and solidarity, inspiring local news coverage, and bringing people together for further action. If we want them as successful as possible, organizers need to do more to:
- Make clear which are the main events in their cities, so supporters can focus organizing attention, and participants know which to attend.
- Press Mobilize to add a field for endorsements and co-sponsors, where hosts could enter multiple organizations. When I corresponded with one of their staffers, she said it would take multiple groups requesting it for them to make it happen.
- If Mobilize doesn’t do that, highlight the larger potential rallies on other ways, including in the text on the Mobilize postings, so members know which ones to attend.
- Coordinate on the ground. Affiliates of the national groups need to be working with local labor, environmental, civil rights, social justice, and faith groups. And then asking members to text, call, and email their friends, so invitations come from trusted messengers.
- Post fliers or posters on lamp posts to complement digital outreach with a physical advance presence.
- Collect contacts at every event to plug random new participants into future efforts, for instance by using QR codes. Then work together continually, not just for major events.
Given the Trump regime’s threats to democracy, Oct. 18 should be a key moment for pushing back and building further momentum. Our tools and approaches should serve this purpose as effectively as possible.
- Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of Soul of a Citizen and The Impossible Will Take a Little While, with nearly 300,000 in print between them. Sign up for his Substack here.
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Trump saw this rival indicted — he almost certainly won't get a conviction
By Jay L. Zagorsky, Associate Professor, Questrom School of Business, Boston University.
With the indictment on Oct. 9, 2025, of New York Attorney General — and longtime Donald Trump adversary — Letitia James on two criminal counts related to loans for a home purchase, mortgage fraud is back in the news.
Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor, is also being investigated by the Department of Justice for allegedly making false statements when applying for a mortgage. Members of Trump’s Cabinet are accused of similar wrongdoings. Could any of these people go to prison?
Mortgage fraud is not a new problem. Subprime mortgage fraud fueled the 2008 financial meltdown, when large numbers of very risky mortgages defaulted. Mortgage fraud was also a key feature of the savings and loan crisis in the 1980s.
Mortgage applications are very long, so there’s plenty of opportunity to make mistakes. Plus, they require borrowers to declare that everything is “true, accurate, and complete.” Misrepresentation can trigger potentially large civil and criminal penalties.
As a business school professor, I was curious how many people are convicted of mortgage fraud today. After all, relatively few people went to jail for fraudulent loans back in 2008.
Since most mortgage fraud violates federal law, I looked at more than a decade of federal conviction data.
What I found was clear: Almost no one has gone to federal prison recently for lying on a mortgage application.
What is mortgage fraud?
Mortgage fraud is when someone intentionally misrepresents facts in order to obtain a property loan. People can lie about many things on a mortgage application, such as their income, assets or employment status, or whether they will occupy the home being purchased or rent it out.
Being caught lying to get a mortgage can be costly. The maximum federal sentence is 30 years, with fines of up to $1 million. Because more than a quarter of all mortgages are guaranteed by federal agencies, and many are acquired by quasi-government organizations like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, most mortgage fraud is a federal crime.
However, just because there are laws on the books doesn’t mean they’re enforced. For example, I work in Boston, where for years jaywalking has been illegal — but as any visitor quickly notices, no one pays any attention to this rule.
How many people are convicted?
The U.S. Sentencing Commission provides detailed data on every person convicted of federal crimes since 2013. The database is large, since federal courts convict almost 70,000 people each year.
However, very few people are convicted of federal mortgage fraud. Just 38 people in the country were sentenced for such crimes in 2024, and among that small group, four of the convicted got no prison time. A year earlier, just 34 people were convicted and seven avoided prison.
Over the past dozen years, fewer than 3,000 people were convicted of federal mortgage fraud, and the number of people sentenced fell steadily each year.
Three thousand people are a tiny fraction of mortgages issued. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau estimates that almost 100 million new mortgage loans were written to purchase or refinance a home over the past 12 years. For those who like precision, 3,000 is only 0.003 percent.
The Sentencing Commission’s files also offer insight into who gets convicted of mortgage fraud. Three-quarters were men. More than 90 percent were U.S. citizens. The typical person convicted of mortgage fraud is a man in his late 40s with an associate degree, the data suggests.
The real penalty
While the maximum penalty is 30 years, almost no one serves that long a sentence. In 2024, the maximum sentence handed out was just 10 years. Since 2013, 15 percent of those convicted got no jail time. The average sentence for people who did get jail time was 21 months, which is less than two years behind bars.
Fines are also much lighter in practice than the maximum $1 million penalty. In 2024, the maximum fine passed down was a quarter-million dollars. Since 2013, the average person convicted of mortgage fraud paid a fine of less than $6,000, with over half of all those convicted paying no fine at all.
Now not paying a fine or only paying a small one doesn’t mean there’s no financial penalty. The courts required most of those convicted to make restitution. In 2024, half of all people convicted had to pay at least a half-million dollars to reimburse their victims, such as lending companies. Over the dozen years I looked at, the average person convicted paid $2 million in restitution for their misdeeds.
More lightning strikes than convictions
It’s impossible to know how common mortgage fraud really is. Some mortgage applications are rechecked in a “post-closing audit.” However, these audits happen within 90 days after the mortgage money is disbursed. Beyond that window, if a loan is paid back on time and without problems, there’s little incentive for a bank or mortgage service provider to recheck an applicant’s information.
What is clear is that while millions of mortgages are written each year, only a tiny fraction of mortgage recipients go to jail for fraud. One way to put this tiny fraction into perspective is to compare it with the National Weather Service estimates of the approximately 270 people hit by lightning yearly. Last year, lightning hit over seven times more people than the federal government convicted of mortgage fraud.
Years ago, I filled in a mortgage application to buy a home. I was consumed with dread wondering if any application mistake would result in my being sent to jail. After looking at the mortgage fraud conviction data, I should have been more worried about being hit by lightning.
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This is how the great sleeping giant of America awakens, roars and puts an end to it
Something dramatic has happened.
Many people who consider themselves non-political or independent, or moderate Republican, or who even voted for Trump last November, can’t avoid seeing what’s now come so clearly into the open.
And they’re finding it terrifying.
They’ve watched Trump order the Texas National Guard into Portland and Chicago, over the objections of the mayors of those cities and the governors of Oregon and Illinois. They’ve heard him call for jailing the mayor of Chicago and governor of Illinois for opposing these moves.
They’ve heard him threaten to invoke the Insurrection Act and send federal troops all over America.
They’ve watched Trump’s ICE agents drag people out of their beds in the middle of the night, zip-tie them and their children, and haul them away.
They’ve seen Trump’s prosecutors indict the attorney general of New York state because she held Trump accountable for fraud. And seen him threaten to do the same to a California senator because he conducted hearings in the House exposing Trump’s role in the attack on the Capitol.
They’ve heard Trump say he can kill anyone who he claims is an enemy combatant trafficking drugs.
They’ve heard Trump direct the IRS, FBI, and Justice Department against liberal groups that oppose him — George Soros’s Open Society Foundation; ActBlue, the Democratic fundraising organization; Indivisible, the community-based resistance organization.
And they watched him take off the air comedians who criticize him — Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel.
All across America, millions of people who have avoided politics, or identified as independents or moderate Republicans or even Trump voters, are shaken by what they’re seeing and hearing.
It’s no longer Democrat versus Republican or left versus right.
It’s now democracy versus dictatorship. Right versus wrong.
It’s no longer a war on undocumented immigrants. It’s now a war on Americans.
It’s no longer a foreign enemy. It’s now the “enemy within.”
Across the land, average Americans are realizing that they too could be dragged out of their homes in the middle of the night by Trump’s ICE agents, or tear-gassed and arrested by Trump’s National Guard, or targeted by Trump’s prosecutors, or shot by Trump’s military.
The Big Reveal is that all of us are now endangered.
Multiple polls show Trump’s approval tanking, but I think it runs deeper than this.
Something dramatic has happened over the last two weeks — as America sees more vividly than ever who Trump is, where he and his trio of lapdogs (Miller, Vought, and Vance) want to take the country, and how we’re all potential targets.
The Big Reveal is impossible not to see. Trump and his lapdogs are doing all of this completely in the open. They have no shame.
Most Americans abhor what they see, because what they see is abhorrent.
This is how the great sleeping giant of America awakens, roars, and puts an end to it.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
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How Trump's racism-fueled revenge tour came for workers in St. Louis
Donald Trump’s revenge tour has come to St. Louis.
But this time, it’s not about prosecutors or political enemies. It’s about dismantling civil rights programs — and it’s personal.
Nearly 2,000 minority and women-owned businesses at Lambert International Airport just learned they must prove they were discriminated against — with evidence locked in their competitors’ files — or lose their ability to bid on federal contracts.
Under new Trump administration guidelines issued last week, contractors must submit “personal narratives” detailing specific economic harm compared to “non-disadvantaged” businesses. They must prove, with a “preponderance of evidence,” that they were denied financing on terms their white competitors received.
How are they supposed to find the evidence? Bank loan terms are confidential. Competitors’ financing deals are private. The contractors are being asked to document discrimination they cannot possibly access.
They can’t. And that’s precisely the point.
The targets of Trump’s dismantling campaign? Civil rights programs created to remedy the exact kind of discrimination he was accused of — and denied — more than a half-century ago.
In 1973, the Nixon administration’s Department of Justice sued Donald Trump and his father for refusing to rent apartments to Black families across 39 buildings in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. The government charged that Trump Management refused to rent to people “because of race and color,” required different rental terms based on race, and misrepresented to Black families that apartments weren’t available.
Trump’s response to the federal civil rights lawsuit?
“They are absolutely ridiculous. We never have discriminated, and we never would.”
He settled without admitting wrongdoing, paid no fine, and faced no requirement to prove his innocence. The discrimination lawsuit — backed by DOJ lawyers, civil rights investigators, and documented evidence — simply went away.
Fifty-two years later, President Trump demands that minority contractors prove they’ve been discriminated against, using evidence they cannot access, or lose their ability to compete for federal contracts.
The double standard is the point: Discrimination you can deny, even with the Justice Department’s lawyers and evidence arrayed against you. Oppression you must document in triplicate, with impossible proof, or lose everything.
The timing couldn’t be worse for St. Louis. Lambert is planning a $2.8 billion terminal renovation — the largest construction project in the region in decades. From 2015 to 2019, the airport reported 28. percent participation by disadvantaged businesses under the old program. Those billions in contracts represented real wealth-building in communities systematically excluded from economic opportunity.
Now the rules change just as the money arrives. Adolphus Pruitt, president of the St. Louis City NAACP, had this to say to the Post-Dispatch:
“By shifting the burden of proof onto minority and disadvantaged business owners with these deeply subjective requirements, the federal government risks reviving old discriminatory barriers under the guise of ‘neutrality.’”
That word — neutrality — is a lie. In an unequal system built on centuries of exclusion, “neutrality” isn’t neutral. It freezes existing disparities in place. It has nothing to do with merit; it’s about returning to the days when white, male contractors got pretty much all the business.
The Lambert changes are part of a coordinated national assault on diversity programs. On his first day in office, Trump displayed his contempt for the civil rights movement of the 1960s by revoking the 1965 executive order requiring federal contractors to maintain affirmative action plans.
In May, the DoJ moved to dismantle the entire $37 billion Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program serving 49,000 contractors nationwide. All federal DEI staff have been placed on leave for eventual termination.
It cannot be overstated that the DBE program itself was created in 1983 during the Reagan administration. Republicans who go along with Trump’s treachery might want to keep Reagan’s name out of their mouths.
Reagan did, after all, sign off on a bipartisan acknowledgment that discrimination in contracting was real and required remedy. Federal officials estimate the new rules will cause a 10 percent nationwide drop in certified firms and cost $92 million to implement. But those numbers vastly understate the impact.
This follows the blueprint laid out in Project 2025, which explicitly called for prosecuting “all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers” with DEI programs.
As John Bowman, president of NAACP St. Louis County and an airport commissioner, aptly told the Post-Dispatch, the “political scapegoating … will have a devastating impact on minority and women-owned businesses.” Which, of course, was Project 2025’s dream outcome.
The contractors at Lambert aren’t asking for handouts. They’re asking for what the DBE program was designed to provide: a fair shot at competing for publicly funded work after decades of documented exclusion. Now they’re being told to prove they deserved that shot all along—to produce evidence of their own oppression as a prerequisite for economic participation.
This answers a fundamental question about who gets to build America’s infrastructure — and who gets built out of the American dream entirely. The man who said “we never have discriminated, and we never would” — while the Justice Department documented otherwise — now demands minority contractors prove their discrimination with evidence he never had to produce.
Say this much for Donald Trump. When it comes to settling old grievances about getting busted for racism, he has a fine memory.
- Ray Hartmann writes on Substack at Ray Hartmann's Soapbox.
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Why should Dems buy guns for Trump to point back at them?
Last weekend in Norfolk, Virginia, at a uniform-mandatory commemoration of the Navy’s 250th anniversary, Donald Trump addressed the troops as if it were a MAGA rally. He told hundreds of sailors, SEALS and Marines that the nation had to “take care” of this “little gnat on our shoulder called the Democrats,” then proceeded to disparage Democrats to cheers and applause from the assembled troops.
His comments drew criticism because the US military is a non-political fighting force, kept that way to protect the nation. But his Norfolk appearance followed a similar speech in Quantico, Virginia, where he informed 800 ranked officers from all fighting units that they’d soon be let loose on “the enemy within,” meaning, again, Democrats.
It is extraordinary, but not hyperbole, to say that Trump is conditioning all branches of the US military to devalue citizens who do not support him politically. As he sends red-state National Guardsmen into blue states against their wishes, Civil War-style, Trump is reshaping historically apolitical forces into his own image, turning armed soldiers against Americans they have sworn an oath to protect.
Rule of law holds – barely
Trump’s authorization for the use of excessive force in ICE raids in Chicago, LA, and D.C. — resulting in several deaths —is well documented. In Portland, a Trump-appointed judge cited the disconnect between violence Trump claims is happening on the ground, and the largely peaceful protests occurring in reality.
It is clear to everyone outside the Fox News bubble that Trump is trying to destabilize Democrat-run cities, as he encourages the use of tear gas and pepper spray to create the appearance of mayhem. His goal is to provoke violent reactions and civil unrest, which will allow him to declare martial law to keep himself in power.
Legal challenges to these actions are stacking up across the country, and so far, judges at the federal district court level are holding the line. However, after the Supreme Court just eviscerated the Fourth Amendment by allowing Trump’s masked agents to harass and detain people based on race, the hope that the judiciary will save us is fading.
Whether the same Republican justices will let Trump continue to terrorize the nation with armed military forces is unclear, but so far, in Trump 2.0, they have sided with him on 21 out of 23 emergency applications. It does not look good. However they ultimately rule on Posse Comitatus, the justices have already enabled a rogue president with malice and criminal intent toward half the nation.
Broken social contract
Trump’s violence against Democratic-run cities is consistent with his goal of strangling them financially. Although it is grossly unconstitutional to condition the receipt of federal tax-funded resources on political affiliation, Trump weaponizes government resources like a mob boss. Small wonder some taxpayers question whether they should fund their own destruction.
After already withholding billions from states governed by Democrats, Trump is now using the government shutdown as a pretext to withhold even more federal funds from them, even though blue states disproportionately fund the federal government compared to red states. Last week he threatened to use the shutdown to cut “many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM.”
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) summed the situation up frankly: “Let’s open our eyes. This isn’t a functioning democracy any longer when — in the middle of a high stakes funding fight — the President illegally suspends federal projects in states run by Democrats as a way to punish the political opposition.”
Why buy the guns aimed at our heads?
By all indications, Trump wants to cleave our nation in half, to stay in power past his expiration date. But by withholding federal resources from Democratic-run states as political retribution, Trump is also building a permission structure for people living in those states to question their own federal taxation, asking why they should pay for the guns pointed at their own heads.
No lawyer worth their salt would advise people to break the law by not paying federal taxes that are due. However, while tax evasion is illegal, tax avoidance is not. Trump, who calls himself “smart” for his own history of tax avoidance, is now literally waging war on Democrats as they foot the bill for the violence.
Americans pay federal taxes under a social and legal contract. While we often disagree with our presidents, every four or eight years, there’s a new one. Some will be conservative, some will be liberal, and over time, it balances. But now we have a president teasing a third term after he tried to violently block the transfer of power the last time he lost an election, backed by a corrupt Supreme Court as he turns cities into war zones to stay in power.
Ezra Klein, no fan of Democrats, writes, “Democrats, morally speaking, should not fund a government that Trump is turning into a tool of personal enrichment and power … The machinery of the state is being organized to entrench Republican power … to create a masked paramilitary force roaming the streets and carrying out Trump’s commands. Do you just let that roll forward and hope for the best?”
Do you?
- Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
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Of all Trump's toadies this may be the most vicious — and hopeless
Never forget that the Ohioan who is a heartbeat away from the presidency — and chomping at the bit to replace the aging, increasingly incoherent incumbent — said he makes things up to get attention.
JD Vance, the former first-term Ohio senator who wheedled his way into the good graces of a convicted felon (he once called an “idiot”) to become vice-president, flat out declared his willingness “to create stories” last year while defending his false, racist rumors of Haitian immigrants abducting and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.
It was a remarkable confession from a craven opportunist who scarcely hid his power lust.
Today Vance salivates over sitting behind the Resolute Desk and proves time and again that he will do and say whatever it takes to get there.
Ohioans saw his politically expedient metamorphosis from anti-Trumper to bearded MAGA poser in his rocky U.S. Senate campaign. They watched Vance prostrate himself before a disgraced ex-president to snag an endorsement and pull off an improbable win.
His brief stint in the U.S. Senate was largely spent auditioning to be Trump’s presidential running mate with performative, made-for-Fox News theatrics and bookings. Vance won the part and the vice-presidency.
That politicians lie is hardly news. But Vance does it pathologically, like his boss. Except the veep isn’t Trump. The Ohio politician doesn’t get a pass on lying or acting like a jerk. That’s reserved for the twice-impeached adjudicated fraudster and sexual abuser who famously bragged he could get away with anything and not lose any voters.
Vance gets no such reprieve.
When he fumbles and fabricates with obvious untruths, the veep gets worldwide ridicule and even worse favorability ratings.
Yet driven by ambition, Vance persists in repeating disproven claims, believing it will benefit his 2028 prospects rather than harm them.
He may be right.
Vance catapulted to the White House as Trump’s understudy despite the dehumanizing story he invented to terrorize lawful immigrant workers in his home state.
He amplified all sorts of lies in the 2024 campaign, including false claims about a stolen election that wasn’t and Trump saving Obamacare which he tried to kill.
Nevertheless, some in the MAGA camp still look askance at Vance’s transformation from Never-Trumper to Biggest-Trump-Fan-Ever.
Authentic doesn’t describe the Silicon Valley venture capitalist-turned-MAGA grievance peddler.
Little wonder Vance was tanking in the Republican primary race for the Ohio U.S. Senate seat until his billionaire pals came to the rescue with Trump’s blessing.
But the 41-year-old from Middletown, Ohio is a climber on his way to the top.
He is a restless vice president who covets his boss’ job.
Problem is Vance has neither Trump’s charisma nor entertainment chops — let alone his cult of personality. To be fair, it’s doubtful any red-tie wearing sycophant does.
Yet from the moment Vance boarded Air Force Two, he began sharpening his skills set as a front man for the Trump regime who could effortlessly dispense spin on the daily with scant connection to reality.
His list of whoppers have effectively erased any pretense that the prospective president-in-waiting is a straight shooter who can be trusted to tell the truth.
But frankly, Vance forfeited the mantle of credibility when he confessed a penchant for inventing fairy tales as a means to an end. He admitted he was willing to manufacture stories that weren’t true to generate headlines that paid off politically.
Everything Vance says must be weighed in the context of that admission. He essentially copped to lying as a partisan ploy for publicity.
Last week the veep super-charged a lie so big and so brazen about the Republican government shutdown it was almost not worth addressing — save for the people who might be misled by the ploy to juice up media attention.
It was a story created out of whole cloth that falsely tied the shutdown to Democrats’ alleged drive to give all immigrants health care. Pure fabrication. But Vance ran with it.
As the U.S. headed for a shutdown a week ago, the shameless Ohioan repeated what he must have known had no basis in fact:
“Democrats are threatening to shut down the entire government because they want to give hundreds of billions of dollars of health care benefits to illegal aliens.”
Vance and other Republicans continued to parrot the made-up claim even after it was factually refuted as fantasy.
Nowhere in the Democrats’ proposal, which Republicans refused to negotiate, is there any demand to fund health care for people in the U.S. unlawfully — who have never been eligible federally funded Medicaid, Medicare, or Affordable Care Act tax credits.
Democrats want Republicans to extend a temporary Biden-era program that lowered health insurance costs for more than 20 million Americans buying coverage through the ACA.
They also want Republicans, who control the White House and Congress, to undo at least some of the dramatic Medicaid cuts the GOP enacted over the summer in Trump’s godawful bill.
But Vance isn’t focused on the dire financial stakes facing low-to middle-income Ohioans or citizens across the country. He has stories to create and appearances to book.
- Marilou Johanek is a veteran Ohio print and broadcast journalist who has covered state and national politics as a longtime newspaper editorial writer and columnist.
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This Nazi philosopher's playbook explains everything Donald Trump does
The endgame for Donald Trump, JD Vance, Kristi Noem, and Pam Bondi is coming into clearer focus, and it’s nearly a one-for-one, step-by-step implementation of Nazi jurist/philosopher Carl Schmitt’s ideas that created and sustained the early Third Reich. Vance has even gone so far as to directly quote Schmitt.
The concepts aren’t particularly complicated, and it’s easy to see how Trump and his enablers are implementing them:
- First, Schmitt taught, “there is no law, there is just power”: democracy is a messy anachronism in which whomever controls the political majority inevitably imposes their will on everybody else, stifling individuality and freedom, both in thought and behavior. The cure for this messiness of democracy, he argued, is a strong leader who transcends politics, understands the people and reflects their true desires, defends their racial and religious identity, ignores inconvenient laws, and thus leads the superior/majority race of people to their true destiny. A fascist dictator, in other words.
- Second, the way the noble dictator rises to “plenary” (ultimate, unchallengeable) power is by discarding participation in the political process; contemptuously ignoring norms; breaking previous promises; flaunting national laws while blowing up negotiations; and refusing to compromise with “inferior” political parties or political ideas. Instead, Schmitt says, a “true leader” puts every institution and person in the nation into one of two binary buckets: “friends” or “enemies.” Friends are lavishly and publicly rewarded with wealth and power; enemies are relentlessly pursued and conspicuously punished until they’re either neutralized, bankrupted, or dead.
- Third, the way to get past the guardrails built into constitutional republics (like the German 1930s Weimar Republic or today’s American republic) is by invoking “emergency” powers, even if it’s necessary to create an emergency to justify the invocation.
When Vance sat down with New York Times columnist Russ Douthat in May of last year he complained that Democrats opposing Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court weren’t interested in Kavanaugh’s legal positions but, rather, whether he would serve or oppose Democratic Party political efforts. He said:
“The thing that I kept thinking about liberalism in 2019 and 2020 is that these guys have all read Carl Schmitt — ‘There’s no law, there’s just power.’”
Not only has Vance apparently read Schmitt, his mentor and benefactor, Peter Thiel, has — according to extensive reporting in Wired magazine — long been fascinated by the Nazi theorist’s ideas.
While it’s unlikely that Trump could tell Schmitt from Fred Flintstone, he instinctively understands the man’s theories — he’s systematically following them, starting with his flouting norms and laws like the Hatch Act (two years in prison for selling Teslas in front of the White House) and both US and international laws against selling pardons or killing civilians (in boats in the Caribbean) without trial and conviction.
And that’s just the beginning. Taking a jet plane in an alleged bribe; giving the UAE high-tech chips in violation of America’s national security in exchange for a $2 billion investment in a Trump family crypto business; and exempting companies that gave him gifts or money from antitrust regulation, tariffs, and Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcements continue the trend.
From there, Trump moved to Schmitt’s friend-enemy doctrine, maliciously punishing his perceived enemies even when — like James Comey, Miles Taylor, and James Clapper — they’re Republicans.
He’s characterized Democrats in terms never before used by an American president to describe members of his opposition party, using words typically reserved for traitors and criminals. This is incredibly wrong and destructive, which is why George Washington warned against it and no president has ever done it.
His friends, though — even if they took $50,000 in a paper bag in an FBI bribery sting (Tom Homan), or looked the other way from Jeffrey Epstein during her eight years as Florida’s top law enforcement officer (Bondi) — can do no wrong. Attack the Capitol and cause the death of three police officers? You get a pardon, and now it appears even compensation.
And now he’s preparing to use the sledgehammer that Hitler wielded to destroy the German constitution, taking it as a club to seize absolute, plenary power: he’s taking visible steps toward invoking a nationwide state of emergency.
Schmitt first advanced this idea in 1933 when a Dutch communist set fire to the German parliament (Reichstag) building, describing what we call a state of emergency as a “state of exception” (Ausnahmezustand).
During such an “exception” or (even phony) moment of “emergency,” Schmitt said, a leader could — indeed, should — use it as an excuse to ignore normal constitutional requirements and laws because the urgency of the exception supersedes the law in order to preserve the republic.
Using this process, Schmitt argued, would allow a “noble Führer” with his finger on the pulse of his people to end-run around the tedious, laborious normal legal and ethical processes by which a nation’s leader normally executed the law.
It would let him become, initially, above the law (as six Republicans on the Supreme Court have endorsed) and, ultimately, become the law himself and rule by decree or executive order.
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich is calling out Trump’s four-step plan to achieve Schmitt’s goal of plenary power (summary in my words, not his):
1) Deploy ICE to Blue cities with brutal tactics that intentionally inflame local people to protest;
2) Exaggerate the “crisis” and try to provoke the protesters to violence;
3) Deploy troops to further polarize and inflame local sentiment, evoking physical resistance to their presence that justifies arrests and live ammunition, a Tiananmen square of sorts;
4) Citing that resistance, invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 to suspend parts of federal law and the Constitution so you can use the troops to steal the 2026 an 2028 elections for the GOP.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has echoed that narrative, explicitly saying that the goal of Trump’s “invasion” is to control and corrupt the elections next year and in 2028, and California Governor Gavin Newsome has echoed the sentiment.
Trump’s behavior is a virtual mirror of the steps Schmitt recommended after the Reichstag Fire, and Hitler followed with both the Enabling Acts (they made it legal to prepare lists of your political enemies to use the state against), and his political assassinations during the later Night of the Long Knives (for which Schmitt wrote the legal justification).
Like so many of us across the nation, Reich is basically begging people not to take the bait Trump is dangling. So far here in Portland, for example, Trump’s and Noem’s attempts at provocation have been met with street theater, dancing furries, people bringing flowers to the ICE building, and a naked bike ride protest.
But the ICE guys, laughing, shot a praying priest in the head from the roof of the ICE building, hitting him with a Pepper ball round that knocked him to the ground.
Baffled, Noem told Trump and America at a cabinet meeting that Portland must have “cleared” the “war-torn” areas and hidden the parts of the city that are smoking ruins from the recent riots she imagines (and Fox “News” lyingly suggests by playing five-year-old B-roll of the BLM protests) have happened:
“[Mayor Keith Wilson] said that Portland was perfectly safe, a beautiful city, no problems. And I said, ‘well, why did you clear the streets for me today then, and build out a four-block radius to make sure I could get in and out of here?’”
Lacking any evidence whatsoever of organized violence against ICE officers or their building in Portland, the notorious puppy killer, her (also married) alleged boyfriend in tow, added:
“This is a sick situation. But those are anarchists, those are people that want to overthrow government. They’re really degenerates. And we’re finding out who is supplying all of those beautiful signs and everything else.”
So far, Portland, Los Angeles, and Chicago have succeeded in not giving in to Noem’s and Trump’s Schmittian provocations. Odds are, though, they’ll continue to ramp up the violence until finally a breaking point is reached, and Trump can then claim justification for the Insurrection Act, something he’s now openly discussing almost daily.
Stephen Miller appears to be salivating at the prospect, telling CNN that “under Title 10 … the president has plenary authority” and then suddenly realizing that he’d slipped and let the cat out of the bag; he froze for the next dozen or so seconds until CNN claimed technical difficulties and cut away. When they came back, Miller omitted that “plenary” word that Karl Schmitt so loved — which means “ultimate power that nobody can challenge” — from his final remarks.
As historian Heather Cox Richardson explained:
“It is this power under Title 10 that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller yesterday claimed was ‘plenary,’ or absolute. The idea that exceptions to the rule of law reveal who is really in charge of the government was central to the political philosophy of German political theorist Carl Schmitt, who joined the Nazis and whose work is increasingly popular among the radical right in the U.S. these days.”
Forbes notes that Trump is already claiming that if courts try to stop him, he’ll neuter them by invoking the Insurrection Act, claiming it gives him plenary powers:
“Trump has suggested he could be inclined to invoke the law if courts rule against him. ‘If people were being killed and courts were holding us up or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I’d do that,’ Trump said Monday, referring to using the Insurrection Act.”
The next few days, weeks, or possibly months will be pivotal.
- Will citizens in one of the Blue cities Trump’s thugs have invaded give him the riot he wants?
- If they do and he invokes the Insurrection Act, will the six compliant, frightened Republicans on the Supreme Court back him up?
- If they don’t, will he ignore them and order the military into our streets to establish martial law anyway?
- Will the nation’s military commanders go along with such an order?
- And if they do, can they stop or effectively disrupt the elections of 2026 and 2028 in Blue cities? (We even had elections during the Civil War and WWII.)
Most Americans, polls show, are aghast. Few of us ever thought we’d live to see the day an American president would be following the steps to cripple a republic laid out by Nazi Germany’s most famous political theorist.
But here we are. And the most important things we can do are to fearlessly keep speaking out (“courage is contagious”), demand action from our elected officials of both parties, and show up peacefully in the streets on October 18th for No Kings Day 2.
See you there!
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Murder on the high seas points to what Trump has planned for home
Last weekend, Donald Trump ordered another summary execution of people on a fishing boat off the Venezuelan coast. The administration claims the dead were engaged in drug trafficking. Despite international outcry over the violence, Trump officials have provided no intel, no intercepted communications, no photos — no evidence whatsoever — that drugs were even onboard when the strike command was given.
It was the fourth such strike by the US in as many weeks. The ship exploded on contact, bringing the death toll to 21 people killed on mere suspicion of drug trafficking.
Trump defends the strikes as countering “narco-terrorist” members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang Trump has unilaterally designated a foreign terrorist organization.
But equipment analysis rebuts his claim, because the small fishing boats could not have reached the US mainland due to distance and fuel limitations of the vessels’ small size.
Whether they were engaged in drug trafficking or not, law-abiding nations do not kill without honoring protocol and process. The United Nations condemned the strikes because “International law does not allow governments to simply murder alleged drug traffickers.” Under international law, suspected drug traffickers should be “disrupted, investigated and prosecuted in accordance with the rule of law, including through international cooperation.” Extrajudicial killings are also forbidden under the US Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Excessive force against Americans
Instead of careful introspection in the wake of what appears to be murder on the high seas, Trump’s Secretary of “War” published snuff videos bragging about the violence, offering up raw meat for MAGA fans watching Fox News. During his recent speech to officers gathered in Quantico, Virginia, Pete Hegseth made his yearning for unrestrained “lethality” known, as he and Trump push Border Patrol, ICE and the US military to escalate barbarism at home.
Trump’s unconstitutional war of brutality against Democratic-run cities has centered on LA, Chicago, D.C., and Portland, but it is just beginning. In last week’s middle-of-the-night ICE raid on a Chicago apartment building, sleeping families were jolted awake by masked strangers suddenly in their bedrooms. Children ripped from their beds were zip-tied and thrown outside, naked and screaming. Armed federal agents in military fatigues busted down doors, pulling men, women and children from nearly every apartment in the five-story building, most of them U.S. citizens. Federal agents used flashbang grenades to burst through doors, deployed drones and helicopters, and left the building trashed.
Trump is champing at the bit to do the same and worse in Portland, Oregon, where he promised this week to send troops to attack “domestic terrorists,” authorizing the use of “Full Force, if necessary.” Trump justified the command in Portland by claiming it is necessary to protect ICE facilities, which he falsely described as “under siege from attack by Antifa and other domestic terrorists.”
Brutality without restraint
Robert Arnold, “the Poet of the South,” has recorded a hauntingly beautiful rejoinder to the Trump administration’s lust for violence. After witnessing Trump and Hegseth’s shameful speeches at Quantico, where Hegseth called for lessening the rules of conflict in favor of muscular lethality, Arnold wrote “On the silence of the generals.”
Arnold’s talk is a seven-minute review of why military restraint makes nations strong, and how discipline rather than unbridled “lethality” advances humanity through peace. Every American should watch it. Arnold observes correctly that lethality without restraint is not strategy. It is butchery. As if responding to Trump’s and Hegseth’s snuff videos, Arnold notes that even during the Civil War, “General Grant, bloody and relentless, knew victory meant binding the wounds of the nation — not gloating in violence.”
Arnold rejects Hegseth’s call for weakening the rules of conflict, and noted the silence of the generals in the room at Quantico as they listened to Hegseth and Trump debase the seriousness of combat:
“Our Generals understand war is the most consequential of human actions — their decisions carry lives in the balance. They know that raw violence is a tool only to be used with precision, justification, and the dignity of restraint. They know war has consequences that echo for generations.
Hegseth does not know this.
Hegseth mistakes slogans for wisdom, violence for professionalism, brute force for strategy. He preaches lethality like a child who’s never had to carry the ghosts from a battlefield home with him. He sees the military as a weapon to be swung, not a burden to be borne.”
Heed Arnold’s warning
Arnold’s words are haunting because they are true. The US military is the most lethal force on earth, “not because it is the most violent, but because it has chosen discipline over chaos, professionalism over cruelty.”
Arnold warns correctly that the world will backslide into barbarism if Trump doesn’t stop. He stresses our nation’s “pride in knowing that we do not wage war like a third-rate regime.” If we abandon rules under the Geneva Convention and “reduce ourselves to brutality and call it strength, then the world will follow us into the pit. Other nations will cast off restraint, and humanity will slide backwards into darkness.”
Trump and Hegseth know this. They know that murdering helpless people at sea will create permanent enemies, radicalized South Americans who hate us. Arnold points this out:
“Every officer in the room at Quantico has seen insurgencies grow of careless violence. (They’ve seen) reports that turned into viral recruitment videos for radicals. (They’ve) knelt next to cots where names were written on slips of paper and learned that nothing erases a family’s grief except truth and restraint and accountability.”
The silence of the generals at Quantico reflected the arithmetic of consequence:
“For every enemy struck without care, there are 10 who will rise in hatred, and 50 children who will remember the smoke … To adopt third world cruelty is not to become stronger. It is to become smaller than what we claim to be.”
The generals who sat quietly at Quantico did not need to say this out loud. Their silence said it for them.
- Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
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These acts of defiance show the MAGA cult is cracking, from Montana to DC
Late-night comic Jimmy Kimmel could barely get the words out of his mouth when he had to say: “I agree with Marjorie Taylor Greene.”
It was his second time this month, he noted, and added, “I need something to wash out my mouth.” But in truth, the issue at hand, which is access to health care, is no laughing matter.
Greene’s latest defection from the MAGA cult of loyalty for which she has been a leading figure popped up in an exclusive interview with CNN in which she didn’t beat around the bush concerning the effect of the House-passed budget bill that, due to not reauthorizing Affordable Care Act subsidies, has caused the shutdown of the federal government.
“Everybody is just getting destroyed” Greene told reporters. “This cliff is coming for millions and millions of Americans where their health insurance premiums are about to skyrocket. Republicans, you have no solutions. You haven’t come up with a new plan in place, and we’re not even talking about it, and it is hurting so many people.”
Greene’s concerns are at odds with the narrative the GOP is trying to spin on the shutdown — namely that it’s all the fault of Senate Democrats. Instead, Greene says the health care crisis now facing millions of Americans, including her kids and constituents, is a direct threat to Republicans in the polls and voting booths.
It’s worth noting Greene is also one of four Republican House members who signed the discharge petition to force the release of the Epstein files, telling The Hill: “I think when it comes to women being raped, especially when they were 14 years old, that’s pretty black and white.”
Moreover, she said Speaker Mike Johnson’s attempt to keep the House shut down was “wrong” and they should reconvene to take care of the vast spectrum of Congressional business.
For his part, Johnson doesn’t want to reconvene the House due to the recent election of a Democrat who, when sworn in, will provide the final signature to force Johnson to deal with the “Epstein bomb”.
What could this MAGA rebellion by Greene have to do with Montana? Well, it’s not so dissimilar from a group of nine Republicans who broke with their own leadership over any number of issues. Chief among them was health care, and support for a bill by fellow Republican Ed Buttrey to lift the pending expiration of Medicaid expansion for low income people that the Senate’s GOP President, Matt Regier, opposed.
Like Greene, Buttrey noted that health care was critical and Republicans had no other plan:
“We have 10 years’ worth of data that shows that the program we designed is working and working well. There’s no need to change it, it’s a savings to our budget, it is providing help for people all across the state, it’s helping save our rural health care facilities. Why would you want to change that or come up with another plan?”
It’s fair to say the GOP tends to “keep its soldiers in line” when it comes to supporting or opposing leadership positions. Yet, just as Greene defied Johnson on Medicare funding and Donald Trump on the Epstein files, Buttrey and his nine “rebels” defied their own leadership and governor to support Medicaid expansion.
None of this spells the end of MAGA, of course. But it shows that when it comes down to the critical issues that affect the citizens of our nation and state, party affiliation is not and should not be the determining factor — especially when it comes to taking care of each other.
- George Ochenski is Montana's longest-running columnist and a longtime environmental activist, concerned with keeping Montana's natural beauty clean and safe. He writes from Helena and appears in the Daily Montanan weekly.
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Hypocrite GOP gov must know abuse isn't big or clever, especially when his target is both
Larry Rhoden spent his first eight months as governor steering South Dakota onto the high ground of civil discourse, only to follow Kristi Noem back into the gutter last week.
Noem, the head of the federal Department of Homeland Security, was in Broadview, Illinois. Protesters have been amassing for weeks at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility there to express disapproval with the Trump administration, resulting in clashes with authorities.
Following her usual impulse to provoke rather than problem-solve, Noem inserted herself into the tense situation with YouTuber and podcaster Benny Johnson in tow, filming her every confrontational move. That included a stroll up to the door of the Village of Broadview Municipal Building with her entourage to ask if she could use the restroom.
Somebody standing on the inside of the door kept it shut and said “no you cannot.”
Noem swiveled and stormed off.
“That’s what Governor Pritzker says is cooperation and keeping people safe,” she blurted on her way past Johnson as he filmed the encounter.
Indeed, how could JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois, forget his solemn oath to support the constitution, faithfully discharge his duties, and facilitate bathroom breaks for presidential Cabinet secretaries?
Rhoden, a Republican who succeeded Noem as South Dakota’s governor in January, was similarly offended. He shared the footage of Noem’s bathroom brouhaha on X (formerly Twitter) and added his own written comments.
“Kristi is the toughest woman I know,” Rhoden said. “If Pritzker thinks a locked door will stop her from enforcing the LAW, then he is severely underestimating my friend.”
But Rhoden wasn’t finished. He followed Noem onto the low road and went even lower in his attack on Pritzker.
“Maybe he should clean up Chicago,” Rhoden said. “Or at least eat a salad.”
That’s apparently supposed to be a joke about Pritzker’s well-chronicled efforts to lose weight.
Not laughing? Neither am I.
It’s disappointing that Rhoden would write those words or allow them to be written on his behalf. It’s also hypocritical coming from a hat-wearing cowboy who’s been on a high horse lecturing South Dakotans about civility ever since he pledged, upon becoming governor, that it would be “one of the pillars of my administration.”
As recently as Sept. 12, Rhoden philosophized about the importance of “civil discourse” in the weekly column he distributes to the media. He said civility is the best way to honor Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist and commentator who was fatally shot a couple of days earlier in Utah.
On the same day he released that column, Rhoden used his official Facebook account to advocate — unsuccessfully, as it turned out — for the firing of a University of South Dakota professor who posted insensitive comments about Kirk in the hours after the shooting.
“We must not send the message to our kids that this is acceptable public discourse,” Rhoden said.
That effort to tear down a USD professor’s career for ill-advised but constitutionally protected free speech stands in contrast to Pritzker’s past efforts to build up the same university. In 2007, Pritzker’s family foundation donated $5 million to help build the Theodore R. and Karen K. Muenster University Center, named in honor of the parents of Pritzker’s wife, Mary Kathryn “MK” Pritzker, who was raised in South Dakota.
Rhoden, meanwhile, is fixated on more recent contributions totaling $790,000 from Pritzker’s issue-based nonprofit, Think Big America, to support a ballot question last fall that would have added abortion rights to the South Dakota constitution. Voters rejected the measure, as Rhoden noted in his X post about Noem’s bathroom video.
“The last time JB Pritzker picked a fight” with Noem and South Dakota, Rhoden said, “it didn’t go well for him.”
Perhaps Rhoden needs a reminder that contributing to a ballot question committee does not equate to picking a fight, and a disagreement over immigration policy does not justify a demeaning comment about a fellow governor.
If he doesn’t know that, he should spend more time reflecting on his own words from last month, when he admonished everyone to honor Charlie Kirk’s legacy by “continuing to talk to each other and focusing on reason and principle, rather than personal attacks.”
- Seth Tupper is editor-in-chief of South Dakota Searchlight. He was previously a supervising senior producer for South Dakota Public Broadcasting and a newspaper journalist in Rapid City and Mitchell. South Dakota Searchlight is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
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