While the East Wing crumbles, the truth gets buried
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
Why this agonizing government shutdown is absolutely, definitely, completely Trump's fault
Since there is a lot of confusion surrounding the shutdown, I thought it would be useful to go over some of the main points as I understand them. I will not pretend this is a comprehensive account, but there are some issues that are reasonably clear.
First, when Republicans claim that they are proposing a “clean” continuing resolution, they are ignoring a trillion-pound elephant in the room. In the past, when Congress passed a continuing resolution, it meant that the money appropriated in the resolution would be spent on the designated items. Under President Donald Trump, this is no longer true.
Trump has decided that because he was elected with a huge mandate (almost as large as Hillary Clinton’s in 2016) normal rules don’t apply to him. He has decided to unilaterally refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress.
He has done this through two routes. The first is through the recission process. Under this process, Congress can vote to reverse appropriations that were made in prior spending bills. Under the rules of the Senate, a recission bill cannot be filibustered so it can pass with just 50 votes. This was the process that Trump used to eliminate much of the foreign aid budget, as well as funding for public broadcasting.
The use of the recission process strips the Democrats of the filibuster power they hold with normal appropriations. The process had rarely been used in prior decades because it effectively means undermining the deals that were made to get an earlier budget bill approved.
But the situation gets even worse with the newly invented “pocket recission.”
With a pocket recission, Trump effectively just refuses to spend appropriated money and then tells Congress towards the end of the fiscal year, “What do you know, I never got around to spending the money you appropriated in this or that area.” Congress never gets a chance to vote since the fiscal year is reaching its conclusion. It would have to reappropriate new money in the next fiscal year if it wanted the money to be spent.
In the old days, this pocket recission likely would have been ruled unconstitutional, since it makes a mockery of Congress’ power to spend, but it’s not clear what this Supreme Court would say. At this point, Trump has gotten away with pocket recissions covering several billion dollars of spending. There is certainly no guarantee that he will not do pocket recissions again in the new fiscal year.
Trump’s recent decisions to “cancel” items like a train tunnel between New York and New Jersey would also fit into this category of pocket recission. The possibility of a pocket recission means that any deal on spending with Trump is pointless, since any time he gets angry about something he can totally ignore his commitment, sort of like his trade deals.
This is why it is disingenuous to say that what the Republicans are offering is a “clean” continuing resolution. If there is no commitment not to reverse appropriations through recission, and to prevent Trump from doing pocket recissions, Democrats cannot prevent any item in the continuing resolution from being subsequently cut. This means that they effectively have no control over the budget once the continuing resolution is approved.
The treatment and rules on recissions would ordinarily be the sort of thing that would be negotiated prior to the approval of a continuing resolution, but there were no negotiations.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) sent the House home shortly after July 4, in large part to avoid any vote on releasing the Epstein files, and Trump ordered Republican senators not to negotiate. There was only one negotiating session involving the congressional leaders and Trump one day before the end of the fiscal year. When no agreement was reached, we got the shutdown.
The Republicans had obviously prepared for the shutdown. They immediately started screaming about how the shutdown was because Democrats wanted to spend trillions providing Obamacare to “illegals.” They knew this was a lie but apparently hoped they could sell it anyhow. (Undocumented immigrants do not qualify for health care coverage, except through a Reagan-era law requiring that emergency rooms treat anyone in need of care. This obviously is not the issue, since Republicans have not even proposed repealing this law.)
It seems they have mostly given up on the lie, which Speaker Johnson bizarrely claimed to have in writing, and instead are harping on how Obamacare has been a disastrous failure. This also flies in the face of reality. The share of the population that is uninsured fell from 18 percent in 2010 to around 8 percent at present.
More importantly, the ACA ended the ability of insurers to discriminate based on preexisting conditions. In the pre-ACA insurance market, people with serious health conditions, like cancer or heart disease, would have to pay ridiculous prices for insurance, or were unable to get coverage at all. The ACA changed this, requiring that all people within an age group were charged the same.
This change is a huge deal not only for the people who directly benefit by now being able to get affordable insurance, but really the entire pre-Medicare age population. In the pre-ACA world, most of the working age population got insurance through their employer. This meant that even people with serious health issues could get insurance in their employers’ pool.
But if a heart attack or some other health problem prevented them from working, they would be forced to get individual insurance as a person with a serious health condition. The ACA effectively provides insurance that people can get insurance.
The ACA also sharply slowed health care cost-growth. The cost of Obamacare, Medicare, and Medicaid in the years since the ACA passed came in far below projections. The Republicans are obviously hoping that people either do not remember or do not know about the state of the insurance market before the ACA. Few who do would want to go back to that world.
The other game that Republicans are playing is the claim that they would be happy to negotiate, once the Democrats pass the continuing resolution. This is a silly game, since there is zero reason to expect Republicans to negotiate in good faith, once the Democrats have no leverage. They had all summer and September to negotiate but refused to do so.
In fact, there is absolutely no reason they can’t negotiate now. In prior shutdowns both parties had no problem carrying on negotiations. Trump himself even negotiated in the 2019 shutdown, the longest in history. If there is some principle about not negotiating during a shutdown, the Republicans have just invented it now.
Anyhow, it appears the shutdown will continue until there is a major reversal of positions by one side or other. In the Democrats’ case, it would mean giving up any leverage they have on spending. In the Republicans’ case, it would mean agreeing to negotiate.
- Dean Baker is the co-founder and the senior economist of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of several books, including "Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better bargain for Working People," "The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive," "The United States Since 1980," "Social Security: The Phony Crisis" (with Mark Weisbrot), and "The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer." He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues.
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This unlikely state is about to enter the eye of the Trump storm
NEWARK — Leave it to Joe Cryan to highlight the absurdity of the federal case against Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ).
Cryan (D), a Union County state senator and one of McIver’s constituents, spoke at a rally Tuesday outside a federal courthouse in Newark as McIver’s attorneys were inside urging a judge to toss an indictment that accuses McIver of assaulting federal officers as they arrested Newark Mayor Ras Baraka in Newark on May 9.
Videos from the chaotic scene of Baraka’s arrest outside migrant hall Delaney Hall do indeed show McIver making contact with officers, pushing one on his shoulder and pushing another one aside with her arm as she walked past him. I’ve seen more jostling on a crowded boardwalk on the Fourth of July, when it barely raises an eyebrow. Cryan called her actions a “supposed assault.”
“As a kid who played a lot of basketball in those schools, if I called a foul in a game of three-on-three for that, I would get laughed at and told to man up when the ball got thrown back in my face,” he said.
The flimsy nature of the charges against McIver is compounded by the timeline of the events in question. After McIver’s alleged assault of the two officers, Department of Homeland Security agents led McIver and two of her House colleagues into Delaney Hall for a tour, and escorted them all off the property an hour later. Prosecutors didn’t announce they were charging McIver until 10 days later.
Did the officers she’s accused of assaulting even know they were assaulted that day? Or is it that prosecutors needed to charge McIver to save face after their case against Baraka crumbled in mere days? I’m certain it’s the latter.
The Trump administration’s prosecution of McIver has brought national attention, probably by design. It’s harder for the opposition party to be effective when they’re busy putting out small fires all across the nation. Some of McIver’s liberal colleagues in the House visited Newark Tuesday to rally McIver’s supporters and heap scorn on President Donald Trump for his administration’s push to lock McIver up.
“This isn’t about the law. This is about power, punishment, and pure politics,” said Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX).
“They want to see if they can get away with this. They want to test whether they can silence a sitting member of Congress who dares to ask questions. Well, the answer is hell no.”
I’m not so sure. U.S. District Judge Jamel Semper, who is overseeing McIver’s case, made no decision Tuesday on her multiple requests to have the charges thrown out, but indicated this thing may be headed to trial.
“Whether this is criminal conduct is for a jury. I’m not wading into those waters,” Semper said.
If this thing does go before a jury, it could happen as early as Nov. 10. Just what New Jersey needs after a nasty gubernatorial election — an assault trial that serves as a proxy for Trump’s immigration policy and Democrats’ response to it, with the eyes of a nation upon us. Can’t wait.
- Editor Terrence T. McDonald is a native New Jerseyan who has worked for newspapers in the Garden State for 20 years. He has covered everything from Trenton politics to the smallest of municipal squabbles, exposing public corruption and general malfeasance at every level of government. Terrence won 23 New Jersey Press Association awards and two Tim O’Brien Awards for Investigative Journalism using the Open Public Records Act from the New Jersey chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. One politician forced to resign in disgrace because of Terrence’s reporting called him a "political poison pen journalist.” You can reach him at tmcdonald@newjerseymonitor.com.
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Trump has kicked a sleeping giant — and now it's furious
On Saturday, 7 to 8 million of us took to the streets to demonstrate against Trump.
That’s not all.
Every major media outlet — including Fox News — has refused to sign Pete Hegseth’s unconstitutional demand that they report only what the Defense Department wants them to report or lose their press credentials. They’ve all turned in their press credentials, which means no one is turning up for Hegseth’s press briefings.
What’s the sound of a press briefing without the press?
Seven of the nine universities Trump “invited” to join his university compact — in which they give up academic freedom for a priority place in government funding — have said, essentially, f--- no.
Disney was forced into reinstating Jimmy Kimmel after consumers threatened to boycott a wide range of Disney products. According to Strength in Numbers, the Disney boycott quickly became four times as large as any boycott over the last five years.
The great sleeping giant of America is awakening.
I’m old enough to have witnessed the sleeping giant awaken several times before.
Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunt destroyed countless careers before the giant roared: “Have you no sense of decency?”
McCarthy melted almost as quickly as the Wicked Witch of the West. His national popularity evaporated. Three years later, censored by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party, and ignored by the press, McCarthy drank himself to death, a broken man at the age of 48.
The giant roared again a decade later, after television showed civil rights marchers getting clobbered by white supremacists. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act.
It roared again after tens of thousands of young Americans were killed in the jungles of Vietnam, finally bringing to an end one of the nation’s costliest, deadliest, and stupidest wars.
It roared again at Richard Nixon after Nixon was heard on tape plotting the cover-up of Watergate — then was forced to exit the White House by helicopter on his way back to California.
It is starting to roar now — at the sociopathic occupant of the Oval Office who won’t tolerate criticism, who has revealed his utter contempt for the freedom of Americans to criticize him, to write or speak negatively about him, even to joke about him.
I’ve seen a lot. I know the signs. The sleeping giant always remains asleep until some venality becomes so noxious, some action so disrespectful of the common good, some brutality so noisy, that he has no choice but to awaken.
And when he does, the good sense of the American people causes him to put an end to whatever it was that awakened him.
- YouTube www.youtube.com
- 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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A colossal blunder shows how much Trump's lackeys care about this red state
“This is a pretty tough time, to be honest,” farmer Glenn Brunknow told NPR in April. “This is about as grim of time as I’ve seen for crop production. Nothing looks like it’s going to make money right now.”
If he wants to come out ahead this year, this eastern Kansas farmer should bet Republicans in the congressional delegation won’t help. If past performance indicates future results, it’s a sure thing.
As markets shriveled this year, Sen. Roger Marshall claimed Trump gave “Kansas farmers and ranchers access to critically important export markets.” That echoes what he said during the depths of President Trump’s first trade war debacle: “His policies are working.”
They were a catastrophe. Kansas farmers lost $1 billion in foregone exports, farm bankruptcies doubled and they triggered bailouts that cost billions.
Today’s farm trade collapse results from one of the most predictable policy failures in recent memory, a step-by-step replay of arbitrary, mercurial tariffs suffocating farm exports. It’s inexplicable those lessons are not being heeded by key policymakers: the President, the U.S. trade representative (who was deputy trade representative the first go round) and the USDA secretary (who had a White House role then).
Meanwhile, the victims of this colossal blunder are relearning a painful lesson. Their lawmakers will do nothing. They’re also ignoring what they witnessed during the first trade wear.
They support the tariffs. In March, Kansas Reps. Ron Estes, Tracey Mann and Derek Schmidt voted in favor of them, twice. It was a legislative sleight of hand, one sentence tucked into a procedural motion that stops the House from even considering legislation to repeal the tariffs. They did it again Sept. 16. In April, Sens. Marshall and Jerry Moran could have repealed the tariffs. But, they voted to keep them, ignoring escalating warnings.
Signals of an emerging crisis appeared almost immediately after of the president’s April 2 tariff announcement. It was projected in the export outlook planned for release May 29. But USDA leaders spiked the report, then excised the expert-generated analysis.
“In the past, a lot of our milo (grain sorghum) exports have gone to China, and so not having them as a trade partner right now is definitely a challenge,” Andy Hineman told the Reflector in September. That Kansas farmer and other milo growers in the state produce about half of all U.S. exports, adding about $1 billion to the Kansas economy. That contribution may not materialize this year.
A recent USDA report tells a dire story: “No exports were reported for the period ending August 31. Accumulated exports were down seventy percent from the prior year.” To paraphrase Marshall’s recent comments that “sorghum is all about the trade issue,” vanishing milo exports are all about the tariffs.
In 2024, US farmers sold more than $12 billion worth of soybeans to China. Last month, the US didn’t sell a single soybean to China, the first time in nearly a decade. Total 2025 soybean sales to China: zero. The Kansas economy is now in a recession due in large part to falling agriculture exports, says Moody’s.
Instead of sticking up for their constituents, Marshall and Mann cheer meaningless trade announcements. Marshall said the president “found a way to break through and gain access” to the Australia beef market. In reality, that market has essentially been open for years. Mann recast a Trumpism: “This is the art of the deal.”
The art of the deal? That’s not what experts say: “US beef processors will be lucky to move $1-2 million worth of beef annually into Australia, compared to the $4 billion worth of beef Australia sent to the US last year.” Meanwhile, President Trump has said the US will begin buying beef from Argentina.
The ballyhooed trade deals do not in fact lower trade barriers. They’re to-do lists. “The United Kingdom and the US plan to work constructively in an effort to enhance (and) positively support future discussions” (emphasis added) on farm trade. The European Union pretend agreement reads the same: The EU and US “intend to work together.”
While USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins was boosting these phantom deals, behind the scenes Agriculture Department officials were putting pencil to paper developing the completely predictable bailout from tariff carnage. In recent days, administration officials from the president to Rollins to key economic advisors have conceded the worst-kept secret in Washington.
Sure bet number two: another bailout is coming, double down on it.
A final wager. USDA paid $28 billion during Trump Trade War I. Will the coming bailout be over or under? Congress appropriated $10 billion in December for more emergency payments. The budget bill passed in July included $60 billion in new farm program subsidies. The cost to repeal the tariffs: zero dollars.
For farmers who think that farming (and voting) is enough gambling, maybe they should become online influencers. The administration might not be able to find time to make a deal to reopen the China market, but it did find time to salvage TikTok.
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Trump only has one way of keeping control — and it's already starting to fail
Trump and his people, with all their strut and swagger, want you to think he’s the most powerful man in America and will continue in power indefinitely. Don’t believe it.
The reason he’s rushing so hard and fast to spread his secret, masked police across American cities while mobilizing the military against civilians is precisely because he’s so extraordinarily weak.
- It’s why he’s breaking laws left and right, from laws against bribery to the Hatch Act to Posse Comitatus.
- It’s why he’s trying to provoke a military confrontation with Venezuela, the same as Reagan did with Grenada two days after the Beirut Marine barracks bombing.
- It’s why he’s trying to distract us from the Epstein Files and the reality that a third of America’s states are in or nearly in recession.
- It’s why every time a report comes out about inflation continuing to spike, unaffordable housing, or job growth stalling out, he comes up with some new outrageous shiny object to dangle in front of the media.
Trump, in fact, is pretty much unique among both modern and historic figures who rode elective office to power and then turned their nations into dictatorships. None were as weak as Trump is today when they succeeded in consolidating enough power to eliminate their challengers and lock down the populace. All had a massively larger base. Consider:
Putin: Came to power just a few years after the Soviet Union had collapsed and in the rubble of the nearly incoherent presidency of the severely alcoholic President Boris Yeltsin. When he became acting president in 1999 amid war in Chechnya and economic recovery, his approval rating vaulted from 31 percent to 80 percent in three months. He sustained 80–88 percent support between 2003–2008, with popular acclaim for restoring order and boosting wages and pensions. Even during controversial wars, his approval reflected genuine public trust, peaking at 86–88 percent following the 2008 war with Georgia and 89 percent after the 2014 annexation of Crimea.
Orbán: His early political career was marked by charisma and reformist credentials. In 1998, at 35, he became Hungary’s youngest prime minister after leading Fidesz — a progressive student movement — to victory. His personal popularity was rooted in perceptions of competence, patriotism, and authenticity amid widespread post-Soviet disillusionment. Even critics acknowledged his ability to project “a modern conservative vision” that appealed to broad swaths of Hungarian society. I’ve written about how I was in Budapest the summer of 1989 when, as a 26-year-old former “student leader,” he gave his first major speech, cementing his then-liberal reformist credentials, eventually catapulting him into power.
Hitler: Germany was in shambles from World War I and the punishing demands of the Treaty of Versailles when Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January of 1933. A bit over a year later, an Aug 19, 1934 referendum on merging the positions of president and chancellor into a single office with him holding it produced an 89.9 percent “Yes” vote. He built the Autobahn, started Volkswagen, and rebuilt the country from the ashes of the war. Under his massive public works and social welfare programs, unemployment fell sharply after 1933 via public works/rearmament from ~34 percent in January 1933 to ~14 percent by January 1936.
Mussolini: In Italy, Mussolini consolidated mass support through national restoration and charisma, rather than coercion. His Fascist Party drew broad appeal by promising to end postwar chaos and “restore Italian greatness.” Mussolini’s personal image — “manly,” “decisive,” and virile — was widely hailed in the Italian media. The Lateran Treaty of 1929, which reconciled Italy with the Catholic Church, skyrocketed his legitimacy among Catholics and conservatives, cementing a decade of popularity across classes. Even the American public, as contemporaneous accounts noted, admired Mussolini’s “efficiency” (“making the trains run on time”) and national modernization during the 1920s.
Looking at our own hemisphere, Fujimori succeeded in destroying democracy in Peru and Bukele did the same in El Salvador, but both solved major crises that gave them over 80 percent approval ratings across their nations when they seized that kind of power.
In Peru, as political scientist Jonathan Schlefer writes for Politico, inflation was so bad that a tube of toothpaste cost as much as a house had five years earlier, while El Salvador was both poor and overwhelmed by gangs that had seized control of most of the country.
By contrast, Trump’s approval rating is consistently low, even though he keeps lying about it as he claims a broad mandate. He didn’t even break 50 percent of the popular vote in 2024, and lost the popular vote in 2016.
As of Oct. 20, 2025, 44.2 percent approved and 52.1 percent disapproved of his presidency, according to Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin. The RealClearPolitics average gives him around 45 percent, while Gallup finds 40 percent, making him one of the least popular U.S. presidents at this stage in all of our history.
His economic approval has sunk to 34 percent, with 62 percent disapproving of his behavior amid inflation and federal shutdown unrest. Unlike his predecessors or authoritarians in other countries that lost their democracies, his base remains intense but small; there’s no evidence of majoritarian enthusiasm existing outside of his core partisan bloc.
The few Republicans willing to defy him and speak up about Trump’s unpopularity (and that of his policies) are often blunt and even see their own popularity increase because of their resistance.
Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), for example, told Semafor Trump‘s economic policies are ruining America and his popularity:
“I can’t see into the future, but I see Republicans losing the House [of Representatives] if Americans are continuing to go paycheck-to-paycheck They’ll definitely be going into the midterms looking through the lens of their bank account.”
So, how does Trump hold onto power and the loyalty of Republican politicians?
Fear, it turns out, is the cement that’s holding the GOP together under Trump.
His indictment of lifelong Republican James Comey and his pardon of criminal grifter George Santos were unambiguous messages to every Republican politician in the nation. He was saying, in effect
“Stay with me and keep licking my boots and I’ll keep you safe even if you commit horrible crimes; cross me and I’ll destroy you.”
So far, it’s working. But as Schlefer points out in Politico, wannabe strong men like Trump only succeed in destroying democracy in wealthy nations about one in four times. Most often, as we recently saw in South Korea and Brazil, they fail and then suffer the consequences; both former presidents are now in prison.
For Trump and the people who are either excusing or actively participating in his corruption and naked crimes, holding onto power almost exclusively by fear is a dangerous game.
As John Adams noted in 1776:
“Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion… that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.”
But politicians like Trump (and his lickspittles) eventually find themselves trapped by the very fear they’ve used to paralyze their party members into compliance or silence. As Winston Churchill famously said:
“You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police ... yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home — all the more powerful because forbidden — terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.”
This is why Trump, as noted above, is building such a massive police and military presence, along with constructing hundreds of new concentration camps across America.
It’s why he had to fire the commission that oversees the White House before taking a wrecking ball to the East Wing. It’s why he’s desperately trying to pack courts and government agencies with toadies who worship or fear him; he knows he only has a short window before the country truly fights back against his strongman attempts to turn America into a third world tinpot dictatorship with a “royal” family that’s corruptly made billions off their brief moment in power.
Fearful men always lean on violence and the threat of violence because eventually the spell of the fear they’re trying to cast across the nation is broken.
We saw it in the American Revolution, when 57 men defied the terror King George III had imposed here when they signed their names — producing an instant death sentence from the British crown — to the Declaration that ended, “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
When enough people stand up against state terrorism to hit a critical mass (3.5 percent of the population, according to political scientist Erica Chenoweth), others quickly join them. The turnout for the No Kings marches suggest we’re close to that.
Evangelist Billy Graham (who, were he still alive, would certainly be horrified by his corrupt son’s behavior) reminded us:
“Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened.”
So, take heart. The No Kings marches proved both Trump’s widespread unpopularity and the fearlessness of an American public echoing over two centuries of our nation standing up to tinpot despots and wannabe dictators.
We Americans have never tolerated a king or a dictator, and we’re not about to start now.
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We gave Trump a bloody nose — here's how we give him another
It’s important to stay focused. Yes, it’s an outrage for the president to post a phony AI video of himself wearing a crown, flying a fighter jet and bombing peaceful protesters with human waste.
It’s outrageous for the congressional Republicans to defend the video or pretend they don’t know Donald Trump posted it. It’s outrageous, moreover, for the press corps to bend over backwards to avoid describing in plain English what everyone can see for themselves.
I mean, “brown liquid”! Jesus God, c’mon.
But let’s keep our heads. We have just witnessed the biggest one-day demonstration in our country’s history. About 7 million Americans across 50 states, including in small towns in rural districts, protested against the crimes of the regime. Together, they sent a message: America does not and will never have a king. What was his response?
To act like a king.
“I think it’s a joke,” the president said of No Kings. “I looked at the people — they’re not representative of this country. And I looked at all the brand new signs… I guess it was paid for by [George] Soros and other radical left lunatics … It looks like it was. We’re checking it out.
“The demonstrations were very small, very ineffective, and the people were whacked out,” he added. “When you look at those people, those [people] are not representative of the people of our country.”
He said that before the phony AI video.
No one can imagine a Democratic president suggesting he can s--- on Americans with impunity. That would be a weeks-long scandal. Yet reporters tend to shrug when Trump does it, because they accept as true the argument that Republicans are the only legitimate Americans.
That alone is an occasion to rehash the old grievance against the press corps. Every liberal I know is sick of the double standard embedded in media coverage of the parties, such that the Republicans are free to say anything at all while the Democrats are always held accountable.
But let’s not lose sight of what has been accomplished.
On the one hand, Trump is confessing to the allegations of illegitimacy against him. Protesters said he is not a king. Then he said, in effect, Oh yeah? Watch me. That alone is worth celebrating, as it affects people who have doubts about Trump, but don’t yet trust the opposition. No Kings drew about 5 million people in June. This time, it added a couple million more. Next time, perhaps, a couple million more than that.
On the other hand, however, is something deeper and more powerful.
The president and his party want the American people to believe that the Republicans — and the Republicans alone — are the real arbiters of reality. Critics do not have the liberty to interpret facts independently. They do not have the right to express beliefs according to guaranteed liberties. Only Republicans have the true authority to define America.
With one voice, more than 7 million Americans said no.
Before the rally, the Republicans said protesters are “Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, violent criminals.”
They are the “most unhinged in the Democratic Party.”
They are the “pro-Hamas wing, the antifa people.”
In reality, No Kings featured millions of mostly white, mostly middle-class citizens over the age of 50. For some, demands were specific. (“Abolish ICE,” for instance.) For most, the protest was a necessity reaffirmation of America’s most basic republican virtues, for instance, that the people are sovereign and the Constitution is law.
As my senator, Chris Murphy, said of Trump:
“The truth is that he is enacting a detailed step-by-step plan to try to destroy all of the things that protect our democracy: free speech, fair elections and independent press, the right to peacefully protest. But the truth is he has not won yet. The people still rule in this country.”
Until now, the president has been able to convince elites in the media, corporations, universities, law firms and even the Democratic Party that he was an unstoppable force, practically an act of God. And in effect, that’s what he became, after they surrendered without a fight. No one dared bloody the bully’s nose. So he became a de facto king.
Things look different now that his nose is bloodied. Those who oppose him are more emboldened. Those who caved are humiliated and discredited. But mostly, the facade has fallen to expose a weakness present all along. His power is determined by the willingness of his enemies to defeat themselves. Now that they refuse, he’s furious.
The common folk are supposed to roll over the way their betters did. Yet here they are, reaffirming America’s bedrock democratic principles, as if they were entitled to them. The worst part is they are from a class of Americans that has the least to lose and the most to gain by opposing him. Under the banner of the most benign political demand — No Kings — they pose the greatest threat. If they were Black or brown, or Muslim or trans, his smears against them might work. But as it is, Trump is making comfortably middle-class white people over the age of 50 feel like warriors in the rebellion against the crown.
To be sure, Trump will escalate. The first thing a bully does after getting bloodied is look around for victims he believes will not fight back. Indeed, after the rally, he said, “Don't forget I can use the Insurrection Act. Fifty percent of the presidents almost have used that. And that's unquestioned power." There’s no telling how far he will go.
But the point has been made. Trump is not invincible. He is not infallible. He is not inevitable. And in reacting to the momentum that’s building against him — with a turd post — he’s making the point himself more persuasively than 7 million Americans can. He’s deepening the obscenity of his illegitimate rule by becoming even more obscene.
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In deep purple North Carolina, Republicans no longer even pretend not to cheat
There’s a strong argument to be made that North Carolina Republicans have, for many years, not been serious about adhering to legal and constitutional norms when it comes to the state’s elections.
In 2016, former state Rep. David Lewis (a man later convicted of multiple felonies) proclaimed on the House floor during a redistricting debate that he and his colleagues had intentionally rigged a new U.S. House map to guarantee a 10-3 Republican majority in a deeply purple state in which Democratic candidates frequently win the most votes — only because, Lewis said, he couldn’t figure out a way to make the map 11-2.
Ever since then, GOP leaders have made it plain that winning and accumulating power are all that matters. Any subsequent statements about fair and honest elections were merely a smokescreen designed to provide a crutch for friendly judges overseeing inevitable post-election court cases and/or to con a distracted public.
That said, professions of pure motives have remained a regular feature of the Republicans’ public approach to election law. Common sense – and ultimately, a Trump-appointed federal judge – confirmed that it was baloney, but even GOP state Supreme Court candidate Jefferson Griffin went to extreme lengths earlier this year to at least pay lip service to the notion that his effort to overturn Justice Allison Riggs’ narrow victory in the November election by tossing thousands of legally cast votes was somehow motivated by a commitment to justice.
As has been made clear in recent days, however, this disingenuous game-playing has finally been officially abandoned. As NC Newsline’s Brandon Kingdollar reported, both state Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger (R-Rockingham) and House Speaker Destin Hall (R-Caldwell) made this remarkable fact crystal clear last week when they took to social media to admit that the new U.S. House map GOP legislators intend to pass into law this week is motivated by but one factor: doing the bidding of President Trump.
This is from Hall:
“President Trump earned a clear mandate from the voters of North Carolina and the rest of the country, and we intend to defend it by drawing an additional Republican Congressional seat.”
And this was from Berger (a man who, two decades ago, sponsored bipartisan legislation to turn the state’s redistricting process over to an independent commission), in a statement on social media after the map’s release Thursday:
“The #NCGA is ready to help Republicans secure Congress and move @realDonaldTrump’s agenda forward!”
It’s important that North Carolinians grasp the substance and significance of these statements and the dramatic and deeply troubling sea change they represent in how laws are being made in our state.
Two of the most important elected leaders in North Carolina have now publicly admitted that they are willfully and quite cheerfully trashing one of the most fundamental premises of representative government — the idea that the composition of a legislative body should at least do a reasonable job of representing the voters who elected it — in favor of a crude and blatant power grab.
This represents a stunning new low in the Republican-led march toward autocracy.
Sure, there’s nothing new about gerrymandering. Both parties have engaged in it regularly down through the years — often disguised in hypocritical pretenses — but never in such a blatant, crude and overtly anti-democratic way.
GOP defenders may try to claim that Berger and Hall’s overt bragging about their actions and motives is somehow refreshingly honest, but that ignores the way it degrades our democracy. When our leaders stop even pretending that they are motivated by anything other than raw power, longstanding fundamental premises of democratic government and fair play are relegated to very thin ice indeed.
And of course, the statements themselves represent an outrageous perversion of how representative government is supposed to work.
Earth to Sen. Berger and Rep. Hall: the composition of Congress has nothing at all to do with who happens to sit in the White House. And even if it somehow did, the fact that Trump eked out 50.8 percent of the vote in last year’s North Carolina presidential contest hardly represents a “clear mandate.”
To the contrary, last year’s election represents but the latest in a long line of races in which North Carolinians have repeatedly shown themselves to be a closely divided lot that leans toward a desire for political dialogue and compromise, not Trump’s ongoing radical assault on the national social contract.
Tragically, at this point, there’s little if anything North Carolinians can do to resist this latest assault on their democracy. State law gives the General Assembly virtual carte blanche to rig electoral maps without the Governor’s approval, and Republican judges have repeatedly rubberstamped such schemes.
As noted in this space a couple months’ back, the best hope for both our state and nation is that those who reject this latest perversion will eventually win enough elections so that they’re able to overturn it and, at last, usher in a system of independent and lawful redistricting. One prays that the decision of Republicans to stop pretending about who they are and what they’re up to will ultimately help abet the process.
- Senior contributor and award-winning journalist Rob Schofield authors regular commentaries and hosts the 'News & Views' weekly radio show/podcast. A part of NC Newsline since 2006, he served as editor from 2017 to 2025 and, prior to that, worked for many years as an attorney championing the rights of low-income people and civil liberties.
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This man wants to steal your vote — and cement GOP minority control
America is at war over partisan gerrymandering. The Republican-controlled Texas legislature has just gerrymandered voting districts to create five more safe Republican US House seats, as demanded by Donald Trump.
Then Missouri Republicans were ordered by Trump to enact a gerrymander to increase the states’ disproportionate Republican minority from 6-2 to 7-1 by cutting Democratic-leaning Kansas City districts down the middle. Now Vice President JD Vance is urging Indiana Republicans to gerrymander the only two remaining Democratic House districts out of existence.
In response, California Governor Gavin Newsom has proposed a ballot measure that would temporarily suspend California’s independent redistricting commission until 2030 and let the Democratic legislature redistrict Republicans out of five seats to match what Republicans have done in Texas.
A large majority of voters nationally don’t think partisan gerrymandering should be legal. According to a recent YouGov poll, 69 percent of Americans think partisan gerrymandering should be illegal and only 9 percent think it should be legal.
Chief Justice John Roberts (and all of his Republican colleagues on the Supreme Court) disagree with this vast majority of Americans. In 2019, Roberts’ 5-4 majority opinion in Rucho v Common Cause (the chief joined by the four other Republicans on the Court) held that federal courts do not have the constitutional power to prevent partisan gerrymandering and restored blatantly partisan gerrymanders in North Carolina and Maryland.
Since Roberts’ decision, partisan gerrymandering has exploded. According to Michael Li of the Brennan Center, partisan gerrymandering has given Republicans 16 extra seats in the House. Without that, Democrats would have a House majority and Republicans would not have been able to pass the so-called “big beautiful bill” which has led to a government shutdown.
As the Brennan Center states, “Gerrymandering decided House control.”
Roberts’ opinion conceded that partisan gerrymandering is “incompatible with democratic institutions” and “leads to results that reasonably seem unjust.” But Roberts then invented a procedural technicality to bar federal courts from doing anything about it or to uphold the Constitutional principle of “one person, one vote.”
Roberts claimed that partisan gerrymandering is a so-called “political question” that federal courts have no right to answer and must be left to the states.
Of course, when one party controls the state legislature, they have every incentive to draw voting districts to guarantee they never lose political power, no matter what the view of the voters is. Voters don’t get to pick their own legislators. Instead, legislators get to pick their voters.
In her dissent in Rucho — joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Stephen Breyer —Justice Eleanor Kagan wrote:
"For the first time ever, this court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because [Roberts] thinks the task is beyond judicial capabilities. And not just any constitutional violation. The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the right participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance their political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives. In so doing, the partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy ... enabl[ing] politicians to entrench themselves in office as against voters' preferences ... They encouraged a politics of polarization and disfunction."
Is it any wonder that a New York Times/Siena poll taken last week found that only 33 percent of voters believe that America’s political system can still address the nation’s problems, while 64 percent believe the political system is too politically divided to solve the nation’s problems?
As former Senate Judiciary Committee counsel Lisa Graves argues in a new book, “[I]n the last 20 years the US Supreme Court has radically curtailed voting rights, undermined anti-corruption measures, encouraged extreme political gerrymandering, restricted the regulation of guns, and obliterated the constitutional right to control one’s reproductive choices. This transformation was orchestrated by a billionaire-backed reactionary political movement, whose interests Chief Justice John Roberts has been all too willing to serve.”
Citizens have no power to overturn a US Supreme Court decision. However, California citizens have the ability to equalize Texas Republicans’ gerrymander of five House seats.
On Nov. 4, they can pass Proposition 50 which lets the state legislature temporarily draw new congressional district maps through 2030, at which point the Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission would resume control of redistricting, and supports nonpartisan redistricting commissions nationwide.
It won’t completely block Roberts’ 20-year project to undermine democracy and judicially enact the increasingly MAGA Republican agenda. (It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call it a “judicial coup”.)
Indeed, last week, SCOTUS heard oral arguments in a case where it appears that Roberts will lead the Republican majority to overturn Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act which protects the right of Black voters to have electoral representation. Such a ruling could likely flip as many as 19 House seats from Democratic to Republican, cementing a Republican House majority for the foreseeable future, regardless of the will of the voters.
Passing Proposition 50 is one thing Californians can do to fight back against Justice Roberts’ undemocratic judicial campaign, which has helped enable Trump’s authoritarianism. Mail-in ballots have already been sent out so California voters can cast “Yes” votes for Proposition 50 from now until Nov. 4.
Beyond that, thanks to John Roberts and his Republican colleagues on SCOTUS, other blue states will have to be brought into the gerrymander wars and enact their own partisan gerrymanders, to balance Republican gerrymanders to the extent possible.
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Trump just took a vicious bruising — here's how we land the knockout blow
No Kings 2.0 was a huge success. More than 7 million (by some estimates, more than 8 million) showed up. We were peaceful. We were patriotic (many of us waved American flags). We stuck to one message: that we refuse to live under a dictator. We had fun (the costumes and signs were fabulous). We felt powerful in our solidarity.
And we are powerful.
What’s next? How do we use that power? What should we do now? I’ll leave to others bigger or more dramatic suggestions. Mine boil down to a dozen simple ones:
1. Organize for the 2026 midterms
Millions of us just participated in one of the largest demonstrations in American history. The most important thing we do with that power is wrest back control of Congress from zombie Republicans who are rubber-stamping whatever Trump wants. Otherwise, we will continue to lose our democracy and rule of law to this tyrant. We must:
- Counter-balance Republican gerrymandering in red states with, at least temporarily, Democratic gerrymandering in blue states (in California, be sure to vote YES on Proposition 50).
- Work with local, county, and state grassroots organizations to identify qualified voters who rarely vote, and make sure they do so next year.
- Organize young people to participate and vote.
- Make sure everyone you know — including friends and relations who have voted Republican in the past — are aware of the stakes in the midterms, and vote against Trump Republican candidates and incumbents.
2. Protect the decent and hardworking members of our communities who are undocumented
This is an urgent moral call to action. As Trump’s ICE continues its vicious roundups and deportations, many of our neighbors and friends are endangered and understandably frightened.
If you haven’t done so already, consider forming an unofficial “sanctuary community” that widely shares information about where ICE agents are located, where ICE raids are occurring, and how ICE is violating the rights of people here legally as well as the undocumented, and that takes videos of what ICE is doing and provides those videos to local and national media.
It’s especially important to protect access to schools, public hospitals, and courthouses. Undocumented parents should not feel afraid to send their children to school. Undocumented people who are ill, including those with communicable diseases, must not be afraid to go to clinics and hospitals for treatment. People who believe they are here legally should never be afraid to report to court.
If you trust your mayor or city manager, check in with their offices to see what they are doing to protect vulnerable families in your community.
If you haven’t done so already, I recommend you order these red cards from Immigrant Legal Resource Center and make them available in and around your community: Red Cards/Tarjetas Rojas. You might also find this of use: Immigration Preparedness Toolkit.
3. Help people who are losing jobs and benefits
Tump’s cruel budget is eliminating food stamps for hundreds of thousands of Americans and reducing or eliminating health insurance for millions more by cutting Affordable Care Act subsidies and making it harder for people to qualify for Medicaid.
The federal government shutdown gives Democrats bargaining leverage to extend the expiring Obamacare premium subsidies in order to head off a spike in insurance premiums for more than 22 million Americans.
But the shutdown is creating its own hardships — such as eliminating paychecks for two million federal workers. Trump is also using the shutdown to fire tens of thousands of federal workers.
As a result, our generosity is needed now more than ever — to support community food pantries, local food banks, community charities, and shelters.
4. Call your members of Congress
Phone your representative and your two senators. If they’re Democrats, tell them that as their constituent you support the shutdown as a way to extend Obamacare subsidies, and ask them to hang in there.
If they’re Republicans, tell them that as their constituent you demand they join Democrats to extend the Obamacare subsidies, and also stop doing whatever Trump wants.
Never underestimate the power of a constituent phone call. Every office keeps track of how many there are and what they’re supporting or opposing.
The Capitol Hill switchboard number is (202) 224-3121. The switchboard operator will connect you to your representative or senators.
5. Protect LGBTQ+ and Black and brown members of our communities
Trump and his lapdogs are already making life more difficult for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other people — through executive orders, changes in laws, alterations in civil rights laws, and changes in how such laws are enforced.
The Trump regime is also changing laws to favor white people and disfavor people of color. He is prioritizing white refugees over refugees of color. He is strong-arming corporations to eliminate programs that have fostered diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Trump’s rhetoric is encouraging hatefulness.
Please be vigilant against prejudice and bigotry, wherever it might break out. When you see or hear it, call it out. Join with others to stop it. If you trust your local city officials, get them involved. If you trust your local police, alert them as well.
6. Participate in or organize boycotts of companies that are enabling the Trump regime — starting with Tesla, X, Amazon, Home Depot, Walmart, and Palantir Technologies
Never underestimate the effectiveness of consumer boycotts. Corporations invest heavily in their brand names and the goodwill associated with them. Loud, boisterous, attention-getting boycotts can harm brand names and reduce the value of corporations’ shares of stock.
7. Support groups litigating against Trump
Some of the most important measures for resisting Trump are occurring in the federal courts. Groups behind this litigation include the American Civil Liberties Union, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, Center for Biological Diversity, Environmental Defense Fund, Southern Poverty Law Center, and Common Cause. They deserve your support.
In addition, Lowell & Associates, Democracy Defenders Fund, and the Washington Litigation Group are representing clients battling to get their jobs back, avoid prosecutions, and recoup millions of dollars that Trump has illegally blocked.
8. Spread the truth
Get accurate news through reliable sources, and spread it. If you hear anyone spreading lies and Trump propaganda, contradict them with facts and their sources.
Here are some of the sources I currently rely on for the truth: Democracy Now, Business Insider, The New Yorker, The American Prospect, The Atlantic, Americans for Tax Fairness, Economic Policy Institute, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, The Guardian, ProPublica, Labor Notes, The Lever, Popular Information, The Bulwark, Heather Cox Richardson, and, of course, this Substack.
9. Join coworkers in getting employers to resist Trump
If you work for a university, law firm, media company, museum, or any other organization that is being pressured (or could be) by the Trump regime to surrender its autonomy to the regime, urge them not to.
Join with your coworkers, colleagues, and alumni to pressure boards of directors and trustees, explaining that it’s impossible to appease a dictator. Join with other organizations or companies in the same industry to demand resistance. Most labor unions are on the right side — seeking to build worker power and resist repression. Support them by joining picket lines and boycotts and encouraging employees to organize in places you patronize.
10. Push for progressive measures in our communities and states
Local and state governments retain significant power for good. Join groups that are moving our cities and states forward, in sharp contrast to regressive moves at the federal level by Trump and his lapdogs.
Lobby, instigate, organize, and fundraise for progressive leaders and legislators. Support higher taxes on the wealthy and on big corporations to finance affordable housing, health care, child care, and elder care.
11. Meanwhile, keep the faith. Do not give up on America
Remember, Trump won the popular vote by only 1.5 points. By any historical measure, this was a squeaker. In the House, the Republicans’ lead is the smallest since the Great Depression. In the Senate, Republicans lost half of 2024’s competitive Senate races, including in four states Trump won.
America has deep problems, to be sure. Which is why we can’t give up on it — or give up the fights for social justice, equal political rights, equal opportunity, and the rule of law. The forces of Trumpian repression and neofascism would like nothing better than for us to give up. Then they’d win it all. We cannot allow them to. We will never give up.
12. Finally, please be sure to find room in your life for joy, fun, and laughter. We must not let Trump and his darkness take us over
Just as it’s important not to give up the fight, it’s critically important to take care of ourselves. If we obsess about Trump and fall down the rabbit hole of outrage, worry, and anxiety, we won’t be able to keep fighting.
Be careful. Be strong. Hug your loved ones. We will win this.
- 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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Trump just committed yet another felony — and this time he knows he's been seen
The president says he has the power to pay members of the military even though the government’s fiscal year ended on Sept. 30.
That may seem acceptable. After all, why should those who serve the country suffer while partisans blame each other for the shutdown?
It isn’t acceptable.
Donald Trump has taken yet another criminal step toward conditions that allow him to do virtually anything with the people’s money, even maintaining an army to occupy cities as if they were the colonies of some distant empire. The president’s move is a reminder of the original anti-theft meaning of “no taxation without representation.” With each new move, this would-be king is setting things up so the Democrats can’t say yes to reopening the government without coronating him.
Right now, the story of the shutdown goes like this.
Trump and the Republicans want the Democrats to sign off on a continuing resolution (CR), so the government is funded this year at similar levels as last year.
The Democrats say they would if Trump and the Republicans agreed to renewing federal (Obamacare) health insurance subsidies expanded during the Covid pandemic.
As of now, the Democrats seem to have the upper hand. They do not control any of the three branches of government. News of the coming spike in premiums is reaching GOP voters. Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a high-profile Forever Trumper, blames her party. Polling continues to indicate that majorities agree with her.
So far, this story suggests the Democrats are on the brink of victory.
The story itself, however, isn’t keeping up with changing conditions.
First, it does not account for the administration’s habit of impounding congressionally appropriated funding. It has been breaking the law, and violating Article 1 of the Constitution, by refusing to send federal money wherever the Congress has said it shall go.
This pattern became more pointed after the shutdown on Sept. 30 in what Don Moynihan has called “ideological targeting.” The Times reported that $27 billion in funding is being expressly held from Democratic districts.
Even if the Democrats get what they want, and the president says yes to renewing Obamacare subsidies, the Democrats must still face the near-certainty that his administration will cheat them. (They must also face the House speaker’s stated intention to claw back, or rescind, money by way of reconciliation bills requiring only a simple majority.)
So already, the Democrats are demanding much more than help for Americans facing skyrocketing health insurance premiums. They are demanding that the president cede the power that he has taken through criminal means (with the Republican Party’s blessing). They are using their leverage, by way of the filibuster, to pull Trump back from the brink of dictatorship. That’s the whole story — or it was.
Now, with news about military pay, the story takes a different and more consequential turn. In addition to illegally impounding funds appropriated by the Congress, the administration is now taking money that Congress intended for a particular purpose to be spent during a particular time, and moving it around to meet the president’s needs.
Specifically, the administration is moving money from an account the Congress intended to be spent on research and development, and moving it to an account to pay members of the armed services. I don’t know if that’s embezzlement, per se, but I do know it’s a violation of the Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7 of the US Constitution, which was written to make sure the people don’t lose control of their money.
I know something else thanks to Bobby Kogan at the Center for American Progress. This move by the White House is a blatant and willful violation of the Antideficiency Act, a law meant to clear up any question about whether it’s a felony for anyone in government to spend any money on anything that’s not approved by the Congress.
And it is.
What’s also clear is Trump’s latest crime (for now, let’s call it embezzlement) progressed from the previous crime (impoundment). That seems to me a logical evolution that began with the idea that the Constitution and subsequent federal law are mere suggestions. And that this progress happened is itself an indication that it will continue, if left unchecked. The worst-case scenario is no longer theoretical.
Under normal circumstances, blue cities and states subsidize red states. They send more tax dollars to Washington than they get in return. However, under a president who’s stealing the people’s power to control their money, the pattern could turn openly exploitative. Blue cities especially could be seen as no more than colonies whose wealth is to be extracted and whose populations are to be controlled. That future may not be plausible yet, but it’s not impossible, as it would be the natural, criminal consequence of taxation without representation.
Which brings me back to the Democrats. First, they can’t make a deal with Trump without being complicit in making any of the above horrors real. Second, they are the only remedy. Trump is not going to prosecute himself. Federal courts of law might be an option, but just getting a hearing would require proof of standing, which would be a high bar even if the Supreme Court were not corrupted. (The Republican Party, meanwhile, is happy to let all the criming happen.)
If a remedy cannot be found in federal law enforcement or the federal courts (or the national Republican Party), then what? If there is to be an American republic in more than name, there must be serious consequences for a lawless executive stealing “the power of the purse” from the American people. As New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, only the Democrats can be those consequences.
How? I can’t say I know exactly. What I can say is the Republicans seem to be aware of being watched. Senate Majority Leader John Thune referenced last weekend’s No King’s protest, for instance. Perhaps he feared the effect it might have on public perception of the shutdown.
People might understand the stakes are about far more health insurance premiums. If big enough, the protest could expose the lie that the Democrats are pandering to their base, increasing the legitimacy of their resistance to Trump. Most of all, the protest could affirm for us our origin story, which is that all men are created equal and that equality is impossible under the illegitimate rule of kings.
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These radical steps are essential now — or Trump will crush any resistance
The No Kings Day protests last weekend were breathtaking. Seven million or more Americans filled streets, explicitly condemning the way Trump has been running our country. They carried handmade signs, sang freedom songs, and for one afternoon reminded the nation that resistance still burns hot.
But here’s the hard truth: that energy, that passion, that righteousness means very little if it doesn’t translate into structure and leadership. Movements that fail to coalesce around leaders and build institutions typically die in the glare of their own moral light or fail to produce results.
We’ve seen it before. The Women’s March drew millions. Occupy Wall Street electrified a generation. Black Lives Matter shook the conscience of the nation. But without leadership, durable organizations, funding networks, and consistent strategy, these movements faded from the political field as quickly as they filled it.
Protests without public faces and follow-through are like fireworks. Beautiful, brief, and gone before the smoke clears.
The last time I saw my late buddy Tom Hayden was when we were both speaking in Dubrovnik, Croatia some years ago. I was doing my radio program live from there and we reminisced on the air about SDS, the organization he helped start with the Port Huron Statement and I was a member of in East Lansing.
Like the American Revolution, the Civil Rights movement, the union movement, and the women’s suffrage movements before it, SDS’s success in helping end the war in Vietnam didn’t just come from mass mobilizations (although they helped), but flowed out of an organizational structure and local and national leaders who could articulate a single specific demand to end the war.
As Frederick Douglass famously said in 1857, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” That demand must be loud, specific, recurrent, and backed by organization and leadership.
When the Occupy movement, for example, was taken over by a group of well-intentioned people who insisted that no leaders or institutions emerge within it, they doomed it to obscurity.
Donald Trump’s neofascist administration understands this dynamic; it’s why they came down so brutally on student leaders in the campus anti-genocide protests. They succeeded in preventing either institution or leadership from emerging in a meaningful way.
Modern protests often reward attention, not action. Social media loves the march, the chant, the sign, and the photo that goes viral. Trump’s people complain and mutter about “hate America marches” but generally tolerate them, assuming they’ll fizzle out like Occupy did. The click feels like participation.
But power never bends to viral content. While the George Floyd protests did produce some changes, those (particularly DEI) are aggressively being rolled back by Republicans with little protest because there’s no institution or leadership to lead the protest against their retrograde actions.
Authoritarian politicians understand this better than anyone. They know that a protest can be permitted because as long as it limits itself to protest it burns itself out. A million tweets feel like movement, but they evaporate by morning. The noise is cathartic, and the system stays the same.
Real change doesn’t happen on the screen or even in the streets. It happens in the precincts, in the county offices, in the long nights where volunteers count ballots or knock on doors. With education, spokespeople, and specific demands.
The campaign of Zohran Mamdani for New York City mayor is a great example; here we’re seeing real leadership and an effective organization that he’s built around his candidacy. It’ll be an inspiration for an entire new generation.
That’s the difference between the America that not just marched in movements but also created organizations with structure, leadership, and a specific vision of the future they’re fighting for.
The movements of the 1960s, for example, changed America because they had leadership, structure, and strategy. The civil rights, labor, and antiwar movements were powered by organizations like the SCLC, SNCC, SDS, and the United Farm Workers. Leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Tom Hayden, and Dolores Huerta trained others, built networks, and turned protest into policy.
Those marches were not spontaneous. They were the culmination of years of organizing in churches, union halls, on campuses, and in living rooms. King’s March on Washington was not the movement; it was the exclamation point on a decade of strategy.
Today, our movements are broader, younger, and more diverse, but also largely fragmented and leaderless. Social media spreads outrage faster than ever, but it can’t replace the disciplined institutions that have historically held movements together. If we’re to save American democracy, we can’t only have bursts of energy without long-term direction.
It is not that people lack courage; they lack coordination. The rightwing oligarchs intent on destroying our democracy built their empire from the ground up with the Powell Memo and, more recently, Project 2025 as specific blueprints.
For more than 40 years, the Republican Party has been playing a long game. While Democrats chased the next election cycle, conservatives built a media empire.
They invested in talk radio, cable news, think tanks, and local media outlets. They funded the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, ALEC, and a constellation of dark-money groups that shape laws before most people even hear about them. They worked the school boards, city councils, and state legislatures. They didn’t just build candidates. They built infrastructure.
And it paid off.
When a bought-off, well-bribed Clarence Thomas delivered the deciding vote in Citizens United v. FEC in 2010 to legalize bribery of judges and politicians, that decision’s infrastructure became their weapon of choice. Suddenly billionaires and corporations could pour unlimited, even anonymous, money into the political bloodstream. And, most significantly, the right already had the arteries and veins in place.
While progressives held rallies, conservatives bought the megaphones, built the institutions, and found, elevated, and empowered leaders and spokespeople. The result is a minority rightwing movement that dominates America through structure and leadership, not popularity or protest.
Democrats have good people, good policies, and good intentions but lack a unified strategy and clear leadership. Too often, the party reacts instead of leads. It posts instead of plans. It wins headlines and loses legislatures. It’s most senior people often dither rather than project power and leadership.
Right now, when the right pushes disinformation and chaos, the left too often offers silence or even confusion. We need a structure that says: here is the America we would govern, and here are the people ready to govern it.
Money is speech, the Court told us. But that was a lie designed to cement oligarchy. Citizens United allowed the wealthy to flood elections with cash, to buy influence, to capture regulators, and to shape policy without accountability.
The result is an American political economy that serves the powerful and distracts the rest. Billionaires fund propaganda networks that pretend to be news. They back think tanks that write laws to protect monopolies and suppress wages. They fill campaign coffers so thoroughly that elected officials become their employees.
This is not a conspiracy theory: it’s an accounting statement. Follow the money and you’ll find the fingerprints of the same handful of billionaire and corporate donors behind almost every regressive policy of the last two decades.
The GOP didn’t just accept this system. They engineered it. And they exploit it to this day.
If democracy is to survive, Democrats — and small-d democrats— must build an infrastructure that competes on a similar footing. That means fundraising systems that depend on millions of small donors instead of a few billionaires. It means community-level leadership development. It means institutions that outlast elections. And it requires specific demands.
Real resistance begins with message discipline. Every Democrat, every progressive organization, every citizen who believes in democracy must be part of a single, steady chorus: defend democracy, restore the middle class, protect the planet, guarantee healthcare and education for all, and — most important — get big money out of politics while establishing a legal right to vote.
The right repeats its talking points until they become accepted truth. We must do the same, only with facts, compassion, and moral clarity.
Endurance is just as essential, and in that sense Indivisible — the one organization that’s really emerged so far to lead this movement — has gotten us off to a great start.
The movement, however, can’t fade when the crowds disperse or when social media moves on. It has to grow in the off-season, in county offices, at organizing meetings, in living rooms, and in campaign trainings that prepare the next generation of leaders.
Change starts locally, which is where you can volunteer and show up. Conservatives understood long ago that power begins on school boards, city councils, and election commissions. They built from the ground up while progressives often looked to Washington. If we’re serious about reclaiming democracy, it must start in those same local arenas where laws are written and values are taught.
We must also be clear about what we stand for. Protest is not policy.
Real policy means repealing Schedule F, protecting voting rights, restoring oversight, enforcing antitrust laws, taxing concentrated wealth, defending reproductive freedom, guaranteeing healthcare and education for every American, making it as hard to take away your vote as it is to take away your gun, and finally removing the corrupting influence of money from our political system.
These are not slogans: they’re the foundation of a functioning democracy, which has been dismantled bit by bit over the years by the billionaires who own the GOP.
And none of this will succeed longterm without strong progressive media. We need to restore and support newsrooms and platforms that report truth, tell stories that matter, and counter the billionaires’ propaganda networks. If we fail to shape the narrative, those who profit from lies will continue to shape it for us.
Finally, real resistance requires action with purpose. Outrage alone changes nothing. When the powerful refuse to listen, we must act with the same courage that fueled the labor movement and the fight for civil rights. Strikes, boycotts, confronting violence with nonviolence, and coordinated economic pressure are how ordinary people force extraordinary change.
As Jefferson, Lincoln, Douglass, Addams, King, Chavez, Newton, and Hayden (among others) taught us, history moves when citizens organize, persist, and make injustice impossible to ignore.
The right has been building its machine since the Powell Memo in 1971. The left must start today. We must be as disciplined, organized, and relentless as they are, but with a moral compass that points toward democracy to counter their fascist project.
The No Kings Day protesters reminded the world that America still has a conscience. But a conscience without a plan is a sermon without a church.
The next phase of this movement must be structural. We need think tanks, training programs, legal defense funds, local newspapers, coordinated communication networks, and candidates ready to lead at every level. We need to replace despair with design and get inside and animate the Democratic Party.
Democracy is not defended by hashtags. It’s defended by hands, millions of them, building, voting, organizing, and refusing to quit when the cameras are gone.
The No Kings Day marches were righteous and inspiring. But history will not remember the crowd: it will remember what the crowd built.
If we want a nation of citizens and not subjects, we must do the slow, steady, unglamorous work of taking back our republic, one precinct, one institution, and one election at a time.
Volunteer for your local Democratic Party and become a precinct committeeperson. Join Indivisible. Run for local office and participate with local pro-democracy organizations. Show up.
That is the revolution worth marching for.
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It wasn't their love for Hitler that got these poor suckers booted from the GOP
While I was off last week writing about Kansas journalists of the past, Kansas journalists of the present had a hell of a story drop in their laps.
Kansas Young Republican leaders were caught exchanging racist, homophobic and white supremacist messages through a group chat with others of their ilk throughout the nation. First reported by Politico, the messages included vice chairman William Hendrix using the words “n–ga” and “n–guh” and saying he admired an adjoining state’s GOP because “Missouri doesn’t like f–s.” Chairman Alex Dwyer used the racist code number “1488,” reacted with a happy face to another Young Republican saying he loved Hitler, and — somewhat perplexingly — wrote that “sex is gay.”
High-profile Kansas Republicans promptly denounced the two men, going out of their way to claim their words didn’t represent the party. Hendrix, who worked in Attorney General Kris Kobach’s office, was fired.
That’s all well and good. But was it enough? Does it actually address the dark clouds of hatred rolling across our state?
If you catch me on a good day, I might say yes. If you catch me on a particularly cranky day, I might say it doesn’t come close. So I wrote two versions of my take, and you can pick the one you prefer. Make sure to read through the end, though, because that’s where we figure out what’s actually happening.
The nice version
Kansas Republican leaders have shown that they have more courage and moral fortitude than U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance.
In quickly and unequivocally denouncing the hate-filled messages from Kansas Young Republicans, party leaders have taken a painful but necessary step. A country with two main political parties can not allow one of them to become a haven for racism, misogyny, homophobia and Nazi sympathizers.
For his part, the vice president claimed last week that too much was made of the messages — that “kids do stupid things, especially young boys.” Never mind that Young Republicans include those aged 18 to 40. His words might sound hypocritical, given that he just demanded mass punishments against those criticizing the late Charlie Kirk, but he was elected vice president, and you weren’t.
Thankfully, Kansas GOP bigwigs took a more honest and searching look. They even deactivated the state’s Young Republicans chapter. All those who spoke out — Kobach, state party chairwoman Danedri Herbert, Senate President Ty Masterson, former Gov. Jeff Colyer and insurance Commissioner Vicki Schmidt should be praised for understanding the seriousness of the moment and the necessity of acting quickly and decisively.
The mean version
Kansas GOP leaders have turned a blind eye to racism, homophobia and violent rhetoric for years.
Statements from prominent Republicans in the state have proclaimed that these shameful text messages don’t represent the party or what it stands for.
But as someone who has followed and covered Kansas politics for the last decade, I can tell you that these messages absolutely reflect a growing tendency within the party — especially the beliefs and rhetoric of younger staffers and activists.
Party leaders could have stepped in at any point to stop this problem. Kobach, Masterson and House Speaker Dan Hawkins could have said that while they might not support legislation protecting LGBTQ+ Kansas children, they believe that everyone should be treated with dignity and respect — including gay and trans folks. Instead, they strip fellow Kansans of life-saving medical care and persecute them through government agencies.
They could have actually forced Rep. Nick Hoheisel, R-Wichita, to face consequences after clashing with a Rep. Ford Carr, D-Wichita, on the House floor. They could have condemned actions by Reps. Patrick Penn, R-Wichita, and Kyler Sweely, R-Hutchinson, after they joked about shooting former Hutchinson Rep. Jason Probst. They could have cautioned Rep. Kristey Williams, R-Augusta, that focusing on the hurt feelings of “a little white girl” in learning about racism missed the point. They could have pushed back against transphobic rhetoric from former Rep. Cheryl Helmer, R-Mulvane. They could have condemned racist incidents faced by Rep. Rui Xu, D-Westwood. The GOP-supermajority House couldn’t even bring itself to oppose racism while passing a bill declaring antisemitism against the public policy of Kansas.
For that matter, party leaders could made it clear that they didn’t want to associate with Kobach after accusations that he employed white nationalists.
But here we are. We’ve lived through years of willful blindness to shameful bias. Kansas GOP leaders were more than happy to continue paying these folks’ salaries and allowing them to serve in government. Until last week, no one paid much of a penalty for racism, homophobia or violent rhetoric. (At least if that person was a Republican. Democrats who point this out can face dire consequences.)
The only reason bigwigs blinked this time was that a story appeared in a national outlet and included clear proof of these activists’ words. That’s it. Other reporting — like the multiple instances I’ve just mentioned — are dismissed as distractions at best and partisan attacks at worst.
Meanwhile, the Kansas Republican Party has leaned into racist trolling during the government shutdown. In social media posts, they put Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly in a sombrero and Department for Children and Families secretary Laura Howard in a Mexican wresting mask. Maybe you find the images funny, maybe you don’t, but I’m not sure how you can square them with Herbert’s claim that “we strive to eliminate racism and we condemn all racist acts and groups.”
Democrats have run people who say terrible things too. The Kansas party has faced its own internal strife. Partisans can lob “whatabouts” until their arms get tired.
But this story is about the Kansas Republican Party and its leaders. Until they clean house and turn their backs on years of winking and nodding at the worst among us, they have no standing to lecture anyone else about morality or good judgment. They have proved that they lack both.
The other version
I’m afraid that neither of the preceding versions of this column cover everything. As I thought about the situation more, I came to a conclusion that’s neither nice nor mean.
Kansas Republican leaders have nothing to lose by cutting young idiots loose. The ongoing GOP project in Kansas has one goal, and one goal alone: lowering tax rates for the obscenely wealthy and reducing restrictions on their businesses.
Any other controversy or infighting distracts from those goals.
People like William Hendrix and Alex Dwyer might have seen themselves as important to the state party and its future. Instead, they were pawns being used by entrenched oligarchs to further cement their power in the Sunflower State. The instant that these men became a liability for the state party, they were excommunicated. Masterson went out of his way to “categorically deny any association” with either.
The big-money interests who want to turn Kansas into a zero-tax paradise read the big national newspapers and websites. They don’t want to be embarrassed. A splashy story from Politico threatens their goals in a way that local news stories don’t.
Put succinctly, they can live with racism until it harms their larger project. Then, all those poor suckers who ironically embraced Hitler find themselves on the street.
In Kansas, like a casino, the owner always wins.
Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
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