When accountability speaks, Trump oinks back
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
This horrifying comment exposed an ugly truth about America
When Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) arrived at the White House yesterday, he was met by a Marine band, officers on horseback carrying the Saudi and American flags, and fighter jets flying over the White House in a V formation.
It was far more pomp than visiting foreign leaders normally receive.
What had the crown prince done to merit such honor from the United States?
He has helped broker a tentative peace between Hamas and Israel. But so have Egypt, Qatar, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates.
The real reason for the honor is that MBS and the Saudis are doing lots of business with Trump’s family — and this visit is part of the payoff.
It’s MBS’s effort to rehabilitate his reputation after Saudi operatives murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and chopped his body into pieces with a bone saw: a killing that U.S. intelligence determined was greenlit by MBS.
But in yesterday’s joint Oval Office appearance — freighted with flattery between Trump and MBS — Trump brushed off a reporter’s question about MBS and the murder.
“A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about, whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen,” said Trump, referring to Khashoggi.
Things happen?
When the reporter then asked MBS about the finding by U.S. intelligence, Trump quickly interjected:
“He knew nothing about it. You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking something like that.”
All of which raises once again the question of who is honored in this upside-down Trump era, and who is subject to shame and disgrace.
Larry Summers, who had been secretary of the treasury under Bill Clinton and a high official in the Obama White House, said Monday he was “deeply ashamed” about his relationship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and therefore would be “stepping back” from all public engagements as he works to “rebuild trust and repair relationships.”
New details of Summers’s relationship with Epstein emerged last week when a House committee released emails showing years of correspondence between the two men, including Summers’s sexist comments and his seeking Epstein’s romantic advice.
Consultants who specialize in rehabilitating the reputations of public figures often advise that they begin with a full public apology, along with a period in which they “step back” out of the limelight.
What separates consultant-driven contrition from the real thing depends on whether it involves any real personal sacrifice.
It’s not clear what Summers will have to sacrifice. Apparently he’ll continue in his role of University Professor at Harvard, the highest and most honorable rank a faculty member there can achieve. (Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has called on Harvard to sever ties with Summers to hold him accountable for his close friendship with Epstein.)
The same question — whom we honor, whom we shame, and who is genuinely contrite — is also relevant to Eric Adams’s final weeks as mayor of New York City, during which the pace of his foreign travel is increasing even as the city foots much of the bill. No contrition from the mayor — although he was indicted on corruption charges that focused, in part, on improper foreign travel.
And then comes Elon Musk, who, despite his reign of terror in the federal government, including a stack of court rulings finding what he did to be illegal, to say nothing of his blowup with Trump, will preside this weekend at a festive DOGE reunion in Austin at a high-end hotel where Musk often has a suite.
In this era of Trump, America’s moral authority — its capacity to separate right from wrong, and to pride itself doing (or at least trying to do) what is honorable — seems to have vanished, along with the norms on which that authority has been based.
Under Trump, the only normative rule is to gain as much power and money as possible. Power and wealth are honored, even if the honoree has greenlit a brutal murder.
The only exception appears to be pedophilia. Or close association with a pedophile, for which an earnest expression of contrition may be sufficient to get back on the honor track.
High on the list of things America must do when this period of moral squalor is behind us will be to restore real honor and real shame.
- 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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This triple Trump voter has finally had enough. You need to hear him
“I’ve had enough,” Adam from Michigan told me in a call to my SiriusXM show last Friday, after identifying as someone who voted for Donald Trump three times.
He plans to vote “against him, up and down the ballot,” next year.
He said it’s not just him — it’s his entire family, and colleagues at work.
“We don’t want to hear any of it — we just turn it off,” Adam said, referring to TV at the office, where most of his colleagues are Republicans who supported Trump.
As we see MAGA Republicans in the House defying Trump on the Jeffrey Epstein files, and Republicans in states like Indiana ignoring Trump’s demands for redistricting and gerrymandering — an attempt to rig the midterms — there’s a clear sign that many GOP officeholders see Trump as a lame duck. They’re not following his every command.
They’re emboldened — and frightened — by the blowout elections for Democrats two weeks ago, which proved Trump is tanking and Democrats are soaring. And they’re looking at the polls where Trump is sinking, not just with a substantial majority of Americans but among Republicans and MAGA too.
It’s on every issue, including immigration and the economy, where Trump is doing the worst.
Adam is one of them. As I told him, I could argue with him for hours about why he voted for Trump three times, and about his claims that Trump’s first term saw a great stewardship of the economy and the handling of the pandemic. But that would get us off course — there’s always time for that.
I wanted him to just explain what had him dumping Trump now and what he planned to do moving forward. A transcript of our conversation follows.
MS: Adam is in Michigan. Hi Adam. Thanks for calling.
Adam: Oh, hey Michelangelo. I am a, I voted for Trump three times, and he is just like, he just right now, it’s amazing how he is not at a 10 percent approval rating. With the Epstein stuff, the tariffs, the economic destruction, the alienation of our allies. Telling Ukraine, you’re on your own. Destroys everything, saying he’s gonna fix things by lowering the tariffs with a mess he created.
Then you have the Epstein files and then he’s in the emails. I think right now is the time every Republican voters should say, “This our chance to dump him, impeach him, remove him, and get back to business.” That’s how I feel like — I’ve had enough.
MS: Tell me a little bit about how, ‘cause you seem very passionately opposed to him, but to vote for him three times, you had to be very passionately in favor of him and supporting him and certainly by that third time. So what is it that really did it for you after he was elected this time?
Adam: Well, the first time was a wild card, like a lot of people, right.
The second time was kind of like, I remember how the economy was pre-COVID, kind of anchored to that. Okay. Like 2020 happened, and then kind of like, this time, I was kind of thinking, Will things be like 2019 again?
I didn’t take him as serious on the tariffs because he talked about in 2015, 2016, but he never actually did it. But then when he did the tariffs this time, it’s like so reckless. With that “liberation day” and like he destroyed our standing in the world. Canada is gonna hate us for like 50 years. I mean, it’s really sad, but I’m just, I did not—
MS: So it was the tariffs first, but then what? The Epstein files? You mentioned a whole bunch of stuff.
Adam: I know, I’m just kind of sick of him, but you know, just, he’s just not the same person, I can’t explain it. He’s just not who he was the first time. Like the first time he cared about the economy more than anything. Like we saw that during COVID, right?
But then this time it’s like.He’s purposely trying to destroy the economy, then trying to act like he’s fixing it. Like I think he’s lost officially lost his mind — well, not officially, but just, he’s just not — he’s a different monster this time. He’s just reckless.
MS: I will, I will agree with you on that. He’s a different monster. Where we will disagree, and I could argue with you about COVID and the economy in the first administration and, you know what he was, but I’m not going to because I’m very happy that you’re now, you know, deciding you don’t support him.
And I do believe he’s a different kind of monster. He wasn’t like this in the first term, but a lot of us saw this coming with Project 2025. He just completely and totally, I think, is captive to these people. He’s kind of checked out.
Are you now going to do what you can in the midterm elections to vote against Republicans to make sure there’s a check on him?
Adam:I thought about the today out on my walk. I was kind of thinking for next election, I think I just have to maybe vote against him up and down the ballot.
I hate to talk about the people who have cancer, but kind of like as a chemo to get rid of the cancer of Trump. I can’t, I mean, no disrespect to people who have cancer. I hate using this analogy ‘cause it’s so disingenuous, but I just dunno how to explain or what to do, you know?
MS: Yeah, I hear you on that a Adam, thank you. I’m glad to hear that. I bet you represent some other people too. Maybe you can quickly tell me, are there other people you know who’ve also decided they don’t like him anymore?
Adam: Oh yeah. I have clients that work, you know, really like ‘hard in,’ said the same thing. They’re all done. All my siblings, my parents. I have colleagues, people at work who are all Republican voters, you know, like the Mitt Romney types, the John McCain types. We’re all done. Like when his staff comes on TV, we just hit the mute button at the office. We don’t wanna hear from any of them, like Peter Navarro or Scott Bessent or any of them.
Like, we don’t wanna hear any of it. We just turn it off.
MS: I’m, I’m glad to hear that. Make sure, do what you can to make sure they vote against Trump, and that means voting for the Democrat on the ticket, particularly in Congress, particularly for the Senate there in Michigan. Very important races in Michigan.
He has to be stopped. If the Republicans do not have the majority, everything stops. He won’t be able to do, what he’s been doing. So make sure you tell them all and organize. Thank you, Adam for the call.
- Michelangelo Signorile writes The Signorile Report, a free and reader-supported Substack. If you’ve valued reading The Signorile Report, consider becoming a paid subscriber and supporting independent, ad-free opinion journalism.
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How Donald Trump and his Jeffrey Epstein scandal lay bare our racist roots
The Jeffrey Epstein scandal stripped away the polite fiction that wealthy white men in America are held to the same standards as everyone else.
Epstein wasn’t an exception. He was the rule, laid bare.
From the first days of European settlement, powerful white men have moved through this country with a kind of immunity that would be unthinkable for anyone else. That isn’t just a cultural habit: it’s the residue of the original architecture of America.
We built a nation on the belief that white men were entitled to rule, entitled to take, entitled to decide whose lives mattered and whose didn’t.
That belief never died. It adapted. It modernized. And today it animates a political movement that has captured one of our two major parties.
The root of the problem goes all the way back to the Doctrine of Discovery. A European/papal decree announcing that white nations had a God-given right to seize any land they encountered became the legal and moral starting point for American expansion.
The Supreme Court wrote it into our jurisprudence in the nineteenth century, and we never really let it go. From that twisted foundation flowed the taking of Native land, the destruction of Native nations, and the belief that whiteness itself conferred ownership.
And then — as I point out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy — that logic didn’t stay confined to the frontier. It seeped into every corner of American life and rose up to try to destroy even the idea of a pluralistic democracy in this country.
Slavery was built on the same logic. It wasn’t an ugly exception to American values; it was a central expression of them. The economy depended on it. Congress bent itself into knots to protect it. The Constitution accommodated it.
When the Civil War ended, our country had a chance to uproot the white male supremacist ideology that had allowed human beings to be treated as property. Instead, we dodged it.
I still remember well, when our son was nine years old and we lived in suburban Atlanta, asking him over dinner, “What did you learn in school today?” and his answer was, “We studied the ‘War of Northern Aggression.’”
We allowed the old Confederates back into the halls of power in the 1870s. We let them write the history books. We abandoned the freedmen who had been promised protection and citizenship.
And the system that emerged was simply white male supremacy, the foundation of slavery, by another name.
Jim Crow wasn’t a detour; it was the natural continuation of the racial hierarchy this country was built on and today’s GOP — and ICE, CPB, and Trump’s toadies in DHS — are trying to re-solidify for the 21st century.
Every tool was used to maintain it. Poll taxes. Literacy tests. Lynching. Chain gangs. Sharecropping. Segregated schools. Redlining. Policing practices that looked far more like occupation than law enforcement.
All of it justified by the same foundational lie that today animates the brutality of Trump‘s ICE raids: that white people were meant to rule and everyone else existed by their pleasure. And the Big Lie that brown-skinned immigrants are committing “voter fraud” that justifies purging millions from our voting rolls every year.
That lie still echoes in our institutions. It’s why entire communities — and now polling places — are policed like enemy territory. It’s why Republicans on the courts (particularly SCOTUS) have so often sided with the powerful over the vulnerable. And it’s why we’ve seen, in recent years, an explicitly brutal willingness to use federal force against Americans exercising their constitutional rights of free speech and protest.
When Trump sent federal agents and troops into Los Angeles, DC, Chicago, Portland, Memphis, and threatened to deploy them elsewhere, it wasn’t a new idea. It was an old ideology flexing its muscles again. It treats American citizens as though they’re foreign enemies. It uses military-trained forces not for defense but for control.
James Madison warned us precisely about this danger of the military policing civilians:
“The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”
He couldn’t have been clearer. The Founders feared the domestic use of military force not because they were naïve, but because they knew exactly how easily power could be turned inward. They knew that once a government starts treating its own people as threats, liberty becomes the first casualty because they’d seen it done by the British in their own time.
The chilling truth is that the movement dominating the modern GOP has embraced that very mentality.
It draws its energy from white grievance and Christian nationalism. It relies on the belief that democracy is legitimate only when it protects white cultural dominance (which is why the Trump Department of Labor is exclusively posting pictures of white workers as if they’re the only “real” Americans).
It thrives on fear and resentment, and encourages a view of fellow nonwhite and female Americans as enemies to be controlled rather than citizens to be represented.
Today’s GOP and the rightwing-billionaire-funded, 50-year-long “Conservative Movement” that drives it have embraced every bad instinct of the Confederacy, the frontier, Jim Crow, and the backlash to the Civil Rights Movement.
They’re not “conserving” anything. They’re restoring an old order.
This didn’t happen suddenly. It took decades and the investment of billions of dollars.
People of a certain age (like me) well remember William F. Buckley Jr.’s 1966-1999 show Firing Line, every Sunday on PBS, as he pontificated about the wonders of “conservatism” and promoted Republican politicians. My dad was a religious viewer and we watched it together every weekend; the show was a major force in national politics.
In a 1957 editorial titled Why the South Must Prevail, Buckley laid out explicitly what the foundation of conservatism must be.
“Again, let us speak frankly,” Buckley wrote: “The South does not want to deprive the Negro of a vote for the sake of depriving him of the vote. … In some parts of the South, the White community merely intends to prevail — that is all. It means to prevail on any issue on which there is corporate disagreement between Negro and White. The White community will take whatever measures are necessary to make certain that it has its way.”
He asked, rhetorically, if white people in the South are “entitled” to “prevail” over nonwhites even in rural areas of the country or large cities with majority Black populations.
“The sobering answer,” Buckley wrote, “is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”
Arguably following up, in April 2021, the National Review published an article headlined: Why Not Fewer Voters? justifying Republican voter suppression.
Nixon welcomed the old segregationist Democrats into the GOP. Reagan polished the rhetoric and wrapped it in patriotic language. The Republican Party spent years perfecting techniques to suppress votes, gerrymander districts, and reshape the judiciary.
By the time Trump arrived, the Party was ready for someone who would drop the coded language and say the quiet part out loud.
Trump told white male voters they were the only “real Americans” and everyone else was suspect. He told them the military and the police existed to protect them from demographic change. He told them the only valid elections were the ones they won.
The good news is that most Americans reject this.
Most Americans believe in a multiracial democracy. They want equal justice. They want freedom that applies to everyone. They don’t want their own government treating nonwhites or women as enemy combatants. They don’t want Epstein-style impunity for morbidly rich white men. They don’t want leaders who behave as if the military is a toy for intimidating political opponents.
But we can’t defeat what we refuse to name. America’s original sin wasn’t just slavery or colonialism: it was the belief that white men are entitled to rule by default and women and nonwhites must be subordinate to them.
That belief still infects our politics and largely controls the GOP. It still shapes our institutions. It still animates Republican justices on the Supreme Court who see equality as a threat and democracy as negotiable.
We can’t move forward until we reckon with that truth about our nation’s history and today’s GOP.
We can’t protect liberty while ignoring the warnings of the people who built this country.
And we can’t defend American democracy — and democracy around the world — while the GOP wages war against the very idea of a nation where everyone counts.
The reckoning is long overdue. This time we have to finish the job.
Double-check your voter registration and pass along the good word to everybody you know.
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As Nazi sympathizer roils GOP, one MAGA senator's silence grows more telling by the day
For several weeks now, the American right has been embroiled in a bitter internal fight about Nazis and antisemitism.
Specifically, the fight has centered on a Nazi sympathizer who keeps finding his way into the orbit of influential conservatives: Nick Fuentes.
Fuentes, a far-right activist and Holocaust denier, has summed up his political worldview as “hating women, being racist, being antisemitic.” He once proclaimed that Jews “are responsible for every war in the world. It’s not even debatable at this point.”
Yet that repugnant belief system hasn’t blocked his access to a who’s who of the conservative movement — including Donald Trump, who dined with Fuentes and fellow anti-semite Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago in 2022.
More recently, Fuentes appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show for a two-hour softball interview that featured a call for a “pro-white” movement to oppose the “organized Jewry” Fuentes believes is undermining American cohesion. Carlson’s interview elevated Fuentes’ profile, giving his extremist views an audience far beyond his usual following.
The interview also roiled the American right, setting off an ugly debate about who should be allowed inside the tent of the conservative movement. Among those warning against the mainstreaming of Fuentes was Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley.
“Listen, this is America. He can have whatever views he wants,” Hawley told Jewish Insider.
“But the question for us as conservatives is: Are those views going to define who we are? And I think we need to say, ‘No, they’re not. No. Just no, no, no.’”
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz went even further, saying: “If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool and that their mission is to combat and defeat global Jewry, and you say nothing, then you are a coward and you are complicit in that evil.”
The public condemnation of Fuentes and his beliefs from Hawley and other high-profile Republicans stands in stark contrast to Missouri’s other U.S. senator, Eric Schmitt.
Schmitt has yet to make any public comments about Fuentes, and his office did not respond to requests for comment.
There’s certainly no obligation for elected officials to speak out on every controversy, but Schmitt’s silence in particular is raising eyebrows.
First, he has never hesitated to attack antisemitism when it emanates from the left. Why the sudden reticence when it comes from the right?
Second, Schmitt is only a few weeks removed from a speech at the National Conservatism Conference where he argued the United States is not a nation built on ideas but on the legacy of “settlers and their descendants.”
Critics heard echoes in Schmitt’s speech of the old “blood and soil” nationalism that underpinned European fascist movements.
And third, over the summer Schmitt hired a staffer who was fired from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign for circulating a video featuring Nazi imagery. That same staffer previously praised Fuentes’ influence on young men, though he later apologized.
Silence doesn’t equal agreement, and Schmitt’s defenders might argue he shouldn’t dignify Fuentes with attention. Why give an extremist more oxygen?
That might be a persuasive if Schmitt had not already brushed shoulders with the ideological world Fuentes inhabits. Once those lines blur, clarity becomes a duty, not an option. Avoiding the issue allows extremists to imagine their views are tolerated within mainstream conservatism.
When the loudest message a leader sends is silence, it can be heard as permission.
Or maybe it’s just cowardice.
- Jason Hancock has spent two decades covering politics and policy for news organizations across the Midwest, with most of that time focused on the Missouri statehouse as a reporter for The Kansas City Star. A three-time National Headliner Award winner, he helped launch The Missouri Independent in October 2020. The Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
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This battle line is needed to bring Trump to his knees
I’m sure my mom was proud to see me as the closing speaker at the No Kings Day rally in San Diego. While she couldn’t be there physically, she joined me in a symbolic manner: I brought with me the American flag that draped her coffin. I received the flag at her funeral, held with full military honors, recognizing her service as the first woman ever to join the US Coast Guard.
No Kings in San Diego was a helluva party, 50,000 celebrating — while at the same time fearing for — that delicate thing called democracy. A thousand American flags fluttered. America at its best. Hell, it could turn you into a patriot. I’m sure mom, a union organizer, schoolteacher, rights activist, and anti-fascist super-patriot, would have loved it.
Frederick Douglass would not have. I could see his ghost, with that astonishing mane of hair, shaking his head.
Douglass, once enslaved, but by 1848 an international bestselling author, was one of the few men to sign the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, the foundational document of the movement for women’s rights.
But Douglass famously warned the women warriors:
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
A single demand. The Seneca Falls Declaration was a long list of 16 enumerated grievances, from the right to become church deacons, the right to property after a divorce, to a constitutional amendment to ban alcohol. Douglass implored them to settle on ONE demand, the mother of all demands: suffrage, the right to vote. With the singular focus on suffrage, the Suffragettes, after some decades, attained all their other goals (including Prohibition).
So, what was is our demand? What did we want to get from the march of seven million? What would we recognize as a victory? What was our cause? Stop ICE raids? Free Gaza? Transgender rights? The crowd seemed to coalesce around one mushy theme: “TRUMP’S A JERK! TRUMP’S A CREEP! A NO-GOOD-NIK!”
From there, it broke down. Everyone had a pet cause, all worthy, a mélange of rightness, a soup of issues, all urgent, all mixing together into a glob of complaints, all injustices demanding our attention. I can hear the admonishing ghost of Douglass: When you demand everything, you get nothing.
My own talk, I’ll admit, yawed from Trump’s imperial sexism in the firing of the first female Commandant of the Coast Guard (that really upset Mom, I’m sure) to my screed against ICE for trying to deport my grandmother a week before her 100th birthday.
[You can watch me and mom here.]
My speech about my “illegal” immigrant family got a great response from the crowd. But even I wasn’t sure of what I was trying to accomplish.
Trump said, “I’m not a King,” because he probably considers it a demotion. In his own mind, he’s the new Caesar.
By Nicole Powers 2025 for Palast Investigative Fund.
Sorry, Donald, you are as much a maniacal monarch as George III. Let me count the ways.
- You took a bulldozer to the people’s house with an actual bulldozer.
- According to Reuters, the Emirati sheikhs who fund Hamas put $864 million, “actual income – cash flowing, free and clear, into Trump family coffers,” via their purchase of the your soon-to-be-worthless cyber-coin.
- You gave out pardons to cop-killing insurrectionists and other more well-heeled friends of your regime.
- In Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago and who knows where next, you “kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures,” a charge our Declaration leveled against King George.
- You effectively ordered the indictment of the former head of our FBI despite your own chosen prosecutor finding no crime.
The Constitution prohibits a “bill of attainder,” any law which targets an individual at the whim of the King. But what is the Constitution to this Royalist tub-o’-lard?
And Trump’s kingly imposition of tariffs runs right into one of the charges in our Declaration of Independence leveled against King George decrying, “Taxes imposed upon us without our Consent.”
I could go on for pages, but I’ll spare you because we all know the list.
At the microphone, looking over the crowd of marchers that Mom and I joined, where anger turned to inspired joy … I thought, something was missing.
Then I realized it. The March missed the most important thing of all. The Demand.
Was No Kings Day, in the end, just a big national complaint-fest?
WHAT DID WE WANT? What DO we want?
MLK’s demand
I go back to the successful marches of my long-ago youth. Martin Luther King’s march from Selma to Montgomery had one single demand: LET MY PEOPLE VOTE. King placed the Voting Rights Act on President Johnson’s desk, demanding he propose it to Congress. LBJ feared signing it — it would end the Democratic Party’s rule of the South — but the march, and the fearless sacrifices of the marchers, forced his hand.
Image: californiabucketlisters.
For all the terrors faced by Black people, from lynchings to housing red-lining, they focused to that one single demand: the right to vote.
The Moratorium marches of 1970 had a single demand: “U.S. out of Vietnam! Hell no, we won’t go!”
The single-demand march has been the people’s effective weapon.
In 1932, starving veterans had myriad legitimate grievances, but the 32,000 Bonus Army marchers settled on one demand — “Pay our Service Certificates!” — and won the veterans benefits Americans enjoy today.
In the 1880s, as robber barons fattened off industrial servitude, workers marched on the first Monday of each September under banners with one demand: a 40-hour workweek. Ultimately, they won.
Our Founding Fathers began their revolt with inchoate complaints. Few of these angry Englishmen were ready for independence until, prodded by Thomas Paine, they coalesced under one slogan: “No Kings.” That was no metaphor. Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration had a long, long list of grievances, but only one single demand: independence, “a new nation…dedicated to the cause that all men are created equal.”
When we have no demand, or a hundred of them, it doesn’t end well. Remember the Women’s Marches? Sorry, but in another generation, NO ONE will remember them. The first one in 2016, days before Trump’s inauguration, was the biggest demonstration in U.S. history, until No Kings. Do you remember the marchers’ demand? Neither do I. And do you remember what those Women’s Marches accomplished? Neither do I. In fact, I suggest that incoherence of the Women’s Marches looked to Trump like weakness and laid the groundwork for overturning Roe v. Wade.
Douglass would have shook his regal mane sadly at the mish-mash of unfocused complaints at No Kings. Yes, it felt damn good to call Trump a tyrant, an imperious schmuck, a heartless, vindictive, power-abusing dickwad. Which, as far as I can tell, just puffed up his already bloated narcissism watching the eyes of millions turned to him.
Don’t duck the question
So, Mr. Smarty-Pants Palast, what would YOU suggest as a demand? I won’t lie: I’m a bit stumped because EVERYTHING is just so effing awful. I mean, where do we begin?
As my readers know, I am fixated on the issue of voting. If we had a fair and square system, without racist suppression trickery, 3.55 million voters purged or denied ballots would have sunk Trump in 2024. Voting is the queen of rights without which we have no others.
But I would not expect to get seven million into the streets for voting rights, though it is my deepest concern. (I was truly gob-smacked, actually horrified, that I did not see a single voter registration table. People, we need to talk about this, but not right now.)
Civil rights leader and social reformer Frederick Douglass c. 1879. Public domain.
I’m realistic: if we followed Fred Douglass’s rule and focused on a demand, the crowd would have thinned substantially. The ideological stew allowed everyone to have their own beef, their own peeve. Even the folks who didn’t vote and helped elect Trump because they didn’t like “Genocide Joe” or whatever their issue got to shout their slogans against the King of Orange.
So, Palast, don’t duck the question: What should have been The Demand?
If I may be so humble as to note that, while we marched, America’s government was shut down. Food stamps were running out. Food inspectors went unpaid. The shut-down, you’ll recall, was focused on ONE damn good cause, a line in the sand that I’ll bet every marcher would agree with: HANDS OFF OUR HEALTH INSURANCE.
Yet, at our celebration, there was nary a word about the shutdown, nary a word about this one crucial demand — protect our healthcare — that needs our full attention, to which we must together dedicate our lives, our liberties and our fortunes.
And so Trump won. A handful of feckless Democratic senators defected because they knew there was no public will to go into the streets for health insurance.
Trump’s shut-down victory is his coronation, proof of his monarchic status, puffed up with the power of vanquishing the most vulnerable among us.
Today, instead of, “Give me liberty or give me death,” it must be, “Give me health insurance or give me death,” because, as a practical matter, that’s what many Americans will face.
I know it’s not exciting as other issues, and our “leader” is, Lord help us, Chuck Schumer. But right now, this is the battle line, the Rubicon which we cannot permit the New Caesar to cross.
If we can’t do that one thing, if we can’t win that one demand, we are just marching in circles.
- Investigative reporter Greg Palast is the author of several bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. His latest film is Vigilantes Inc, America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen, produced by Martin Sheen and narrated by Rosario Dawson. Sign up for more reports at https://gregpalastinvestigates.substack.com/
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Trump and his lapdogs are pushing a thinly-veiled lie — but Democrats can exploit it
Donald Trump claimed last week on social media that “Our economy is BOOMING, and Costs are coming way down,” and that “grocery prices are way down.
Rubbish.
How do I know he’s lying? Official government statistics haven’t been issued during the shutdown — presumably to Trump’s relief (the White House said Wednesday that the October jobs and Consumer Price Index reports may never come out).
But we can get good estimates of where the economy is now, based on where the economy was heading before the shutdown and recent reports by private data firms.
First, I want to tell you what we know about Trump’s truly s---ty economy. Then I’ll suggest 10 things that Democrats should pledge to do about it.
1. Prices continue to rise as real wages fall
While the cost of living isn’t going up as fast as it did in 2022, consumer prices are still up 27 percent since the onset of the pandemic. Wages haven’t kept up.
Americans know this. In a recent Harris poll, 62 percent say the cost of everyday items has climbed over the last month, and nearly half say the increases have been difficult to afford.
Much of this is due to Trump’s tariffs, which are import taxes — paid by American corporations that are now passing many of the costs on to consumers. Even Trump knows this, which is why he’s removing tariffs on coffee, bananas, beef, and other agricultural commodities. But his other tariffs will remain, boosting the costs of everything else.
As a result, wages — when adjusted for inflation — have been falling, government and private-sector data show. Since the start of the year, inflation has been rising faster than after-tax pay for lower- and middle-income households, according to the Bank of America Institute.
According to the JPMorganChase Institute, the rate of real income growth has slowed to levels last seen in the early 2010s, when the economy was still recovering from the financial crisis and the unemployment rate was roughly double what it is today.
2. Job growth has stalled
Americans are scared of losing their jobs. In the same recent Harris poll I referred to above, 55 percent of employed workers say they’re worried they’ll be laid off.
That worry is borne out in the data. Indeed’s job posting index has fallen to its lowest level since February 2021.
The Fed’s Beige Book — which compiles reports from Fed branches all over the country — also shows the job market losing steam.
The latest ADP private-sector data confirms that the labor market continued to weaken in the latter half of October, with more than 11,000 jobs lost per week on average.
Finally, Challenger, Gray & Christmas (a private firm that collects data on workplace reductions) reports that U.S. employers have announced 1.1 million layoffs so far in 2025. That’s the most layoffs since 2020, when the pandemic slammed the economy, and rivals job cuts during the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009.
3. Homeowners are underwater, foreclosures are up
Nearly 900,000 homeowners (about 1.6 percent of all mortgage holders) are now underwater on their mortgages, the highest share in three years. Many of these buyers purchased in 2022–24 with low down payments in markets that have since cooled.
At the same time, filings for home foreclosures are up about 17 percent since the third quarter last year (according to ATTOM Data Solutions), suggesting more borrowers in trouble.
4. Corporate profits continue to rise
You might think that with all these stresses on American consumers, corporate profits would dip. But in reality, U.S. corporate profits continue to rise, and the stock market continues to hit new highs (although the stock market is wobbly, as I’ll get to in a moment).
As a result, the investor class — the richest 10 percent of Americans, who own more than 90 percent of the stock market — are reaping big rewards.
How to square this with all the layoffs and so few job openings? Amazon’s profits are through the roof, but it’s laying off 30,000 people.
First, corporations are reluctant to expand and hire because of so much uncertainty about the future, caused in large part by Trump’s tariffs and his expulsion from the U.S. of many workers critical to the agriculture and construction industries.
Secondly, profits are being led by the six major high-tech firms, whose monopolistic hold over their markets has given them the power to raise prices.
Third, many corporations are making use of artificial intelligence. AI is boosting business productivity while reducing the demand for workers. We’re seeing that trend mostly in the technology sector, which continues to substitute AI for jobs. But the trend seems to be spreading to other industries.
5. Inequality is widening
Put this all together and you get a two-tier economy whose inequality gap is widening.
America has always had a two-tiered economy, but for the last 80 years, the middle class has been in the upper tier along with the wealthy, while the working class and poor have been in the lower one.
Now, the middle class is joining the lower tier. This new reality has huge implications both for the economy and for American politics.
The richest 10 percent of households — whom I’ve described as the investor class — now account for nearly half of total U.S. spending, thanks to the stock market surge. (Thirty years ago they were responsible for about a third.)
Meanwhile, middle- and lower-income families are pulling back. They’re facing tightening budgets, higher living costs, declining real wages, and a raft of corporate layoffs.
The consequent divergence in spending — with a smaller group of people keeping the economy going — is fueling concerns that the U.S. economy is becoming more fragile.
With the economy so dependent on the richest 10 percent — who in turn are highly dependent on the stock market — a stock market downturn would raise risk of a serious recession.
6. What the Democrats must pledge to America
The Trump economy is truly s---ty for most Americans. Every time Trump or his lapdogs in Congress tell Americans that the economy is terrific, they seem more out of touch with reality.
Democrats need to show America that they can be better trusted to bring prices down and real wages up.
This means, in my view, promising the following 10 things. These should constitute the Democrats’ pledge to America:
- Trump’s across-the-board tariffs are import taxes that are raising the prices of just about everything American consumers buy. Democrats will eliminate them where their costs to consumers are far higher than any potential benefits in the form of new jobs.
- Another major source of high prices is monopolies — especially in high-tech, health care, food, and finance. Democrats will vigorously enforce antitrust (anti-monopoly) laws. Giant corporations will be busted up. Mergers or acquisitions by large firms, barred.
- Workers need more bargaining power to get higher wages. Part of the answer is stronger unions. Democrats will make it easier for them to start or join unions.
- The national minimum wage will be raised to $20 an hour. No one who works full-time should be in poverty.
- Housing cost increases will be slowed by stopping private equity firms from buying up large tracts of housing and colluding on prices.
- Health-care costs will be lowered by making Medicare available to everyone.
- Working families will get help with child care and elder care.
- They’ll also get paid family leave.
- If adequate-paying jobs are unavailable, workers will also have access to a universal basic income. It won’t make families comfortable, but it will be enough to keep them out of poverty.
- Taxes will be raised on the wealthiest to pay for this.
What do you think?
- 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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Red state's grim farce reveals horrifying chapters to come for Trumpism
New College of Florida is on its intellectual deathbed.
Once an authority-challenging, free-thinking institution for students passionate about learning, a place where difference was celebrated and creativity encouraged.
Now, it is becoming a third-rate jock school with overpaid administrators and underachieving freshmen, a casualty of Ron DeSantis’ culture wars.
NCF has announced it “will happily be the first college in America to formally embrace and sign President Trump’s vision for higher education,” a document called the “Compact for Academic Excellence.”
This compact has little to do with “excellence” and everything to do with coercion and control.
Universities must give up their First Amendment rights, as well as their right of free assembly. No more academic freedom: The government can assess the political viewpoints of every professor, administrator, librarian, student, and staff member, and mandate the “protection” of “conservative values.”
Kind of reminds you of China, where universities are instruments of state communism.
In its legal analysis, the Knight First Amendment Institute says the compact allows the government to “‘transform or abolish’ academic departments” and police every aspect of university life, “empowering the government to determine the approved mix of faculty and student viewpoints and the permissible subjects of academic inquiry.”
If Trump or his minions decide they don’t want anyone teaching climate science or the history of Jim Crow, they can kill those subjects stone dead.
Knight says universities may “develop ‘models and values’ different from those of the Trump administration, but only if they ‘forego federal benefits.’”
Nice little college you got here. Be a shame if the Department of Education had to investigate you for criminal wokeness and snatch back your federal funding.
‘Ideological differences’
New College wasn’t on Trump’s initial list of nine (much larger, much more prestigious) universities, including Vanderbilt, Brown, MIT, Dartmouth, and the universities of Pennsylvania, Virginia, Southern California, Arizona, and Texas.
UT-Austin, where an administrator was recently fired for “ideological differences,” issued a statement saying it was “honored” to be on the list and was “enthusiastically” reviewing the compact, probably with a view to signing onto the administration’s demands.
Seven of the others have said a flat “no.” Vanderbilt is a probable “no.”
But New College can’t wait to officially obey in advance. It’s already done most of what Trump’s compact mandates.
President Richard Corcoran has closed departments, shut down diversity initiatives, and attacked the college’s open, tolerant culture.
Piles of books on LGBTQ+ issues, feminism, and the Holocaust ended up in a campus Dumpster.
The books were not imposed on students by pinko profs, they belonged to a library run by students.
Something like 40 percent of faculty have resigned. Others have been fired or denied tenure.
Some long-serving teachers have even been insulted on their way out.
Amy Reid, a professor of French and founder of NCF’s now-canceled Gender Studies Program, was denied the title of “emerita” when she left after 30 years of teaching.
Emeritus status is honorary. You don’t get any money for it. It’s just a “thank you for your service.”
Reid was beloved by students and faculty but voted against Corcoran becoming president. He vetoed the honor, citing her letter of resignation in which she wrote, “the New College where I once taught no longer exists.”
He sniffed, “She need not be burdened by further association with it.”
Professor of Music and Latin American Studies Hugo Viera-Vargas had the publications, the performance credits, and the support of distinguished scholars that should have assured tenure.
Yet NCF’s president and Board of Trustees refused to tenure him. Corcoran wouldn’t consider the qualitative data, the letters from grateful undergraduates Viera-Vargas helped publish their work in scholarly journals, or his interdisciplinary approach to the history of the Caribbean.
Seriously?
According to Corcoran, Viera-Vargas’ classes were too small, never mind that NCF advertises small class sizes as an educational plus.
Viera-Vargas taught courses on the African diaspora and how race, gender, and music inform Caribbean society: mainstream academic pursuits in the 21st Century.
But Corcoran said he wants the college to move “toward a more traditional liberal arts institution.”
DeSantis and Corcoran’s hand-picked trustees include Trumpists, business people, lawyers, and academics associated with the rightist Claremont Institute, Hillsdale College and The Heritage Foundation.
Christopher Rufo, the most notorious of the lot, takes credit for creating the moral panic over Critical Race Theory and perpetrated last year’s hysterical (in both senses) nonsense about Haitian immigrants barbecuing cats on their backyard grills.
Students and faculty are supposed to take this person seriously?
Then there’s the money.
You may recall that the governor, who loses no chance to trash higher education, has set up a Florida DOGE, a Mini-Me version of Elon Musk’s barbarian bros, which is supposed to eradicate what he calls the “ideological study stuff” in colleges and universities and ferret out that good old waste, fraud, and abuse.
You may also recall that Republicans have controlled this state for 30 years and DeSantis has been in office since 2019.
Maybe he’s a little slow; maybe, as one critic said, it’s not so much “a serious policy effort and more like a bizarre attempt to stay relevant in national politics.”
The money
The governor’s attack-DOGEs found the cost of educating each undergraduate at NCF is close to $90,000 per year.
At the University of Florida, the state’s highest-ranking institution, the per-student cost is $45,000.
NCF’s president is one of the highest-paid in the state system, pulling in $1.3 million a year.
The president of the University of Florida makes $2 million.
UF has 62,000 students; NCF has 881.
What do New College students get for this lavish outlay of taxpayer money?
Sports! NCF is spending millions on athletic facilities and athletic scholarships for less-than-stellar students.
The SAT scores of the 2024 class are down 170 points from the pre-Corcoran era.
Here’s what else they get: a degree from a college tanking in the ratings.
Since 2023, NCF has plummeted 59 places.
It doesn’t exactly burnish the college’s reputation when it pulls stupid stunts like inviting actor, provocateur, and famous misogynist Russell Brand, soon to be tried on rape and sexual assault charges, to come and talk free speech.
NCF subsequently thought better of it, although it didn’t cancel him entirely.
He’s being “rescheduled.”
Nor does naming as 2024-25 presidential scholars the likes of Joseph Loconte, a Heritage Foundation fellow, and Bruce Gilley, a big fan of western imperialism.
Leconte is getting paid 165 grand for a year’s residency, while Gilley gets $130,000.
(See waste of money above).
When the Guardian newspaper asked Gilley to comment on his appointment at NCF, he responded in the finest tradition of classical scholarly decorum, saying, “F--- you, you ideological midwit.”
Gilley’s scholarship could be called “eccentric.” He argues colonialism was the best thing that ever happened to India, the Congo, and other benighted Third World hell holes.
Gilley might want to acquaint himself with the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, in which the British killed at least 1,000 Indians demonstrating in favor of independence.
Or maybe take a look at the Congo under Belgian King Leopold II.
The place was a slave state, the king’s private rubber company.
At least 10 million died of starvation, disease, famine, and summary execution.
Fringe academics
For the past two years, NCF has been pre-emptively dumbing itself down, embracing fringe academics, and suppressing speech it doesn’t like.
The college has even promised to erect a statue of Charlie Kirk.
Given all this, does it really matter if New College signs Trump’s compact?
Will anyone even notice?
Maybe when the lawsuits begin.
Lawyers of all political stripes say the compact is unconstitutional.
Even the decidedly un-woke American Enterprise Institute is horrified: “For a university to bend to this pressure and sacrifice the academic freedom of its faculty is to abandon constitutive institutional commitments essential to both education and the pursuit of knowledge.”
Here’s the thing: Young people are not empty vessels to be filled up with what Florida’s governor calls “ideological stuff.” Not Marxism, not conservatism, not gender ideology, not historical propaganda.
They do not live in a bubble where everyone is white, Christian, and straight.
Sure, there are Kirk acolytes who want to pretend we can go back to the 1950s when men were men, women were housewives, and people of color knew their place.
But for most students, conservative indoctrination won’t work.
They’ve seen racism; they know the climate is in crisis; they are aware of homophobia and other forms of prejudice.
They live in the 21st Century, not the 19th.
New College will have been destroyed for nothing.
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This White House disgrace makes no effort to conceal Trump's sheer contempt
Donald Trump will debase the White House today like never before.
Far worse than bulldozing its East Wing, Trump will use the People’s House as the grotesque backdrop for reducing to rubble any pretense of American moral leadership in the world. He will prostrate himself — and our nation — at the feet of one of its most malign actors.
All for the money.
The killer’s name is Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. The world came to know him as MBS when he first gained widespread notoriety for ordering the brutal murder in 2018 of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi citizen and legal permanent resident in the U.S.
Little more than seven years after Khashoggi was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul — his dismembered body never to be found — MBS will be fêted today at the White House.
Trump will be there to greet him as a dignitary — ready with smiles, handshakes, photo ops, and promises of billions in deals (presumably not limited to his family in this case).
Trump has spent seven years evading the truth, but the intelligence record is unambiguous. On Oct. 2, 2018, Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain documents for his marriage. He never walked out. Turkish authorities and U.S. intelligence confirmed the gruesome details: he was bound, injected with a fatal sedative, then dismembered, his body chemically dissolved.
This was not some “rogue operation.” The CIA examined audio recordings from inside the consulate, intercepted calls, and text messages. MBS sent at least 11 texts to his top adviser, Saud al-Qahtani, who oversaw the 15-man hit squad sent to Istanbul. A member of the hit team called a senior aide to MBS from inside the consulate immediately after the murder to report the job was done.
The CIA’s assessment wasn’t vague. Officials called it “blindingly obvious” that MBS gave the order. A killing this organized, this brazen, couldn’t have happened without his approval.
And what did Trump do with this intelligence? He didn’t just ignore it — he rejected it outright. He issued a disgraceful, exclamation-point-laden statement dismissing his own CIA’s findings, claiming they only had “feelings” with “no smoking gun” — a deliberate, contemptible lie designed to protect a killer.
Trump framed his surrender as “America First” by prioritizing arms sales and oil over the murder of a journalist who lived here. In a moment that never truly engendered the scorn it deserved, he wondered aloud whether people really wanted him to give up “hundreds of thousands of jobs.”
That’s what it always comes down to: Money. Arms. Oil. Trump declared that abandoning Saudi Arabia would be a “terrible mistake,” ensuring “we’re with Saudi Arabia and staying with Saudi Arabia” — to hell with justice, truth, and American values.
The rest of the world hasn’t forgotten. When the Biden administration released the declassified intelligence report in 2021, it confirmed what everyone already knew: MBS viewed Khashoggi as a threat and supported using violent means to silence him.
MBS hasn’t changed. Saudi Arabia is executing prisoners at a record rate and maintaining an unprecedented human rights crackdown. Dozens of activists and writers languish in Saudi prisons for speaking freely.
This is not just a crackdown on adults. Human rights groups have documented that Saudi authorities are reneging on their promise to halt the death penalty for juveniles, executing individuals for crimes allegedly committed when they were children, in addition to the hundreds executed for non-lethal, drug-related offenses.
But today, Trump rolls out the red carpet — literally. There will be a South Lawn arrival ceremony, an Oval Office meeting, a Cabinet Room signing ceremony, and an East Room dinner hosted by Melania Trump. They’ll sign deals on AI, defense, and semiconductors potentially worth $142 billion. There will be smiling photo ops and glowing praise.
What there won’t be is accountability. What there won’t be is justice for Jamal Khashoggi. What there won’t be is any acknowledgment that the man being honored in the White House ordered a journalist lured to his death and dismembered with a bone saw.
Seven years later, Trump is doubling down on that betrayal. It would be interesting to see if any of Khashoggi’s erstwhile colleagues in the press dare mention his name today.
It appears that the media has moved on. Congress has moved on. But Jamal Khashoggi is still dead, his body never found and his murderer is being celebrated as an honored guest.
For Donald Trump, everything has a price.
And as long as he’s our president, so does America’s soul.
- Ray Hartmann writes on Substack at Ray Hartmann's Soapbox
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The way Trump's acting shows this time he truly is worried
I want to get back to some of the content that was found in the 23,000 emails released by the House Oversight Committee that were obtained from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein.
I’m going to go straight to the authority, Julie K Brown. She’s the reporter for the Miami Herald who wrote that blockbuster series revealing that Epstein got a sweetheart deal from federal prosecutors. It’s because of her that any of us knows Epstein's name.
Here are the facts reported in Brown’s piece published last week about the new collection of Epstein correspondence. For brevity’s sake, I’m going to liberally edit so the only quotes are from the emails.
- Epstein wrote that Donald Trump not only knew he was trafficking girls – but that in one case, Trump had “spent hours” with one of the sex trafficking victims at Epstein’s house.
- In releasing three emails, Democrats on the Oversight Committee redacted the victim’s name. The Republicans, on releasing all 23,000, revealed her to be the late Virginia Giuffre, who had previously said that, to her knowledge, she never saw Trump do anything inappropriate with girls or women.
- “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump,” Epstein wrote to accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell in 2011.
- In 2019, Epstein told journalist Michael Wolff that Trump “of course knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.”
- That exchange with Wolff came less than a month after the Miami Herald published in 2019 an investigation into Epstein’s crimes – the sex trafficking of dozens of underage girls
- Epstein offered insight on Trump to a Russian diplomat.
- Epstein offered to send New York Times reporter photos of Trump posing with girls in bikinis in his kitchen.
- Larry Summers, the former Harvard president, asked whether the Russians had “stuff” on Trump. Epstein didn’t answer.
- In March 2018, Epstein’s brother, Mark, told him to ask the Trump-advisor Steve Bannon if Vladimir Putin has “the photos of Trump blowing Bubba.” It is unclear what “Bubba” refers to, but it was a nickname for former President Bill Clinton.
- In 2018, Kathryn Ruemmler, who worked in the Obama White House, sent a Times op-ed debating whether Trump should be impeached. “[Y]ou see i know how dirty donald is,” Epstein said.
- Epstein’s death was ruled a suicide, although a subsequent investigation by the Federal Bureau of Prisons noted that cameras in the unit were not working properly and that guards had fabricated their reports. Mark Epstein, Jeffrey's brother, believes he was killed because he had damaging information on powerful people.
‘Use the spa to try to procure girls’
When I read that Epstein had told Wolff “of course he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop,” I was reminded of something. It was a piece written by the Editorial Board’s own Lindsay Beyerstein.
In July, Lindsay dug up an old Page 6 gossip item from the Oct. 15, 2007, edition of the New York Post. In it, an anonymous source explained Epstein’s exile from Trump’s Florida club, Mar-a-Lago.
That anonymous source, Lindsay said, was almost certainly Trump. He “was notorious for laundering his version of reality through Page 6, either anonymously or under the pseudonym ‘John Barron.’” she said.
Here’s what that source (Trump) told Page 6 about Epstein: “He would use the spa to try to procure girls. But one of them, a masseuse about 18 years old, he tried to get her to do things. Her father found out about it and went absolutely ape-[bleep]. Epstein’s not allowed back.”
Lindsay had dug up that item, because of something Trump said on Air Force One last July. He said the reason he kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago was because he was poaching spa workers.
“People were taken out of the spa, hired by him. … When I heard about it, I told him, ‘Listen, we don’t want you taking our people, whether it was spa or not spa.’ I don’t want him taking people. And he was fine. Then not too long after that, he did it again and I said, ‘out of here.'”
As Lindsay wrote, Trump made it sound like their falling out was due to Epstein “hiring away valued employees with in-demand skills.”
But the Page 6 item suggests he knew more was going on — that there was a longstanding pattern to “use the spa to try and procure girls.”
This latest revelation in Epstein’s own words is a further incrimination: “Of course he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.”
Using Giuffre to shield Trump
Republicans on the House Oversight Committee accused Democrats of redacting for bad-faith reasons the name of the sex-trafficking victim who had “spent hours” with Trump at Epstein’s house. They said that by hiding the name of the late Virginia Giuffre, the panel’s Democrats were just trying to smear the president with selectively leaked emails.
It’s true enough that Giuffre had said under oath that she didn’t believe Trump had any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes. In her memoir, she said she met Trump once. Giuffre did not accuse him of any wrongdoing.
But aboard Air Force One back in July, the president acknowledged that Giuffre was one of the teens taken from the club. In 2000, Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell recruited her, she said. In 2007, Trump said anonymously that “a masseuse about 18 years old, [Epstein] tried to get her to do things.” That wasn’t Giuffre, but the point is, he knew. And according to Epstein, that’s why Trump asked Maxwell to stop.
The suggestion is that Giuffre didn’t know the whole story.
It’s also that the Oversight Republicans are using a dead sex-crime victim (Giuffre killed herself in April), who “spent hours” with Trump at Epstein’s house, to shield the president from the consequences of knowing what a child-sex trafficker was doing under his own roof.
Guilty is as guilty does
A lot is still unknown, but what we do know is how the president is behaving to the revelations found this week in the Epstein emails.
Which is to say, like he’s guilty.
Trump also ordered the Justice Department to redirect attention away from him and toward Bill Clinton and other Democrats who were in Epstein’s circle. There is no credible evidence connecting the former president to Epstein’s crimes, Reuters said.
The House Republicans are expecting “mass defections,” according to Politico, in favor of the discharge. The House votes this week. I don’t put much stock in him, but it’s worth noting Joe Scarborough said Thursday he does not expect Senate Republicans to stand in the way.
Perhaps that’s due to growing public skepticism.
CNN’s poll editor Henry Enten said Thursday, “Nobody is buying what Trump is selling on Epstein. His net approval on it is an absolutely dreadful negative 39 points, far worse than any other major issue. It isn't improving over time. Even among the GOP, just 45 percent approve of the job the Trump admin is doing on the Epstein case."
"It's clearly the biggest scandal in presidential history,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) during an interview. “He wouldn't be acting this way if he wasn't so deeply worried about what's in those files. What we've already seen is immensely incriminating. Clearly Trump was at the center of a child-sex ring ... the scandal could bring him down."
“The scandal could bring him down"? Eh, maybe. He might be acting guilty now, but this criminal president is always acting guilty … of something. It’s all in plain sight. Will this one bring him down?
All I can say is we’ve been here before.
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Trump's Epstein scramble may be a coverup for an even darker and more extreme secret
The likelihood that dozens of House Republicans will vote in favor of compelling the Justice Department to release the Epstein files has caused Trump to reverse his objections and urge House Republicans to back such a measure.
But this raises two questions that are the subjects of today’s Office Hours discussion.
First: Is Trump sincere about wishing to release the Epstein files?
Some say yes. He didn’t count on how strongly the MAGA base wanted the files released, and therefore how much opposition he’d run into from House Republicans. Trump’s announcement avoids a potential embarrassment for him. Now he just wants to get the Epstein matter behind him.
Others say no, he doesn’t really want them released. Calling for their release is just another Trump ruse to make it look as if he’s innocent.
If he genuinely wanted the files released, he could order the Justice Department to release them — rather than go through the circus of a discharge petition, which might not make it through the Senate.
He knows that if the Justice Department begins to investigate several prominent Democrats who have been linked to Epstein — which Trump has ordered the DOJ to do — the DOJ could refuse to release any further files related to Epstein by claiming that the disclosures could harm continuing investigations.
So today’s FIRST Office Hours question: Is Trump sincere about wanting the Epstein files released, or is this just another Trump ruse?
Which brings us to today’s SECOND Office Hours question: Assuming Trump is still trying to hide what’s in the Epstein files, why do you think he’s doing so? I’ve heard several theories:
1. He wants to protect the privacy of other victims. Although this is the argument that Fox News and various Republicans have been using to justify Trump’s reluctance to release the files, it might possibly be true.
2. He’s trying to hide the fact that he was a confidante of the late Virginia Giuffre. Giuffre, one of the most prominent survivors of Epstein’s sexual abuse, died by suicide in April. The redacted emails released last week by House Democrats included one from Epstein suggesting that Trump had spent time with Giuffre at Epstein’s estate. Giuffre had worked for Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
Perhaps Trump doesn’t want the embarrassment of having been a confidante of Giuffre, who was one of the earliest and loudest voices calling for criminal charges against Epstein and his enablers (other Epstein abuse survivors have credited her with giving them the courage to speak out).
3. He’s trying to hide the fact that he was also one of Epstein’s “clients” who had sex with underage girls. In the emails that have been released, Giuffre specifically and repeatedly denies that Trump had sex with her or any other girl, even as she made allegations against many other powerful figures.
But this hardly exonerates Trump. Giuffre might have been lying. She might have been paid off or intimidated.
The stakes for Trump are huge. If he was in fact one of Epstein’s clients, it could lead to his impeachment in the House and conviction in the Senate, because Trump’s MAGA base — to which congressional Republicans are solicitous — would probably turn against him. They can tolerate all sorts of wrongdoing by him but not pedophilia.
4. Not only is he trying to hide that he was an Epstein client who had sex with underage girls, he’s also trying to hide his involvement in Epstein’s and perhaps even Giuffre’s apparent suicides. I’m reluctant even to include this among the claims I’ve been hearing because it’s such a dark and extreme one. I’m mentioning it only because it is being discussed. Some people believe Trump would stop at nothing.
So what do you think? Why is Trump going to such lengths to hide his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein?
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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Even Trump's most fawning fans are dumbfounded by this brainwave
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is the zombiest health-care program in the country. No matter how long or hard Republicans have tried to kill it, it just keeps humming along.
Republicans’ obsessive, 15-year hatred of the ACA, aka Obamacare, is not hard to understand.
First, it was created by Democrats and signed into law by their arch nemesis, Barack Obama.
Second, it smacked of dreaded socialized medicine, ignoring the fact that America’s highly successful government-managed programs, Medicare and Medicaid, have been around for more than 60 years.
It is also not hard to understand why Republicans can’t kill Obamacare, even when they control the government: 45 million lower-income Americans depend on the ACA for their health insurance, with federal government subsidies making it affordable. Added to that, 64 percent of Americans hold a favorable view of the ACA, according to a KFF health-tracking poll.
In addition, Republican-controlled states have among the highest rates of ACA participation. Since the program was enacted, more than half of the national growth in ACA participants has come from Texas, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina.
In Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, and West Virginia, enrollment has more than tripled in the last five years. The popularity of ACA, its tremendous success in providing health care for 45 million Americans who couldn’t otherwise afford it, and the fact that a large portion of ACA participants reside in Republican-controlled states make Republican politicians extremely leery of messing with Obamacare. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene’s support for extending ACA subsidies to help her constituents didn’t cause a massive MAGA earthquake.
Since ACA subsidies were not approved as part of the deal to reopen the government, Republicans have had another opportunity to huff and puff over that horrible Obamacare before they inevitably approve the subsidies as they have done annually for more than a decade. With the most consequential mid-term election in modern history looming in 2026, they will do as little as possible to upset millions of their constituents who depend on Obamacare.
Naturally, President Trump inserted himself into the health-care discussion. Trump proposes that the subsidy money being sent to the “money sucking insurance companies” be sent instead to ACA participants so they can get “much better” insurance on their own. So instead of the government providing subsidies directly to the health-care providers to make the insurance plans affordable for lower-income Americans, the participants themselves would provide the money to the “money sucking insurance companies” to purchase their health insurance.
Am I missing something?
First, the “much better” insurance outside the ACA doesn’t exist. The same major companies provide health insurance both inside and outside ACA, including Kaiser Permanente, Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cigna, and Anthem. In addition, under ACA, no participant can be denied coverage due to a preexisting condition, all plans must include essential benefits including prescription drugs, maternity care, and behavioral benefits, and insurers are banned from setting annual or lifetime limits on benefits.
Second, since the subsidies pay for a set percentage of the cost of the insurance plan, the amount of the subsidies rises annually with any premium increases. If money is paid directly to participants, it can be eaten up quickly if an annual inflator isn’t provided. In addition, there is no guarantee that such payments would exist from year to year, as have the ACA subsidies.
Cash payments are a bad idea that would ultimately make health insurance less affordable for lower-income Americans. Like most unsound, half-baked ideas for which Mr. Bleach Injection is famous, it was first spread in capital letters on the Truth Social propaganda platform complete with the customary misinformation.
As to those money-sucking for-profit insurance companies, they are the companies who Trump and Republicans have supported at least since Republican president Dwight Eisenhower campaigned against “socialized medicine” in 1954. They have been the Republican bulwark against the socialized healthcare programs common among advanced democracies in Europe and Asia as well as Canada and Australia.
Unfortunately, the long-standing Republican belief that America’s free-market competition would keep health care affordable is a myth. The major insurance companies form a virtual oligopoly that controls prices and supply. The for-profit health insurance industry does what every successful capitalist industry does: maximizes profits. For our grifter president to rail against these “money-sucking” insurance companies is knee-slapping hypocrisy.
The ACA was always intended to be a bridge program between the traditional for-profit health-care system and a future universal health-care system which the majority of Americans support. The ACA is far from perfect since it still utilizes for-profit companies to provide the health insurance, but for 45 million Americans, it’s the best we’ve got for now.
For decades Republicans haven’t come up with a workable plan to reduce health-care costs. They are tied to the for-profit health-care system where solutions simply don’t exist. Attacking Obamacare has been all they have had in their arsenal, which does absolutely nothing to fix America’s broken health-care system.
Medicare has proven a much less expensive health-care system than the private insurer system since it doesn’t exist to make money and has the power and leverage to pay considerably less for hospital and physician services than private insurers.
Expanding government-managed Medicare to all Americans would reduce health-care costs, remove for-profit insurers from the system, and guarantee coverage for all Americans like citizens in every other advanced democracy. The next step could be offering a government health-care option like Medicare alongside traditional for-profit insurance programs for Americans to choose between.
In the past, Republicans have complained that offering the government-sponsored option would eventually kill off the for-profit insurance companies since it operated at an unfair advantage and would be cheaper. Advantage the American people.
- Tom Tyner is a freelance editorialist, satirist, political analyst, blogger, author and retired English instructor.
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