Trump declares open war on his true enemy
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
Trump is now completely alone
Friends, Trump is alone. |
That’s different from the United States being alone.
We — that is, the vast majority of Americans who were against Trump’s war from the start, and who support NATO and the United Nations Charter and the post-World War II system of alliances and rules — are not alone.
Most of the people of the United States stand with most democracies of the world.
When Trump’s call to America’s traditional allies for assistance clearing the Strait of Hormuz was rebuffed by those allies, those allies didn’t rebuff the United States. They rebuffed the person in the Oval Office who didn’t even consult with them before launching this war.
French President Emmanuel Macron said his country “will never take part in operations to open or liberate the Strait of Hormuz in the current context.” (Trump responded, “He’ll be out of office very soon.) Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand said that Canada “was not consulted prior to the offensive operation” and “has no intention of participating in” it. British PM Keir Starmer has said the U.K. would not be “drawn into the wider war.”
And so on.
So, like an angry five-year-old whose friends refuse to come to his party because he shouts at them and never shares his toys, Trump exploded: “[W]e no longer ‘need,’ or desire, the NATO Countries’ assistance — WE NEVER DID! Likewise, Japan, Australia, or South Korea,” he added. “In fact, speaking as President of the United States of America, by far the Most Powerful Country Anywhere in the World, WE DO NOT NEED THE HELP OF ANYONE!”
May I be so bold as to address myself to America’s allies and friends?
In point of fact, we the people of the United States do need your help.
We need your help fighting global climate change.
We need your help heading off pandemics.
We need your help countering global criminal gangs who are trafficking people and dangerous drugs and weapons.
We need your help fighting global poverty, hunger and disease.
We need your help safeguarding freedom and democracy from authoritarian regimes intent on extinguishing freedom and democracy around the world.
It’s important that you, the citizens of other democracies, know that the vast majority of us — the people of the United States — are embarrassed and offended by the oaf who now occupies the highest office in the United States.
He does not speak for us. He is not making decisions based on our welfare, let alone the well-being of the rest of you. Please don’t confuse him for us.
We are trying our best to resist him, contain him, protest against him, and remove him from office as quickly as we possibly can.
Thank you for your patience.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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Trump is about to pay the price for skipping this basic childhood lesson
I feel incredibly fortunate to have understood an essential truth about how to treat people when I was just 6 years old.
It was a week or so after Halloween. My parents had held back most of my good candy that year with the understanding that I’d already had too much sugar on that magical holiday and the day after, and it would be far better and healthier to ration it out. So, seven days later, they turned over the motherlode, and I brought it all to school with me in a brown paper lunch bag.
My friends were positively drooling over it. But as I recall, I told each of them, “This is all mine. I’m not sharing,” even as I purposely held it up to their faces to tempt them. No matter how much they begged and pleaded, I refused to change my selfish little mind.
About a month later, I was devastated to learn that my friend Louis wasn’t inviting me to his birthday party due to my little candy teasing/greed fiasco that he was still upset over. And he told me as much.
I bring this up now because I thought of Louis and the party that never was after Donald Trump tossed his little foot-stomping temper tantrum (one in a series) after finding out America’s NATO allies had all told him to pound sand as he asked for help in Iran.
This is a 79-year-old man who never learned the lesson that most children do at an age when they’re still obsessed with Legos: you reap what you sow. Or to put it another way — do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
It’s also simple common sense, something our president never developed. He could not believe that threatening leaders who not long before were our friends wouldn’t result in their lining up to kiss his ring and do whatever bidding he ordered with a blindly obedient, “Sir yes sir!”
Behavior has consequences. Negative behavior has negative consequences.
You may recall that in January, Trump had his heart set on taking over Greenland, while at the same time threatening the NATO alliance. This little piece of outrage had no precedent and absolutely no reason to occur aside from the fact that he decided he wanted to do it, the costs in enraging our allies be damned.
Trump emerged incensed and confused that every country rejected his plea for military assistance in Iran, feeling ghosted and dissed. He couldn’t imagine why they would abandon America in its hour of need, after all it has done to keep NATO together and help them out.
Let’s put aside for a moment whether the United States has, in fact, done much directly as a NATO ally to protect the alliance aside from serving as a deterrent. The truth is that our allies weren’t rejecting the USA, but merely Trump himself.
This is patently obvious.
Trump, you see, has positively no self-awareness. He craps all over our allies, bullies them ceaselessly, destroys their economies with damaging tariffs, treats them all like dirt…and then expects them to jump to help in a war they were never advised about, much less invited to lend a hand in planning.
This is a president who completely lacks any understanding about diplomacy, respect, unity. All he knows is intimidation and plundering. It seems to shock him to his core that he can’t gain support by screaming insults. Indeed, he wonders why no one wants to be his friend, lacking the ability to differentiate between a sycophant and a comrade.
Treating people like garbage only brings you garbage in return, a key reason why this man’s leadership is on borrowed time. All of his cowed Republican supporters in Congress will turn on him the moment it’s convenient. The same went for members of the European Union. Not a single member has the slightest motivation to want to help Trump out of whatever mess he’s gotten himself into, because its leaders can’t stand the sight of him, much less the scent.
As all of us on the side of sanity have been screaming from day one, at some point character has to matter. A man who has not the thinnest volume of empathy and compassion, who understands only punishment and cruelty and criminal conduct, can survive for a period of time – far too long, in this case – but never fully thrive.
I call your attention to the story that broke on Monday about the State Department’s considering withholding lifesaving assistance to people with H.I.V. in the African nation of Zambia unless it signs a deal to give the United States greater access to its critical minerals (copper in particular).
Put another way, this greed-driven, morally depraved administration is threatening the lives of some 1.3 million people in Zambia who rely on daily H.I.V. treatment to keep them alive, along with tuberculosis and malaria medications.
And what’s the rationale here? To plunder resources from a poverty-stricken nation, which Trump has made clear is a far greater priority than any human life. It is unconscionable on a scale that’s breathtaking.
When this is the kind of policy Trump and his subhuman aides push – the idea that nothing should ever be done out of goodness and decency but must be transactional – he and they shouldn’t be surprised when there’s push-back.
People don’t typically go out of their way to help those who are out only to benefit themselves. They’re far more likely to provide assistance, and to compromise, when civility and integrity are intrinsic to the mix.
When it comes to Trump, there is only vanity, hostility, arrogance, because somehow the concept of mutual benefit bypasses him. Finally, on the cusp of turning 80, he’s finding out that the art of the deal is about more than just taking without giving a thing in return.
Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.
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MAGA without Trump will make today's hell seem like paradise
We live strongly tempted to believe that Donald Trump represents a one-off, the type of charismatic leader that captures a dangerous zeitgeist, the one the founders worried about, and one for whom a pending disposal, whether by scandal, term limits, or just old age, provides the country an off-ramp from insanity, the restoration of normality, the opportunity to at least grab some of the older greatness — warts and all.
Don't fall into that trap because while we wait, the real movement roots.
The world missed a critical point in time, an opportunity to atone for all that was "last time" while also the chance to cap everything coming, wasting the moment that was late January 2021. Oh, to go back, right, Mitch? As per always, the GOP let justice and righteousness fall 10 senators short in impeachment 2.0, all to ensure a bright billionaire future on the backs of working Americans.
MAGA-MORE took root as "Trump Two: Angrier, Hungrier, and Uncut" sailed in through a post-pandemic fog. Trump provided post-COVID clarity for a mean crowd, doing the only thing he ever did well, the only thing they ever wanted: instinctive anger and cruelty directed at all "others."
So here we are, the world a stage for a man ranting through a dangerous retribution tour, resulting in the vast majority of the globe, including 60% of Americans, counting down days. But others have calendars, too — the MAGA pure-bred, those who see Trumpism as a mere baptism in a growing religion, none more committed and dangerous than Bishop Peter Thiel, currently converting "Palantir" into a war chest and a tech-juiced para-military. Palantir money and power currently await next-gen MAGA.
Yet again here we are, facing election 2026 — we hope — with another moment in a particularly dangerous time. War, possible recession in the wind, a long, hot summer, and top-tier players positioning, ever building. Thiel often leads the way.
Everyone understands that Vice President J.D. Vance, once a fairly harmless, almost tolerable, anti-Trump "hillbilly," now functions as a Thiel torpedo, for now restrained only by fealty to Trump — waiting, planning. Vance kept his cymbals quiet in the drumbeat to bombs on Iran for a reason. Too risky, the war, the politics, and Trump (Get used to the distance).
Over on the side, Thiel somehow found time to leave his Palantir planning for a week to visit Rome and give a talk on the future. Note, quickly, he didn't speak at the Vatican, where he'd have to justify himself to the relatively liberal, pro-immigration, pro-poor people Pope Leo. Instead, Thiel found MAGA Catholics and similar right-wing zealots to talk about ... Well, we don't know, because he specifically limited these seminars to invitees. So, behind closed doors, no recording devices, the gods only know what they talked about. But we can bet he's positioning himself as singularly essential in a Hard-Right global totalitarian future.
He is not there extolling the virtues of Jeffersonian democracy.
History clearly teaches that "Hard Right" always means singular power, functioning fascists, committed to doing whatever it takes to overthrow Classic Western Liberalism, which, notably, includes the rule of law and democracy. We feel that tension already building in one man's MAGA movement, Trump. Except it only begins there and, through the likes of Thiel, readies to really grow.
Because not only is Thiel tied to Vance, but also the increasingly dangerous Elon Musk, newly-minted media mogul Larry Ellison, far-right Italian PM Giorgia Meloni, along with too many others, ready to use whatever tethers MAGA together post-Trump.
Problematically, this group has the goods to get it done, "it" being big-brother Orwellian control made ever easier by overruning old school media (Thanks, Ellison!), tightening social media, and a lot else, all of it now combined with AI and the surveillance state made possible by Palantir. This column won't go harmlessly unnoticed — nothing will.
Past totalitarian movements came with inherent risk; you might lose your life or your stuff. It required commitment and bravery. Not this one. These people's "stuff" includes not just guarded luxurious compounds, multi-citizenships, and White Houses, but also every international electron netting the globe, satellite to screen, all monitored in real time according to a real plan by the ever-ready AI and — again, surveillance. Certainly, there's no risk to their lives, not with billions, even trillions, at their disposal, all projected forward with drones, robots, driverless vehicles, monitored by Gen-Z generals sitting behind screens. "Control the world and get a sandwich, all from the luxury of home, risk-free!"
That's a tempting opportunity for them. After all, if they happen to fail it will likely encompass little more than nations paying them to go away. Don't think it's not possible.
This is depressing. Except the world still has this "moment in time 2.0," perhaps the last chance. A ton of tools may be falling together. In a world of memes, the "Epstein class" resonates hard. The war in Iran gives the American public a prequel of what the world looks like when ruled by whim, dictators bombing when they "feel it in their bones," with a recession looming, the billionaire reckoning, and AI set to take over perhaps one-third of society's jobs. It really is now or never.
And it's not too late. Try as they might, the Trump-GOP hasn't been able to wipe away American fondness for elections. After all, the GOP wouldn't be considering nuking the filibuster to pass the SAVE Act if it could win elections. Americans like democracy, preserving the right not to be shot in the street, not have their media monitored, all that. We are the ones who feel unsettled, knowing that this time we may lose our lives or our stuff if we just let it happen.
What to do?
Someone smarter than me has to put together a plan under which enough of us unify. I can contribute, even with something all too obvious. If one needs direction, wants a read on the future, a figure to fight, start seeing Trump as nothing less than a harbinger, the mascot of the Epstein class, entry-level fascism, look farther, look to the Epstein class as both memes and monsters, to Musk, to Ellison, and the true north on this one, watch Thiel, the guy who perhaps is willing to risk it all.
Fair is fair. They will all certainly be watching you. Stare back. Because in some ways, they already have all the money, all the tech, most of the anger, and a vicious plan. They have everything except hearts and minds. So steady yours and don't waste another moment.
Jason Miciak is a Rawstory Columnist at Large, former Associate Editor of Occupy Democrats, an American Attorney, Author, and single parent girldad. He can be reached at @JasonMiciak, and on Bluesky here. Seeking beta readers for soon to be released novel, reached at jasonmiciak@gmail.comKeep reading...Show less
MAGA's fragile ego is killing us
In January 2026, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the Food and Drug Administration’s new inverted food pyramid to replace the Michelle Obama’s “myplate” visualization. There is some good in the change: promoting whole foods and minimizing processed foods, as I noted in My “Beef” with Bobby. But the science ends here as RFK instead relies on bro-science. Taking his cue from the “manosphere” and MAHA wellness influencers, he emphasizes animal proteins over plant proteins. More on that in a moment.
Just one month after releasing the new food pyramid, RFK released a workout video with Kid Rock where the pair eat steaks, pump iron, and then drink raw milk in a hot tub together. It’s difficult to watch, but even more difficult to describe. Comedian Stephen Colbert called it “senior softcore that feels like dropping acid.”
RFK has long sought to prove his manliness. He has admitted to taking testosterone, while insisting, unconvincingly, that he’s not on steroids. The administration more broadly seems to have an obsessive and desperate need to demonstrate its masculine prowess. In fact, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s warrior mentality may have contributed to the US attacks on Iran. It has certainly contributed to his callous dismissal of human casualties. Both meanwhile defer to President Donald Trump’s allegedly off-the charts levels of testosterone.
These food policies and performative workouts might appear unrelated. But, a closer connection exists between beef, masculinity, and the American nation, one that has, in fact, twined since the country’s earliest days. RFK’s effort to Make America Healthy Again is mere revival of a longstanding American narrative.
For all its chest-thumping certainty, this administration’s relationship to masculinity looks less like confidence than anxiety, much like the frontier myth itself.
The idea that meat is manly can be traced to the cultural founding of the nation on the actual frontier. In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the struggle to conquer the wilderness had fostered American virtues of independence, self-reliance, and democracy. Proving your manly virtue on the frontier made immigrants into American men as America became a virtuous nation. Declaring the closing of the frontier, Jackson lamented America’s ability to grow and innovate. Men would wither without the opportunity to test their mettle as the nation expanded.
Beef was central to imperial expansion on the frontier. Ranching not only justified the expropriation American Indian land, but beef products supplied to the US Army made expansion possible. By slaughtering to the brink of extinction the 50 million bison that roamed the Great Plains, they settled the “Indian question.” Historian Joshua Specht calls cattle “mobile colonizers.” Culturally, ranchers and cowboys justified the violence against American Indians in the interests of civilization. Central to this myth was the frontier man, bringing civilization to the feminized “vanishing Indian,” a curious paradox, to be sure, where Native Americans could be at once docile and violent.
Today we are left with an embarrassing historical echo. Protein as the final frontier of fitness influencers ironically returns us to the actual frontier in American history. Now we can see why RFK’s two provocations in the culture war of 2026 are related. Food has always been gendered and tied to nothing less than the ideals of the nation and what it means to be an American.
Today we see the same gendering of meat wrapped up with big business. Only un-American soy boys refuse to eat meat. Meat advertisements often demonstrate the masculinity of meat consumption by displaying oversexualized women cooking meat, implying that both women and animals are to be dominated and consumed by men.
There is of course no evidence that soy intake affects male hormones, or that meat consumption is required for elite athletic performance. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose character once said, “You hit like a vegetarian,“ has more recently called for cutting back on meat, noting that it isn’t necessary for athletes and harms the planet. James Cameron’s documentary The Game Changers challenges the myth that animal protein is needed for physical strength and elite athletic performance. Cameron follows tennis stars, Olympians, and even the ultimate fighter James Wilks to see how plant protein permeates their diets. But the myth lives on, perpetrated by RFK’s shirtless workouts and emphasis on eating meat. And because the old adage ”follow the money“ seems to be guiding light for this administration, it should come as no surprise that the meat industry is also a major donor.
Still, the science on red meat consumption and its effects on our planet and health are clear. Red meat consumption reduces life expectancy by increasing risks of cardiovascular disease, obesity, and cancer. Cattle also consume much of the world’s arable land, leading to deforestation and increased greenhouse gas emissions. While beans and legumes make it into the dietary guidelines, they are entirely absent from the pyramid.
Despite the eagerness of the administration, Kid Rock, and MAHA followers to heed RFK’s food and exercise advice, many of these same figures recoiled when Michelle Obama tried to move toward nutrient-dense fruit and vegetables in school lunches. Republicans accused her of trying to impose a “nanny-state,” and bristled at her impudent attempt to shape what Americans choose to eat. Again, gender is at work in our food policies.
Despite claiming to restore “scientific integrity” and “common sense,” RFK ignores the government’s own “Scientific Report of the 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee,” which consistently advocated plant-based sources of protein, especially beans and lentils while reducing the intake of red meat. The committee even suggested moving the “Beans, Peas, and Lentils Subgroup from the Vegetables Food Group to the Protein Foods Group.”
Cultural tropes can be hard to break, but it is time for a new generation of athletes and influencers to confront the wellness-to-fascism pipeline. Our secretary of health should not be making policy decisions on the basis of pseudoscience for the sake of winning a culture war. Nor should his leadership parrot “manosphere” talking points that openly embrace a hostility toward women and decry the feminization of Western society. This is nothing short of what one nutritionist called a “vibes-based policy disaster.” For all its chest-thumping certainty, this administration’s relationship to masculinity looks less like confidence than anxiety, much like the frontier myth itself. Still, these performances should not require the rest of us to pay with our health and our planet for their fragile egos.
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This unforgivable lie is Trump's most heinous insult to troops yet
Donald Trump has a fixation with numbers. He must get this trait from his uncle who taught at MIT. Trump claims his uncle had three university degrees “in nuclear, chemical, and math.”
That’s a lie, of course. And it fits. And math? What? We surely know Trump failed his math courses. That’s because Trump’s obsession with numbers usually involves numbers he makes up, pulls out of thin air, and, well, lies about, just like he lies about his uncle.
He doesn’t just lie about numbers. He remakes them as he sees fit, larger, smaller, higher, lower, more pleasing and flattering. He has a long history of making false or misleading statements about figures, consistently exaggerating numbers related to his achievements, support, and events.
Throughout his life — and in the interest of brevity, let’s stick to his political career — Trump has treated data not as a collection of facts but as a tool for image-making.
From the moment he was sworn in, he famously inflated his 2017 inauguration crowd size. Later, he compared the crowd that participated in the insurrection he provoked on January 6th to the historic crowds of the March on Washington in 1963.
These weren’t just wildly false. They were insulting.
And if you’re a glutton for lies and keep up with Trump’s fibs, you know the pattern extends to the economy, immigration, job numbers, gas prices and on and on. He routinely posts whoppers on Truth Social and delivers them during interviews, rallies, and even State of the Union speeches.
He constantly claims “record-breaking” statistics, such as 20 million illegal border crossings or inheriting “record” inflation, even when the numbers are grossly exaggerated or the opposite is true.
Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie once explained Trump’s reliance on falsity: “Trump looked at my wife and said, whether it’s true or not, if I say it enough times, it becomes true… He takes what he knows is incorrect and convinces himself by saying it enough times.”
This habitual distortion creates a phony version of leadership where popularity and success are measured by unadulterated nonsense rather than real results, i.e. electoral victory as a “landslide” or unfavorable approval ratings as “fake news.”
Trump has established a perverse precedent where obvious facts become inconvenient. His reliance on fabricated numbers doesn’t just mislead supporters; it erodes the shared seriousness required for a functioning democracy.
Alarmingly, we watched him do it six years ago with COVID. The question now, as his Iran war enters its third week and injuries and fatalities begin to mount, is whether we will watch him do it again.
On Thursday, a second military evacuation flight landed at Ramstein Air Base carrying roughly 19 more wounded American troops, including two injured in a drone attack whose details the Pentagon has declined to fully disclose. This follows about 20 who arrived days earlier. The official Pentagon tally now sits at roughly 140 injured and 13 dead.
Some of those numbers reached the public through leaks, not through clear, direct briefings from the equally fact-challenged Pete Hegseth.
When wartime casualty data has to escape through back channels to reach the American public, you don’t need a history degree to understand what’s happening. You just need a memory.
During the Vietnam War, the Johnson administration manipulated, obscured, and downplayed U.S. involvement and casualties to manage public opinion and conceal the lack of progress.
Trump has traversed this dubious road before. In the spring of 2020, he suggested that COVID case counts could be reduced simply by doing less testing.
“When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases,” he said. “So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.’” The White House said it was a joke. It wasn’t. And if it was, these are people’s lives we are talking about.
He pressured the CDC. He slow-walked reporting. He feuded publicly with his own health officials when their projections made him look bad. He even tried to keep cruise ships away from U.S. shores so that the infected passengers wouldn’t raise the ominous COVID numbers.
He turned the routine act of counting the dead into a political liability to be managed rather than a solemn obligation to be honored. By the time it was over, the United States had one of the highest COVID death tolls in the developed world.
Now here we are again.
The Iran war is just over two weeks old. It has already cost American taxpayers more than $11 billion in its first week alone. Gas prices are rising by the day. A military refueling plane crashed, and the administration was remarkably quick, suspiciously quick, to distance the incident from enemy fire.
Meanwhile, the White House communications operation has been running this conflict like a winter blockbuster, complete with NFL-style highlight reels and video game-style footage. It’s disgusting. War is not a game. It is deadly. People are maimed. People die.
Trump worked hard to manipulate COVID data. Public health experts and career officials forced some transparency. But now, in his second term, he has a compliant inner circle, a press operation built for deflection, and an instinct to reward officials who shade the truth in the boss’s favor.
Consider what happened in August 2025, when Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after a weak jobs report, accusing the agency of producing “fake” or politically motivated data. The message was clear: numbers that make him look bad are unacceptable.
Unlike a virus or a jobs report, this war has names and faces, and anxious families waiting by their phones. Those families deserve accurate information. They deserve to know exactly how many of their sons and daughters have been hurt and how badly.
Our troops are not inconvenient data points to be managed around an approval rating.
They are human beings in harm’s way. Every one of them deserves to be counted fully, honestly, and publicly.
Trump has ridiculed our troops before, under-counting the injured and dead, may be his greatest insult toward them.
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The 17 reasons to tell Trump 'you're fired'
Tyrant Trump’s favorite snarl is “You’re Fired!” That was his bellow on “The Apprentice” television program. Subsequently, he told hundreds of thousands of federal civil servants and contractors, “You’re Fired!” Shame on the pitiful Democratic Party that allowed him to regain the presidency last year.
It is long overdue for the Democrats in Congress to lay the groundwork for impeaching President Donald Trump and removing him from office. Trump provides them with the impeachable evidence openly and brazenly every day. No president in history has ever declared that “then I have Article II, where I have the right to do anything I want as president.” No president has ever dared to say, as did Trump in an interview with Reuters on January 15, 2026, that “…when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election” and meant it.
Based on their detailed declaration against King George III in the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the congressional safeguards in the Constitution drafted in 1787, our Founders, were they members of Congress today, would unanimously vote articles of impeachment against Trump for rampant constitutional lawlessness.
Here are 17 articles of Impeachment against dictator Trump that many constitutional law scholars would endorse, drafted by constitutional law specialist and practitioner, Bruce Fein. (For the full text of the articles of Impeachment, here.)
Ask these lawmakers if they are waiting for Trump to use the Insurrection Act to order the military to seize the state voting machinery and repress the vote in the contested states or districts?
ARTICLE 1—WAR POWER-MURDER-PIRACY
ARTICLE 2—MILITARIZATION OF DOMESTIC LAW ENFORCEMENT
ARTICLE 3—SERIAL UNCONSTITUTIONAL DETENTIONS AND DEPORTATIONS
ARTICLE 4—BRIBERY
ARTICLE 5—RETALIATION AGAINST CONSTITUTIONALLY PROTECTED SPEECH OR ASSOCIATION
ARTICLE 6—ABUSE OF THE PARDON POWER—SABOTAGING THE RULE OF LAW
ARTICLE 7—ILLEGALLY CRIPPLING OR DEFUNDING PROGRAMS TO PROTECT CONSUMERS, THE NEEDY, WORKERS, AND THE ENVIRONMENT
ARTICLE 8—USURPATION OF THE CONGRESSIONAL POWER OF THE PURSE
ARTICLE 9—CONTEMPT OF CONGRESS—SECRET GOVERNMENT
ARTICLE 10—PERVERTING LAW ENFORCEMENT TO PERSECUTE POLITICAL OPPONENTS AND BENEFIT FRIENDS
ARTICLE 11—SUSPENDING OR DISPENSING WITH LAWS
ARTICLE 12—FLOUTING SECTION 1 OF THE 14TH AMENDMENT
ARTICLE 13—SPECIOUS NATIONAL EMERGENCY—FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION DECLARATIONS
ARTICLE 14—DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN EMOLUMENTS CLAUSES
ARTICLE 15—CHRONIC DECEIT AIMING AT DICTATORSHIP
ARTICLE 16—TREASON
ARTICLE 17—MEGALOMANIA-HUBRIS
Already, a growing majority of the American people want Trump Impeached. They are feeling the impact where they live, work, and raise their families of Trump’s dictatorial, corporatist regime, which is endangering, weakening, and wrecking America! The criminal, illegal, unconstitutional war against Iran and the continuing full backing of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocide against the Palestinians and the Israeli bombing of Lebanon’s civilian population and occupying southern Lebanon will only increase the hardships on the American people. US soldiers are also being ordered to illegally obey illegal orders. Six Members of Congress who served in the military issued a video statement that said, “You must refuse illegal orders.” Representatives said in the video, “No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.”
Send these articles of Impeachment with your own thoughts and demands to your two senators and your representative by letter, email, or voicemail. (The Congressional switchboard number is 202-224-3121). You can also call local congressional offices to voice your concerns to your member of Congress. Ask them when will they exercise their constitutional duties. What further criminal outrage, program, and police state power will move them to catch up with the demands of the people back home?
Ask these lawmakers if they are waiting for Trump to use the Insurrection Act to order the military to seize the state voting machinery and repress the vote in the contested states or districts? He has already noted this limitless power in his first term and more recently.
There are only 535 members of Congress. Flood them with your demands to literally save our Republic and the Constitution for which it stands. Otherwise, WITH TRUMP AND HIS DANGEROUSLY UNSTABLE PERSONALITY, IT IS ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE, MUCH WORSE, HERE AND ABROAD.
Take charge, people, one by one, citizen group by citizen group! Use your sovereign power under the Constitution.
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This simple tactic will take down Trump — and every one of his sycophants
Hey, DNC, I’ve got your unifying message right here.
A new poll shows that the majority of Americans believe Donald Trump is using the Iranian people as human distractions for his crimes against humanity. Deploying 2,500 Marines to Iran is a clear signal that Trump is willing to send our military to die for him just because his name is so embedded in the Epstein Files.
This is the kind of thing Democrats should be talking about every chance they get. Trump’s failures are all they need to campaign on. Every last one of his sycophants in Congress shoulders the blame for everything he does, and that’s what Democrats need to focus on.
MAKE TRUMP’S FAILURES STICK TO MAGA CANDIDATES.
That’s it.
That’s the Democratic Party’s unifying message for the 2026 midterms.
You’re welcome, Ken Martin! It’s okay, you can send me a small stipend for that and the other ideas I have about the aggressive campaign every Democratic candidate needs.
Call it OPERATION TRUMP’S FAULT.
Gas prices? Trump’s fault.
Grocery prices? Trump’s fault.
Epstein Files and the Iran body count thus far? Soooo Trump’s fault.
Trump is the Republican Party, and they are him (maybe not Rep. Thomas Massie at the moment, but the rest for sure).
Democrats have been accused of not bragging about our accomplishments while also not holding their Republican colleagues accountable. It’s time to switch things up ahead of a midterm election that Trump is already telling everyone is rigged. Sound familiar? Do any of us need to relive any of our previous elections over the last decade of Trump Blight?
Democrats need to quit campaigning nicely and use the truth as a weapon against their Republican opponents, who are barely holding on to their simple majority because they’ve been dropping like flies in the House.
CNN reports that a record 35 House Republicans are either retiring or seeking higher office, such as Senator or Governor. It’s the most since at least 1930, according to data cited from the Brookings Institution.
The recent scandal surrounding Rep. Tony Gonzalez (R-TX) is just the latest gift handed to the Democrats from the Trumpublicans. Despite his initial refusals to resign, Gonzalez has now acquiesced and isn’t seeking reelection. And the House Ethics Committee’s investigation into Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) falsifying her Congressional expense report could cost them their majority even before the midterms.
Mace’s seat was already going to be vacated before January 2027 because she’s running a failing campaign for Governor of South Carolina. Her erratic online behavior and support of Trump instead of the Epstein Survivors have made her incredibly unpopular both online and off. And now she might be expelled from Congress over the more than $9,000 she allegedly embezzled from the United States government.
That’s another glorious advantage for Democrats if it happens. No bills are going to get passed when there’s every chance of a 217-217 tie. It weakens the Hastert Rule (not bringing bills to the floor without majority party support), and passing any bills out of committee becomes more difficult.
While there have been plenty of Democrats speaking out against the Trump regime and the Epstein Files, they’re still facing the very real problem of getting the truth to rise to the top, where Americans can see it. Trump and his allies are doing all they can to control the flow of information. FCC Chair Brendan Carr is now threatening to pull broadcast licenses if networks don’t air Trump’s Iran propaganda. At the same time, the 2026 midterms will be the first election truly impacted by the advances in AI technology and deepfakes. Whatever Elon did to help Trump in 2024 is going to not just be repeated, but worsened by whatever his Grok can be programmed to say or show.
As someone who makes my meager living by telling the truth, I’ve only grown more worried about how we’re supposed to believe anything we see or hear at this very critical moment. Our democracy is at stake. Nobody should be playing nice when every decision Trump makes comes with a body count.
But I’m not here to complain without providing solutions. The way to get the truth to the American public is to deliver it to them in a way that can’t be ignored. How does Trump’s propaganda get shared? It starts with a briefing from Press Secretary Karoline “KKKaroline Lie-vitt” Leavitt in a Press Room full of chosen right-wing media outlets. Seems a little biased, right?
So where’s our Democratic Press Secretary to give a daily briefing to counter those lies, like a daily response to the State of the Union? I’ve had this idea since about a week after Trump slithered back into the White House, and every time I’ve written or posted about it on social media, the response is overwhelming.
All members of the media would be invited to the Democratic Press briefing, which would be held at the Capitol. There’s no way the press wouldn’t show up, regardless of the outlet. The so-called “liberal” media that’s been jettisoned from the daily White House briefings is starved for access to the truth and would relish the chance to get real answers to their questions. The right-wing media would show up with their biased questions and get owned by someone smart, informed, and experienced at handling people like Peter Doocy.
I’ve often suggested Jessica Tarlov from Fox News for the job, because she shuts down the pile of stalking smarm that is Jesse Watters five days a week without raising her voice. I don’t know that she’d take the pay cut, but that’s the vibe we need from a Democratic Press Secretary. They’d meet the press while Democratic members of Congress go on TV to keep pushing the unifying message:
EVERYTHING IS TRUMP’S FAULT.
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Donald Trump reveals his legacy
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
This is hands down the stupidest member of Trump's Cabinet
Friends, At a press briefing on Friday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth complained about a CNN report that the Trump administration had underestimated Iran’s ability to disrupt global oil traffic by closing the Strait of Hormuz. |
“Patently ridiculous,” Hegseth told reporters, adding — even as the strait’s blockage was proving to be Iran’s most powerful leverage in the war — we “don’t need to worry about it.” He also denied that the U.S. bombed the school where some 175 children were killed. Hegseth added that, as to CNN, “the sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”
These remarks are remarkably stupid, on several levels.
First, CNN got it absolutely right in reporting that Trump’s national security team had underestimated Iran’s ability to disrupt global oil traffic. CNN cited “multiple sources familiar with the matter.”
The New York Times published a similar story, reporting that in the lead-up to the U.S.-Israeli attack, “Trump downplayed the risks to the energy markets.”
Even The Wall Street Journal, hardly a New York Times or CNN clone, substantiated the story on Friday, reporting that Trump rejected warnings that Iran would likely retaliate by closing the strait because he believed Iran would capitulate before doing so, and he assumed that even if Iran tried to close it, the U.S. military could handle it.
Second, Hegseth’s comment that we “don’t need to worry about” the blockage of the strait is not only false but flippantly insulting to an American public that deserves to know what the Trump regime is planning to do about soaring prices at the gas pump, directly due to that blockage.
Third, even if Hegseth believes that David Ellison’s ownership of CNN will silence CNN’s critical coverage of Trump, it’s remarkably stupid of Hegseth to say it out loud. “The sooner David Ellison takes over CNN, the better” is an open admission that Trump backed Ellison’s bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s parent, to silence criticism.
That deal is still pending, so Hegseth’s admission is likely to fuel even more opposition to it. California’s attorney general has already suggested he’ll go to court to block it. Now other attorneys general, the ACLU, and Democrats in Congress may join the case as co-plaintiffs.
Hegseth’s admission also confirms CNN’s worst fears that Ellison will throttle criticism of Trump — a fear that’s already caused several leading lights to exit. As Variety put it, “Anderson, cooped. Jake, tapped. Erin, burnt. Kasie, hunted. Wolf, blitzed.”
Ellison has already proven himself an unreliable steward of journalistic independence at CBS News. One departing producer there explained in a farewell memo to colleagues that she could no longer work where stories are “evaluated not just on their journalistic merit, but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations — a dynamic that pressures producers and reporters to self-censor or avoid challenging narratives that might trigger backlash or unfavorable headlines.”
Finally, Hegseth’s denial that the U.S. is responsible for the deaths of nearly 200 schoolchildren in Iran is belied by mounting evidence that the U.S. did bomb the school. Hegseth’s further insistence that the U.S. “never targets civilians” is refuted by the U.S. military’s killing of at least 157 people on 40 small boats in the Caribbean without evidence they were “narcoterrorists” rather than civilians.
And, friends, this was just one news conference.
Pete Hegseth’s job is so far over his head that he can’t even see it. He evidently believes it’s to cheerlead and defend Trump with bonkers claims like “We didn't start this war, but under President Trump we’re finishing it” and “America is winning decisively, devastatingly, and without mercy” and “we will show no quarter for our enemies.” (“No quarter” means kill everyone and take no prisoners, which is a war crime.)
In the days leading up to the U.S. attack on Iran, Hegseth spent his time criticizing “wokeness” at American universities, feuding with Anthropic over safeguards for AI, and, in the day before the war began, forcing Scouting America to abandon programs aimed at promoting diversity.
He dismisses war crimes, pooh-poohs the rules of engagement, and projects unequivocal belligerence at a time when the United States is rapidly losing whatever moral standing it had in the world.
Granted, it’s difficult to select one of Trump’s Cabinet members as the stupidest. But Pete Hegseth stands out for sheer boneheaded ignorance.
Pray for America and the world.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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The single move that will bring Trump's plans crashing down
The drumbeats for expanding our (and Israel’s) war with Iran are loud.
Cable news panels talk about strategy. Politicians talk about deterrence. Pentagon briefings talk about targets and timelines. But there’s one thing missing from almost every conversation in Washington.
Risk.
Not the geopolitical kind. Not the think-tank kind. Real risk. The kind that lands in your living room in the form of a letter from the government telling your family that your child is being sent to war.
For most of modern America’s leaders — and certainly for generations of the Trump family — that risk simply doesn’t exist.
We live in a country where fewer than one percent of the population serves in the military. The burden of fighting America’s wars has been placed on a narrow slice of our people. They’re mostly working class, many come from rural communities, and many join because it’s one of the few stable ways to get healthcare, education benefits, and a future.
Meanwhile the people who debate whether we should be bombing Iran are almost never sending their own kids.
That didn’t used to be the case.
During World War II nearly every American family had someone in uniform. War was a shared national sacrifice, and politicians understood that every decision they made could cost the life of one of theirs or their neighbor’s son or daughter.
I remember well how Vietnam brought that reality home in a different way. I hated it, protested against it, got kicked out of school for those protests, and still curse LBJ and Nixon for their lies that killed nearly 60,000 of my fellow citizens. But that, in retrospect, is exactly how it should be. That protest/debate was a good thing for our nation, every bit as good as the war was wrong and bad.
The draft lottery meant that millions of young Americans suddenly had skin in the game of war. College campuses erupted in protest not because students were uniquely radical but because they knew they might soon be the ones crawling through rice paddies under machine gun fire in a war that the country had, by then, fully realized was based on lies.
The draft was what forced our country, our families from coast-to-coast, to confront the human cost of war. And eventually it forced our government to end that war.
In 1973 Richard Nixon and Congress ended the draft and created today’s all-volunteer military. The argument sounded reasonable at the time, particularly after the upheaval of Vietnam. A professional military would be more skilled and more motivated, they said. It would be more competent, even more lethal.
But then something else happened because the draft ended: war became easier for politicians to throw our military into, because the dissenting voices in the ranks had vanished.
When only a tiny slice of Americans are at risk for fighting, bleeding, and dying, the political price of launching a war drops dramatically. Congress members can vote for military action without worrying that their own children or those of their constituents will pay the price. Television pundits can cheer for bombing campaigns without imagining their own kids in uniform.
The result has been nearly nonstop war for half a century, from Ronald Reagan’s attack on Grenada straight through to today.
Afghanistan lasted 20 years. Iraq dragged on for nearly two decades. The United States has been involved in military operations across the Middle East and Africa that most Americans can barely locate on a map.
Now we’re staring at the possibility that Trump’s attacks against Iran could metastasize into World War III.
The stakes here are much higher than George W. Bush’s wars that he told his biographer, Mickey Herskowitz, were fought to get him a second term in the White House. Iran isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan: it’s a nation of nearly 90 million people with a large military, deep regional alliances, and the ability to disrupt global energy markets overnight. It’s twice the size of Iraq or Texas.
And a war there could ignite the entire Middle East, which could easily spread to Europe (and already has, in a minor way, with Iran’s attacks on Cyprus and their missiles sent at Turkey). As we deplete our munitions, it might also encourage China to try to take Taiwan.
Yet the discussion among Republicans in Washington sounds strangely casual. Analysts debate air strikes on TV and guess about retaliation scenarios the way sports commentators pontificate about playoff strategies. Pete Hegseth struts and preens for the camera like a tough guy.
All because it’s easy to talk that way when you know your family won’t be fighting.
Now, imagine a different system.
Imagine that the United States had a national draft that applied equally to everyone. Rich kids and poor kids. Red states and blue states. The children of senators, CEOs, and television hosts alongside the children of factory workers and teachers.
This is how it works today in Norway (includes women), Sweden (includes women), Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Greece, Israel (includes women), South Korea, Singapore, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In Finland, Switzerland, Austria, Norway, and Sweden young people can opt to serve in the nonprofit sector (like hospitals or environmental work) instead of the military.
The draft provides a right of passage into adulthood for young people, something found in the history of every society. Those who serve for a year could be rewarded with free college or trade school. They’d get out of their local bubble, see the world, meet and work side-by-side with people who don’t look or speak or pray like them.
These are all good outcomes of national service.
And it’s successful: other than Israel, which has its own unique problems, you’re not hearing much bellicose war rhetoric from any of those nations’ leaders.
If we had that here, do you think Republicans would still talk so casually about war with Iran? Would Congress rush to authorize military force if their own sons and daughters might be called up next month?
History suggests the answer is no.
Countries with universal service become more cautious about war because the entire society feels the consequences. Parents ask harder questions, students organize, and communities demand clear, explicit, detailed answers about why a conflict is necessary and exactly what victory would look like.
Shared sacrifice, in other words, produces democratic accountability. And right now America doesn’t have that.
Instead, we’ve created a system where war is something that happens to somebody else, that roughly one percent who volunteer. It’s fought by someone else’s kids. It’s endured by someone else’s family.
That’s not how a democracy is supposed to work.
The Founders of our republic deeply distrusted standing armies, so much so that they wrote into the Constitution that the army must be funded every two years or it will cease to exist. It’s right there in Article I, forcing our country to reevaluate our military and its use every time Congress reconvenes:
“The Congress shall have Power…To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;”
They believed that America should only go to war when the public truly understood the stakes and Congress had engaged in a vigorous, public debate about it. That’s why declaring war was not among the powers the Constitution gives the president.
“The Congress shall have Power…to declare War…”
When there was a national consensus, and only then, would we go to war. Citizen soldiers were supposed to ensure that war remained a last resort rather than a convenient tool of foreign policy. This BS like Republicans today are doing as they hold briefings for Congress behind closed doors would have horrified them.
And ignoring that concern is how Trump got us here: the all-volunteer military quietly erased that safeguard.
Don’t take me wrong: the men and women who volunteer to serve our nation deserve enormous respect. They’ve carried the weight of America’s wars with courage and sacrifice.
The problem isn’t them: it’s the rest of us. When the risks of war are concentrated in a small segment of society, the rest of the nation stops paying attention. Politicians face less pressure, military interventions multiply, and wealthy defense contractors prosper.
The human cost of war, in other words, gets hidden.
But a fair national draft would change that overnight.
It wouldn’t make America more warlike: history shows it would do the opposite. If every family knew their children could be sent to fight, Americans would demand diplomacy first, second, and third.
Wars would still happen when they truly had to, but they wouldn’t happen so casually. A president who just orders the troops to start shooting at a country like Iran would be held to account by every family in the country.
As the war with Iran grows hotter, we should be asking a simple question that almost nobody in Washington wants to hear:
“If the road to war with Tehran required the sons and daughters of the billionaire and political class to march beside everyone else’s kids, would we still be there?”
- Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.
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Ron DeSantis won't drop this racist lie
“There are wrongs which even the grave does not bury.” – Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897), American abolitionist and author
Since he became governor, Ron DeSantis has made anti-Blackness — by way of race-tinged rhetoric, policy, and legislation — one of the major pillars of his administration.
He is not alone.
A persistent narrative spun by a wide swathe of white Republicans is that white people are under attack and suffering harm because of reverse discrimination. The clamor is that white Americans are now the most disenfranchised group in the United States.
The narrative is of rampant anti-white racism, the difficulties and challenges whites encounter in all aspects of their life, and the jobs, housing, and other opportunities denied them because unfair laws, policies, and programs are skewed to benefit African Americans, Latinos, Native American, and other non-white people. All this noise is disingenuous.
Since each man came into office, both the DeSantis and the Trump administrations have partnered on a sardonic crusade, labeling DEI programs as indoctrination and discrimination while forcefully dismantling affirmative action and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in government, education, and commerce.
Republican operatives have unleashed a groundswell of recrimination that has deepened the already profound racial divisions that have sadly become a routine feature of life in the United States.
Yet this entire premise of Black people being afforded an unfair privilege is built on a centuries-old lie.
Slavery is America’s Original Sin, the perpetual stain that DeSantis, Trump, and other apologists spend inordinate time trying to convince us that none of it really happened. Yet for the more than 400 years since enslaved Africans have been in this country, the dominant majority has erected physical, social, political, psychological, economic, and other barriers to any Black progress.
Confrontation between integrationists and segregationists at a whites-only beach in St. Augustine, June 25, 1964. Still from FHP film. (Via State Library and Archives of Florida)
Struggle
It has been a monumental struggle all these years for African Americans to move past the obstacles set in their way including chattel slavery, Jim Crow, de jure and de facto segregation, and redlining.
The Florida American Civil Liberties Union notes that “throughout his tenure, this governor has used the power of his office to subjugate and control the lives of Black people in Florida. But slavery is over, and we’re not asking for our freedom anymore. We’re taking it.”
DeSantis and his administration, the ALCU said, are “on a crusade this election season to stop progress and keep in place coercive and unfair laws that control the bodies of Black people in Florida.” If they prevail, “the lives of people who are historically the most impacted by these policies will continue to be at risk: Black people.”
The ACLU adds, “The administration of Gov. DeSantis has demonstrated a disdain for Black people and their lives in Florida. His actions as governor demonstrate that under his governance, the lives of Black people are expendable.”
The anti-DEI campaign has targeted Florida’s public schools, teachers, universities, professors, and businesses. To wit: Florida’s 12 public universities have been prohibited from using state or federal funds for DEI programs, following legislation signed by the governor and reinforced by the State Board of Governors.
Recently, Florida’s Attorney General James Uthmeier launched yet another legal fusillade at what’s left of Florida’s already weakened DEI programs.
In what might be the coup de grâce, Uthmeier released a legal opinion declaring that many of the established DEI and affirmative action measures in Florida’s public and private sectors constitute unlawful race‑based discrimination under federal and state law.
“Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier issued a formal opinion finding that dozens of state laws requiring race-based preferences, classifications, or quotas violate the Equal Protection Clause and Florida’s Constitution. Relying heavily on the Supreme Court’s holding in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the opinion states that Florida will not defend or enforce statutes that mandate race-based decision making,” according to CWC, “a national association of employers committed to effective labor and employment law compliance and the sensible regulation of the U.S. workplace.”
The CWC report notes that “these letters do not change federal law, but they reflect an increasingly aggressive enforcement posture by state officials and reinforce heightened scrutiny of race conscious policies following [the] Harvard [ruling]. It would not be surprising if other state attorneys general weigh in, either echoing these concerns or offering a sharply different view, adding to legal and political uncertainty for multi-state employers.
Republicans, MAGA — perhaps most Americans — love to brag that the U.S. is a meritocracy but that is fiction.
A glance at the racial landscape across America tells a different story. White people comprise 59% of the U.S. population but dominate in just about all spheres of American life.
Confrontation between integrationists and segregationists at a whites-only beach in St. Augustine, June 25, 1964. Still from FHP film. (Via State Library and Archives of Florida)The real race disparities
A 2014 study by the Women Donors Network found that 95% of the 2,437 elected state and local prosecutors in the United States — who wield tremendous power — were white, with 79% being white men, despite white men representing only 31% of the population. This lack of diversity significantly affects the fate of defendants who are disproportionately Black and Hispanic.
Only 1% of elected prosecutors were non-white women. In 66% of states that elect prosecutors, there were no black prosecutors, while 15 states had only white prosecutors. We can blame the ol’ boys network, which is reflected in the reality that 85% of incumbent prosecutors run for re-election unopposed.
In other fields:
- America’s Fortune 500 corporations with the highest revenue generated employ a mere eight black CEOs.
- 80% of all public-school teachers are white despite the diversity of America’s student population and students of color making up more than half of the student body.
- A white high school dropout has an easier time getting a job than a Black man with a college degree, so Black men’s educational levels do not guarantee equal job opportunities.
And perhaps the biggest data point, massive wealth disparity. Statistics show that wealth disparities between Black and white households in the United States are profound and pervasive, with white households possessing almost 10 times more median wealth than Black households. In 2022, the median wealth for white households was about $285,000, while for Black households it was $44,900.
White households, comprising 60% of the population, held 84% of total U.S. household wealth in 2020, while Black households (13.4% of the population) held 4%.
A RAND study regards the wealth gap as the present-day manifestation of that history of lost income and lost opportunity. The gap has been widening, year after year, for at least the past 30 years. In fact, it has only meaningfully narrowed in recent years during moments of economic turmoil, when housing and stock prices fell.
“You can see how it becomes this baked-in system, with every generation having less to pass down to the next generation,” said Jonathan Welburn, an expert in economic analysis and lead author of Rand’s wealth gap study. “Yesterday’s segregation is today’s wealth gap. We like to pretend that we live in a race-neutral, merit-based society now, that this is all in the past, but you can’t erase history. It shows up in our wealth. For many, it shows up in the lack of wealth.”
Demonstrators gathered in Tallahassee near the Florida Capitol on May 31, 2020, to protest the police killing of George Floyd. (Photo by Peter T. Reinwald)
Redlining and more
In Florida, the gap between Blacks and whites is driven by institutional and systemic structures that include unequal access to housing and jobs; disinvestment in Black and brown communities; redlining; the unwillingness of banks to give African Americans loans at the same rate and percentage as whites; lower investment returns; and a centuries-long legacy of discrimination.
Palm Beach Post reporter Wayne Washington wrote about the effects of racism, discrimination and segregation on Black Floridians in 2023. He detailed in his story the reality that, “on a broad range of issues — financial, political, social — Black Floridians still lag behind white Floridians and in many areas the gap has grown. In DeSantis’ Florida, he writes, Black residents are sicker, poorer, less educated. It’s getting worse.”
Former state Sen. Bobby Powell, a West Palm Beach Democrat and former chair of the state’s Black Legislative Caucus, said the DeSantis administration is more interested in scoring political points at Black people’s expense than working to improve their lives.
“Right now, we’re under a regime that works to attack the idea of diversity and inclusion,” Powell says in the story. “People are jumping on that bandwagon. We’ve got gaps now that I think will grow even larger.”
Researchers from the United Way argue that “such institutionalized racism will not solve itself. Black babies in Florida are half as likely to see their first birthday. Black men have the shortest life expectancy of any group in the United States.”
More than half of black households in Florida live below the United Way’s Asset Limited Income Constrained Employed (ALICE) threshold.
“Segregation persists. The average black household with an income of more than $60,000 lived in a neighborhood with a higher poverty rate than did the average white household earning less than $20,000. It isn’t getting better,” the report said.
Supporters of affirmative action and diversity, equity, and inclusion point out that one important element of the fight is to reframe these initiatives as benefits to society, individuals, and communities — to highlight attempts to reach parity and equality and eschew preferential treatment. They also advise implementation of new and innovative ways to leverage data proving the return on investment from building a culture that embraces all people.
African Americans and other non-whites can’t give up the fight. They have no choice but to oppose DeSantis, Trump, and the rest on the streets, in the courts, in the voting booth, despite concerted efforts by far-right Republicans to squelch any dissent.
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Dead school kids are the price of Hegseth's 'losers' bluster
If we’re not better than Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, we’re in terrible trouble.
War always means innocent people dying. But civilized nations try — imperfectly, too often unsuccessfully — to limit that risk. That’s why rules of engagement exist in the first place. They are not about political correctness or bureaucratic caution. They are about preventing needless death.
Hegseth has spent years ridiculing that idea.
Long before he became Donald Trump’s defense secretary, Hegseth built a career attacking the very guardrails meant to keep wars from sliding into indiscriminate violence. As a Fox News personality and conservative activist, he mocked military lawyers who insisted on verifying targets before pulling the trigger. He sneered at the notion that American commanders should exercise caution when civilians might be nearby. He called those rules “stupid.”
Once in power at the Pentagon, he moved quickly to dismantle the culture that produced them.
Hegseth fired the military’s top judge advocates general and shuttered Pentagon offices tasked with reducing civilian casualties. He framed the changes as part of a new “warrior ethos” — a phrase that sounded less like professional military doctrine than something ripped from a locker-room speech.
When the war with Iran began, he boasted that American forces were operating with what he proudly described as “maximum authorities.” No more of the supposedly timid constraints of past conflicts. No more hesitation.
“Death and destruction from the sky all day long,” he said at one briefing.
Those words now hang over the ruins of an elementary school in the Iranian port city of Minab.
According to preliminary findings reported this week, a U.S. strike aimed at an adjacent naval installation likely destroyed the school building, killing roughly 175 civilians, most of them children. Officials familiar with the investigation say the target list relied on outdated intelligence. The school had once been part of the military base years earlier, but had long since been converted to civilian use.
It appears the strike planners simply didn’t double-check.
In the old Pentagon culture Hegseth spent years mocking, double-checking was exactly the point.
The rules he derided existed for reasons that went beyond humanitarian concern. Civilian deaths inflame local populations, alienate allies and create more enemies than they eliminate. Every experienced military commander understands this. It is both a moral obligation and a strategic necessity.
Hegseth, a despicable lout whose moral compass was shattered long ago—if he ever had one—sneers at all that as weakness.
Even before entering government, his public life was defined by conduct that suggested a man who mocked rules — legal, ethical, or otherwise — as inconveniences that applied to other people.
A woman told Monterey, California police in 2017 that after a Republican women’s conference where Hegseth was the keynote speaker, he took her phone, blocked his hotel room door with his body, and sexually assaulted her despite, in her words, saying “no” repeatedly. She went to a hospital, underwent a rape kit exam, and handed her clothing to investigators. No charges were filed, but Hegseth later paid his accuser $50,000 in a confidential settlement. His explanation: he feared what the allegation might do to his Fox News career.
That’s what he told senators, under oath. But despite that and a litany of other horror stories presented by people who knew the real Hegseth, he was confirmed because the Republican majority of the United States Senate wasn’t going to challenge Donald Trump on issues of personal morality.
So today, this depraved man commands the most powerful military force on earth. Should it come as a surprise that he has dismantled every institutional check he can find that was designed to prevent mistakes?
Hegseth is every bit as vile as his recently fired Cabinet colleague, Kristi Noem. But unless he personally wounds Trump’s psyche with an ad campaign, there’s little reason to hope that he’ll meet the same fate.
It’s naive to bemoan that Hegseth doesn’t care about body counts. It’s why he has the job.
His position demands seriousness, restraint, and respect for the traditions of a professional officer corps that has spent generations learning the hard lessons of war. It requires someone who understands that American power is not measured by how eagerly we unleash it.
Instead, it is now held by a man who treated the laws of war as punchlines long before he had the authority to bend them.
At least 150 children are dead in Minab. Their families do not care whether the missile strike was technically legal, whether the intelligence file was outdated, or whether the final investigation assigns blame.
And if we don’t care either, shame on us.
Our current government conflates caution with cowardice. Pete Hegseth called that attitude strength.
History will call it something else.
- Click here to subscribe to Ray Hartmann's Soapbox
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