All posts tagged "democracy"

This dark addiction has taken over — and threatens to end our republic

In a comment to my recent article about how much Trump-like corruption the American people will tolerate, Sabrina Haake (who writes the “Haake Take”) wrote:

“I really want to see a deep dive on how power affects the brain. A strong addiction, as you say. but it deserves a special study in the age of Trump, given its complete takeover…”

It’s a great question, and the revelations of the Epstein connection to Trump and numerous — perhaps hundreds — of rich and powerful men and their abuse of powerless children again highlights how this addiction warps behavior, destroys lives, and kneecaps democracies.

For most of our history, Americans have believed that political power is something granted — temporarily — to leaders who serve the public good.

But modern neuroscience and social psychology are revealing something more dangerous and more sobering: power doesn’t just sit in someone’s hands; it reshapes the human mind itself.

And — as Trump’s masked secret police abuse people with total impunity and his toadies celebrate it with bizarre videos, as Republicans vote for more tax cuts for billionaires while cutting off health care and food for the poor, as Ghislaine Maxwell is treated like a princess while her victims are demonized — we’re seeing how this has twisted and damaged our nation.

Put a man in uniform and give him unaccountable power over life and death and it changes him. Give a president complete immunity for any crimes he commits and it unleashes a darkness no country should have to suffer.

As our democracy strains under the weight of Trump’s relentless need for dominance, the science raises a disturbing question: Are we witnessing the consequences of a dark addiction to power, and, if so, what does that mean for the future of our republic?

Researchers from Berkeley to Columbia have discovered that when people feel powerful, the brain shifts into what scientists call an “approach state.” Dopamine-driven reward circuits fire more easily. The world seems simpler, brighter, even easier.

Confidence rises. Caution fades. And empathy, that quiet internal tuning fork that vibrates in response to other people’s feelings, becomes less sensitive.

Many remember when the world’s richest man — who oversaw the destruction of USAID, which has already led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people — highlighted what wealth and power had done to him in a revealing comment to an interviewer:

“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response.”

In one remarkable experiment, scientists used brain scans to measure how automatically the brain “mirrors” — deeply feels/understands and can empathize with — others’ experiences. People who were praised, flattered, and told stories that put them into a high-power mindset showed less mirroring, meaning their brains became less attuned to the people around them.

Historically, this has been a definition of evil. Less connected. Less empathetic. Less concerned for others because they’re no longer able to actually feel within themselves what others are experiencing.

This neurological shift doesn’t necessarily make powerful people behave as if they’re immoral, but that’s often the case and when it does it can produce tragic results for those around them or those they have power over.

And here’s where modern politics — and particularly the Trump era, Epstein, and the politicians at the center of today’s GOP — enter the picture.

Psychologists have long identified a trio of personality traits known as the Dark Triad: narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. People high in these traits crave status and admiration. They feel little guilt. They view relationships transactionally.

For them, power isn’t a tool to shape policy: power is the point itself. It’s the reward. The psychological oxygen.

When people with these characteristics gain power, dominance becomes patriotism, cruelty becomes strength, and attention becomes fuel.

And we can see that this hunger for power hasn’t just shaped Donald Trump’s life. It’s reshaped the entire conservative movement. The entire Republican Party. Even — particularly those average people who spend hours with rightwing media — our national narrative, the story we tell ourselves about who we are and what our nation means.

And neuroscience gives us one more warning: losing power can feel like withdrawal.

We’re seeing this right now as Donald Trump thrashes about, losing his grip on his party and his followers. Calling a reporter “Piggy.” Sucking up to a foreign tyrant who’s handing his family billions.

We see it as Republican senators slip into legislation a clause that forces the government to give each of them millions of taxpayer dollars, or help cover up Epstein’s crimes.

For someone whose identity is fused with dominance, losing an election — or even facing accountability — can feel intolerable. The result is a frantic attempt to reclaim power at any cost, even if it means attacking institutions, undermining elections, or convincing millions that democracy itself can’t be trusted.

This is how republics falter, reflecting the “narcissistic collapse” that I’ve written about before.

It often begins with a psychological spiral when one leader’s desperation to hold onto power merges with millions of his followers’ fears and grievances, until the nation itself becomes trapped inside his addiction.

So, what do we do? It turns out that the antidote to the danger of power is democracy itself.

Shared power. Checked power. Transparent power. A system of checks-and-balances where no one person becomes the sun around which the nation must orbit.

So the question we face today — the question both science and history force us to confront — is this:

“How will We, the People respond as Trump, his MAGA movement, and the GOP lash out at us as they’re losing the near-absolute power they now enjoy and has been handed them by six corrupt members of the Supreme Court?”

Will we stand up and speak out?
Will we defy their attempts to militarize our nation and terrify us into submission?
Will we take away their tax breaks and immunities and force them back into the world the rest of us inhabit?
Will we rally together and support each other and the brave politicians and leaders willing to risk their lives and livelihoods by rising in resistance?

Or will we as a nation — like the Germans and Italians did in the 1930s, like the Russians and Hungarians did over the past two decades, like most of today’s GOP are doing right now — surrender to power addiction and decide that having a “Dear Leader” and single-party state is okay?

The choice is ours.

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.

Trump as 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 2017, 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/

Sinister GOP blueprint laid bare by these shameless red-staters

Let’s be blunt: Michigan Republicans, like their counterparts nationally, are no longer merely questioning elections. They are actively seeking to undermine them.

Their latest maneuvers, calling for federal intervention by baselessly smearing Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s ability to fairly oversee elections to cheering President Donald Trump’s pardons of the state’s alleged false electors, reveal a party more invested in manufacturing distrust than in protecting democracy.

Put together, these moves are not isolated issues. They form a strategy: cast doubt, sow suspicion, and demand federal oversight, all the while shifting focus from governance to grievance.

'Conflict of interest' gambit

On Thursday, GOP leaders in the Michigan Legislature demanded that the U.S. Department of Justice step in and monitor the state’s 2026 elections because Benson might have a personal political stake — she’s running for governor — and therefore cannot be trusted to run elections impartially.

But those who know how our elections work also know Michigan has a deeply decentralized system administered across 1,600+ local jurisdictions and that electoral oversight is routinely conducted with bipartisan monitors and observers.

What’s happening here is not about transparency, it’s about casting suspicion.

Rather than offering credible evidence of wrongdoing, these Republicans are demanding a federal takeover of state elections under the guise of “protecting fairness.”

That is opposite the principle of local control and further erodes public confidence.

The optics of a state handing over election control to Washington, D.C., are antithetical to stated conservative principles valuing states’ rights over those not explicitly delineated to the federal government.

Pardons of false electors

Furthering this attempt to undermine elections were the October pardons by Trump of 16 Michigan Republicans who allegedly signed on as a false slate of electors in 2020 in an effort to overturn the certified election results in the state.

The pardons, which were wholly unnecessary after the charges were dismissed, undercuts faith in the very system Republicans insist they are defending.

It is breathtakingly hypocritical.

Keep in mind that the Republicans charged in the false elector case were not exonerated. After having sat through hours of testimony in the case, it was clear to me that the evidence showed an attempt to try and overturn Joe Biden’s Electoral College win.

But a poorly handled investigation and an overreaching prosecution ultimately left the judge little choice but to reject the charges.

When you pardon those who seemingly tried to subvert the system and were already cleared of any consequences, how do you then credibly say you’re working to protect the system?

Why this matters

The integrity of elections is built by process, by transparency, and by predictable rules. In that regard, Michigan is among the best, having been ranked second in the nation for election administration in 2024 by the Elections Performance Index.

Released by the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, the report scored Michigan at 88 percent on the index, second only to New Mexico, which also scored 88 percent.

The report noted Michigan had shorter wait times for voters, far fewer registration and absentee ballot issues than the national average and a much lower rate of unreturned mail ballots. Michigan was also higher than the national average in both voter turnout (59.3 percent compared to 47.5 percent nationally) and voter registration (91 percent compared to 84 percent nationally).

Yet now, Republicans lawmakers seem fixated not on improving how we vote but on how they can discredit how we vote.

When political actors sow doubt in elections without credible evidence, they are not engaging in oversight — they are delegitimizing democracy.

When they then demand federal intervention in a state process because they don’t like the referee, they are undermining the system of state-run elections that the U.S. Constitution guarantees.

State Republicans’ relentless refusal to accept the basic legitimacy of our voting system aren’t signs of vigilance: they’re warnings.

If we continue down a path where power matters more than truth and sabotage masquerades as oversight, then the greatest threat to Michigan’s elections won’t come from foreign actors or technical glitches — it will come from those who claim to defend democracy while dismantling it from within.

Jon King is the Michigan Advance’s editor-in-chief, having previously served as the outlet's senior reporter, covering education, elections and LGBTQ+ issues. King has been a journalist for more than 35 years and is the Past President of the Michigan Associated Press Media Editors Association who has been recognized for excellence numerous times, most recently in 2022 with the Best Investigative Story by the Michigan Association of Broadcasters. He is also an adjunct faculty member at Cleary University. Jon and his family live in Howell. Michigan Advance is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.

This looming contest may be our last chance to stop Trump's march to one-party rule

Perhaps like most Americans, I didn’t take seriously enough the significance of the rousing welcome that Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Victor Orbán, received from Republicans at their 2022 CPAC conference in Texas. In retrospect, it was an alarming portent of the authoritarian direction in which the GOP was determined to take the country.

It also dispelled my naïve belief that Americans were united in their reverence for American democracy and commitment to preserving it. Millions of Trump supporters are more than willing to see America moving in the direction of Hungary’s “illiberal democracy,” as characterized by Orbán.

An illiberal democracy is a faux democracy where the government manipulates electoral processes, restricts civil liberties, suppresses dissenting voices, bends the rule of law, destroys checks on government power, and institutes virtual one-party rule.

In Hungary, Orbán’s Fidesz party has been in power for 15 years. In that time, Orbán and his allies have dismantled Hungary’s democracy: undermining checks and balances, taking control of the country's media, civil society and universities, and consolidating power.

Trump and his anti-democratic allies are trying to accomplish at breakneck speed what Orbán accomplished over considerable time, hoping to secure a tight enough grip on the country by the 2026 midterm elections to ensure a Republican victory and authoritarian future. To accomplish his purpose, Trump has yet another year to continue his election rigging, with every extrajudicial scheme on the table.

Some political analysts have posited that the 2026 midterm elections could be the last free and fair elections Americans will see. In fact, we may have already seen America’s last free and fair election.

A great deal of rigging has already occurred to skew voting results in 2026 in Republicans’ favor.

Trump has demanded red-state gerrymandering to create more Republican-dominant districts. Republican-controlled states have enacted voter suppression laws that include shortening the time period for mail-in ballot returns, limiting drop box locations, disqualifying all legally dated ballots received after Election Day, changing an individual’s registration status to “inactive” after missing one election, adding documentation requirements in order to vote, limiting polling hours, banning drive-through and overnight early voting, and empowering partisan poll watchers.

The worst may be yet to come. The House has passed a bill requiring proof of citizenship for all federal-election voters, which could disenfranchise more than 21 million legal voters.

Cleta Mitchell, an anti-voting lawyer involved in Trump’s failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election, believes Trump could declare a national emergency in 2026 to allow the federal government to take control of national elections from the states. Who would put it past him?

While Trump has a year to plot more ways to rig the midterm elections, states committed to democracy have been expanding access to voting. In 2023, 47 new laws expanding voter access were enacted in 23 states, 13 of which are controlled by Democrats and four which have split control. At least six Republican-controlled states expanded voter access.

At least 80 national organizations are also working to ensure that no legal voter is deprived of his or her constitutional right to vote, including the League of Women’s Voters, the NAACP, AARP, ACLU, Alliance for Youth Organizing, Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause, The Voter Participation Center, VoteAmerica, and Voto Latino Foundation.

Countering the voter-suppression movement of the authoritarian right, these organizations are working overtime to ensure that no voter suppression hurdle will prevent any American from exercising his or her constitutional right to vote.

The 2026 midterms will be more than a referendum on how Americans feel about Trump’s presidency. They will be a referendum on how committed we Americans are to preserving our democracy.

If submissive Republican legislators hold their congressional majorities in 2026, American democracy as we have known it for 238 years will no longer exist, the constitutional checks-and-balances system demolished. Trump’s assault on democracy the last 10 months would be but a small preview of the chilling authoritarianism awaiting the country the next three years.

Americans who truly want to help save our democracy will not only vote in the midterms but will help to register voters, participate in GOTV outreach, advocate for voters’ rights legislation, and work for pro-democratic candidates.

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy inspired a nation by asking, “If not us, then who? If not now, then when?” May we be so inspired.

Uncertainties abound. Do the 7-8 million Americans protesting at No Kings rallies represent the over 75 million Americans who constitute the majority of voters? Does that portion of voters who support a more authoritarian Trumpian government extend well beyond the MAGA faithful? Could a rigged election preclude a fair outcome? Is preserving our democracy even a significant voting issue for most Americans?

Only the 2026 midterm election results can answer those questions — as the fate of America’s democracy hangs perilously in the balance.

Tom Tyner is a freelance editorialist, satirist, political analyst, blogger, author and retired English instructor

I met Chávez and Maduro. I know drugs are not the reason Trump wants war with Venezuela

I met with Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez just days after he was kidnapped. I’ll tell you about that, and the current President Nicolás Maduro’s visit to my New York office. But first you must know three things about Venezuela, to understand why Donald Trump has ordered a covert operation to overthrow their government.

1.Venezuela has the largest reserves of oil on the planet.
2.Venezuela has the largest reserves of oil on the planet.
3.Venezuela has the largest reserves of oil on the planet.

Look it up: According to OPEC’s own site, Venezuela’s 303 billion barrels in proven reserves are four times the reserves of Saudi Arabia.

(By the way, Donald, when you announce a “covert” operation, it’s no longer covert. But never mind.)

For years, I was BBC Television’s correspondent covering Venezuela and US attempts to overthrow their elected government. Trump invented nothing. This is at least the fourth US-backed attempt at overthrow and assassination of a Venezuelan president.

The first attempt was in March 2002 when I was tipped off that Chávez would be overthrown in a military coup. Indeed, in April of that year, he was kidnapped by renegade officers who had the fantasy, shared by the US State Department, that the public hated Chavez and would celebrate his overthrow.

But it turned into another Bay of Pigs after tens of thousands of angry Venezuelans surrounded Miraflores Palace while the coup leaders “inaugurated” Exxon Oil’s lawyer as “president.” George W. Bush’s Ambassador to Venezuela attended this wacky inauguration of the faux president.

But then the plotters, with Exxon’s man and the US ambassador, fled the Presidential Palace after the coup leaders, fearing for their lives, returned Chávez, by helicopter, safely to his Oval Office.

(Download the film of my BBC reports, The Assassination of Hugo Chávez, produced with Oscar-nominated cinematographer Richard Rowley. If you’d like to make a tax-deductible donation, we would truly appreciate it.)

I met days later with Chávez, who told my BBC audience that while he was in the helicopter, he clutched his rosary because he expected to be pushed out into the sea.

Instead, he was returned safely by the frightened coup leaders back to his office. Chávez then chose to let his kidnappers escape without punishment.

In 2004, Maduro, the future president, was sent by Chávez to meet with me at my office in New York to review the evidence that Wackenhut Corporation (now called GEO, a major operator of ICE detention centers) had planned to assassinate Chávez.

Venezuelan intelligence had secretly taped US Embassy contractors in Caracas talking in spook-speak: “That which took shape here is a disguised kind of intelligence… which is annexed to the third security ring, which is the invisible ring.” (“Invisible Ring”? Someone at the State Department has read too many John le Carré novels.)

The State Department under George W. Bush also tried to purge voters from Venezuela’s election files (and those in Argentina and Mexico) using the very same company, Choicepoint, that purged voter files in Florida in 2000 to hand Bush his baloney election “victory.”

Third try: During Trump I, the US attempted to bully Venezuelans into electing a white guy named Juan Guaidó (who lived in the US) whom Trump hoped would defeat Maduro in an election. But the Black and Indian population of Venezuela, after they finally elected one of their own, Chávez, were not going back to white minority rule which had crushed them for 400 years. Guaidó never even ran for president, but the US government nevertheless declared him the true president and gave this grifter all the US assets of CITGO, the Venezuelan oil company.

Today, we are at the fourth attempt to overthrow Venezuela’s government by kidnap (again?!) or assassination.

This time is different, because President Maduro really did lose his third re-election bid for the presidency but has simply refused to leave office. (Hey, you’d think Trump would admire that.)

No question, Maduro has become a dictator. But if the US thinks it can invade Venezuela, or appoint Maduro’s replacement, you don’t know Venezuelans. They are patriots and they are all armed. How many Americans will Trump send to their deaths to get his hands on Venezuelan crude?

Democracy

The saddest thing is that Maduro has corrupted and destroyed the robust democracy that Chávez brought to Venezuela. In 2006, I joined Chávez’s opponent Julio Borges, a decent guy, on the campaign trail. Borges would get just two or three supporters in a town. Then I joined Chávez who, in the same town, would appear and draw thousands.

Chávez was wildly popular because, as an opposition journalist told me, derisively, “Chavez gives them bread and bricks!” — that is, he gave the public food, housing and medical care by using the nation’s massive oil proceeds for public services. Under the old regime, the oil wealth was siphoned into the pockets of wealthy Venezuelans in Miami.

I have little sympathy for Maduro, who like Trump has taken office through vote manipulation. But the invasion or assassination of either head of state should scare and horrify us all.

Why not Saudi Arabia?

Trump and our National Security Advisor, Marco Rubio, have said that Maduro must go because he has threatened democracy in Venezuela and is trafficking fentanyl into the US.

Think about it. If Trump wants to save democracy, why attack Venezuela, not the dictatorships of Saudi Arabia or Abu Dhabi or the Emirates? Let’s not forget that Arabian Peninsula “royals” are merely dictators in bathrobes.

Why Venezuela and not the Arabian Peninsula potentates?

Let me count the ways: Qatar has bought $2 billion of Trump crypto coins that will go into Trump family pockets. And there’s that little gift from Qatar of a 747 jet for The Donald, not the US government. And there’s the $2 billion in easy squeezy from the Saudis for Jared Kushner.

A 'narco terrorist'?

Trump has accused Maduro of running a cartel dumping fentanyl into the US, an accusation as credible as Trump’s claim against that other alleged narco-terrorist nation, Canada.

I am no fan of my once-friend Maduro, now a brutal authoritarian and vote thief, a Venezuelan Putin. But drug lord? No sane drug dealer would run drugs from Caracas to Miami. In fact, according to the latest UN World Drug Report, Venezuela is neither a major drug producer nor a key trafficking corridor to the US.

Trump’s troops have slaughtered more than two dozen people who were supposedly running drugs from Caracas to Miami. While Trinidad’s president is a Trump ally, that government stated that the two dead who could be identified, Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo, were simply commuting from work, like many workers, across the seven-mile strait between the countries. Even our Secretary of State, “Little Marco,” said the boat was merely heading to Trinidad then changed his statement to “Miami” after Trump announced their supposed destination.

And did you notice? Every time a US prosecutor interdicts a drug shipment, they proudly display the drugs and cash and the names of the dealers obtained in the haul. Yet after these little commuter boats were attacked, not sunk, we were never shown the drugs, the evidence.

There was indeed a drug boat, a submersible, attacked by the US. But American media generally failed to mention that, unlike the fishermen and commuters killed coming from Venezuela, the one real drug haul came from Colombia and was captured in the Pacific Ocean, not the Caribbean.

So where are the drugs coming from, if not Venezuela or Canada? According to a New Yorker investigation, one of the world’s largest and most violent cocaine cartels, the Kinahan Organized Crime Group, is run out of — you guessed it — Abu Dhabi.

Act of war

There’s no doubt why most Venezuelans want to see Maduro go. The economy is on its deathbed. Why? Because a US blockade, basically a siege of Venezuela, has caused the near total collapse of Venezuela’s source of wealth, its oil industry. By blocking oil equipment from going in, and an embargo of oil going out, the nation is being strangled. An embargo is a globally recognized act of war which Americans (let alone Venezuelans) never authorized.

$Greg Palast meets Nicol\u00e1s Maduro$ Greg Palast meets Nicolás Maduro. Picture: Palast Investigative Fund 2004.

The idea that Maduro wrecked the economy is b------t through and through. Imagine if America laid siege to Texas, allowing no goods in, blocking oil from going out.

Nevertheless, the public, hoping the embargo would lift, voted out Maduro. He must go. But by Venezuelan ballots, not American bullets.

And let me tell you as an energy economist that the embargo of Venezuelan oil, cutting the nation’s exports 74 percent from 2.4 million barrels a day to 735,000, has easily added nearly a dollar to the price paid by Americans at the gas pump.

Chávez told me that he knew the limit of how far he could push the US and its oil companies. “I’m a good chess player,” he told me. Not Maduro. For example, Maduro turned down British Petroleum’s request to take over the oil fields once operated by the French national oil company. Britain later seized $10 billion in Venezuela’s gold reserves held in the British Exchequer.

As you’ll see at the opening of my film The Assassination of Hugo Chávez, the whacko idea of murdering Venezuela’s president was first floated on television by none other than televangelist Pat Robertson, whom inside sources told me was furious that he was turned down in his request to the Chávez government for a diamond mining concession.

To his TV audience, Robertson said, “You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if [Chávez] thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war.”

That’s true, I suppose. But why start a war at all?

Oil and diamonds. How much blood are they worth?

May I suggest that we return democracy to Venezuela with ballots, not bullets.

Greg Palast is an investigative journalist and filmmaker, author of New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Sign up for his reports at https://gregpalast.substack.com/

This clear scale shows how American democracy is in terminal decline

For generations, Americans have been taught that the United States is the world’s beacon of democracy. Politicians across the spectrum speak of the nation as a “shining city on a hill,” a place where freedom and the rule of law set the standard for the rest of the world. But the truth is harder to swallow: the U.S. is drifting away from liberal democracy and toward authoritarianism.

A survey of more than 700 political scientists conducted by Bright Line Watch in 2020 found that the vast majority believe the U.S. is rapidly moving toward some form of authoritarian rule. Scholars rated American democracy on a scale from zero (complete dictatorship) to 100 (perfect democracy). After Donald Trump’s first election in November 2016, they gave it a 67. Several weeks into his second term, the score had plunged to 55.

Elections, rights, and freedoms are under attack — and America is running out of time to save its democracy. The experts’ warnings are not abstract; they reflect a country where voter suppression, gerrymandering, corporate influence, a compliant Supreme Court, and executive overreach are eroding the foundations of democratic governance. When citizens are uninformed — or choose not to vote — the systems of power tilt toward elites, making it easier for authoritarian forces to consolidate control. Authoritarian forces also thrive on fear — fear of immigrants, political opponents, or anyone deemed an outsider — turning Americans against one another and eroding the inclusive ideals that once defined the nation as a melting pot.

One of the hallmarks of authoritarian systems is the concentration of power in a single office. In the US, the presidency has been steadily amassing authority for decades. Presidents of both parties have expanded executive power — from Woodrow Wilson, who during and after World War I oversaw a massive expansion of federal authority, centralized control over the economy, and signed the Espionage and Sedition Acts to suppress dissent, to more recent administrations.

After September 11, 2001, Congress handed the executive branch sweeping powers through the Authorization for Use of Military Force, essentially giving presidents a blank check for war. Since then, presidents have increasingly governed through executive orders and “emergency” declarations, bypassing Congress altogether.

Barack Obama further expanded executive authority through extrajudicial drone strikes, targeting individuals abroad without judicial review or due process, demonstrating that executive power can be exercised unilaterally and with limited accountability.

Meanwhile, Congress has been paralyzed by polarization and gridlock, leaving lobbyists and corporate donors to fill the vacuum. The Senate’s structure, which gives Wyoming and California the same representation despite a 70-fold population difference, allows minority rule to dominate national policy. Gerrymandering and voter suppression further hollow out electoral accountability. A government that concentrates power in the executive while undermining the voice of ordinary citizens is not functioning as a democracy.

Authoritarian governments also justify extraordinary powers in the name of “security.” The U.S. is no exception. The National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013, revealed a government that watches its citizens on a scale once unthinkable. At home, local police departments increasingly resemble military units, rolling out armored vehicles and tear gas against peaceful protesters.

We saw this during Occupy Wall Street, Standing Rock, and Black Lives Matter uprisings. The deployment of force against citizens exercising their constitutional rights should alarm anyone who values democracy. Yet the normalization of militarized policing has created what philosopher Giorgio Agamben wrote as a “state of exception” — where emergency measures become everyday tools of governance.

Yes, Americans still enjoy constitutional rights — but too often these rights exist more on paper than in practice.

Free speech? Tell that to whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, Snowden, or Reality Winner, who were prosecuted under the Espionage Act for revealing government misconduct.

Voting rights? They’ve been under relentless attack, especially since the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted protections for minority voters. States have since imposed strict voter ID laws, purged voter rolls, and closed polling places in Black and Latino communities.

Even fundamental rights like reproductive freedom are being stripped away. The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade, unleashing a wave of state-level abortion bans. Millions of women and people who can become pregnant no longer have control over their own bodies. That’s not democracy; that’s state control of private life.

Another clear sign of authoritarian drift is the domination of politics by wealthy elites. Since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision, corporations and billionaires have been able to pour unlimited money into elections. Political campaigns are dominated by super PACs and billionaire donors. Our democracy is no longer guaranteed — from Wall Street to the White House, power is slipping into the hands of a few.

Political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found in 2014 that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy,” leaving ordinary voters almost powerless to shape the laws that govern them.

The authoritarian character of the United States cannot be understood solely within its borders. With more than 750 military bases worldwide and a defense budget larger than the next ten nations combined, the United States functions as a global empire. Military interventions — from Iraq to Afghanistan to drone strikes across the Middle East and Africa — have often been launched without meaningful Congressional approval.

Empire abroad normalizes authoritarianism at home. Militarized policing, mass surveillance, and a bloated national security state are justified by the logic of “permanent war,” which also benefits defense contractors, private security firms, and other corporate interests that profit from endless conflict. As Hannah Arendt wrote, imperialism abroad often requires repression at home. That warning has become reality.

The United States still holds elections and maintains a written constitution, but appearances are misleading. The US still calls itself a democracy, but in practice, authoritarian forces are calling the shots. What makes American authoritarianism distinctive is its velvet glove: it is not a dictatorship in the classical sense but a regime where democratic symbols cloak undemocratic realities. Its most effective disguise is the illusion of freedom itself — an ideology of free market capitalism that promises choice while consolidating power in the hands of a few.

Americans are told they live in the land of opportunity, yet the choices available to them — whether in the marketplace or at the ballot box — are increasingly constrained by corporate monopolies and two political parties beholden to the same economic elites. Recognizing this drift is the first step toward reversing it. Unless structural reforms are undertaken — curbing corporate power, restoring voting rights, protecting civil liberties, and demilitarizing both foreign and domestic policy — the United States risks cementing its place not as the defender of democracy but as an exemplar of its decline.

It is a bitter irony that 66,000 living World War II veterans — who risked everything to fight authoritarianism abroad — now witness the creeping authoritarianism at home and the steady erosion of the freedoms they fought to secure. Their sacrifices are a reminder that democracy is fragile and must be actively defended.

Democracy is not self-sustaining. If Americans care about preserving freedom, they must act: vote in every election — from school boards to city councils to state legislatures — and recognize that their power extends beyond the ballot box. As consumers and shareholders, they can choose carefully which corporations they support, amplifying businesses that align with democratic values while withdrawing support from those that undermine them.

Citizens can also engage directly with elected officials, starting meaningful discussions to make their voices heard, and volunteer with nonpartisan nonprofit advocacy organizations and watchdog groups that protect the democratic process, civil rights, and corporate and government accountability and transparency. Pushing for structural reforms that rein in executive power and corporate influence, challenging fear-mongering narratives, and defending the rights of marginalized communities are all essential steps to reclaiming and preserving democracy.

We each have a role to play. Wake up, America! It’s one thing to recognize the nation’s slide toward authoritarianism and complain about it — it’s another entirely to take action. Be no bystander; democracy depends on participation. We ignore its demise at our peril.

Martina Moneke writes about art, fashion, culture, and politics. In 2022, she received the Los Angeles Press Club’s First Place Award for Election Editorials at the 65th Annual Southern California Journalism Awards. She is based in Los Angeles and New York.

Trump hinted at plans to cancel 2028 election while talking to generals: Dem

President Donald Trump's speech to hundreds of the US' top generals on Tuesday hinted at plans to cancel the 2028 election, according to Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman of New York.

In an appearance on The Jim Acosta Show on Tuesday, Goldman said the speech appeared to be preparing the ground for an authoritarian power grab.

"It’s also, I think, really dangerous because it is trying to manufacture a crisis so that Donald Trump can continue to take more and more authoritarian actions and so that he can usurp more and power," said Goldman.

"And ultimately, my view is that he is looking ahead to 2028, where he will say that, for cockamamie made-up reasons like he’s talking to these generals about."

"That 'well, look, we’re being invaded from within from the enemy within and we’ve got to keep our border safe. And that’s what our focus has to be. We can’t possibly have an election under these circumstances.'”

"You really think that could happen?" said Acosta.

"Yeah, I think that’s where a lot of this is heading towards," said Goldman. "I think that's why he's floating a third term. That's why he's using this language of a war, of the enemy within, of securing our border."

Trump, in his speech to the generals at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, said the military's job was to help protect from the "enemy within," and discussed sending troops into Democratic run cities such as Chicago and Portland.

Trump's worst outrage is close to being forgotten

Most of us humans have scant ability to hold in our minds things that seemed of tremendous importance not that long ago. We seldom hark back to an incident that at the time seemed momentous, only to be shoved to the back of our minds by a succession of more recent attention-grabbing events.

Thus, far too seldom do we think back on one of the most disturbing incidents in US political history: Donald Trump’s illegal scheme to destroy American democracy by attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results and replace the duly elected president, Joe Biden, with the loser, Donald Trump.

Trump’s assault on democracy is something we must never forget.

The evidence of Trump’s criminality was such that the Department of Justice indicted him on four felony counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States and witness tampering. If brought to trial and convicted, Trump would have faced serious prison time.

The indictment cites compelling evidence of Trump’s illegal activities:

Using knowingly false claims of election fraud to get state legislatures and election officials to change electoral votes
Organizing fraudulent slates of electors to cast fraudulent votes for Trump
Using the Justice Department to conduct sham election crime investigations
Using Vice-President Pence in the certification proceeding to fraudulently alter the election results
Inciting a Capitol insurrection to halt the certification process of electoral votes

If Trump’s illegal scheme had worked, he would have supplanted Biden as president and American democracy would have been crushed. The election of the US president in accordance with the Constitution would have been subverted, the American people would have been denied their constitutional right to elect their president, and the losing candidate would have pulled off a bloodless coup against the US government.

The American people cannot be reminded too often or strongly that the person who attempted to destroy our democracy is now sitting in the White House. Had he not been elected president, he would have stood trial and if convicted by a jury of his peers, could very well be sitting in prison today.

Trump’s first seven months in office shows that he is as disdainful of democracy as when he attempted to subvert it in 2020. He has attacked judges who have ruled his executive orders illegal or unconstitutional, run roughshod over the Constitution and rule of law, usurped the authority of a compliant legislature, and appointed servile loyalists to head the FBI, CIA, and DOJ and do his authoritarian bidding.

Attempting to skew the 2026 midterm elections in Republicans’ favor, Trump has vowed to enact an unconstitutional executive order to end mail-in voting and pressed Texas to add five Republican-dominated election districts through gerrymandering to try and maintain a House majority.

With still a year and a half before the election, Trump will assuredly devise other schemes to try and corrupt the mid-term election process as he did the 2020 presidential election results.

We must never forget that our current president poses the greatest internal threat to American democracy of any president in history. He has already proven that he was willing to destroy our democracy to stay in power. Every day that he remains as president is a reminder that no person has ever been less deserving of the office.

So much has gone on since Trump was reelected that his vile assault on democracy in 2020 is a fading memory: his tariff wars, his outrageous lusting to acquire Greenland and make Canada our 51st state, his treacherous attacks on universities and blue states, his using his presidential power to wreak vengeance on his “enemies,” his failed claim to end Russia’s war on Ukraine, his green-lighting Israel’s genocidal slaughter of Palestinian civilians, and his transparent, pathological lying that reveals an ever-growing state of delusion.

Each of Trump’s latest outrages pushes the 2020 election treachery farther into the recesses of memory.

So what happens now that we’ve elected a democratic-smashing authoritarian president? First, we make sure that we never again elect a person whose is not 100 percent committed to protecting and preserving American democracy. Lesson learned.

Next, we do everything possible to mitigate the damage that Trump can do as president.

As patriotic Americans, we can protest regularly en masse against Trump’s ongoing attempt to turn America into an autocracy like Russia or Hungary. We can elect Democratic majorities to the House and Senate in 2026 to rein in an overreaching, power-grasping president and ensure that no onerous, anti-democratic laws are passed.

We should strongly encourage the 2026-elected Congress to impeach Trump, shortening the amount of time he has to shred our democracy. If democracy is as precious and inviolable to us as to our forefathers, we will do everything within the law to remove the democratic annihilator from the White House as soon as possible.

Tom Tyner is a freelance editorialist, satirist, political analyst, blogger, author and retired English instructor

With this Putin-inspired attack, Trump crossed a line no president ever dared touch

On Monday, Donald Trump crossed another line that no president in our history has ever dared to touch. With the echo of Vladimir Putin’s whisper in his ear, in front of President Volodymyr Zelensky and seven other European leaders, Trump announced he’s preparing an executive order to ban mail-in ballots and even outlaw voting machines across America ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Sitting in front of the Chancellor of Germany and the Prime Minister of Great Britain — both nations that allow and even encourage mail-in voting — Trump said:

“Mail-in ballots are corrupt mail-in ballots. You can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots, and we as a Republican Party are gonna do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in ballots. We're gonna start with an executive order that’s being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they’re corrupt. And, you know that we’re the only country in the world, I believe, I may be wrong, but just about the only country in the world that uses it because of what’s happened.”

This is not just a partisan maneuver. It’s an open assault on the Constitution, a grotesque power grab, and a direct threat to the foundation of democracy itself. And it’s happening in real time, in broad daylight, with a criminally compliant Republican Party cheering him on.

Republicans hate mail-in voting for multiple reasons.

First, for people who’re paid by the hour, mail-in voting increases participation because they can fill out their ballots at the kitchen table after work. Republicans don’t want people to vote, and have introduced more than 400 pieces of legislation in the past three years nationwide to make voting more difficult.
Second, mail-in voting makes voters better informed and less vulnerable to sound-byte TV ads because, while perusing that ballot at the kitchen table, they can look up candidates on their laptops and get more detail and information. Republicans hate informed voters and rely heavily on often-dishonest advertisements to swing voters.
Third, mail-in ballots — because they arrive in the mail weeks before the election — give voters an early chance to discover if they’ve been the victim of Republican voter-roll purges, one of their favorite tactics to pre-rig elections.
Fourth, mail-in ballots end the GOP trick of understaffing and under-resourcing polling places in minority neighborhoods, leading to hours-long lines. Hispanic voters generally wait 150 percent longer than white voters, and Black voters must endure a 200 percent longer wait; mail-in ballots put an end to this favorite of the GOP’s voter suppression efforts.

Trump, knowing all this, couldn’t help himself yesterday, finally blurting out his real reason for wanting to end mail-in voting in America:

“We got to stop mail-in voting, and the Republicans have to lead the charge. The Democrats want it because they have horrible policy. If you [don’t] have mail-in voting, you’re not gonna have many Democrats get elected. That’s bigger than anything having to do with redistricting, believe me.”

Once again, Trump is ignoring the law and the Constitution, which explicitly delegates the administration of elections to the states and Congress, not presidential executive orders.

That’s not some vague norm or debatable tradition: it’s written into the very DNA of our system of government. States set the rules, unless Congress — not the president — overrides them. States decide how their citizens vote, as the Constitution’s Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 dictates:

“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”

Yet here we have a president declaring that he alone will dictate the terms of elections nationwide, in direct violation of two centuries of law and precedent. This is not only unconstitutional, it’s tyrannical.

When a president asserts powers he does not have, with the full knowledge that they aren’t his to wield, he’s announcing to the country that the rule of law no longer constrains him. That’s the definition of dictatorship.

And what makes this even more obscene is the source of Trump’s inspiration. According to multiple reports, Trump’s sudden rant on mail-in ballots followed a private conversation with Putin, who reportedly told Trump that mail-in voting was the reason he lost in 2020.

The man occupying the Oval Office is now taking advice about how to rig American elections from the very dictator who has spent his career poisoning journalists, jailing opponents, and staging sham referendums to annex entire countries.

It’s bad enough that Trump has always been Putin’s toady, but now we see the Kremlin effectively writing U.S. election law. If Jefferson, Madison, or Lincoln were alive to hear this, they would spit.

Mail-in voting is not a scam. It’s not a trick. It’s how tens of millions of Americans — Republicans, Democrats, independents — exercise their right to vote.

Seniors rely on it. People with disabilities rely on it. Military service members overseas rely on it. Hourly workers who can’t take a day off rely on it. Parents with young children rely on it. Rural voters, who often live miles from polling places, rely on it.

And every study, every audit, every bipartisan commission has found mail-in voting to be secure, safe, and reliable. Five states do it exclusively; we’ve had it more than two decades here in Oregon with nary a single scandal or problem. To call it fraudulent is a lie. To ban it is voter suppression on a scale this country has never seen.

And voting machines? Trump is openly declaring that he’ll return us to mind-numbingly slow hand-counting of ballots, a tactic straight from the authoritarian playbook designed to create chaos, delays, and endless opportunities to dispute the results in 2026 and 2028.

I’ve had concerns about voting machines and Windows-based tabulators for decades, but my solution isn’t to end them. Instead, we should use machines owned by the government itself, generating paper ballots and operating transparently on open-source software with every election subject to sample audits.

Instead of trying to make elections more secure, Trump’s laying the groundwork for election theft in plain sight. This isn’t subtle: it’s the loud declaration of a man preparing to overturn the will of the voters, with the blessing of a foreign adversary, and with a Republican Party too craven to object.

If Trump succeeds in outlawing mail-in ballots and voting machines, millions of Americans will simply not be able to vote. Seniors in nursing homes, service members abroad, people with disabilities, single parents, rural citizens: they will all be disenfranchised overnight. And make no mistake: that’s the point.

This is not about integrity. This is not about security. This is about shrinking the electorate to a size that Republicans believe will guarantee them victory forever.

Republicans know they can’t win free and fair elections in much of America. They know their policies are unpopular. They know their agenda is toxic.

So they cheat. They gerrymander districts into grotesque shapes that make a mockery of representative government. They purge voters from the rolls. They criminalize voter registration drives. They intimidate voters at the polls.

And now, at Trump’s command and Putin’s urging, they want to ban the very methods by which millions of Americans vote. This is not politics as usual. This is the slow-motion strangulation of democracy.

Every American who believes in self-government must rise up against this. Governors must prepare to defy such an executive order in court and in practice. State legislatures must assert their constitutional authority.

Attorneys general must be ready to sue. And ordinary citizens must take to the streets, the phones, the ballot box, and every civic space available to declare that this will not stand. Because if it does, we’ll have surrendered the very essence of the American experiment.

We’ve been here before in spirit if not in form.

Ronald Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with the Iranian Ayatollahs to hang onto the hostages until after the election. Richard Nixon tried to sabotage our democracy by killing Lyndon Johnson's peace negotiations with Vietnam and followed-up with burglaries and cover-ups when he thought Democrats were onto him. He was forced to resign. George W. Bush and the GOP stopped the counting of votes in Florida and handed the presidency to themselves. That assault has scarred our politics for decades.

But never — not once in 250 years — has a president openly declared that he will strip states of their constitutional right to run elections, end mail-in voting, and ban voting machines altogether. This is unprecedented, authoritarian, and it must be stopped.

It’s also just one in a broad spectrum of attacks Republicans have launched against your right to vote, with the SAVE Act — which will prevent women from voting if their birth certificate and drivers’ license have different names on them and they’ve never had an official change-of-name in the courts — teed up in the US Senate. All while millions are being purged from the voting rolls as you read these words.

This is the moment when the American people must decide whether they still believe in democracy. If we shrug, if we accept this as just more noise from a corrupt and broken con man, we will lose it. If we wait for someone else to act, we will lose it. If we tell ourselves the courts will save us, we may be bitterly disappointed.

The survival of democracy has never been guaranteed. It has always required vigilance, courage, and action. Now it requires all three from each of us.

Trump’s promised executive order is not just a legal maneuver. It’s a declaration of war against the American people. It’s the dream of every tyrant: to control who votes and who does not, to dictate the rules of elections so that the outcome is predetermined.

What Putin and Trump are proposing is not democracy. It’s not freedom. It’s not America.

And the Republicans who are enabling this treachery are as guilty as Trump himself. They’re betraying their oaths, their constituents, and our country. History will remember them not as conservatives or patriots, but as the gravediggers of our Republic.

This is the line. This is the moment. We cannot let Trump and his cronies bulldoze democracy into the ground at Putin’s command. Every patriot, every progressive, every independent, every honest conservative who still believes in the Constitution must join together and say no.

No to dictatorship. No to disenfranchisement. No to treason.

If we fail now, there may not be another chance.

Supreme Court's democracy hijack is one step closer to complete

Earlier this month, Louise and I vacationed across several different cities and rural areas in Norway, the country from which my grandfather emigrated to the United States in 1917. The place was immaculate, modern, and, astonishingly, seemed entirely free of homelessness. Official stats say around 3,000 people lack housing across the entire country. That’s about the number you’ll see sleeping on sidewalks in a single Los Angeles neighborhood.

Depending on the city, it looked like half or more of the cars on the road were electric. Norway has mandated that, starting this coming January, all new cars sold in that nation must be zero-emission. Charging stations are everywhere. Already, 89 percent of all new cars sold there last year were fully electric.

But the real eye-opener wasn’t the electric cars or tidy sidewalks; it was the democracy. Norway is a functioning democratic republic, but not in the American sense where billionaires run the show to their own benefit.

It’s a country that practices democratic socialism, a term that causes conniptions among Fox “News” anchors and libertarian think tanks but simply means this: The people vote for leaders who actually implement policies the majority wants.

Sadly, that’s not the case here pretty much at all, at least since the Reagan Revolution. Back here in the United States, six billionaire-corrupted Supreme Court justices just told us that democracy doesn’t matter anymore. That the desires of millions of Americans can be rendered meaningless, especially if billionaires and their puppets want it that way.

Yesterday, this Trump-packed Supreme Court quietly — in an unsigned ruling on their badly-abused so-called “shadow docket” with no public debate and no explanation — handed down one of the most destructive rulings in modern history.

In a 6–3 decision, the justices green-lit Trump’s plan to gut the Department of Education, firing 1,400 people, freezing $6.8 billion in funding, and throwing the constitutional guarantee of equal access to education under the proverbial bus. It also flies in the face of the constitutional requirement that the president “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” by spending money Congress appropriates and keeping open agencies Congress created.

Justice Sotomayor’s dissent was scathing, calling the ruling “indefensible” and warning it would “cripple the federal government’s ability to ensure civil rights are enforced in education.”

The highest court in our land just sided with a twice-impeached, sexual-assaulting, insurrection-inciting president to dismantle the very agency responsible for making sure children with disabilities get accommodations. That Black and Brown, Jewish and Muslim students aren’t systematically discriminated against. That poor children in poor neighborhoods can still get a good education. That people with massive student debt can get some small breaks. That schools have at least some federal oversight.

Compare that to Norway.

While American billionaires are buying legislators and court decisions to keep their taxes low, their subsidies for the fossil fuel industry flowing, and to crush unions, Norwegians are investing in their people.

Nobody in Norway ever goes bankrupt from medical bills. College and trade schools are free. Unions are everywhere, wages are high, and stiff taxes on the morbidly rich ensure that public services like education and healthcare are publicly funded rather than run by greedy corporations and billionaire CEOs.

How do they do it? Why is it so different there compared to here?

Because in Norway, and across most of Europe, democracy is real. Citizens are automatically registered to vote. Elections are free of voter suppression, and dark money is illegal. Politicians are answerable to the people, not to fossil fuel barons or Wall Street banksters.

And so, people can vote for legislators who can actually give them what they want:

Universal healthcare
Free higher education
Robust public transit
Workers’ rights and living wages
Climate action, not climate denial

Meanwhile, in America, six corrupt Republicans on our Supreme Court have become an unelected, billionaire-funded wrecking crew that’s gleefully tearing down every public institution that threatens plutocratic rule.

This disparity, this tragedy, is no accident here in our country.

As I’ve written about for years and most recently detailed in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, it began in the modern era with Lewis Powell’s 1971 Memo, a blueprint for corporate America to seize the courts, media, education, and politics. Nixon rewarded Powell by putting him on the Supreme Court the following year, and the rest is tragic history.

From Buckley v. Valeo to Citizens United, this court and its billionaire benefactors have redefined bribery as “free speech” and legalized the wholesale purchase of politicians. And, of course, Supreme Court justices.

This week’s shadow docket ruling is just the latest in that decades-long march toward oligarchy and, now, dictatorship.

The irony? The majority of Americans want a Norway-style system.

66% support Medicare for All
58% support free college and student debt cancellation
64% support taxing the ultra-rich more heavily
60% of workers say they’d join a union if they could

So why don’t we have it?

Because six corrupt Republican Supreme Court justices, and the corrupt rightwing billionaires who bought them and support their lavish lifestyles, won’t let us.

They’ve legalized voter suppression, gutted campaign finance laws, blessed gerrymandering, and are now attacking public education, the very foundation of a functioning democracy.

The lesson of Norway isn’t that the people there are somehow better. It’s that they’ve built institutions that respect the will of the majority and block the power of the morbidly rich. And when their democratic institutions are under threat, they act.

In America, we must do the same.

End lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court and put in term limits.
Ban dark money in politics.
Rebuild public education, not dismantle it.
Tax the morbidly rich.
Expand and protect voting rights.

This isn’t a left-right issue; it’s a democracy-versus-oligarchy issue. And this week’s Supreme Court ruling should be a five-alarm fire.

If we want a country that looks more like Norway and less like the feudal state Trump and his bought-off justices envision, we’ve got to fight for it.

The billionaires may have the Supreme Court, the White House, and Congress, at least for now. But we still have the numbers.

And in a democracy, that still means something, if we make it mean something.