All posts tagged "elections"

This MAGA meltdown points to mega Trump defeat

Faced with a revolt among his MAGA faithful over his decision to join Israel in starting a war with Iran, our increasingly demented and delusional president declared this week that “MAGA is Trump.”

He was responding to, among others, MAGA stalwarts Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, who rightfully called him out for abandoning his vow to “abandon the failed policy of nation building and regime change” and his endlessly repeated lie of an “America First” agenda.

Indeed, the nation and world watch in stunned disbelief and overwhelming opposition. Two-out-of-three American disapprove of this haphazard war. That’s no surprise given the fiascos over the Weapons of Mass Destruction that didn’t turn up in Iraq, the long, bloody, and losing effort in Afghanistan, and the recent kidnapping of Venezuela’s president and wife in a blatant attempt to take over the world’s largest known oil reserves.

Even worse is what seems to be utter confusion about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.

First Trump claimed an attack by Iran was “imminent” — which has been proved false even by his own intelligence agencies.

Then it was necessary to “take out” Iran’s nuclear capability, which even those with short memories will recall he claimed to have “obliterated” in last year’s Israel-U.S. attack on Iran.

Then it was for regime change to get rid of what he dubbed “the lunatic” 87-year old ruler.

But then it was we had to attack because Israel was going to attack first — and being the stalwart ally in Israel’s Gaza genocide, our Middle East assets would also be attacked.

MAGA politicians can’t even agree if it’s a war. MAGA Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, claims “We’re not at war right now. They have declared war on us.”

Meanwhile, Montana’s own cluster of muddled MAGAs, masquerading as our congressional delegation, have all backed the bombing — a commitment which is rather specious now that half of the delegation, Rep. Zinke and Sen. Daines, have announced they will not seek reelection.

In the meantime, Montana’s super-patriot junior senator Tim Sheehy is so MAGA gung ho he physically attacked Brian McGinnis, a Marine veteran in full dress blues, who was protesting that “no one wants to go to war for Israel” during a Senate hearing. The incident was captured in videos that have now gone viral.

In the meantime, gas prices are skyrocketing and are now higher than when Trump took office, the global economy is threatened by the closure of the Straits of Hormuz through which 20 percent of the world’s oil and natural gas are transported. The closure is now used as the latest justification for going to war … which, ironically, resulted in the closure.

Toss in the continuing inflation exacerbated by rising energy prices, the incredible blunders of Trump’s illegal tariffs, his radical attacks on long-time allies, the brutality of his war on immigrants, and the picture of MAGA madness comes into full focus.

Chaos is what’s emanating from the White House now and has been doing so since Trump re-claimed the presidency a year ago. But chaos is not what businesses want or need. Commerce thrives on stability where supplies, costs, and distribution are consistent and profit margins are predictable. Same goes for citizens who are trying harder every day to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.

Has MAGA made America great again? Absolutely not. The utter chaos has done just opposite — which is no doubt why the MAGAs are terrified of the outcome of November’s elections.

George Ochenski is Montana's longest-running columnist and a longtime environmental activist, concerned with keeping Montana's natural beauty clean and safe. He writes from Helena and appears in the Daily Montanan weekly.

Trump bombed Iran and left America vulnerable to retaliation. That's no accident

History doesn’t repeat, as Mark Twain allegedly said, but it sure does seem to rhyme. And right now, the rhyme between the first year of the George W. Bush presidency and the first year of Donald Trump’s second term is staring us in the face and it’s getting scary.

After “Poppy” George H.W. Bush finished his 1991 “little war” against Iraq, he left American troops stationed at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. Those soldiers on what Osama bin Laden considered sacred Muslim soil — the home to Mecca — became his primary grievance against America.

He said so publicly, raving at the New York Times and anyone else who’d listen. American men were drinking alcohol and looking at pornography and thus defiling Saudi holy land, he said, and American women were showing their bare arms and driving cars in a country where such things are absolutely forbidden. When Bin Laden declared war on us, he meant it as part of a religious and moral crusade.

That war came home on September 11, 2001, and it arrived at a miraculously convenient moment for an otherwise hapless George W. Bush. The new president had taken office under a cloud of illegitimacy after five Republicans on the Supreme Court, two of them appointed by his own father, stopped the Florida recount — that would have handed the election to Al Gore — and thus gave Bush the presidency.

Millions of Americans believed the 2000 election had been stolen, between Jeb Bush purging 90,000 Black voters from the Florida rolls just before the election, and the five Republicans on the Court handing Bush the Oval Office. His approval ratings were mediocre at best, he had no mandate, and he struggled to find any sort of an agenda beyond more tax cuts for billionaires that could excite the public.

Then the towers fell, and overnight Bush became the most popular president in the history of modern polling: his approval rating hit 90 percent. The man who’d been floundering became, overnight, a “wartime president,” which was exactly what he’d wanted all along.

Back in 1999, Bush told his ghostwriter Mickey Herskowitz that if he ever got the presidency, what he really needed was a war:

“One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander in chief ... My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it.”

Bin Laden’s 9/11 attack on the US gave Bush his “chance to invade,” his war capital. He spent it to invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks, and to drive an even larger tax cut for billionaires than originally anticipated.

Exposed by the Downing Street Memos, his administration had fabricated intelligence, ginned up fake connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, and lied about weapons of mass destruction. Hundreds of thousands of people died as a result of his lies, but Bush got his “successful presidency.”

Now look at Trump.

His poll numbers right now are worse than Bush’s were in the summer of 2001; worse in many regards than any president in polling history. His approval ratings on literally every topic — from immigration to ICE to taxes to inflation to healthcare, etc., etc. — are underwater and sinking.

Further, there are allegations that the FBI is sitting on evidence related to claims Trump raped at least one and possibly two 13-year-old girls. His family is openly monetizing the presidency, with his nepo sons and son-in-law cutting real estate deals and cryptocurrency schemes with the governments of Saudi Arabia and the UAE while Trump pushes — against the advice of our intelligence agencies — to send advanced AI chips to those same countries.

The corruption is so brazen it barely qualifies as corruption anymore. Trump and his lickspittles have pulled off what was previously unimaginable: the reinvention of government as a machine to generate profit for the ruling family — much like Saddam Hussein had done in Iraq and Vladimir Putin has done in Russia — all right out in plain sight.

Meanwhile, Trump’s ICE agents are terrorizing communities across the country, beating and intimidating American citizens, deporting legal residents without due process, and violating the Fourth and Fifth Amendments so routinely that constitutional scholars have stopped being shocked and started being terrified. Reports of ICE-related deaths of American citizens like Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis are piling up as the Trump regime refuses to cooperate in state-level murder investigations.

On top of all these crises, the electoral landscape for November is looking catastrophic for Republicans. Trump and the GOP are staring down a potential wipeout in the 2026 midterms, which is why red-state legislatures are gerrymandering with abandon, why Trump is floating proposals to nationalize elections, ban mail-in voting, and station ICE agents outside polling places in minority neighborhoods.

These are not the actions of a confident political party that believes it’s doing what’s best for average Americans. They are, instead, the actions of people who know they’re on the verge of losing power and facing accountability, and are therefore willing to destroy our very democracy to hold onto power.

So, Trump desperately needed something to change the subject. And right on cue, he launched an unprovoked military attack on Iran, apparently at the urging of Benjamin Netanyahu, who has his own desperate need to remain in power to keep himself out of prison for his own bribery and corruption scandals.

The bombing of Iran gave Trump a few days of wall-to-wall war coverage, pushing every other scandal (including Epstein) below the fold. It was a classic wag-the-dog maneuver, but so far it’s worked well enough to dominate the news cycle.

But here is where the rhyme with 2001 turns frighteningly dark.

Kash Patel, Trump’s FBI director, has fired or reassigned almost the entire FBI team responsible for tracking Iranian threats inside the United States. The specialists who spent years building intelligence networks to monitor Iranian-linked operatives on American soil have been purged from the agency, fired unceremoniously.

At the same time, Trump has let funding for the Department of Homeland Security lapse, leaving critical counterterrorism functions in limbo as Republicans in Congress refuse — at his insistence — to act. He’s systematically dismantled the very apparatus that exists to prevent a terrorist attack on the continental US or our assets around the world.

Ask yourself why. Why would a president who just bombed Iran simultaneously gut the very intelligence infrastructure built by previous administrations to detect and prevent Iranian retaliation? Why would you poke a hornet’s nest and then fire the guy with the EpiPen?

Unless you wanted to get stung.

The logic is almost too ugly to contemplate, but it tracks perfectly with recent history. Bush needed 9/11 and got it, and it saved his presidency. Trump needs something equally dramatic to reset his collapsing political fortunes.

A spectacular Iranian-sponsored attack on American soil, or even a major domestic attack by a radicalized actor inspired by the chaos Trump himself has created, would instantly transform him into a Bush-like “wartime president.”

It would push the bribery, the rapes, the constitutional violations, the ICE killings, and the election rigging off the front page overnight. It would give him emergency powers he has already shown he’s more than willing to abuse. It would give Republicans a reason to “rally around the flag” and postpone the reckoning that November 2026 currently promises.

This is not some wacky conspiracy theory: it’s simply pattern recognition. When a president provokes a hostile nation, then fires the people whose job it is to protect us from that nation’s retaliation, the conclusion is either staggering incompetence or something far more sinister.

We can’t afford to wait and find out which one it is.

Call your senators and your representative today. Call them tomorrow. Call them every day until they act. Demand that Trump’s attack on Iran stop before it spirals into a full-scale war nobody voted for.

Demand that the FBI immediately reinstate its Iranian threat-monitoring teams. Demand that DHS be fully funded and its counter-terrorism mission restored, with ICE being forced to start obeying the law and the Constitution.

And demand that Congress exercise its constitutional authority over war and peace before Trump drags us deeper into a conflict designed to serve no one’s interests but his own and Bibi Netanyahu’s. The phone number for the Capitol switchboard is (202) 224-3121.

Use it. Our safety, our democracy, and our future depend on it.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

Disbelief as Trump tries to torpedo high-stakes GOP primary: 'Sure, why have people vote?'

President Donald Trump made it known on Wednesday that he wants to take a major election decision away from Republican voters in Texas — and the internet had serious reactions to his comments.

Trump has threatened to interfere in elections before, or flat out cancel them, but after a tight primary race in the Lone Star state between incumbent Sen. John Cornyn and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the president promised an endorsement — but only on the condition that the loser of his choice drop out. A GOP runoff election was slated for May 26, as neither candidate won more than 50 percent of the vote.

"The Republican Primary Race for the United States Senate in the Great State of Texas, a State I LOVE and won 3 times in Record Numbers (the HIGHEST vote ever recorded, by far!!!), cannot, for the good of the Party, and our Country, itself, be allowed to go on any longer," Trump posted Wednesday. "IT MUST STOP NOW!"

Republican strategists have indicated that Trump was likely to endorse Cornyn, according to a report from The Atlantic.

People responded to Trump's threat on social media:

"They sound nervous about Texas," Democratic strategist Adam Parkhomenko wrote on Bluesky.

"Good thing there's nothing dictatorial-sounding about that," progressive political activist Carol Norris wrote on Bluesky.

"Sure, why have people vote?" Retired Professor Emeritus of Immunology and Genomic Medicine, Jim Hagman, Ph.D., wrote on X.

"This might sound crazy, but what about just letting voters decide instead?" Napp Nazworth, Executive Director of American Values Coalition, wrote on X.

This terrifying Trump plot to steal elections is already underway

Recently, Steve Bannon told an audience:

“And I will tell you right now, as God is my witness, if we lose the midterms … some in this room are going to prison — myself included.”

Now, it looks like Donald Trump and the people around him are seriously considering declaring an emergency to let them seize control of this November’s elections, according to reporting in the Washington Post:

“Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.”

Trump and the lickspittles and criminals he’s surrounded himself with are in a panic. If Democrats take the House and/or Senate in this November’s elections, they’ll have the power of subpoena so the regime’s crimes and corruption will be laid out for everybody to see. Some could even go to prison, including Trump himself.

He’s been basically screaming, “Do something!!!” at Republicans for the past year. It started publicly with his demanding that Texas and then other red states further gerrymander their elections to reduce the number of Democrats in the House.

In red states they’re purging voters in Blue cities from the rolls like there’s no tomorrow, and the GOP is trying to recruit “election observers” to challenge signatures on mail-in ballots on an industrial level. As reporter Greg Palast pointed out, this is how Trump took the White House in 2024; if it hadn’t been for over 4 million (mostly Black) fully qualified US citizens being purged or having their ballots rejected after technical challenges, Kamala Harris would be our president today.

But given how badly Trump’s doing in the polls today, even all these efforts don’t look like they’ll be enough to keep the House and Senate in Republican hands.

So now Trump toadies like Jerome Corsi (the creator of the Birther movement and the Swift Boat slurs, who’s been a guest on my program multiple times) have an idea: just imitate what Putin, Orbán, Hitler, and other dictators have done to hang onto power when they get unpopular: declare an emergency and use it to rig the election.

Yesterday, the Post detailed how MAGA-aligned activists are now openly discussing manufacturing or exaggerating a national emergency to justify Trump’s agents in the federal government to interfere in this November’s elections.

These aren’t fringe anonymous trolls on some obscure message board; they’re people operating in proximity to the president of the United States. Corsi arguably destroyed John Kerry’s chances in 2004 and lit the Birther fuse that catapulted Trump into political fame.

And they’re floating the idea that if normal democratic processes don’t produce the “right” outcome, they could help create a fake crisis to seize control of the election nationally.

If you’ve studied history — and you know I have — that’s the moment when the hair on the back of your neck should stand up.

Because this isn’t new, creative, or even uniquely American: it’s straight out of the authoritarian playbook.

In 1933, Germany’s parliament building, the Reichstag, went up in flames at the hands of a mentally ill Dutch communist who was probably maneuvered into the act by the Nazis. Adolf Hitler declared it “proof” of an existential communist threat. Civil liberties were suspended overnight. Gone in the blink of an eye were freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to assemble as Hitler’s goons began to round up his political opponents and throw them into his new concentration camp at Dachau.

Elections were technically still held, but under conditions so distorted they no longer qualified as free or fair in any meaningful sense, and the so-called “temporary” emergency became Hitler’s legal bridge to a permanent dictatorship.

Similarly, in Turkey in 2016, elements of the military tried to pull off a coup against Recep Tayyip Erdoğan while he was out of town. Erdoğan declared a national state of emergency and then kept it in place permanently. Tens of thousands of protesters were arrested. Judges and teachers were purged from their jobs, and media outlets were closed down for being “fake news.”

While emergency rule was in effect, Turkey held an election that transformed its parliamentary democracy into a hyper-presidential system tailored to give virtually all federal power to Erdoğan himself. It was the end of democracy in Turkey.

Vladimir Putin’s rise offers another variation. In 1999, a series of apartment bombings killed hundreds of Russians and the Kremlin blamed Chechen terrorists. The attacks propelled Putin, then a relatively unknown prime minister, into the presidency on a wave of fear and fury.

Putin then declared a state of emergency that expanded his police powers, gave him tighter media control, and let him seize control of the elections process. In the years since then, elections in Russia have become ritual rather than reality. The ballots are printed every few years, and the votes are counted, but the outcome is never in doubt.

Viktor Orbán in Hungary shows yet another model. He declared a “state of crisis” over migration by Syrian refugees in 2015 and kept renewing it long after migration levels collapsed. During the COVID pandemic, he got the parliament to give him the authority to rule by decree on an indefinite basis; it’s still in effect.

As a result, elections still happen (there’s one coming up), but the media landscape was completely taken over by Orbán-friendly billionaires (see: CBS, WaPo, LA Times, Fox “News,” Sinclair, Wall St. Journal, NY Post, and 1,500 rightwing radio stations). Orbán didn’t need to cancel Hungary’s elections; he simply reshaped the legal and political environment in which they happened.

There’s a common thread in all of this. The crisis wannabe dictators inevitably declare — real, exaggerated, or cynically manipulated — become the justification for seizing extraordinary powers. Those powers narrow dissent, intimidate opponents, and functionally rig the elections.

That’s why this shocking new reporting in the Washington Post is so alarming. When political actors like Corsi begin talking openly about declaring an emergency to override or interfere with elections, they’re not blowing smoke: they’re testing a classic dictator’s narrative.

They’re trying to figure out — and will learn from the national reaction to this Post reporting — whether they can persuade the public that normal election processes are too dangerous to trust. After all, in each of the cases I listed above, the machinery of democracy was used to hollow out democracy itself.

And they may not even have to manufacture an emergency: if Trump can sufficiently provoke Iran, they may activate their proxy network around the world and in the United States, and we could be facing a genuine crisis on the order of 9/11. This is one of the few ways to make sense of today’s massive military buildup in the Middle East.

The danger here isn’t just a fabricated catastrophe or a retaliatory strike by Iran, although those are pretty damn severe. It’s the normalization of the idea that if the electorate appears likely to choose “wrongly,” an emergency can justify changing the rules of democracy.

History shows us, over and over again, that when a nation loses its democracy to an aspiring autocrat, the language and strategy used is always the same. “The nation is under threat.” “The moment is an emergency.” “Normal rules must be suspended — just temporarily — to save the country.”

And in every case, “temporary” turned out to be the most dangerous word of all.

We’re now at that moment where influential figures are publicly contemplating that path, and the lesson from history isn’t subtle. The real emergency, in a constitutional republic, begins when leaders like Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan and Trump — and their toadies like Corsi, Bondi, Noem, and Gabbard — decide that elections themselves are the problem.

Multiple observers have noted that this plan is grossly unconstitutional. But so were Trump’s tariffs (which also used IEEPA emergency authority as their rationale), and the Supreme Court let him run with them for almost a year before stopping him.

Similarly, ICE goons kicking in people’s front doors and smashing their car windows to drag them off without a judicial warrant is a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, but Trump’s agents continued to do it every day. Something being against the law or the Constitution has never stopped our convicted felon/rapist/insurrectionist president in the past.

This plot will only be stopped if it’s widely reported and an outraged public rises up in opposition. Call (202-224-3121) your elected representatives — Democratic and Republican — and let them know you’re onto this plot and won’t tolerate it. And that if they have any fidelity left to the Constitution and American values, they won’t either.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

'You have to leave': New audio kneecaps House lawmaker's claim journalist never booted

An Atlantic journalist dubbed a "top-notch hater" by Rep. Jasmine Crockett's team and thrown out at Crockett's rally in Lubbock, Texas, on Friday, released audio from the moment she was told to leave the lawmaker's campaign event.

Elaine Godfrey, a staff writer covering national politics for the outlet, was wearing her press badge identifying who she was and had "attempted to join a closed-door press scrum with the congresswoman that was open to the other reporters at the rally," but was turned away. Instead, she decided to start interviewing people in the crowd when a security guard walked up to her and told her she needed to leave, escorting her away.

In the unedited transcript Godfrey reveals what happened during the incident.

Woman: Can you get your stuff? (Speaking to someone else.) Her team wants her to leave, and they’re asking her to leave.

Godfrey: Why are you asking me to leave?

Woman: They just said, ‘Elaine from Atlantic, white girl with a hat and notepad. She’s interviewing people in the crowd. She’s a top-notch hater and will spin. She needs to leave.’ (Speaking to someone else.) I just told her to get her bag and go [unintelligible] that’s from her team.

Godfrey, who needed to get an Uber from the location, was then told by a security guard to go wait outside the event, along the side of a country road.

She got an Uber and then followed up with Crockett directly on Friday.

"After getting picked up by the Uber, I went straight to Lubbock’s famous Prairie Dog Town, where I received a warmer welcome," Godfrey wrote. "I called Crockett directly today to ask about all of this. When she answered, and I told her who was calling, she said, 'Oh!,' sounding surprised, and hung up. She did not respond to my follow-up texts."

Crockett's team has said there is no evidence that a journalist was booted from the rally.

Godfrey told CNN that plenty of people also witnessed what happened — and that she has the receipts to show for it, including the recording.

JD Vance just made a revealing omission as he pushed preposterous claims

Vice President JD Vance did not utter the word “tariffs” a single time during his upbeat speech at a Plover, Wisconsin, machining plant Thursday. The visit, aimed at shoring up vulnerable Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden ahead of the 2026 midterms, was part of a post-State of the Union victory lap Vance is taking to market the so-called Golden Age of prosperity Trump claims he and the Republicans have delivered to rural and blue-collar voters.

It’s a tough sell.

The latest Marquette University Law School poll, released the day before Vance parachuted into Wisconsin, shows Trump hitting a second-term low with Wisconsin voters, with 44 percent saying they approve of the job he’s doing and 54 percent saying they don’t approve. Across partisan affiliations, the rising cost of living is voters’ No. 1 concern, while 55 percent of respondents told pollsters tariffs are hurting Wisconsin farmers. Manufacturers are not happy, either.

“I can tell you from my experience running our company, from everyone I talk to in my networks — 95 percent of people in manufacturing — 99 percent do not support the tariffs,” said Sachin Shivaram, CEO of Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry, a Wisconsin-based company with locations across the Midwest.

Shivaram spoke on a press call with Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin ahead of Vance’s speech Thursday. Many business owners, he said, are afraid to publicly share their criticisms of the Trump administration. When he meets other leaders of manufacturing companies in boardrooms, he said, “It’s like, look, we can’t say anything about how dumb the tariff policy is, because we’re going to be the next one whacked on X.” But, he added, “it’s costing all of them, all of us, a lot of money.”

Tariffs have caused “chaos and uncertainty” for businesses, agreed Kyle LaFond, owner and founder of American Provenance and Natural Contract Manufacturing, a small business that makes personal care products.

“Last year, when these tariffs were first instituted, I absorbed those costs as much as possible. I did that for about eight months,” LaFond said. “But that is not a sustainable business practice.” Ultimately, he said, businesses have to pass along the cost to their customers: “Tariffs are just attacks on the American consumer.”

Trump's failure to deliver the economic miracle he advertised, along with devastating cuts to health care and the safety net, pose a looming problem for Republicans ahead of the midterms. The solution they’ve hit on is a combination of bluster, bullying and straight-up lies.

There’s a reason slim majorities of Wisconsin voters chose Trump in 2016 and 2024. Vance put his finger on it in his speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee: “When I was in the fourth grade, a career politician by the name of Joe Biden supported NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent countless good jobs to Mexico.”

Wisconsin manufacturing workers and farmers suffered tremendously from global trade deals. Democrats and Republicans alike brushed aside their pain and tried to tell them that the booming stock market and increasing corporate profits were worth the crashing prices and job losses. Never mind the communities ruined and all the families that fell out of the middle class.

Trump and Vance spoke to those voters. In his convention speech, Vance cleverly tied global trade deals supported by both political parties to immigration: “Now, thanks to these policies that Biden and other out-of-touch politicians in Washington gave us,” he said, “our country was flooded with cheap Chinese goods, with cheap foreign labor.”

But the immigrants who make up 70 percent of the labor force on Wisconsin dairy farms did not drive the collapse of Wisconsin’s small-farm economy. They, too, were displaced by globalization that drove down prices and accelerated a “get big or get out” economy that has taken a heavy toll on working people on both sides of the border. The arrival of immigrants willing to work long hours for low pay on farms that were forced to expand rapidly to stay afloat was a blessing to farmers who simply couldn’t find American workers to fill those jobs.

Today’s increasingly virulent, demagogic attacks on those hardworking immigrants should make everyone queasy.

Alex Jacquez, a former White House economic official in the Biden administration who also worked for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, sees Vance’s rise as a big win for the populist right. Vance’s criticism of global trade deals that hollowed out American manufacturing, and his appeal to the “forgotten” American workers who have never recovered from outsourcing, struck a nerve with voters across the industrial Midwest.

“But I think the question is whether the actual policies put forward are having the outcomes that they intend here,” Jacquez said in a phone interview Thursday.

Trump ‘s failure to deliver the economic miracle he advertised, along with devastating cuts to health care and the safety net, pose a looming problem for Republicans ahead of the midterms. The solution they’ve hit on is a combination of bluster, bullying and straight up lies.

In his Plover speech, Vance doubled down on Trump’s scapegoating of immigrants and Democrats in the State of the Union. Following up on Trump’s racist characterization of the entire Somali immigrant community in Minnesota as “pirates” responsible for plundering public aid, Vance blamed “‘illegal aliens” for fraud in public benefits programs and voting. He brought up Trump’s lurid descriptions of crimes committed by immigrants and, like Trump, excoriated Democrats for not standing up and cheering as the president subjected grieving parents to a gory rehash of violent attacks on their children.

The reason Democrats didn’t stand up during Trump’s speech, Vance suggested, is that “they answer to people who have corrupted this country. They answer to people who opened the border. They answer to people who got rich off of illegal immigrant labor. … We want American workers to get rich for working hard, not illegal aliens.”

Sucker-punching Democrats on immigration was a goal of the State of the Union speech. And Republicans will keep on punching. Their sanctimonious horror at the very idea of their colleagues not standing up and cheering for the victims of violent criminals is a way of changing the subject away from the spectacle of masked federal immigration agents spreading murderous mayhem in Midwestern neighborhoods, and, of course, the fact that none of this is making American workers better off.

As Jacquez pointed out, “Certainly Trump has cracked down on immigration, but that doesn’t seem to be redounding to the benefit of native-born workers. We’ve seen the unemployment rate creep up even while fewer immigrants are working these days on the manufacturing side.”

“We lost manufacturing jobs in every single month of 2025,” he added. “There has been no resurgence whatsoever in actual people getting jobs in manufacturing and, in fact, in many sectors, some of the trade policies that Trump has advanced have been actively harmful.”

At the end of his speech, Vance took questions from local media that reflected the immediate concerns of voters in western Wisconsin.

What can his administration do to stop the closure of rural hospitals that are creating a health care desert in the district he was visiting?

Vance blamed the problem on the Biden administration, although rural hospital closures did not begin under Biden and are severely exacerbated by Medicaid cuts under Trump. Vance also claimed the Trump administration is now turning things around with the rural hospital fund included in the “Big Beautiful Bill Act” — $200 million of which was awarded to Wisconsin in December.

Derrick Van Orden also pumped the rural hospital fund in remarks ahead of Vance’s speech, saying it’s “just a lie” that Democrats care about rural health care, because they didn’t vote for the massive tax- and spending-cut bill that contained the rural health care fund.

KFF projects the fund will only make up for about one-third of the Republicans’ cuts to Medicaid in rural areas. And that offset is temporary. The rural health fund expires in five years. In Wisconsin, meanwhile, 250,000 people are losing their health care coverage because of the Medicaid cuts and changes to the Affordable Care Act passed by Republicans. Those losses are concentrated in rural areas, and have a cascading effect on rural hospitals and entire rural economies.

Van Orden, who has spent his whole political career calling for the elimination of the Affordable Care Act, reversed course and voted with Democrats to extend ACA subsidies last month — right after voting to block the same measure when Democrats brought it up the day before.

In answer to a question on the health care worker shortage and the aging population of rural Wisconsin, Vance took a swipe at college students who major in women’s studies. The Trump administration — which has focused on repealing a pandemic-era pause on student loan repayment, resumed garnishing the wages of student debtors and imposed less affordable repayment plans — wants to make it easier for people to study to become doctors and nurses without getting “layered up with debt,” Vance declared.

Will the Trump administration withhold Medicaid money from Wisconsin as it recently announced it will do to Minnesota, as punishment for the state’s refusal to hand over the sensitive, personal information of food assistance recipients and of voters?

In answer to that question, Vance said it was outrageous that Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers and the Wisconsin Elections Commission have refused to hand over the data Trump is demanding, and left the open the option of withholding federal Medicaid money, saying Democrats “like to cheat” in “voter rolls and welfare rolls.”

Asked about farmers facing wildly fluctuating commodity prices, Vance celebrated the administration’s success in getting China to open up its market to U.S. soybeans. That’s a head-scratcher, since China was purchasing about half of all U.S. soybeans a year ago, before it stopped amid a trade war caused by Trump’s tariffs. That was a big problem for Wisconsin farmers who were suddenly stuck sitting on a bumper soybean crop after losing their biggest buyer. Even with the new deal, those farmers will not be made whole, Darin Von Ruden, president of the Wisconsin Farmers Union, told Wisconsin Public Radio, and China has now found new markets, setting up a long-term business loss.

Among Vance’s many preposterous claims, perhaps the most incredible was the picture he tried to paint of a caring, empathetic Trump, who wakes up every morning asking what he can do to solve the problems of the American people. Do even Trump’s supporters buy the idea that the man who made $4 billion off the presidency after just one year in office is driven by selfless concern for the needs of others?

On one occasion, Vance said, during a discussion of the soaring stock market, Trump asked earnestly what could be done for people who don’t own any stocks. The answer, he said, was Trump’s brilliant plan to give low-income workers a $1,000 federal match for retirement. That idea was actually signed into law by Biden four years ago.

Asked for his further ideas for investing in rural communities, Vance said his administration will mostly “just listen” to voters. He held up Van Orden as the administration’s point man for keeping in touch with constituents in rural Wisconsin. Unfortunately, Van Orden is so notorious for avoiding in-person contact with voters, Democrats have made a regular practice of visiting his district to hold town halls from which he is reliably, notably absent.

The claim that either he or the Trump administration is concerned about solving the problems of Wisconsin voters is the biggest lie of all.

Ruth Conniff is Editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Examiner. She formerly served as Editor-in-chief of The Progressive Magazine where she worked for many years from both Madison and Washington, D.C. Shortly after Donald Trump took office she moved with her family to Oaxaca, Mexico, and covered U.S./Mexico relations, the migrant caravan, and Mexico’s efforts to grapple with Trump. Conniff is the author of "Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers" which won the 2022 Studs and Ida Terkel award from The New Press. She is a frequent guest on MSNBC and has appeared on Good Morning America, Democracy Now!, Wisconsin Public Radio, CNN, Fox News and many other radio and television outlets. She has also written for The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times, among other publications. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her husband and three daughters. Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.

Retiring GOP lawmaker spills about what he dislikes most about Trump: 'I'm not into that'

WASHINGTON — After President Donald Trump’s historically combative State of the Union address, many retiring congressional Republicans are breathing sighs of relief.

“I like teams that are cohesive,” retiring five-term Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) told Raw Story of Trump’s bombastic Tuesday night address.

Bacon’s one of 29 House Republicans heading for the exits, part of a wave of 68 members who’ve announced their retirements after this Congress.

While 31 are running for governor or Senate, Bacon's one of a handful of more moderate Republicans slated to leave office altogether.

That’s in no small part because of the MAGA-turn of the GOP, which has many in the middle looking for a Trump-sized escape hatch from Trump.

“You got to pick somebody that's more of a unifier than a divider,” Bacon said at the Capitol. “He's a populist. Populists like anger, but I'm not into that.”

If you too don’t like anger mixed in with your politics, you may want to turn off your TV for the next nine months, because political watchers say on Tuesday Trump set the stage for one of America’s most bitter elections ever.

‘Pretty good for the base’

Americans struggling to pay their bills were given little hope as Trump all but declared mission accomplished while decrying the “nation in crisis” he took over from former President Joe Biden and bragging about a tariff-induced economy remade in his own image.

Trump’s rosy economic pronunciations garnered standing ovations from most Republicans in the chamber, even if many weren’t buying what the President was selling.

“Are you worried at all about the affordability pitch?” Raw Story asked Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL). “That Republicans risk coming across as out of touch in November?”

“I’m retiring,” the 10-term Republican told Raw Story through a laugh.

“Not your worry?” Raw Story pressed.

“I'm not worried,” Buchanan said. “It was pretty good for the base.”

What’s good for GOP gooses in Trump’s America isn’t necessarily good for GOP ganders.

“There's a lot of strength in economic numbers,” Bacon told Raw Story. “But what hurts — and he's part of the blame, both sides are — the angst and the anger, the hyper-polarization and the mocking, it's sort of ugly. It does hurt to see it.”

With Trump’s populism cloaked in hyper-polarization — tribalism, even — the anger-tinged State of the Union address wasn’t an outlier.

“What you saw … reflects the anger I see at home towards him and also anger his supporters have towards the public,” Bacon said. “It's a two-way thing. There is hate out there.

“I always think leadership should elevate things, but that's not his mantra.”

And Trump’s mantra may be coming to a governor’s mansion near you soon.

Revolution will be localised

The mass exodus of moderates is coupled with a wave of ideologues running to take what they’ve learned in Trump’s Washington to their state capitals.

During this midterm cycle, two sitting Republican U.S. senators and 10 House Republicans are waging gubernatorial contests where riding Trump’s coattails is seen as a boon to their brands.

That’s why many Republicans running in deep red states, despite the President’s plummeting national poll numbers, are clinging to Trump and his divisive State of the Union address.

“It was great! Call ’em out,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) told Raw Story. “He called it like it was. He's one of the few presidents who'll do that. He tells it like it is and calls people out.”

“Are you worried at all about the gridlock?” Raw Story asked, “The tribalism?”

“No,” said Tuberville, who’s running for Alabama governor. “We're not defeated, we're winning. America’s winning. That’s all we care about. We don’t care about politics.

“We lost for four years. We were going down the drain so fast. America is back!”

Some six hours east, in South Carolina, Trump’s not just a populist — he’s popular, at least according to a fall 2025 Winthrop University poll showing 80 percent approval with conservatives in the state.

That’s why gubernatorial candidate Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) has gushed since Trump’s address.

“Do you worry that your party risks looking out of touch with the American people when it comes to affordability?” Raw Story asked.

“The American people saw how the Democrats are not only out of touch, they still don't get it,” Norman said after Democrats refused to stand when the President railed against “illegal immigrants” Tuesday.

“They did it sitting on their hands. They're the new party of the socialists.”

To Norman, like many elected Republicans, the State of the Union address was as prophetic as it was a pronouncement of a new America.

“You look at the next four months and see what happens,”: Norman said. “If it's all good, it's going to have an impact.”

“If” is a mighty big word.

‘He misses Joe’

Democrats say their GOP counterparts are high on their own supply, especially after Trump spent the bulk of the State of the Union in reality TV mode, as when he awarded two war heroes with Medal of Honor’s in real time or garnered a rare bipartisan standing ovation for the gold medal-winning U.S. men's hockey team.

The celebration of exceptional Americans wasn’t lost on Democrats.

“There are wonderful people to honor in this country, and I'm glad that he honored them,” Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) told Raw Story. “But I don't know, it kind of felt like he would rather talk about other people than talk about his record.”

Biden still holds a special place in Trump’s heart, according to Moskowitz.

“He misses him. He misses Joe,” Moskowitz said. “I mean, he misses Joe more than we miss Joe.”

Democrats miss “Uncle Joe” a lot, especially his appeals for bipartisan compromise.

While Biden was known as a fighter he also prized unity, which Democrats say is a concept lost on Trump, at least in the Tuesday address they saw as a historically prickly flop.

“Worst. Divisive. Partisan. Beneath the office of President,” Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) told Raw Story. “Didn't unite anyone; divided everyone. He should be pulling us together and uniting us.”

With the 2026 elections under way, liberal leaders like the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-WA), left Trump’s address all but salivating.

“He's clearly disconnected from the struggles of the American people. That was very clear,” DelBene told Raw Story. “Affordability is the number one issue across the country and continues to be and no awareness on their side.”

“But Trump’s got the bully pulpit,” Raw Story pressed. “Does that worry you at all?”

“When people hear him talk and they have a different life experience, what they're going through right now, it doesn't connect, and we've seen that across the country,” DelBene said.

“We see in special elections, people are souring on the Republican agenda and the broken promises. He promised to lower costs on day one.”

These red state Republicans just proved they're cowards

Donald Trump doesn’t hide it. He insults, he lies, he scapegoats. Immigrants are rapists, murderers, invaders. Entire communities are reduced to caricatures. Facts are optional. Truth is inconvenient. His State of the Union address was a masterclass on hate and racism.

And here’s the tragedy: Montana’s delegation greeted it with silence.

Steve Daines? Silent.
Tim Sheehy? Silent.
Ryan Zinke? Silent.
Troy Downing? Silent.

Not a word of condemnation. Not a hint of pushback. Just polite quiet while bigotry spreads.

Lies dressed as policy

Trump’s words aren’t analysis — they’re performance. Numbers, evidence, reality — they don’t matter.

Immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes than native-born Americans. They are more likely to work, pay taxes, raise families, and invest in their communities.

But that doesn’t fit the narrative, so Trump’s lies fill the airwaves. And when Montana’s elected officials stay silent, it’s as if they’re handing him the microphone, nodding along, and saying, “Carry on.”

Silence is consent

Let’s be blunt: Silence from our delegation is not neutrality. It is consent. It is complicity.

Every racist attack, every misleading claim, every smearing of a human being is amplified when the people elected to protect their constituents do nothing.

This silence has consequences. It tells Montanans that some members of our communities — hardworking nurses, farmers, teachers, business owners — are less worthy of protection, less deserving of respect. It tells them that when lies are shouted from the highest office in the land, their representatives will look the other way. That is not courage. That is cowardice.

Montana values? Show them

Montana prides itself on fairness, independence, and integrity. We claim to value honesty and community. And yet, when a national leader traffics in lies, fear and racism, our delegation acts as if the rules of decency don’t apply to them.

Silence is easy. Standing up is hard. But Montana deserves leaders who will speak truth to power, who will reject lies, who will reject racism in all its forms — even when it’s convenient to look away.

Trump’s racism is clear, Montana’s response is clearer

Trump uses incendiary language to divide. He spreads falsehoods to stir fear. He targets whole communities as if their humanity is optional. And Montana’s delegation? They respond with nothing.

Steve Daines. Tim Sheehy. Ryan Zinke. Troy Downing.

Silent.

No rebuke. No clarification. No defense of decency. Just a collective shrug while truth and humanity are trampled.

That is not leadership. That is surrender. That is a public demonstration that, for our elected officials, political convenience matters more than integrity, more than honesty, more than people.

The time for silence is over

Racism wins when good people say nothing. Lies thrive when leaders shrug. Montana can do better. We can demand accountability. We can insist that truth, fairness, and decency are not optional, even when the powerful try to make them so.

Montana’s delegation has chosen silence and complicity. Their inaction in the face of lies and racism makes one thing clear: We need elected officials who reflect Montana values — leaders who will speak truth, defend decency, and call out falsehoods wherever they appear. We are better than this. Montana deserves better than this. And we need officials who are better than this.

Montana, silence is not leadership.

Doug James was born in Great Falls, Montana in 1957. He graduated from Charles M. Russell High School in Great Falls and then earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in History, with high honors, from Southern Methodist University in 1979. Doug earned his Juris Doctorate degree from the University of Montana in 1982. After graduating from law school, he worked for the Montana Securities Department in the State Auditor's Office from 1982-1984. He has been in private practice in Billings since 1984. Doug is married to Kathy Webster James.

This monstrous right-wing ruling may have finally met its match

Good news.

You may remember that back in November I mentioned that Montana was considering a bill that would effectively negate the Supreme Court’s awful Citizens United decision, which held that corporations are people under the First Amendment and therefore entitled to spend unlimited amounts of corporate money in elections.

A similar bill has just been introduced in California.

Montana is a great and beautiful state. Some 1,145,000 people live there. But California! Almost 40 million people live in the Sunshine State. If California were an independent country, it would have the fourth-largest economy in the world (behind Germany and ahead of Japan).

So the possibility that California might pass this legislation is a very big deal.

As you know, corporate political spending was growing before Citizens United, but the decision opened the floodgates to the unlimited super PAC spending and undisclosed dark money we suffer from today.

Between 2008 and 2024, reported “independent” expenditures by outside groups exploded more than 28-fold — from $144 million to $4.21 billion. Unreported money also skyrocketed, with dark money groups spending millions influencing the 2024 election.

Most people assume that the only way to stop corporate and dark money in American politics is either to wait for the Supreme Court to undo Citizens United (we could wait a very long time) or amend the U.S. Constitution (which is extraordinarily difficult).

But there’s another way, and there’s a good chance it will work. It will be on the ballot next November in Montana. And there’s now a chance California could enact it!

As I’ve pointed out, individual states have the authority to limit corporate political activity and dark money spending, because states determine what powers corporations have.

In American law, corporations are creatures of state laws. For more than two centuries, the power to define their form, limits, and privilege has belonged only to the states.

Corporations have no powers at all until a state government grants them some. In the 1819 Supreme Court case Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, Chief Justice John Marshall established that:

“A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it, either expressly, or as incidental to its very existence … The objects for which a corporation is created are universally such as the government wishes to promote. They are deemed beneficial to the country; and this benefit constitutes the consideration, and, in most cases, the sole consideration of the grant.”

States don’t have to grant corporations the power to spend in politics. In fact, they can decide not to give corporations that power.

This isn’t about corporate rights, as the Supreme Court determined in Citizens United. It’s about corporate powers.

When a state exercises its authority to define corporations as entities without the power to spend in politics, it will no longer be relevant whether corporations have a right to spend in politics — because without the power to do so, the right to do so has no meaning. (Delaware’s corporation code already declines to grant private foundations the power to spend in elections.)

Importantly, a state that no longer grants its corporations the power to spend in elections also denies that power to corporations chartered in the other 49 states, if they wish to do business in that state.

And what corporation doesn’t want to do business in California?

All a state needs to do is enact a law with a provision something like this:

“Every corporation operating under the laws of this state has all the corporate powers it held previously, except that nothing in this statute grants or recognizes any power to engage in election activity or ballot-issue activity.”

Sound farfetched? Not at all.

The argument is laid out in a paper that the Center for American Progress published last fall. (Kudos to CAP and the paper’s author, Tom Moore, a senior fellow at CAP who previously served as counsel and chief of staff to a longtime member of the Federal Election Commission.)

Which is exactly what the new California bill does. Here it is: AB 1984. (I kind of like the name.) You can find the text and status of the bill here.

The heroes of the day are Assemblymember Chris Rogers and Senator Mike McGuire, who have stepped up to sponsor and co-author the measure, respectively.

I hope Gavin Newsom gets 100 percent behind this effort. If he has his eye on the White House in 2028, this would be a feather in his electoral cap. The Citizens United decision is enormously unpopular. Some 75 percent of Americans disapprove of it.

It’s time to make Citizens United history. California (and Montana) can lead the way.

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.or

State of the Union confirmed something truly terrifying for Trump

As I’ve painfully done before, I watched Donald Trump’s State of the Union address so that you didn’t have to. And I hope you didn’t, as you will never get those almost two hours back. It was truly torturous.

If you did, I’m sure you saw what I saw: a delusional, mentally declining man yelling stuff and popping our speakers, claiming everything was great and forcing his GOP subjects to stand and applaud.

I am not going to go through many specifics here because you’ve heard it all before: The golden age, “an economy for the ages,” prices are “coming down.” It was just the same lies. He said tariffs were a winning policy for America. He only briefly addressed the Supreme Court ruling while pushing his new tariffs, and he laughably claimed tariffs would “replace the income tax.” The camera at that point panned to Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who had an “over my dead body” look on her face.

Trump touted himself as a president who’s done an extraordinary job and he cast the Democrats as villains, people who are “crazy,” angrily pointing at them as members of his Cabinet and many Republicans in the room stood and applauded.

The speech also had its vicious racism and violence portion, attacking Somalis and celebrating mass deportations by his masked thugs of ICE. And there was the assault on transgender children and their families — that’s when Trump called Democrats “crazy” for actually standing by kids.

Trump focused on pre-planned narratives of people in the audience and used their stories, including the now-disgraced US Olympic men’s ice hockey team — though I was glad to see that five members of the team did not attend or go for a visit to the White House before.

And there was so much more — so, so, so much more — as this was the longest State of the Union in memory. When Trump speaks longer, it’ a sign that deep down he believes he’s in big trouble. He thinks that if he just says stuff over and over and dominates an audience’s time, he’ll convince people. A true narcissist.

But the bottom line: We could not have asked for anything better. Trump doubled down on every horrible, unpopular thing he has done. He claimed this terrible mess of an economy is wonderful and celebrated the violence and racism he’s brought us. He lied and lied.

And the entire GOP cheered him on. They can’t break from it, either deep in the cult or too afraid. And it will likely take them down in November.

Governor Abigail Spanberger of Virginia gave one of the best rebuttals from the opposition party I’ve seen. She was concise yet very specific and had substance, gravity, and urgency.

She took apart Trump’s claims and focused on the wreckage: the attacks on our democracy and the killing of Americans in the streets. She highlighted Democratic wins — including her landslide win last November — and the Democratic enthusiasm. It was serious yet also upbeat and pitch perfect as she stood before an audience that applauded her at times. This was a far cry from Katie Britt in her kitchen — remember that?! — and a sweating, water-guzzling Marco Rubio. There will be no SNL skit — except about Trump.

Even though Trump’s speech, like that of most presidents, was watched by a higher percentage of people from his own party, CNN’s poll of viewers showed it to be the least popular SOTU this century, with only 38 percent of viewers calling it “very positive.” That’s Trump tanking with his own base. Per CNN political director David Chalian, “The polling universe [of those who watched the speech] is about 13 points more Republican than the overall population.”

The GOP is now trapped, frozen until November, as Trump has decided what the message is: Voters are wrong about what they’re feeling, and I’m right about what I’m saying. That’s a recipe for disaster.

Michelangelo Signorile writes The Signorile Report, a free and reader-supported Substack. If you’ve valued reading The Signorile Report, consider becoming a paid subscriber and supporting independent, ad-free opinion journalism.