Trump is clearly mentally diminished — Dems must target these people pulling his strings

On Friday, the president changed his mind. He decided that he is not going to break the law by withholding $187 million in federal funding for an intelligence and counterterrorism initiative in New York City.

And you should be grateful.

“I am pleased to advise that I reversed the cuts made to Homeland Security and Counterterrorism for New York City …” he said. “It was my Honor to do so. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

But Donald Trump didn’t change his mind. Not really. He just wants us to think so. Fact is, he wasn’t part of the decision to (illegally) cut off the money. Someone in the regime decided for him. Here’s the Times:

The cuts, which represented the largest federal defunding of police operations in New York in decades, were made by the Department of Homeland Security, without explanation and without the approval of President Trump, White House officials said.

Indeed, President Trump was blindsided by the decision to defund the police, not learning of the cuts until Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York called him on Sunday to protest the change after the fact, according to three people with knowledge of the call.

If the cuts had gone through, Trump would have defunded the police more than anyone, ever. That would not have been a good look for a president who bills himself as the great champion of law enforcement, and here’s the thing about that: someone in the White House knew it.

They knew it would hurt Trump to be seen as the president who kneecapped New York cops, seemingly making it harder for them to stop the next 9/11. Yet this someone went ahead and did it anyway, in the knowledge that Big Daddy is preoccupied with other matters.

I don’t want to belabor the obvious, but this sometimes happens when the father of the family, as it were, is old and doddering, and can no longer be trusted to tell the difference between reality and television. This sometimes happens when a “family member” really hates Big Daddy and wants to expose him. That way, everyone sees the truth!

I kid, but only slightly. It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s someone in the White House who really hates Trump, despite working for the hate regimes, and actively seeks ways to humiliate him. (Consider the unknown aide responsible for putting makeup on his hand to cover up whatever ailment he has. The makeup’s color and his skin color are so mismatched that you can’t help thinking it was done on purpose!)

More important is that it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s someone – or a group of someones – that recognizes the chance to seize the reins of power for themselves and if it goes sideways, Trump can take the fall.

The president very often doesn’t seem to know what’s going until an outsider tells him. It could be a congressional Democrat. For instance, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Trump didn’t understand the coming spike in insurance premiums, the result of him and the Republicans failing to renew federal subsidies.

“We laid out to the president some of the consequences happening in healthcare, and by his face and the way he looked, I think he heard about them for the first time,” Schumer said.

It could be a Democratic governor. After watching a Fox segment that made Portland look like a hellscape, Trump planned to send National Guard troops there. Then he talked to Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, who, like New York’s Kathy Hochul, set him straight.

Trump told Kotek: “But I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’”

But mostly, Trump learns about what his regime is doing when the press corps asks about what it’s doing. This is an ongoing pattern but most recently, Trump did not know that US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had convened a meeting of the top military officials until questioned. The AP: “The president's participation was not part of the original plan for the meeting but that he decided that he wanted to go.”

His speech there was word salad. As I wrote, he twaddled on about Biden’s autopen; about the unfair media; about tariffs; about the border; about “the time he went to a restaurant in Washington to eat dinner”; and even the “Nobel Peace Prize he felt he had earned.”

Then, amid the outpouring of words, there was a moment of clarity, and Trump seemed to remember what his people had been telling him.

“It’s a war from within,” he said. “It’s really a very important mission. We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military ... because we’re going into Chicago very soon.”

(Subsequently, the regime ordered Texas National Guard troops to Illinois against the wishes of JB Pritzker. The Illinois governor has filed suit to stop it.)

Retired Army General Barry McCaffrey told MSNBC the speech was “one of the most bizarre, unsettling events I’ve ever encountered.” And: “The president sounded incoherent, exhausted, rabidly partisan, at times stupid, meandering [and] couldn’t hold a thought together.”

(In fairness, Trump isn’t too far gone yet. As Jen Psaki noted, he is still aware enough to put the kibosh on any plan to defund the police.)

This pattern is so frequent and so public that the Washington press corps really should be asking, as Dan Froomkin recently suggested:

  • “Is he a confused old man?
  • “Is he being manipulated by his staff?
  • “Is he delusional? Is he gaslighting us?
  • “Who’s in charge?”

On Friday, I argued that the growing awareness of the president’s dementia (so far primarily due to Pritzker’s use of the d-word) could present an opportunity for coalition-building – between anti-Trump partisans who always believed him to be a threat to democracy and non-partisan swing voters who supported him in the mistaken belief that he’d solve pressing problems, like inflation and the cost of living.

The main obstacle to building a coalition is changing minds, namely, that indie voters are not going to admit they were wrong to choose a fascist. It hits different, however, when the same fascist appears to have dementia and, as a result, is doing weird stuff, like trying to defund the police while ordering troops to do the work of the police. At that point, the lift is less heavy. Liberals are not asking swing voters to stand up for democracy, just to stand against demented chaos.

It also hits different when, in the context of dementia, it seems that someone – or a group of someones – is pulling the strings and that Donald Trump is more puppet than president.

That framing could also have a powerful effect on swing voters in joining an anti-authoritarian and pro-democracy coalition. They would not have to blame the president, thus blaming themselves by implication. Instead, they could blame the unelected liars and cheats – Russ Vought and Stephen Miller spring to mind – who are conspiring behind his back. Indies might even be encouraged to take the moral high ground. At least some of the power-grab involves humiliating a demented old man in public.

In this light, I think Project 2025 becomes something bigger than the authoritarian playbook that liberals go on and on about, and that indie voters tend to tune out. It becomes a stand-in for the schemers pulling Trump’s strings. They know their policies are so unpopular that they would never become reality if Vought and Miller couldn’t whisper in the ear of a doddering old man who can no longer be trusted to tell the difference between reality and television.

For independent voters who may be looking for an off ramp, it’s not Project 2025. It’s Puppet 2025.

To be sure, I don’t trust the press corps to do the work that democracy needs. Reporters are happy to show a live feed of Trump seemingly not knowing what’s going on, but that’s the extent of it. They are not going to ask for the names of the puppet masters. They are not going to hold Trump to the same ageist standards that they held Joe Biden to. (They are certainly not going to flirt with the same conspiracy theories.) The hypocrisy is so baked in that, for now, I have no hope of it changing.

(And to be sure, all my talk of Trump’s dementia might give the impression I don’t think he’s an evil man who’s capable of committing his own atrocities. Let me be the first to disabuse you of that notion.)

But the news media isn’t the only thing that swing voters experience. They also experience the pain and the chaos of unpopular policies pursued by this regime: tariffs, inflation, healthcare cuts, not to mention masked thugs ripping families apart. The more pain and chaos they feel, the more they might be open to the argument that the pain itself is proof that the democratically elected president isn’t in charge.

Hallelujah — a leading Dem finally uses the right word to describe Trump

I could be wrong, but JB Pritzker may be the first Democrat to apply the d-word to Donald Trump. More importantly, the Illinois governor may be the first to link Trump's criminality to his dementia. And! He may be the first to explain America’s existential crisis in context of a remedy.

A threefer! Pritzker said:

"It appears that Donald Trump not only has dementia set in, but he's copying tactics of Vladimir Putin. Sending troops into cities, thinking that that's some sort of proving ground for war, or that indeed there's some sort of internal war going on in the United States is just, frankly, inane, and I'm concerned for his health. There is something genuinely wrong with this man, and the 25th Amendment ought to be invoked."

Like I said, I could be wrong. California Governor Gavin Newsom came close to saying it. Last month, his social media account mocked one of Trump’s Truth Social posts, parsing all the lives, with a zinger on top: “Take your dementia meds, Grandpa. You are making things up again.” (Newsom has also said there’s something wrong with Trump. He suggested his cognition has decayed dramatically since his first term.)

But that’s as close as Newsom got, and as far as I can tell, no Democrat as high as Pritzker has said outright that Trump is demented.

This is not to say no one has been talking about it directly. I have. USA Today’s Rex Huppke has. The New Republic’s Greg Sargent has. The Hill’s Chris Truax has. There are dozens more examples. (There’s also a repertoire of wink-wink-nudge-nudge that the Democrats have used since Joe Biden dropped out of the campaign. Kamala Harris talked a lot about Trump’s “stamina” and “weakness.” Others followed her lead.)

But that’s pretty much the extent of it. Despite wall-to-wall coverage of Biden’s mental state, now to the point where some respectable journalists are claiming there was a vast conspiracy to cover it up, the Washington press corps seemed to have priced into their coverage of Trump his obvious deterioration. There’s barely a hint of anything about it. Absolutely no one has used the d-word in their reporting. It’s enough to make you wonder if there’s a vast conspiracy to cover it up.

I will say that something changed this week, at least in terms of coverage by the New York Times, which tends to be a bellwether for newspeople. A piece on his gathering of top military brass resulted in this reaction from a seasoned Times-watcher: “I assert that the New York Times has changed its approach to writing about Trump.”

The article, headlined “Trump Gave the Military’s Brass a Rehashed Speech. Until Minute 44,” was about how difficult it is to pick out the newsworthy bits from Trump’s speeches, as they tend to be retreads of the same things he’s always going on about.

Despite addressing elites of the American military, Trump twaddled on about Biden and the “infamous autopen”; about the unfair media; about tariffs; about the border; about “the time he went to a restaurant in Washington to eat dinner”; and even the “Nobel Peace Prize he felt he had earned.”

As Times reporter Shawn McCreesh said: “These were pretty much the same things he talked about a day earlier while standing next to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in the State Dining Room at the White House, which were the same things he talked about at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service in Arizona, which were the same things he talked about at Windsor Castle and at Chequers in England.”

But then, out of that miasma of mangled words, broken thoughts and disconnections arose “something new. Something different,” McCreesh wrote. The president of the United States said that “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

To make sure you don’t miss it, McCreesh repeats those words in italics. “‘We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military,’ the president of the United States said.”

McCreesh is reporting, not commenting. He’s not saying directly that Trump looks like an old man whose brain is so broken he can’t stop perseverating on the same five topics or that out of that word salad, he sometimes spews the pristine proclamations of a dictator. Instead, he takes a reportorial approach toward arriving at a similar conclusion. He’s showing, in other words, not telling, and the showing is clear.

“It has become harder to perceive the occasionally revealing things the president says … because of the way he sometimes says them,” McCreesh wrote. “For a 79-year-old, he’s often shown a great deal of energy, but he seemed a bit sapped Tuesday. As his remarks went on and on, his voice took on a more monotonous quality. A day earlier, when he spoke … Mr. Trump sounded out of breath at times.”

McCreesh could have taken a different reportorial approach.

He could have backgrounded the word salad and focused on how the “training ground” remark is in keeping with all the other dictatorial things Trump has said, which altogether are in keeping with Project 2025, published prior to the election. McCreesh could have focused on how, with each of these statements, the president seems to be coming around to publicly embracing that manifesto, after having renounced it. Indeed, such an approach would have gone viral. Just today, Trump said, in essence, he lied when he said he had nothing to do with it.

In short, McCreesh could have set aside the word salad to establish continuity between, say, the president who led an attempted insurrection and the president who said, years later, “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

Instead, McCreesh foregrounds Trump’s word salad to suggest that something has changed, and that such change could itself suggest that his dictatorial statements are the exception to the rule. “Thousands of words pour forth from the president’s mouth,” he wrote. “Sometimes, he tucks in a wild insight about the direction he is taking the country.”

Which brings me back to Pritzker. He’s why I’m dwelling on this piece and the way McCreesh wrote it. In being the first leading Democrat to use the word “dementia,” Pritzker's doing something similar — foregrounding Trump’s deteriorated mental state such that all the crazy things that he’s doing in defiance of reason, morality, the Constitution and the law are downstream from there. (McCreesh’s foregrounding is, of course, implicit while Pritzker’s is explicit).

While other Democrats are making what seem to be ideological or policy-based arguments against the president — he’s a threat to your freedoms or he’s failing to protect your health care — Pritzker can take what you might call a position of big-hearted centrism. He can stand against Trump’s tyranny while at the same time genuinely lament that his disease has turned him into a despot. Now the dementia has set in, Pritzker said, Trump is copying Putin. “I'm concerned for his health.”

This won’t be fully convincing to a lot of people, myself included, but its effectiveness with independent voters might bring us around in time. Pritzker, or another ambitious Democrat, could easily pivot this framing to include all those things that swing voters thought he was going to do but didn’t. Why is food still so expensive? Why did my electric bill go up? Why didn’t Trump do what he said he was going to do? You could, as liberals often do, say that he lied, or that he actually wants to immiserate the middle class. But that would require changing swing voters’ minds. It would require them to admit they were wrong. Probably more effective to say, well, he’s gone mad with the dementia.

It’s the difference between the patient and his sickness. He isn’t saying, “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds,” because he’s a fascist. He’s saying it because he’s sick. While the symptoms are the same, the diagnosis is politically what matters.

Consider comments made by Jack Cocchiarella. A CNN host asked the young YouTube influencer for his thoughts on the government shutdown.

“Trump to me is kind of this dementia-addled nursing home patient in the White House right now,” he said. “He’s leaning on [budget director Russell] Vought, he’s leaning on [Deputy Chief of Staff] Stephen Miller, because he doesn’t want to get the job done.

“He just doesn’t seem interested in negotiating. He’s taking pleasure in what Russ Vought said, which would be the traumatizing of federal workers. That was their goal coming into this administration. So it seems like that’s all they wanna do. And I don’t know how that gets any Democrat, who actually cares about people who are gonna see their premium double, triple, to come to the table, and why would you?

“This Administration doesn’t want to engage.”

Nothing here about Trump being fascist. Cocchiarella merely thinks he doesn’t want to negotiate with Democrats because he’s old and mean.

Since last year’s election, the Democrats have been in debate with themselves. Some say they need to keep sounding the alarm about Trump’s threat to democracy. Others say that didn’t work last time and they should focus on “kitchen-table issues,” which is to say, economics.

Dementia, in the way that Pritzker used it, could be the link between them. Why is Trump acting like a dictator? Why didn’t he do more to bring down my grocery bill? Same answer. It’s as elegant as it is simple.

These GOP tactics just show you can't deal with cheats and liars

I don’t know who is going to win the fight over the shutdown of the US government. I do know that it’s wrong for Donald Trump and the Republicans to do nothing while 24 million Americans enrolled in state exchanges watch their health insurance premiums spike by two, three or four times. I know it’s wrong for them to steal $1 trillion in Medicaid from 83 million people, who can’t live without it, and hand it over to people who are so rich they will never notice an extra $1 trillion.

I know you can’t make deals with liars and cheaters. Even if the president and his party agreed today to the Democrats’ terms, there’s no assurance they won’t turn around tomorrow and impound the money they said they would spend. Trump has already impounded — illegally — billions and billions, some with the Supreme Court’s blessing. This mistrust is deepened by the increasingly extortionist language coming out of the White House. The press secretary said this week that if the Democrats “don't want further harm on their constituents back home, then they need to reopen the government. It's very simple.”

That’s what criminals say when they’re blackmailing you.

There are two schools of thought in American politics, specifically among liberals and within the Democratic Party — between those who want to game things out in terms of “good” and “bad” strategy and those who are sick of gaming things out and want to focus on the good and the bad. Who is going to win the shutdown fight? I don’t know and to a degree, I don’t care. The Trump cartel is evil. It must be fought. It must be forced to face the truth about itself and what it has done. That’s what I care about. If saying so puts me in the minority, so be it.

On Tuesday, Jake Grumbach brought my attention to a superb illustration of this conflict between strategy and truth. An economist at UC Berkeley, Grumbach commented on a conversation between Ezra Klein, the New York Times columnist and podcaster, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, perhaps best known as the author of Between the World and Me.

Their chat touched on many things, but the standout topic was Charlie Kirk.

In the aftermath of Kirk’s murder last month, Klein wrote that Kirk “was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.”

This might be true if you squint hard and tilt your head, but Klein’s goal wasn’t to represent reality accurately. It was to bridge political divisions that he believes triggered the spasm of violence that ultimately killed Kirk.

In contrast, here’s what Coates said about Kirk:

“I don’t take any joy in saying this, but we sometimes soothe ourselves by pointing out that love, acceptance, warmth — that these are powerful forces. I believe they are. I also believe hate is a powerful force. I believe it’s powerful, a powerful unifying force, and I think Charlie Kirk was a hate-monger. I really need to say this over and over again that I have a politic that rejects violence, that rejects political violence. I take no joy in the killing of anyone, no matter what they say. But if you ask me what the truth of his life was, the truth of his public life, I would have to tell you it’s hate. I would have to tell you it was the usage of hate, and the harnessing of hate towards political ends.”

On the one hand is a liberal who is willing to say nice things about a hateful dead man, even though those nice things are not grounded in reality, for the purpose of easing tensions with hateful living people. Tell them some sweet little lies and just maybe things will get better.

On the other hand is a liberal who is unwilling to say nice things about a hateful dead man, because those nice things are false, and because he knows that no amount of nice is going to stop hateful living people from hating him. Bargaining with evil obscures evil outcomes. While those sweet little lies might feel good, the devil always gets his due.

“The main point I think most are missing [about Klein’s interview with Coates],” Grumbach said, “is that Klein is saying the role of the journalist-intellectual is to do strategic politics, whereas Coates [is saying] the role of the journalist-intellectual is to tell the truth.”

And truth is, demagoguery is not debate. Calling Kirk a debater obscures the fact that he was a demagogue. Propaganda is not persuasion. Kirk didn’t try to persuade college students so much as humiliate, or demonize, them into submissive silence. Lying is not the same as free speech, but Kirk attacked those who tried “censoring” his lies. It may seem strategic to accept certain falsehoods as if they were true in order to avoid conflict, but that’s if the other side wants unity. Kirk, Trump and the rest never saw a point in that. Indeed, gestures of peace, no matter how mutually beneficial, are provocations of war.

On Tuesday, Trump told admirals and generals “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.” He also suggested military leaders “could be tasked with assisting federal law enforcement interventions against an ‘invasion from within’ Democratic-led cities, such as Chicago and New York City,” the Military Times reported.

As usual, Times columnist Jamelle Bouie was blunter and clearer: “The president of the United States wants to use the American military to kill American citizens on American soil. That's the whole story!”

There was a time for strategic politics with Republicans, back in the day when they recognized the basic humanity of Democrats, but that time is gone. Trump and his party will not be constrained by morality, the Constitution or the law. So the more liberals (like Klein but not only Klein) pursue strategic politics, in the hopes of “turning down the temperature,” the more it looks like complicity or worse.

If the Democrats choose to bargain with Trump over the shutdown, knowing that he will betray them once their backs are turned, they would not only enable his crimes, but protect him from their consequences. They would permit him to avoid facing the truth.

“We have to understand that standing up matters, that our voice matters, to not give into the cynicism, because that is what they rely on in order to perpetuate this idea that they have total immunity from consequences,” New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on the night the government shut down. “They will experience the consequence of this, but [the Democrats] have to be the consequence.”

You cannot make a deal with a criminal for whom you must be the consequence. If he faces the truth, maybe. But not until then.

It's not the Dems who must feel real pain if this shutdown is ever to end

One of the main assumptions in the story about the government shutdown, which began at midnight, is that the Democrats see a “rare opportunity to use their leverage to achieve policy goals.”

That quote is from the Associated Press. Here’s some more: “Senate Democrats say they won’t vote for [the Republican funding resolution] unless Republicans include an extension of expiring health care benefits, among other demands. President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans say they won’t negotiate, arguing that it’s a stripped-down, ‘clean’ bill that should be noncontroversial.”

I wonder about that, though.

I mean, I know the Democrats have to demand something concrete in exchange for their vote, but the opportunity seems bigger than just getting the GOP to renew Obamacare subsidies that were expanded during the covid pandemic. The opportunity seems bigger than policy.

It seems like a chance to expose the Republicans’ lies.

Then ask why. Why do they lie so much?

Then answer: because Republican voters can’t know the truth.

The truth is that Trump and his party do not care one way or another if, in the coming months, health insurance premiums for those who are enrolled in Obamacare exchanges double, triple or quadruple.

They do not care if everyone else enrolled through their employers sees their insurance premiums spike, or sees the cost of their health care spike, as a result of healthy people leaving Obamacare exchanges.

What they do care about is stealing from Medicaid — to the tune of $1 trillion over a decade — to cut the taxes of very obscenely rich people who will never notice that their taxes have been cut. Oh, and they care about seeing their social inferiors suffer. That’s a whole lot of fun.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with not caring. It is part of the makeup of a native-born authoritarian cartel that’s invested above all else in maintaining a social hierarchy with rich white men on top.

Though rule-by-the-rich is very popular among the rich, it’s not so popular among workaday folks, even conservative Americans who otherwise see advantage in being aligned with their social betters.

Though the Trump cartel is working hard to change it, America is still a democracy. The GOP still needs its base until it has completed its consolidation of power. For now, it can’t afford to alienate its supporters with the truth – that the Republicans are scamming them.

Who will suffer most from cuts to Medicaid? Republican voters in GOP-controlled states. Who will suffer most from Obamacare spikes? Ditto. Because, in both programs, there are more Republican voters than anyone else combined, the Republicans must pretend to care.

But mostly, they lie.

At first, the lies were of the “waste, fraud and abuse” variety.

Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) said he might think about renewing the Obamacare subsidies, but “there is a lot of, whatever you want to call it, fraud,” he told Axios. “And I think everybody acknowledges that, so how do you reform it and still get bipartisan support?"

Also per Axios, Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) said they’re thinking about requiring “ACA enrollees to have ‘skin in the game’ by making them pay a minimum premium and barring zero-premium plans that are ACA-compliant but that critics contend fuel fraud.”

Yes, they contend it’s fraud. It isn’t, though. Those are just the rules. If you don’t like the rules, get enough support to change them. But that’s the thing. Americans like the rules, as they are. So Republicans lie.

“Waste, fraud and abuse” was always a code for “Obamacare is for Black people,” so no Republican feared opposing it. But apparently the dogwhistle wasn’t getting through to the base. So the Republicans dropped the coded language to say outright that the Democrats want one and a half trillion dollars to give “illegal aliens” free health care.

Here’s Vice President JD Vance:

Democrats are “saying to the American people that [they] wanna give massive amounts of money, hundreds of billions of dollars to illegal aliens for their health care, while Americans are struggling to pay their health care bills. That was their initial foray into this negotiation. We thought it was absurd. We told them it was. Now they come in here saying that if you don’t give us everything that we want, we’re gonna shut down the government.”

Every word Vance said, including “and” and “the,” is a lie.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) went straight at him for that lie:

“The federal government by law … does not fund health insurance for undocumented immigrants in Medicaid, period. Nor the ACA, nor Medicare. Undocumented immigrants do not get federal health insurance premiums. Period. Period. They’re lying.”

Let’s be real. There is no reality in which Republican voters suddenly wake up to the truth of Schumer’s words and as a result, admit to themselves that the Trump cartel has been lying to them all along. That’s because lying, no matter how disgusting, is not the worst part of the predicament America finds itself in. The desire to believe lies is.

So the goal wouldn’t be convincing Republican voters they’ve been lied to. The goal would be convincing they’ve been scammed. To do that, however, requires much more than merely calling Republicans out as liars. It requires pain — pain felt by Republican voters themselves.

That’s what Republican voters will feel if Trump and the Republicans get what they want from the Democrats: a “clean CR” that includes nothing to stop the shock that’s coming, when health insurance premiums skyrocket while the safety net unravels. Pain is the only teacher in politics. That’s the Democrats’ real opportunity.

Not policy.

Pain.

This GOP defeat suggests Trump finally has a fight on his hands

It’s premature, but so far, I think the congressional Democrats have shown some spine in the face of another government shutdown.

Let’s hope they show more. If they do not, their public reputation for wimpiness is going to balloon. And I don’t mean among Republicans and independents. I mean among their own kind. This is no time for finding a comfy spot between freedom and despotism. The Democrats must fight, even though there’s a cost, as there always is, to fighting.

Last time, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer shucked and jived about 30-day extensions, all the while scheming in the background for face-saving ways to cave. In the end, he said keeping the government open was better than closing it, as Donald Trump would then have the power to redefine “essential services” and cut them to the bone. Nine Senate Democrats acquiesced. Did they get something in return? No.

But this time at least, Schumer isn’t messing around with 30-day extensions. The House passed one last week, with one Democrat for it and two Republicans against it, but it was killed off almost immediately in the Senate by a Democratic filibuster.

If Schumer were planning to shuck and jive again, he would have gotten his caucus to vote for it — it’s called a temporary “Continuing Resolution” – while claiming party leadership is still negotiating with Trump. He didn’t, though. For now, I’ll take that as a hopeful sign.

That’s partly because there’s no one to negotiate with. GOP leaders in the House and Senate don’t want to make any moves without the president’s say so. Meanwhile, the president himself seems to believe his party doesn’t need the Democrats to keep the government open. (This assumes Trump cares, and I’m very much unconvinced that he does: “If it has to shut down, it'll have to shut down,” he said.)

That Schumer isn’t messing around (so far, at least) with a phony CR extension comes from something else — monumental upward pressure from the base of the Democratic Party to stand firm against Trump, even if doing so undermines efforts at bipartisan compromise.

Poll after poll shows Democratic voters are themselves increasingly furious with party leadership, especially with its weakness in the face of tyranny. That can be explained in the plainest of terms. Trump’s evil is no longer theoretical. It is real, and it must not be bargained with.

Schumer now thinks the situation is much different, because the president and his party are weaker than they were then.

“The BBB bill, which they have passed, is highly unpopular with the American people,” he said. “Democrats are unified. We have been strong on the same message for a very long time, which is: We need to help the American people lower their costs, particularly on health care.”

A lot of people are asking the question: what then? In exchange for keeping the government open, the Democrats want the Republicans to agree to renewing Obamacare subsidies and rolling back cuts to Medicaid. If the Republicans balk and the government closes, how will it end? Will the Senate Republicans nuke the filibuster? Then what?

How do the Democrats win the argument?

Honesty, I don’t think this question is one of politics. It’s one of punditry. It’s the kind of question you ask yourself when you think of yourself as a disinterested arbiter who stands in remove of the words used by each party, and who assesses which side “won the debate.” It’s a whole lot of fun spending your time gaming things out (trust me), but in the end, it’s still punditry, not politics. And now, it’s irrelevant.

Trump acts like the Congress doesn’t matter. (The Republicans in the Congress act like the Congress doesn’t matter. The Republicans on the Supreme Court have ruled that in some cases, the Congress really doesn’t matter.) The president has pushed his party to claw back money signed into law by previous presidents. His administration has illegally impounded hundreds of billions of dollars in congressionally approved funding, all because it’s not “consistent with his priorities.”

He has said he has the right to do whatever he wants, however he wants, to whomever he wants.

“I’m the president,” he said.

He has determined press freedoms are “really illegal.” With the Supreme Court’s blessing, he’s arresting people for the “crime” of their identity. He has ordered prosecutors to indict at least one of his enemies by declaring him “guilty as hell.” (He said there’s no “enemies list,” but more indictments are coming.) And now, he has deemed that liberal groups that criticize him are “domestic terrorist organizations.”

He said, “they are sick, radical left people, and they can’t get away with it.”

And on top of this, the Republicans control everything.

As one observer put it: “You think people are going to blame the party that controls zero branches of the government and not the guy who repeatedly says he has the power to do literally whatever he wants?”

How do you win the argument against a criminal? You don’t. Absent the power to investigate him, all the Democrats can do right now is fight, and they must fight though fighting could come at a price. Yes, the shutdown may go on indefinitely. Yes, the Senate Republicans might nuke the filibuster. Yes, a lot of bad things might happen, especially to the Democratic base pushing the leadership to fight. But guess what? A lot of bad things are already happening and they will continue to happen whether the Democrats cooperate or not.

Those who are worried about arguments fear losing and won’t fight. Those who are willing to fight know they might lose and do it anyway.

A shutdown looms. Here's why Dems are right to hold their ground

Until now, the debate over government funding has always boiled down to one question: which party is to blame for the shutdown.

This time, however, is there really any question? The congressional Democrats want to negotiate. The president refuses to. Since the government can’t be funded without a deal, the blame’s on him.

The Democrats want to prevent an explosion of health insurance premiums, which is expected in the coming months, by extending pandemic-era Obamacare subsidies. They want Donald Trump to agree in exchange for their vote in keeping the government open. (They also want the Republicans to backtrack on Medicaid cuts.)

But Trump won’t talk. He canceled a previously scheduled meeting, because “no meeting with their congressional leaders could possibly be productive,” he said on his social media site. That’s not something you say when you want the opposition to come to the bargaining table, which raises the question: what does Trump want?

An answer was suggested when the White House issued a threat to slash even more of the government workforce if there’s a shutdown.

Here’s Roll Call: “The budget office plans to advise federal program managers to fire employees whose paychecks are financed by annual appropriations if a partial government shutdown begins Oct. 1, rather than just furloughing them as is the usual practice.”

I don’t think the message could be clearer: either the Democrats do what Trump tells them to do or their precious government gets it.

Any other president in our lifetimes would not have done this.

First, because doing so would undermine their own demands. (Trump wants to keep the government open but also shred it if it closes? Just be honest and shut it down, because that’s what you wanted all along.)

Second, because it looks thuggish, like something a hostage-taker would do for ransom.

Third, and most important, such a move is blatant coercion, giving the opposition more incentive to say no.

The subtext is Trump is not a dealmaker. He’s a bully. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was right to call his bluff. This is “an attempt at intimidation,” Schumer said. Trump has “been firing federal workers since day one — not to govern, but to scare. This is nothing new and has nothing to do with funding the government. These unnecessary firings will either be overturned in court or the administration will end up hiring the workers back, just like they did as recently as today.”

But the subtext is also that he’s a cheat.

Even if the president agreed to the Democrats’ demand for extended subsidies under the Affordable Care Act (and even if he said, “My bad, here’s all that Medicaid money back, all $1 trillion of it, so please, pretty please, vote to keep the government up and running!”), what’s to prevent him, a day later, from double-crossing the Democrats? In July, he rolled back $9 billion in funding for public TV and radio that the Republicans had already agreed to. He said claw it back, and they did.

The answer is nothing. There is no guarantee.

Which is all the more reason for the Democrats to say no.

The Democrats are under enormous pressure, from inside and outside the party, to act like “the adults in the room” and to pretend, at least, that the president is a reliable bargaining partner. This is, after all, the logic of Washington. Only the Democrats make choices while Trump and the Republicans are free to act as irresponsibly as they wish to.

But this “logic” should be rooted in two hard facts. One is that the president has been at war with the government workforce since taking office. (Schumer said as much.) Open or shut, it makes no difference to him. Two is that he will say whatever he wants, whenever he wants, to whomever he wants, for as long as it takes to get him to wherever he wants to go, whatever that goal might be at any given moment.

Not only does it not matter to him whether the government is open or shut, it doesn’t matter whether his words are true or false. Fraud, deceit and confabulation run in his blood, and if he were just some street crazy, rather than the president of the United States, no one would be blamed for saying no to him. Saying yes would be crazy!

Trump is the president, however. I wish I knew what the Democrats should do, but I don’t. How do you bargain with a man who either forgets what he said the day before, because he’s in the early stages of dementia, or denies he said any such thing, because it’s convenient to? How do you make a deal with a president who doesn’t want a deal? (Not to mention, how do you hold him responsible when the rightwing media complex, and the press corps, enables his forgetting/denials?)

What I do know is much of the current debate among liberals feels like it’s beside the point. Some say Schumer and the Democratic leadership should stick with health insurance. Others say they should demand Trump lift his stupid tariffs. Others still say they should trade their vote to keep the government open on a promise to defend free speech. All of these are trying to appeal to a broad majority in the hopes that a broad majority won’t blame the Democrats if negotiations fail. And all of them overlook the fact that Donald Trump never stands by his word.

As of now, the Democrats are warning of a shutdown if the president does not accept their demands. He doesn’t care, one way or another, so perhaps that’s what the Democrats should demand – that he care. He will prove he doesn’t when the government shuts down, thus bringing us back to the beginning and the question of who to blame.

Trump and his lickspittles will say anything — which makes them dangerous as hell

I want to pick up on a point I made yesterday, about how the president and his co-conspirators, inside and outside the regime, do not mean what they say. They do not care about the truth behind their words, only whether those words can achieve a desired outcome.

In his inaugural speech, in January, Donald Trump said that “after years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.”

Last week, however, he said unfavorable news coverage is “really illegal.” He told the White House press corps that “I’m a very strong person for free speech. The newscasts are against me. They’ll take a great story and they’ll make it bad. See, I think that’s really illegal.”

Trump suggested as much again after the return of ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.

“Why would they want someone back who does so poorly, who is not funny, and who puts the Network in jeopardy by playing 99 percent positive Democratic GARBAGE,” Trump said.

“He is yet another arm of the DNC and, to the best of my knowledge, that would be a major illegal campaign contribution. I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 million. This one sounds even more lucrative. A true bunch of losers. Let Jimmy Kimmel Rot in his bad ratings.”

Trump didn’t mean a word he said about freedom, unless he meant freedom for him and his friends, not for perceived enemies. (By the way, there were 14 million YouTube views of Kimmel’s show, according to The Hollywood Reporter. That’s close to a record. Also: Jimmy Kimmel is an entertainer, not a Democratic operative, nor is his show a “major illegal campaign contribution.”)

All Trump cared about was whether his words would lead to an outcome that he wants, in this case, violating the freedoms of a comedian who pokes fun at him.

Remember the context in which this all started. The regime and its media allies cynically exploited the death of a demagogue. They coordinated a nearly instantaneous assault on “the left,” long before any material evidence was available, accusing Trump’s critics of abusing their freedoms to create conditions of hatred and fear that ultimately inspired 22-year-old Tyler Robinson to kill Charlie Kirk.

“It is a vast domestic terror movement,” Stephen Miller said of the “radical left.”

“With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, eliminate and destroy this network and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”

But state and federal investigators have not found a link between Robinson and “the left.”

“There is no evidence connecting the suspect with any left-wing groups,” one source in the investigation told NBC News. “Every indication so far is that this was one guy who did one really bad thing because he found Kirk’s ideology personally offensive.”

Moreover, Robinson’s crime might not rise to the level of federal terrorism charges, undermining the suggestion that he is part of “a vast domestic terror movement." A second source told NBC News that “it may be difficult to charge Robinson at the federal level,” citing the fact that he didn’t cross state lines, Kirk wasn’t a federal officer or elected official, and he was killed “during an open campus debate.”

(I had suggested that Robinson was associated with the groypers, a group of online trolls who are racist to the core, openly and without reservation. They believed Kirk was too liberal. In hindsight, that suggestion was premature. Though Robinson came from a MAGA family, evidence so far, including a relationship with his trans roommate, indicates that he was truly disturbed by Kirk’s hate-mongering. Still, his reasons remain unclear, which is often a feature of shooters.)

That nothing so far connects Kirk’s killer to “the left” will not stop the regime from continuing to portray political speech as political violence — from equating the president’s critics to terrorists. It will simply move on, as it did on Wednesday, when a lone gunman killed a person, and seriously wounded two more, at an ICE facility in Dallas. All three victims were detainees. No ICE agents were injured. The shooter killed himself.

Like after Kirk’s murder, before any material evidence came to light, the regime immediately suggested “the left” was to blame.

Vice President JD Vance said “this obsessive attack on law enforcement, particularly ICE, must stop.”

US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said “while we don’t know [the] motive yet, we know that our ICE law enforcement is facing unprecedented violence against them.”

Then, as if frustrated by the fact that no one has yet found evidence of a “vast domestic terror movement” on the “radical left,” the evidence … suddenly appeared! Kash Patel, who was a conspiracist and podcaster before he became director of the FBI, posted on Twitter a photograph of five bullets. On one of them was written the words “anti-ICE.”

I don’t know if the shooter was anti-ICE. I presume an investigation will bear that out. What I do know is the victims were immigrants, not ICE agents. I know the regime is looking for a reason, any reason, to crack down on liberty. And I know something else: that the regime is clear about its goal. In a followup, Noem suggested the attack was a warning to the president’s critics: do not criticize the president.

“Their rhetoric about ICE has consequences,” she said. “Comparing ICE day-in and day-out to the Nazi Gestapo, the secret police and slave patrols has consequences. … The violence and dehumanization of these men and women who are simply enforcing the law must stop.”

I’ll end with what I hope is a running theme – that the regime does not care about the truth behind its words, only whether those words can achieve a desired outcome. Noem said ICE agents are “simply enforcing the law” without saying they are also simply breaking it.

This week, for instance, ICE agents held a 5-year-old girl hostage in pursuit of her dad, who has been in the country peacefully for 20 years. On Monday, DHS announced that ICE will deliberately break California’s new law forbidding feds from wearing masks, a statute designed to protect individual liberty and ensure accountability.

Why? Because assaults on ICE are up by “1,000 percent.”

We will break the laws of a sovereign state to protect ourselves, but your complaints about us breaking those laws must stop. Indeed, such complaints might be something that the government should “identify, disrupt, eliminate and destroy” in order to “make America safe again.”

They do not mean a word they say.

Here's the real lesson of the Jimmy Kimmel saga — and it's not good for Trump's lackeys

Jimmy Kimmel was back on Tuesday night and he did not apologize. He said he wasn't trying to make a joke at the expense of a dead demagogue (not his words) but that he understood if his monologue last week about the killing of Charlie Kirk was taken by some to be "ill-timed or unclear or maybe both." Otherwise, however, he had strong words for the companies that continue to black-out his show, Nexstar and Sinclair.

"That's not American," he said. "That's un-American."

What lessons can we draw from his remarks and this entire episode?

First, that the president may seem strong, perhaps invincible, but isn’t. Like all tyrants, Donald Trump needs collaborators and opportunists who are driven by greed and ambition more than belief in the one true (maga) faith. While Trump is doing what he can to shield himself from democratic accountability (gerrymandering, for instance, and attempting to prosecute enemies), many of those collaborators and opportunists can’t. They are exposed to the heat of public opinion.

Trump used the Federal Communications Commission under Chairman Brendan Carr to bully Disney, which owns ABC — cancel the funny guy or lose your broadcast license. ABC obeyed, sparking public outrage leading to Disney losing about $6.4 billion in market value by Monday morning. By Monday afternoon, it said Kimmel was back.

Trump intimidates anyone who allows himself to be intimidated. Disney didn’t have to suspend Kimmel. It could have fought back in court, and almost certainly succeeded, against attempts by the FCC to revoke its license. It didn’t stand firm on First Amendment grounds, because it didn’t have the incentive to (though it could expect to be bullied again.) But the boycott, which triggered its losses, was all the reason it needed to restore its love of free speech.

We are seeing a similar dynamic happening throughout the regime, in which greedy, ambitious collaborators who believed Trump’s power would shield them now seem to be reassessing their position. With an eye on polls showing an increasingly unpopular president, which fuels the potential for a Democratic takeover of the House this time next year, US Attorney General Pam Bondi appears to be rethinking how far she is willing to go to break the law in Trump’s name. Thanks to the Supreme Court, he’s immune to prosecution. She, however, is not.

I think the second lesson we can draw from Jimmy Kimmel’s return is that his suspension had nothing to do with Kirk or remarks made by Kimmel about him. The demagogue’s murder was exploited cynically — by the regime and by collaborators — in order to achieve a desired outcome. None actually cared about the truth of their words, only whether those words accomplished their goals.

The regime wanted to punish dissent, so it accused Kimmel of “the sickest conduct possible” to create conditions for doing so. Brendan Carr said Kimmel “appeared to be making an intentional effort to mislead the public that Kirk’s assassin was a right-wing Trump supporter,” the AP said. Kimmel didn’t say suspect Tyler Robinson was MAGA. He said MAGA was doing everything it could to prove he wasn’t MAGA.

ABC wanted to get the regime off its back, so it caved, pointing to the grumbling of affiliate owners as reason (see below). Now that it has rediscovered its spine, however, the regime must decide whether to back off, exposing its weakness, or move forward with more threats, thus forcing ABC executives to defend their original position, perhaps this time in court, which was that nothing Kimmel said was over the line, and anyway, have you heard about this thing called free speech?

Nexstar and Sinclair, owners of a quarter of the country’s ABC stations, want something too — and are exploiting a dead demagogue to get it.

Sinclair, which is owned by an obscenely rich family, wants uniform rightwing propaganda. (It has aired programming that claims that Kirk was a prophet.) Nexstar wants Carr to sign off on a merger with another TV company, Tegna. Both Nexstar and Sinclair have said they still won’t broadcast Kimmel because of the terrible things he said about Kirk, which were not terrible things, and they know it. They are only saying they were, because they are collaborators who believe they can please Trump by strawbossing a comedian who makes fun of him.

And Kirk is just one example of exploitation. The regime, and anyone who thinks they can benefit from it, do not believe anything they say. They say they are fighting misinformation while spewing vast amounts of misinformation. They say they are combatting political violence while inspiring political violence. They say they are defending free speech and liberty while policing speech and punishing dissent.

Last week, the president suggested that unfavorable news coverage about him is “really illegal.” He told the White House press corps that “they’ll take a great story and they’ll make it bad. See, I think that’s really illegal.” He added: “Personally, you can’t have a free airwave if you’re getting free airwaves from the United States government.”

But on Jan. 20, 2025, Inauguration Day, Trump said: “After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America”

He didn’t mean a word, but his collaborators work very hard to hide that fact, and as long as they do, Trump lies keep their hold on us.

Make them feel the heat of public anger, however — make collaborators understand that their benefactor can protect them for only so long — then their behavior changes, and with that, Trump’s power wanes.

Perhaps that’s the most important takeaway from Kimmel’s comeback: that the people still have power, that the enemies of democracy aim to convince the people otherwise, and that tinfoil dictators like Trump are only as strong as the greed and ambition of those around them.

David Letterman exposed exactly what Trump is

We should talk about two stories published over the weekend, and what they tell Americans about the true objective of Donald Trump.

First, the administration shut down a bribery investigation of Tom Homan. Before Trump was reelected, Homan accepted a $50,000 bag of cash from an undercover FBI agent, according to Reuters. Homan apparently promised “immigration-related” government contracts once he was back in charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Second, Trump demanded that US Attorney General Pam Bondi move more quickly to prosecute named enemies, including US Senator Adam Schiff, former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Trump called them “guilty as hell” on Truth Social in what appears to be a post intended to be a direct message to Bondi. As one observer noted wryly, “this is literally just Watergate but instead of the Nixon tapes, Trump just … tweeted it out.”

This twofold perversion of the law is indeed what Richard Nixon was guilty of. He knew he was guilty of it. That’s why he hid it and it took a year for investigators to uncover it. Trump, meanwhile, isn’t bothering to hide it, but either way, it’s criminal.

As Jonathan Bernstein said:

“Richard Nixon resigned ahead of certain impeachment and removal in part for a much milder version of all this, one that took place in absolute secrecy and took over a year to uncover. Trump is doing a much worse version. Out in the open. It’s obviously a blatant, massive violation of his oath of office, and [Chief Justice] John Roberts notwithstanding … well, I’m not a lawyer, but it sure looks criminal to me.”

More than that, however, it’s a window into what Trump truly wants — rules and laws that protect him and his friends while at the same time, those very same rules and laws punish his enemies. He wants rules and laws to explicitly recognize in-groups and out-groups. And he wants law enforcement to recognize that difference when enforcing the law.

All men are created equal? Nope. Justice is blind? Nah.

Most of us believe the law should be applied without fear or favor. Whether you’re white or Black, Christian or Muslim, straight or trans — everyone is subject to the same rule of law. Everyone should be treated equally. And when the law isn’t applied that way, we call it injustice.

But I think most of us misunderstand, more or less, how equality is viewed by Trump and the rest of their MAGA movement. Equality is no virtue. It’s a vice. It is a violation of their rights and liberties, and a subversion of what they believe to be the natural order of things — in which American society is shaped like a pyramid, with money and power gathered toward the top and controlled by rich white men. Importantly, the in-group should never be treated the same way as the out-group. When the law is applied equally, they call that injustice.

All this is blindingly hypocritical (and we should say so) but the term “hypocrisy” can’t capture the enormity of the fraud. MAGA does not pay lip service to equality. It opposes it, often openly. A better term is impunity — for the rule of law and for the rest of the small-r republican values that are enshrined in the Constitution. Impunity is the true goal. Trump’s success, whatever that means, literally depends on everyone else obeying the law, under penalty of law, while he is free to break it.

That’s what was going on when Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked: "Why won't the president accept the conclusions of his DOJ to not bring charges against Letitia James?"

Her response: "The president has every right to express how he feels about these people … who literally tried to ruin his life … He wants to see accountability."

Crimes for me, punishment for thee.

Trump isn’t hiding the fraud the way Nixon did, but he is hiding it in his own way — beneath a mountain of propaganda about his enemies.

The Justice Department official who closed the bribery investigation into Tom Homan said it was a “deep state” op. Trump himself urged Bondi to prosecute quickly based on the lie that his impeachments and indictments were baseless. He said: “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me … OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

But I think the lies could fade into the background as the abject unfairness of his presidency comes more into the mainstream view. Indeed, the lies could end up fading even faster thanks to Trump himself. His post, which was clearly intended for Bondi, conveys a sense of urgency — as if he’s aware that time is running out for his totalitarian project and people are beginning to figure out his scam.

Polls indicate a public deeply dissatisfied with his presidency, creating conditions for a potential takeover of the Congress by the Democrats. Such uncertainty is going to give collaborators and opportunists like Bondi a serious reason to hesitate. As David Frum wrote, “Such people now have to make a difficult calculation: Do the present benefits of submitting to Trump’s will outweigh the future hazards?"

That’s why, it’s a good idea for the Democrats to begin building a case for law and order, which is to say, for restoring the equal and moral administration of justice. (Reformers like Casey Michel and Adam Bonica might call this an anti-corruption platform, for other reasons.) Do it now, as Trump’s power grab is reaching a tipping point. Promise to hold accountable anyone tempted to break the law in Trump’s name.

“I want to make it clear. There’s going to be a Democratic majority in just over a year,” California Congressman Eric Swalwell said. “To the FCC chairperson [Brendan Carr] and anyone involved in these dirty deals: get a lawyer and save your records, because you’re going to be in this room answering questions about the deals that you struck, and who benefited, and what the cost was to the American people.”

I have some sympathy for Democratic leaders in that it’s difficult to pinpoint a “kitchen-table” issue that will appeal to a broad majority of people, but especially voters who are loosely affiliated with the parties. Right now, they have settled on health care. All the power to them.

But Trump is unlike any president in our lifetimes, even Nixon, who was a crook. Everything Trump has done since taking office a second time — illegal tariffs, illegal self-dealing, illegal funding cuts, illegal terminations, illegal military occupations, illegal immigrant detentions, illegal media censorship, illegal everything, virtually — is rooted in the fact that his administration is, as David Letterman said last week, an “authoritarian criminal administration.”

Fighting crime is perhaps the kitchen-table issue.

Besides, being the party of crime-fighters has a nice ring to it.

This Dem just gave voice to the resistance

As you know, Jimmy Kimmel was suspended — before being reinstated this week — due to two factors.

One is a federal government, specifically the FCC, that is turning into the Thought Police.

The second is the cowards and quislings at Disney and ABC, who are under the illusion that they can forfeit just a little of their freedom and the Thought Police won’t eventually confiscate it all.

After Kimmel was suspended, there was an outpouring of support by artists and journalists, politicians and free-speech advocates, as well as other late-night hosts. CBS News reported that, “Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon opened their late-night shows using a mix of humor, song and expressions of solidarity” with Kimmel.

Colbert’s commentary was notable. He reran the segment of Kimmel’s remarks that FCC Chairman Brendan Carr called “the sickest conduct possible.”

That segment: “The MAGA Gang [is] desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.”

“Given the FCC’s response, I was expecting something more provocative,” Stephen Colbert said. “That’s like hearing that Playboy has a racy new centerfold and finding out it’s just … Jimmy Kimmel.”He went further.

Colbert said it sounds like the FCC told ABC to punish Jimmy Kimmel or else.

“It feels to me shutting down this type of speech would represent a serious threat to our freedoms,” he said. “And you know who else thinks that? Brendan Carr in 2020 when he tweeted: ‘From internet memes to late-night comedians … political satire … helps hold those in power accountable. Shutting down this type of political speech — especially at the urging of those targeted or threatened by its message — would represent a serious threat to our freedoms.’”

- YouTube youtu.be

That’s good, and I think we should remain hopeful, but I think we should also be realistic. The regime has moved from being coy about its plan to punish dissent to being open about it. The New York Times reported that the president said “broadcasters risk losing licenses when hosts criticize him.” His followers are bragging. Benny Johnson, the prominent propagandist, said: “We did it for you, Charlie. And we’re just getting started.” With Kimmel, even after the reinstatement, a chill has set in.

I would now expect TV people to be looking over their shoulders, not only at the people who cut their paychecks, but to the snitches eager to rat them out. We can expect that chill to seep into their work. And that chill will likely be chilliest among people Trump already dislikes.

It’s as MSNBC’s Anthony Fisher said yesterday afternoon: “What is happening now is actual, successful, speech-chilling censorship.”

And we have seen it before.

Fisher refers to the “MAGA thought police,” a spin on the secret police force, modeled after Soviet Russia’s, featured in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. (It punishes “thoughtcrimes.”) Zack Beauchamp wrote a big piece about the “the third red scare,” a reference to the first one, in the 1920s, and the second one, in the 1950s, in which the country seemed to erupt in paranoia about Communists hiding behind every tree. This time, though, instead of the red being that of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, it’s that of the Republican Party of the United States.

And finally Jeet Heer said: “This is the biggest attack on free speech since the McCarthy era but it also has significantly less popular consensus behind it than the second Red Scare. It's being done on behalf of a minority faction led by the most unpopular president in modern history. Organizing against this can win.”

Good organizing needs good messaging. That’s why, in addition to saying what’s happening now is like what happened in the first and second Red Scares, we should dust off the old 20th-century liberal rhetoric and update it for a new kind of totalitarian regime. And I think, without really being aware of it, Ro Khanna did just that.

“This administration has initiated the largest assault on the first amendment and free speech in modern history,” the congressman said last week. “They’re making comedy illegal. Brendan Carr pressured ABC to cancel Jimmy Kimmel and Disney [which owns ABC] canceled Jimmy Kimmel, this canceling from an administration that lectured us about culture.

“That’s why today I’m introducing a motion to subpoena Brendan Carr to bring him in front of this committee to stop the intimidation of private businesses and to stand up for the First Amendment.

“Now it’s not just Brendan Carr. Attorney General Pam Bondi is prosecuting hate speech, even though hate speech is constitutionally protected and even though we’ve had so many lectures from my friends on the other side of the aisle not to prosecute hate speech.

“And then what about our vice president, the champion of free speech, as he told us during the campaign. The vice president is telling Americans to snitch on fellow Americans with offensive posts and to call their employer so they can be fired. And the vice president is threatening to prosecute political organizations that he disagrees with.

“We are Article 1 of the Constitution, not foot lackeys … It is time that we stand up for our constitutional role to defend the freedoms of Americans? People are tired of us giving our power to Donald Trump at JD Vance. We have an obligation to our constitution, not to Donald Trump at JD Vance, as they ride roughshod over the First Amendment.”

This assault isn't about Charlie Kirk

Telling the truth about a propagandist and liar has been deemed a radical act worthy of punishment. I use the case of novelist Stephen King to illustrate.

King had said Charlie Kirk, who was murdered this month, “advocated for stoning gays to death.” King was speaking the spirit of the truth, if not the precise letter of it, but was nevertheless hounded and harassed into apologizing by right-wingers who not only want to police speech but compel it. You shall honor the saintly demagogue or pay a price.

Unsurprisingly, the dragnet is widening. Last week, late-night television host Jimmy Kimmel was “suspended indefinitely.” (That probably means his show is canceled.) According to the AP, it’s because comments he “made about Charlie Kirk’s killing led a group of ABC-affiliated stations to say it would not air the show and provoked some ominous comments from a top federal regulator.”

What comments?

Before I tell you what Jimmy Kimmel said, it’s important to tell you what other people are saying he said. Why? Because it’s like a sinister game of telephone, and the farther we get from the facts of what he said, the more chances there are for the totalitarians among us to replace reality with lies, making us all liars (not to mention insane).

First, a voice from the right, Piers Morgan: “Jimmy Kimmel lied about Charlie Kirk’s assassin being MAGA. This caused understandable outrage all over America, prompted TV station owners to say they wouldn’t air him, and he’s now been suspended by his employers. Why is he being heralded as some kind of free speech martyr?”

Second, a voice from the left, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes: The ABC affiliates said they would refuse “to air Kimmel’s show, they say, because the comments the late night host made on Monday night relating to the motives of the man who shot and killed Charlie Kirk wrongly suggest[ed] the killer was part of the MAGA movement. He was not.”

Morgan is wrong. Kimmel didn’t lie. Hayes is wrong, too. Jimmy Kimmel did not suggest “the killer was part of the MAGA movement.”

Here’s what he said, per the AP:

“The MAGA Gang [is] desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.”

Also: “Many in MAGA land are working very hard to capitalize on the murder of Charlie Kirk.”

See anything wrong here? I don’t.

Indeed, neither did “multiple executives” at ABC, who, according to Rolling Stone, “felt that Kimmel had not actually said anything over the line.” What they did feel, however, was fear of an unfavorable interpretation of Kimmel’s words. Rolling Stone reported that two sources said “the threat of Trump administration retaliation loomed.”

What retaliation? Hayes reported on it, as did the AP. Just before the Kimmel news broke, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, issued an open threat to ABC, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company: get rid of Jimmy Kimmel or else.

“This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney,” Brendan Carr told maga propagandist Benny Johnson. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

And with that, it’s clear this is no longer about a dead demagogue. It’s about exploiting the memory of a dead demagogue to advance the totalitarian project: to not only police speech but compel it. I expect Kimmel to follow Stephen King’s lead and apologize in time for doing something he did not do, affirming the lie and undermining the truth.

I think the union representing Kimmel’s musicians is right.

“This is not complicated,” said Tino Gagliardi, the president of the American Federation of Musicians. “Trump’s FCC identified speech it did not like and threatened ABC with extreme reprisals. This is state censorship. It’s now happening in the United States of America, not some far-off country. … This act by the Trump Administration represents a direct attack on free speech and artistic expression. These are fundamental rights that we must protect in a free society.”

But I think it’s wrong too. This is complicated.

What’s happening is not just a consequence of government thugs attacking free speech and artistic expression. It’s also the consequences of three decades of corporate consolidation and the near-total lack of antitrust law enforcement. A handful of companies now own media outlets tens of millions use. In the case of the ABC affiliates, two firms — Nexstar and Sinclair — own nearly all of them.

This results in not only an artificially narrow range of information and views, but also a vulnerability on the part of media owners faced with a belligerent government such as the current one. They can stand on free press and free speech grounds and risk the wrath of a criminal FCC, or they can play along. ABC could have chosen to interpret Kimmel’s words in his favor — he didn’t say what critics said he said. Instead, it chose to interpret his words in maga’s favor. It sacrificed Kimmel in the misbegotten hope that doing so will appease them.

It won’t.

I don’t mean ABC won’t get something for failing to take its own side in a fight. (I have no idea what it might gain.) I mean surrendering in advance won’t end well, as we have seen in countries like Hungary and Turkey, where “autocratic carrots and sticks,” as Brian Stelter put it, have led to their respective governments having near-total control of the media. No one in Hungary mocks Viktor Orbán. No one in Turkey jokes about Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. And that’s what Donald Trump wants.

Jimmy Kimmel isn’t just a comedian. To the president and MAGA faithful, he represents “the left,” which is to say, anyone who has enough independence of mind to laugh. Indeed, that might be the biggest obstacle to their hostile takeover attempt. If you have the courage to laugh at the reality of the human condition, you don’t need a strongman like Donald Trump to save you from the truth about it.

But courage, like the enforcement of antitrust law, is lacking. It’s one thing for the state to bully private enterprise. It’s another for private enterprise to roll over, because it believes rolling over is its interest.

I’ll end by quoting Dan Le Batard.

“Once you’re a coward who is extorted, the bully’s gonna keep extorting” you, the sportswriter and podcaster said. “When [ABC] gave Trump $16 million on something that [ABC News anchor George] Stephanopoulos said, they opened the doors now to all of media feeling like it needs to capitulate to a threat — and now you get dangerously close to state-run media.”

He added: “I’ve never seen, in my lifetime, America in the position it’s presently in where the media is running this kind of scared from power, as if we’re not a place where one of the chief principles is free speech.”

Ignore the Meghan McCains — far-right voices know something terrible about Kirk's killing

A few hours before law enforcement authorities announced they had taken into custody the suspected killer of Charlie Kirk, Meghan McCain, daughter of the late John McCain, weighed in on “the fundamental difference between the right and the left in this country.”

“It’s that the left glorifies death, particularly of adversaries, and the right does not,” she wrote on Twitter. “And it’s not something I think I really have fully faced until Charlie’s assassination. And it’s petrifying.”

I know, I know. But before you say anything more, lemme get back to the press conference where the alleged killer was named.

Turns out the bad guy is 22-year-old Tyler Robinson. He’s white, comfortably middle class and apparently from a respectable conservative Utah family. His mom and dad are registered Republicans. (Their son is unaffiliated.) Tyler was steeped in gun culture (not surprising given that he killed Kirk with one shot at more than 175 yards). And he was, as they say, Extremely Online.

This is clear in the messages he wrote on four shell casings. They were:

  1. “Notices bulges OWO what’s this?”
  2. “If you read this, you are gay lmao”
  3. “Oh bella ciao bella ciao bella ciao ciao ciao”
  4. “Hey fascist! Catch! Up arrow symbol, right arrow, three down arrow symbols”

The message on the first shell casing, which was fired, alludes to “an internet meme tied to animated videos and furry culture,” according to USA Today.

“OwO references an emoticon, and ‘what’s this?’ denotes cuteness or curiosity. It’s frequently referenced by video game streamers.”

The message on the second casing contains an online taunt. But those on the third and fourth are the most important.

“Oh bella ciao bella ciao bella ciao ciao ciao” are lyrics to “the anthem of the antifascist Italian resistance during World War II,” according to USA Today.

“Hey fascist! Catch! Up arrow symbol, right arrow, three down arrow symbols” refers “to a cooperative shooter video game called Helldivers 2,” the paper said. “The input is the code for an airstrike. It has morphed into a meme and is used to imply a devastating reaction to something that should be destroyed.”

But The Verge revealed something about that video game that is getting little or no attention. First, that it featured “Bella Ciao,” the anti-fascist Italian resistance song, and second, that it was a satire.

The Verge reported that “the world of Helldivers — which evokes Robert Heinlein’s book Starship Troopers and the subsequent movie — concerns fascism thematically” and “developer Arrowhead has characterized it as a satire where players fight for a fascist state.”

Again, with feeling – players fight for the fascist state.

On Friday, Utah Governor Spencer Cox was asked about the significance of the inscriptions on the shell castings, as they might suggest a motive. Cox said he couldn’t speak to all of them, but did say that “Hey fascist! Catch!” seems to speak for itself, adding that the implication is that Robinson’s intention was for Kirk to catch his bullet.

Cox took “Hey fascist! Catch!” out of its video-gaming context, first because he probably was not aware of it, but second, because that fits the narrative that he and others on the right want to tell — that political violence is coming solely from “the left” and that, as Meghan McCain said, anyone who has been critical of Charlie Kirk “glorifies death,” thus justifying the president’s abuses of power to stop them.

But if you put “Hey fascist! Catch!” (and the other inscriptions) in their proper context of Extremely Online culture, a different picture emerges, one where the right is so focused on alleged enemies they’re missing what’s happening among their own, and it’s here that I must beg your pardon if I’m introducing you for the first time to groypers.

In a nutshell, groypers are hardcore, unrepentant racists. They hate everyone, openly and without reservation. (They are also weird about sex and women. They overlap with “incels.”) They are decentralized and defuse, but Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist podcaster, speaks for them. Fuentes didn’t like Kirk. For instance, he thought Kirk was too soft on Israel, which is to say, he wasn’t antisemitic enough. Fuentes used to be on Team Trump but parted ways for reasons I have forgotten. Anyway, he thought Kirk was a sycophant. Kirk backed off from demanding Trump release “the Epstein files.” Meanwhile, Fuentes raged against him, calling for his party to be “hanged in the midterms.”

There are many important (and repugnant) aspects of groypers, but for our purposes here, the main one to remember is they communicate online using an array of obscure images that most people would see as meaningless, if they were not also Extremely Online. One of them is called Pepe the Frog. Basically, if you see it, it means whoever is using it is a white-power nihilist (or, at the very least, a terrible human being.) And guess what? Tyler Robinson knew how to speak groyper.

In 2018, when Robinson was 15, his mother posted a Halloween picture on Facebook in which her son is wearing a black track suit with white stripes. He’s striking a pose similar to one taken by Pepe the Frog in a well-known rendering. Robinson’s mom, Amber Jones Robinson, wrote that Tyler was dressed up like “some guy from a meme,” suggesting she had no idea what he was. (She probably didn’t know “Bella Ciao” is on the “Groyper War” playlist on Spotify either.) In this, I think Jones Robinson has something in common with the entire GOP, which is the near-total lack of awareness of just how close they are to danger.

That seems to have changed. Suddenly (as in, yesterday and today), high-profile rightwing chaos-agents are expressing an awareness of the possibility that if Charlie Kirk can get popped, so could they.

Richard Hanania, the authoritarian apologist, has discovered the virtues of gun control.

“‘The Left’ did not kill Charlie Kirk,” Hanania said. “Talking like this is an attempt to silence critics of the Trump administration. No movement is responsible for crazy people. The only way you get something close to complete safety is strict gun control.”

Christopher Rufo, the “antiwoke” provocateur, was more deceitful. He said FBI Director Kash Patel (who said during Friday's presser that he’d see Kirk “in Valhalla”) didn’t have “the operational expertise to investigate, infiltrate and disrupt the violent movements — of whatever ideology — that threaten the peace in the United States.”

Rufo continued, saying the country has two choices: “enter a spiral of violence, which would be a catastrophe” or “federal law enforcement makes a credible plan to restore the civil order, initiates a campaign to disrupt domestic terror networks in all 50 states, and sets them in motion with the goal of preventing further bloodshed, all of which can and must be done in a principled, legal, nonpartisan manner.”

Rufo didn’t say “the left” didn’t kill Kirk but he didn’t say it did either. Like Hanania, law and order, rather than lawlessness and disorder, are suddenly very important to him after an apparent groyper killed Charlie Kirk. Together, they represent a notable departure from rightwing dogma, and not only from the position, articulated by Kirk, that “some gun deaths every single year” are a “rational” price to pay for having “the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.” It’s also a notable departure from Trump’s current trajectory.

The Republicans, especially at the state level, are not prepared to do anything about the actual means of achieving political violence, which is to say, about guns. (Governor Cox had nothing to say about the fact that it’s easy to buy and legal to openly carry long guns on Utah’s college campuses. Trump, meanwhile, seems to believe political violence doesn’t count if it’s against Democrats). The party will instead follow the president’s lead in criminalizing political speech.

Hanania and Rufo seem to be the canaries in the coal mine. While Trump and the Republicans are busy telling their story – “that the left glorifies death, particularly of adversaries, and the right does not,” according to Meghan McCain – they are not seeing the actual right-on-right white-on-white danger to their lives. And while the attempted assassination of Trump should have been their first sign of trouble, it wasn’t. It took Charlie Kirk getting killed to see that.

Here's what not to say about the murder of Charlie Kirk

You don’t have to say nice things

You don't have to say nice things about Charlie Kirk just because he’s dead. You can condemn political violence in all its forms — and you should. You can wish his family well. You can express your sincere condolences to all families of all victims of all political violence. You can even overlook, if you believe it’s worth it, the fact that he spent nearly all of his young adult life selling for profit the hatred of racial and sexual minorities, liberalism and the Democrats generally.

You can choose to do these things in full confidence that you have lived up to your obligation as a decent human being. But otherwise, you don’t have to say nice things in order to prove to someone — whoever that is — that you are not glad he’s dead. You don’t have to prove anything.

Live by the sword …

It would be appropriate to suggest that Kirk could be a victim of the kind of politics that he sold, just as it was appropriate to suggest that the Marlboro Men were victims of the kind of products that they sold. (All five men died of smoking-related diseases).

Kirk embraced political violence as a “remedy.” He bussed his followers to the J6 insurrection. He once said: “We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor.”

It is in no way an endorsement of political violence to suggest that Kirk saw the consequences of his choices, just as it was not an endorsement of, say, lung cancer to suggest that the Marlboro Men saw the consequences of theirs.

In 2023, Kirk famously said annual gun deaths are a “rational” price for our society to pay in exchange for its liberties.

“We should not have a utopian view [of gun violence],” he said. “We will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death. That is nonsense. That’s drivel. But I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth it to have the cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”

So it’s not only appropriate to suggest that Charlie Kirk died by the sword that he lived by, it’s deeply moral, as it affirms the belief that no one but the individual can be held responsible for the choices of that individual. (The shooter, it should go without saying, will be held responsible for his.) I would even say it’s deeply conservative to say so.

I took that to be Matthew Dowd’s intention when he said, in reaction to news of Kirk’s death, that “hateful thoughts lead to hateful words which then lead to hateful actions.”

Dowd’s comments were downright bland to those who know Kirk’s work, as historian Seth Cotlar does. He noted this week that “when a conservative gun enthusiast tried to assassinate Trump, Kirk immediately tried to fan the flames of division by blaming it on ‘them,’ by which he meant … everything on ‘the left.’”

Though bland by conservative standards, Dowd's words were too much for MSNBC. The network sacked him before saying that he “made comments that were inappropriate, insensitive, and unacceptable. There is no place for violence in America, political or otherwise,” as if he were endorsing violence.

By contrast, consider this moment during a recent Fox broadcast in which the cohost suggests “involuntary lethal injection” as a remedy for homelessness.

“Just kill them,” said Brian Kilmeade.

On 'assassination'

This week, the Associated Press said Kirk was “assassinated.” That characterization, however, is not neutral.

It conveys the president’s preferred view of his death, as an example of America becoming a “killing field” that requires the remedies of a strongman, like murdering the homeless, per Trump’s fave TV show.

But Kirk was not assassinated. He was murdered.

Yes, he was a prominent figure. Yes, he was very important to the Republican Party. But he wasn’t running for high office, he wasn’t leading a mass movement and he was not democratically elected. If anything, he had a high perch because billionaires gave it to him.

Melissa Hortman was assassinated, however. She was a Democratic legislator and the former speaker of the state House who led the enactment of sweeping progressive reforms in Minnesota. In June, she was assassinated by an anti-vaccine terrorist named Vance Boelter.

Boelter shot three others, also killing Hortman’s husband. But he was not assassinated. He was murdered. Hortman was a former speaker. For that reason, her murder rises to the level of assassination.

This is not just semantics.

By elevating Kirk’s murder to the level of an assassination, he’s turned into a moral figure who appears to transcend politics, such that we are forced to either praise him — or at least say nice things about him — or remain silent for fear of being seen as endorsing political violence.

That is, of course, one of the goals of authoritarian politics — to censor, silence and suppress the opposition by any means. Kirk was key to that. He presented himself and his organization as champions of free speech on college campuses while also keeping lists, complete with pictures, of professors and students who said and wrote things he didn’t like in order to encourage people to monitor and harass them.

Kirk’s bad faith wouldn’t have been so bad for freedom and democracy if highly visible liberals had not also accepted as true the lies he told. Sadly, that continues to be the case, even in death. This week, the New York Times’ Erza Klein wrote that Kirk practiced politics “the right way” by “showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.”

Yes, demagogues can be very persuasive, and you’d think a liberal like Klein would have said so plainly – if he were not more smitten with his reputation for reasonableness than he is focused on actual politics. For that, we must turn to a rightwing writer, Richard Hanania, who explained how “rightists justify calls for repression and violence.” In doing so, he explained the very tactic Kirk worked hard to perfect:

1) Go to social media and find the most obscure people celebrating violence. Say that this is "the left."

2) Say "the left" wants you dead, blaming the entire Democratic Party.

Literally, not a single Democrat is celebrating the Kirk assassination. It's complete wishcasting on the right. They're radicalizing their followers based on an inaccurate view of their opponents that fits with a victimization narrative.

Meanwhile, the most prominent people on their side started indulging in conspiracy theories and gleefully sharing memes after Nancy Pelosi's husband is attacked … The hypocrisy is overwhelming. They get off on the idea of “civil war” and collapse and invent the reality they want to see. They imagine Democrats are like themselves when they're not.

Under these conditions, the president and his goon squad are almost certainly going to try targeting all of “the left,” as Kirk defined it. The regime is already arresting people for the “crime” of their race, with the Supreme Court’s blessing. If they can criminalize your identity, they can criminalize your speech — or at least force you into silence, for insufficiently praising a “free speech champion” like Charle Kirk.

The GOP's answer to our gathering health crisis? A eugenicist without the slightest clue

If the Republicans cared about the public’s wellbeing, they wouldn’t have confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the US Department of Health and Human Services. He had no business there, but that didn’t matter. Their top concern has been the wellbeing of Donald Trump.

Kennedy is now giving the Republicans a headache with insane talk of vaccines causing autism and how he had no choice but to fire the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director because, he said, she told him she was not trustworthy. But that headache isn’t borne of caring about people. It’s borne of concern that people might figure out the Republicans don’t care about them.

The secretary was under pressure before he fell to pieces last week during testimony before a Senate committee. More than a thousand former HHS workers had signed a petition calling on him to resign. The pressure only increased afterward. Kennedy’s sister and her son, a former congressman from Massachusetts, added their voices.

Here’s the New York Daily News reporting on it:

“‘Robert Kennedy Jr. is a threat to the health and well-being of every American,’ Joe Kennedy wrote on X the day after the hearing. As a purveyor of misinformation and sower of confusion, RFK is not adequately ‘protecting the public health of our country and its people,’ the secretary’s nephew said. “At yesterday’s hearing, he chose to do the opposite: to dismiss science, mislead the public, sideline experts and sow confusion.’

The Daily News report added: “The essential values of ‘moral clarity, scientific expertise, and leadership rooted in fact’ required of anyone taking on current challenges to public health in the US are simply ‘not present in the Secretary’s office,’ Joe Kennedy said. ‘He must resign.’”

But even if he resigned today, the fact remains that the Republicans who confirmed him still don’t care about public health. In addition to taking away Medicaid benefits from millions of people over the next decade, there’s the immediate emergency facing anyone who buys their health insurance through state exchanges (aka “Obamacare”).

If the congressional Republicans do nothing, and no one expects them to do anything, there are about 20 million enrollees in the Affordable Care Act marketplaces who will see their monthly premiums jump by an average of 75 percent, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

And that’s if they’re lucky.

Charles Gaba, a health policy expert and founder of ACAsignups.net, told me in an interview last week (see below) that some people who are currently getting expanded federal subsidies could see their monthly premiums jump by “100 percent, 200 percent, 300 percent or more.”

Charles explained “there are two main reasons for this: congressional Republicans allowing the improved tax credits which have been in place since 2021 to expire, and the Trump administration changing the underlying ACA tax credit formula to make it even less generous yet.”

The Obamacare crisis won’t happen gradually over 10 years, like the Medicaid crisis will. It will happen over the next four months if congressional Republicans do not act by the end of this month.

Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, are trying to ramp up the pressure on their Republican colleagues by getting insurance providers to inform enrollees in September what’s going to happen.

In a letter, Democratic senators including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told insurers “individuals and families need clear, direct information from their health plans as soon as possible about their rising premiums and cost-sharing requirements, and worsening coverage.” They said the info should be sent "as early and directly as possible … Under these dire circumstances, annual premium notices set to be released in October will not come soon enough."

Axios said some Republicans are open to extensions “but they're also worried about the projected $335 billion cost over 10 years.”

That, my friend, is the tell.

The Republicans took one trillion dollars away from Medicaid and food stamps to cut taxes for rich people who will never notice their taxes were cut. Before that, the Republicans confirmed a conspiracy theorist, crank and weirdo as secretary of health and human services.

Do you think they’re really concerned about the public’s concern?

“There's still a small chance of Congress extending the tax credits this month, but it's unlikely,” Gaba told me, “and even if they do, I expect them to either weaken them, include a poison pill provision so they can blame a failure to extend them on Democrats, or both.”

JS: Lots of people still don't know they are going to be facing an enormous spike in their premiums. How bad is it going to be?

CG: Very, very bad.

As you know, I've spent the past several months shouting from the rooftops that tens of millions of Americans (around 23 million, give or take) enrolled in individual market health insurance policies are facing massive net premium increases starting January 1, 2026.

The increases will range widely depending on a variety of factors, of course, including where they live, what their household income is, how old they are and what policy they're currently enrolled in.

Overall, I estimate gross premium hikes (for those not currently receiving subsidies) will average around 23 percent, while the healthcare policy analysts at KFF estimate that net increases – that is, what the enrollees actually pay after federal tax credits are applied – will increase by an average of 75 percent nationally.

There's about 1.8 million unsubsidized enrollees on-exchange and 1-2 million off-exchange, who will be hit with the 23 percent average.

Meanwhile, there's around 21 million currently subsidized enrollees who will face the 75 percent average … and again, in many cases it will be much more than that: 100 percent, 200 percent, 300 percent or more for the same policy they're currently enrolled in.

There are two main reasons for this: congressional Republicans allowing the improved tax credits, which have been in place since 2021, to expire, and the Trump administration changing the underlying ACA tax credit formula to make it even less generous yet.

There's still a small chance of the Congress extending the tax credits this month, but it's unlikely, and even if they do, I expect them to either weaken them, include a poison pill provision so they can blame a failure to extend them on Democrats, or both.

Again, this will be happening well before the midterms, starting Jan. 1, 2026 – less than four months from now. And yes, my own family is among those facing this, as are you, as I understand it.

Kennedy testified last week. If you were a Senate Democrat, what would you have asked him about exploding insurance premiums?

To resign.

Seriously.

I thought about another long-winded answer, but there's no longer any point in arguing or debating his justifications for what he's done.

He's a eugenicist without the slightest clue about protecting the public from legitimate health crises and who, in fact, has caused and is causing more of them to happen daily. He needs to resign. Now.

He's going to try phasing out the COVID vaccine. I don't know what better evidence there is that it worked than the fact that we're still alive. Yet here we are, giving this man the benefit of the doubt.

Absolutely. During the depths of the COVID pandemic, conspiracy theorists were making all sorts of absurd claims that they were being "magnetized," that Bill Gates was using the vaccine to implant microchips into our bloodstreams (which is not only insane but ironic, given that Elon Musk is literally installing microchips into people's brains now via Neurolink), that it was supposedly causing Parkinson's-like shaking, etc, etc. All of this was complete garbage.

The boldest claim I heard was that everyone who took the COVID vaccine would shortly be dead, and in the months and years that followed, any time a public figure passed away from any cause (old age, hit by a car, whatever), somehow that "proved" their claim, which is absurd. Over 270 million Americans have received at least one COVID vaccine. Yet the vast majority of us are doing fine four years later.

It's absolute lunacy, doubly so when you consider that Operation Warp Speed — the public-private partnership by the first Trump administration to accelerate the development of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines — was a massive, legitimate success, which the Trump administration can sincerely claim bragging rights for. Yet somehow, his own base has decided that the very product of that success is some sort of liberal/Democratic conspiracy. Absolute madness.

The press corps can't be let off the hook. I can't count how many times I have read the phrase "vaccine skeptic," as if Kennedy is considerate and thoughtful, rather than liars and scammers. I don't know how to get truth-tellers to privilege facts over lies. Do you?

One of the reasons I've gained whatever respect I have for my healthcare data wonkery over the past decade-plus is that I do my best to use reliable sources. I cite those sources and when I make a mistake (which does happen from time to time), I do my best to own up to it, correct it and explain how I got it wrong.

While there are exceptions, a large portion of the press corps has allowed themselves to become bothsides stenographers who mindlessly repeat whatever drivel comes out of the mouths of Trump, Kennedy, Mehmet Oz and other charlatans in this administration. In many cases they're continuing to do this even as the Trump administration defunds, bullies and extorts their own organizations.

Unfortunately, I don't know how to get them to change their behavior; all I can control is my own, including doing the best I can to get my own data analysis and reporting right.

The erosion of science (vaccines), the erosion of health care (Obamacare), the erosion of the safety net (Medicaid). It's like the Republicans don't care about public health at all unless it affects them personally, and perhaps not even then (in the case of mass shootings). If people die, they die. Thoughts and prayers. Yet they enjoy a reputation for caring about people. How did this happen?

I don't think it was any one thing; racism and misogyny have played a major role, of course, along with decades of attacks on public education and on education in general. Regardless of what got the ball rolling, though, that it gained momentum makes perfect sense to me.

When the Republican Party started to become a slave to its most extreme elements, it started scaring away its genuinely sane, decent members, which, in turn, made those who remain more extreme and awful on average, which scares off more moderates, turning those who remain more extreme yet, and so on.

If this was the only part of the equation, it would be a recipe for the death of the party. However, the other factor is that as it's scaring off more and more moderate voices, it's also attracting more extreme members who had previously been shunned by both major parties.

Once Donald Trump came along, the floodgates were opened – he welcomed in and praised the most awful, racist, bat---- members of society. So here we are — with a Republican Party that seems to consist of almost nothing but the worst dregs of society.

MAGA's 'real America' begs for help as Trump drives it to ruin

The numbers were bad. There were just 22,000 new jobs added to the economy. Here’s how the Washington Post summarized things:

“The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported fewer jobs in downward revisions to June job creation, in a warning sign about President Donald Trump’s tougher tariffs and immigration enforcement. In August, the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.3 percent.”

Fox Business is interested in shielding Trump from the consequences of his terrible choices. So morning host Stuart Varney asked the US secretary of labor if Trump’s tariffs “have anything to do with this slowing job market?”

Unsurprisingly, Lori Chavez-DeRemer lied.

“Tariffs are working … How do I know this? Because companies are reinvesting in the American workforce. We’re seeing the consumer confidence up. We’re seeing real wages up. Blue-collar boom? I talk about it. It seems like something that is rhetoric but it’s not because that’s what we’re seeing on the ground blue-collar wages are up 1.4 percent. Unemployment is still holding steady. Statistically, it’s nonexistent. That’s the key to the American people is that we’re leaning in. We’re doing everything we can for this workforce and now this is one more thing that the Fed can do. And [Federal Reserve Chairman] Jerome Powell hasn’t done his job and .. that’s why [Trump has] been so vocal about this. We need those interest rates down.

As I said, Chavez-DeRemer lied, but she lied a lot.

Wages are not up, blue-collar or otherwise. Companies are not “reinvesting in the American workforce.” They are bribing Trump to be the exception to his import tax. Unemployment is not “nonexistent,” statistically or otherwise. It literally increased to its highest level since October 2021, when America was still in the throes of the pandemic.

If “tariffs are working,” they’re not working for men.

They were supposed to restore the former glory of the American working man by bringing back factory jobs. But “men have lost 56,000 jobs over the past four months, with women gaining 76 percent of the jobs in 2025 (compared to around 50 percent normally),” economist Mike Konczal said.

“Trump's effort to bring back men jobs with tariffs has backfired spectacularly, causing those industries to shrink.”

But of course the biggest lie is the one out in the open. Could tariffs possibly have something to do with a slowing job market? Yes! In fact, that’s exactly what everyone expected would happen after Trump imposed — without Congress and without law — a massive national sales tax. They would eat into profits and bring hiring to a crawl.

And since the president is the main cause of the slowdown, his administration has the incentive to hide that fact, especially to find someone else to blame for it. That’s why Chavez-DeRemer spends so much of her Fox time accusing Powell of dropping the ball.

Powell has already said an interest rate cut is likely. He said that before today’s job report. And he said a rate cut was needed because of the “downside risks to employment,” which I take to be bureaucratese for “Trump’s tariffs are killing off jobs so we gotta juice the economy.”

Point is that Powell was already signalling to do what the president has been demanding, but that’s inconvenient timing for Chavez-DeRemer, who was tasked with finding a scapegoat in order to hide from Trump’s supporters that he, and he alone, is the cause of the problem.

And because protecting Trump from the consequences of his terrible choices is the goal of his administration, no one is going to say boo after it’s clear a rate cut had practically no effect on jobs. Mike Konczal also said today that employers have been pricing a cut into their planning. By the time it happens, it may not make a lick of difference.

Our second item is a local news report by KATV reporter Andrew Mobley on the reason why Arkansas farmers are facing catastrophe.

The reason is Trump, but no one blames him. Here’s Mobley:

“Almost everything that could go wrong for Arkansas farmers did go wrong this year and it’s so bad that many are facing bankruptcy or even the closure of farms that have been passed down for generations.

“A dismal global market, and plunging commodity prices, mean there’s little to no hope of breaking even for many farmers, even as sky high input cost rise, because of inflation and now tariffs” (my bolding).

“Though President Trump’s big beautiful bill provided them much-needed update to safety-net subsidies for farmers, they won’t see those federal dollars until late next year, by which time some have projected that as many as one-fourth or even one-third of Arkansas farmers will face bankruptcy or be forced to leave the business.”

Mobley’s report covers a meeting between farmers and their US representatives. Not one of the farmers states the obvious: that they are facing the wall because Trump put them against it, and he put them against it because they supported him, and they supported him despite knowing that his tariffs would put them against the wall.

And now, because Arkansas farmers cannot implicate the president, or the Republicans in the Congress, without also implicating themselves, they are reduced to pleading with them for some sort of federal bailout, which is to say, begging their kidnappers to pay ransom.

That said, it’s not often you see the most salient feature of American politics — whiteness — stand out so perfectly formed in the wild.

“Real Americans” (ie, white farmers “who put food on your table”) are transparently asking to be rescued from the dire consequences of their terrible choices by their savior, but instead of being held accountable for them, as anyone who is not white most certainly would be, they are portrayed as victims of circumstances to be pitied, not condemned.

“Until the federal government steps in to save them, they have had no one to turn to but God,” reporter Mobley said. “It’s hard not to be moved by the cries of the people who put food on your table.”

Actually, it’s not that hard.

And finally, and once again, Robert F Kennedy Jr.

I have talked about him a lot, but I wanted to end on this note: During three hours of testimony Thursday, before a Senate committee, that man fell to pieces under the slightest pressure.

This is not a small concern. Kennedy is the top public health official in the country. Boil down everything and the most important thing about him is that the public trusts him to act in everyone’s best interest.

Most people don’t know much about medicine, about science and about policy, but everyone can size up a man as trustworthy or not. And I don’t know how Kennedy didn’t fail that assessment in every way.

Kennedy could not be corrected on matters of fact, forget about matters of public health, without becoming defensive, petulant and emotional. He grunted. He groaned. He wiggled nervously in his chair. He rolled his eyes. He scowled at United States senators. I could go on.

Watch the clip between Kennedy and US Senator Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico. Pay attention to Lujan’s face.

Do you see a man who can be trusted?

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