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This is hands down the stupidest member of Trump's Cabinet

Friends,

At a press briefing on Friday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth complained about a CNN report that the Trump administration had underestimated Iran’s ability to disrupt global oil traffic by closing the Strait of Hormuz.

“Patently ridiculous,” Hegseth told reporters, adding — even as the strait’s blockage was proving to be Iran’s most powerful leverage in the war — we “don’t need to worry about it.” He also denied that the U.S. bombed the school where some 175 children were killed. Hegseth added that, as to CNN, “the sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”

These remarks are remarkably stupid, on several levels.

First, CNN got it absolutely right in reporting that Trump’s national security team had underestimated Iran’s ability to disrupt global oil traffic. CNN cited “multiple sources familiar with the matter.”

The New York Times published a similar story, reporting that in the lead-up to the U.S.-Israeli attack, “Trump downplayed the risks to the energy markets.”

Even The Wall Street Journal, hardly a New York Times or CNN clone, substantiated the story on Friday, reporting that Trump rejected warnings that Iran would likely retaliate by closing the strait because he believed Iran would capitulate before doing so, and he assumed that even if Iran tried to close it, the U.S. military could handle it.

Second, Hegseth’s comment that we “don’t need to worry about” the blockage of the strait is not only false but flippantly insulting to an American public that deserves to know what the Trump regime is planning to do about soaring prices at the gas pump, directly due to that blockage.

Third, even if Hegseth believes that David Ellison’s ownership of CNN will silence CNN’s critical coverage of Trump, it’s remarkably stupid of Hegseth to say it out loud. “The sooner David Ellison takes over CNN, the better” is an open admission that Trump backed Ellison’s bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s parent, to silence criticism.

That deal is still pending, so Hegseth’s admission is likely to fuel even more opposition to it. California’s attorney general has already suggested he’ll go to court to block it. Now other attorneys general, the ACLU, and Democrats in Congress may join the case as co-plaintiffs.

Hegseth’s admission also confirms CNN’s worst fears that Ellison will throttle criticism of Trump — a fear that’s already caused several leading lights to exit. As Variety put it, “Anderson, cooped. Jake, tapped. Erin, burnt. Kasie, hunted. Wolf, blitzed.”

Ellison has already proven himself an unreliable steward of journalistic independence at CBS News. One departing producer there explained in a farewell memo to colleagues that she could no longer work where stories are “evaluated not just on their journalistic merit, but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations — a dynamic that pressures producers and reporters to self-censor or avoid challenging narratives that might trigger backlash or unfavorable headlines.”

Finally, Hegseth’s denial that the U.S. is responsible for the deaths of nearly 200 schoolchildren in Iran is belied by mounting evidence that the U.S. did bomb the school. Hegseth’s further insistence that the U.S. “never targets civilians” is refuted by the U.S. military’s killing of at least 157 people on 40 small boats in the Caribbean without evidence they were “narcoterrorists” rather than civilians.

And, friends, this was just one news conference.

Pete Hegseth’s job is so far over his head that he can’t even see it. He evidently believes it’s to cheerlead and defend Trump with bonkers claims like “We didn't start this war, but under President Trump we’re finishing it” and “America is winning decisively, devastatingly, and without mercy” and “we will show no quarter for our enemies.” (“No quarter” means kill everyone and take no prisoners, which is a war crime.)

In the days leading up to the U.S. attack on Iran, Hegseth spent his time criticizing “wokeness” at American universities, feuding with Anthropic over safeguards for AI, and, in the day before the war began, forcing Scouting America to abandon programs aimed at promoting diversity.

He dismisses war crimes, pooh-poohs the rules of engagement, and projects unequivocal belligerence at a time when the United States is rapidly losing whatever moral standing it had in the world.

Granted, it’s difficult to select one of Trump’s Cabinet members as the stupidest. But Pete Hegseth stands out for sheer boneheaded ignorance.

Pray for America and the world.

  • Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org

Trump is cornered

Trump is cornered.

Iran’s missiles, drones, and nuclear facilities have been severely hobbled, but its regime is still standing. Many of its senior political, military, and intelligence leaders are dead, but they have been replaced by others. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard survives.

Iran’s new supreme leader, in his first official message since he took over from his slain father, says Iran will continue to block the Strait of Hormuz by bombarding tankers trying to get through.

The closure has caused “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market,” according to the International Energy Agency. Oil has reached $100 a barrel, gas at the pump has risen almost 20 percent since the war began, and the stock market continues to slide. Higher oil prices are also raising the costs of food, medicine, electricity, and airline tickets.

Trump knows all this could deliver Congress to the Democrats in the midterms. So — with the Strait of Hormuz blocked and Iran’s new regime sounding more belligerent than ever — what does he do now?

Here are the four options:

1. He declares victory and exits the Middle East within a few days, even though the Strait of Hormuz is still blocked — hoping that Iran will unblock it to sell its own oil.

This poses a high political risk for Trump. Most Americans were against the war to begin with. If fuel prices stay high and Trump has little to show for his war, he and Republicans are almost sure to be penalized brutally in the midterms.

2. He unblocks the Strait of Hormuz with American warships escorting oil tankers, then he declares victory and gets out.

This is militarily risky. The Pentagon has been turning down requests to escort tankers through the strait, saying the threat to American warships from Iranian bombardment is too high. So, trying to open the strait now risks the deaths of more U.S. service members.

3. He spends the next two weeks trying to decimate what’s left of Iran’s missile and drone capacities and its navy, in the hope that everything will return to normal after Iran is neutered. Then he declares victory and gets out.

This is risky in a different way. Iran has shown remarkable resilience in maintaining its missile and drone offenses even as the U.S. and Israel have destroyed much of them. If Trump declares victory and Iran’s belligerence continues notwithstanding, fuel prices could remain high and the “victory” will be shown to be a sham. The worst of all worlds for Trump.

4. He gets Russia, Venezuela, and oil producer allies in the Middle East to dramatically increase production, in hopes this will reduce oil prices and contain the slide of the U.S. stock market.

This will be very hard to do. OPEC’s surplus capacity is limited. Venezuelan production is also limited; even if U.S. oil companies dramatically increased their investment there, it would take many months to boost output. Russia is selling its oil to China and India. Even with additional supplies, the Department of Energy warns that gas prices are unlikely to recede to prewar levels until mid-2027.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

Trump utterly hates this everyday thing — and it could be what crushes him

My hearing is lousy, so I recently decided to buy some hearing aids — very special advanced AI hearing aids that let me hear compliments extremely clearly but screen out all negative criticisms.

I’m joking, of course, to make the point that if such hearing aids were ever available, the people who bought them would discover they’re more disabled than they were when they couldn’t hear well. That’s because while we all love praise, the most important feedback we get tells us what we’re doing wrong.

Without this critical feedback, we might inadvertently insult friends, drive into oncoming traffic, walk off cliffs, make dumb mistakes on the job, or even (if we’re President), get the United States into a war without obvious end.

In other words, without critical feedback, we would totally f--- up.

But critical feedback is difficult to get even under the best of circumstances. You’re lucky if your best friend or spouse tells you your breath smells or you need a shower or you’ve got snot hanging out your nose, because almost no one else will.

The higher you go in any hierarchy or power structure, the more difficult it is to get critical feedback because you’re surrounded by people who want to please you and dare not displease.

When you have power to promote or fire them, make their lives happy or miserable, give them their heart’s desire or cast them into living hell, they’re not going to tell you that you just made a fool of yourself with a client or that your joke was tasteless or you’re behaving like an a--hole. They’ll tell you that you’re wonderfully clever, funny, charming, and perfect.

This is why many people in positions of authority in effect wear my advanced AI hearing aids that amplify compliments and screen out criticisms — which makes them vulnerable to making big mistakes.

So, if you’re a CEO or chairman or director or president of anything, you need to make a special effort to get critical feedback — soliciting it, rewarding it, showing that you value it by changing your mistaken views or asinine behavior.

When I was secretary of labor, I made a point of promoting staff who gave me constructive criticism. Even so, it was still hard to get honest feedback.

One day after a television interview, when I was heading back to the office surrounded by people telling me how well I looked and how cogent and thoughtful I sounded, one young staff member said very quietly, “Mr. Secretary, you used your hands so much that you blocked your face.”

I stopped. The others seemed horrified. I asked the young staffer, “What else did you notice?”

“Well,” she said, hesitatingly, “you kept using terms like ‘Earned Income Tax Credit’ and ‘discretionary budget’ that no one outside official Washington understands. You need to use everyday English.”

“Thank you!” I said, and a few days later made her a special assistant for communications. For the next several years, she gave me some of the most valuable feedback I’ve ever received.

Which brings me to Trump.

Not only does he love and solicit praise — if you can bear them, watch his sycophantic cabinet meetings — he absolutely, utterly, passionately, hates criticism.

He goes ballistic on anyone who gives him negative feedback. He punishes journalists who write bad stories about him. He fired the then head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics who told him and the rest of the world how badly the economy was doing.

He explodes in fury at staffers who give him bad news. When former Attorney General William P. Barr said there was no evidence that the 2020 election was stolen, Trump flung his lunch across the room and smashed his plate in a fit of anger as ketchup dripped down the wall.

“I thought, boy, if he really believes this stuff, he has lost contact with — he’s become detached from reality,” Barr testified to the January 6 committee.

All this may explain his decision to go to war in Iran, without a clear objective or an exit strategy.

According to the New York Times, White House officials have become pessimistic about the lack of a clear strategy to finish the war, but “they have been careful not to express that directly to the president, who has repeatedly declared that the military operation is a complete success.”

If they’re careful not to express their pessimism to Trump, how the hell is he going to see the depth of the hole he’s dug for himself and the United States?

Privately, aides say they’re “frustrated over Trump’s lack of discipline in communicating the objectives of the military campaign to the public.”

But there’s no chance in hell they’ve expressed their frustration to Trump.

All of which means Trump isn’t getting the feedback he needs. He remains sealed in his cocoon — wearing the equivalent of my advanced AI hearing aids — oblivious to the dangers he’s creating for you, me, and everyone else.

  • Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org

This Trump move pushed us to the brink — but there's still a way to put things right

As we reach the 12th day of the war in Iran — with death and destruction rippling throughout the Middle East — it’s important to bear in mind where the real failure of this lies.

So far, at least 2,000 people have been killed, including 175 Iranian schoolchildren, and seven American service members. At least 140 U.S. service members have been wounded, several critically. The final tallies on both sides will almost certainly be far higher.

Soaring oil and gas prices in the U.S. are inevitably hitting the poor and working class much harder than the affluent.

We’re spending huge resources on this war — roughly $1 billion per day, or $41,666,667 per hour, $11,574 per second.

These are resources that could be better spent improving the lives of the American people.

Americans need health care. Affordable housing. Child care and elder care. Better schools. We want our basic needs met. But the government has said we “can’t afford” these things.

Yet supposedly we can afford nearly $1 trillion for the Pentagon. Trump now says the Pentagon needs $500 billion more.

The tragic failure at the center of this devastation is not that most Americans have succumbed to war fever. To the contrary, poll after poll shows that most Americans do not support this war.

In fact, this is the first war America has entered in modern times without a majority in support.

The real failure is that the richest and most powerful nation in the world — the nation that has led the world since World War II and that established the postwar international order emphasizing multilateralism, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law — is now being led by a rogue president who rejects all these values.

One man has decided for himself to make this war. One lone person has initiated this mayhem without gaining Congress’s approval, without getting the approval of allies, without even articulating a clear reason for it.

The lone person who sits in the Oval Office has no endgame for this war, hasn’t given a consistent answer for what “victory” will require, and doesn’t appear to know what he’s doing.

One single individual is now wreaking havoc — lives lost, energy prices soaring, our treasury being emptied, our own needs overlooked, and potential future terrorism unleashed on this and other lands for years to come.

This war marks an overwhelming failure of American democracy. It is ultimately our failure.

What can we do now?

On March 28 — two weeks from this coming Saturday — we march across America in the largest demonstration in the nation’s history.

In coming weeks and months, we harden our elections systems so they cannot be overridden by the despot in the White House.

In November, we turn out the largest numbers ever recorded for a midterm election, to take back leadership of Congress from those who have enabled this rogue president.

Meanwhile, we continue to defend our communities, protect our immigrant friends and neighbors from state violence, and defend our universities and schools, our museums and libraries, and our media and newspapers from state despotism.

The best way for us to respond to the devastation of this war, in other words, is to strengthen the mechanisms that should never have allowed it to occur in the first place.

  • Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org

Dark new poll reveals something deeply broken in America — and it predates Trump

A survey released last Thursday by the Pew Research Center finds that 53 percent of American adults describe the morality and ethics of our fellow citizens as “bad” (ranging from “somewhat bad” to “very bad”).

This puts Americans way out front of other nations on the we-hate-our-compatriots scale. In the 24 other countries polled by Pew, most people called their fellow citizens somewhat good or very good.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from the United States is Canada, where 92 percent say their fellow Canadians are good, while just 7 percent say they’re bad.

Why are we so down on our fellow citizens? It may have something to do with our politics.

Some 30 years ago, my dear friend, the late Republican Senator Alan Simpson, told me Democrats viewed Republicans as stupid and Republicans viewed Democrats as evil.

“I’d rather be in the stupid party,” he chuckled.

I asked him why Republicans saw Democrats as evil.

He took a deep breath. “Religion.”

I said I didn’t understand.

“It’s the Christian right,” he said as if talking to a five-year-old. “Since Reagan, my party has been a magnet for religious conservatives and Christian fundamentalists, where it’s all about good and evil. Too bad, pal. You’re on the evil side.”

That was 30 years ago. Since then, the divide has only sharpened.

In 2012, Mitt Romney told supporters that “47 percent” of Americans would vote for Obama no matter what because they’re “dependent upon government ... believe that they are victims ... believe the government has a responsibility to care for them ... [and] pay no income tax.”

Insulting 47 percent of Americans was no way to win an election. It was also no way to unite the country.

Then in 2016, Hillary Clinton described half of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables.” Also no way to win or to foster mutual trust.

Once Trump took office, dislike of our fellow citizens soared.

Before he entered the White House, 47 percent of Republicans and 35 percent of Democrats said people in the opposing party were “immoral.”

By 2022, after years of Trump’s venom, 72 percent of Republicans and 63 percent of Democrats called people in the opposing party “immoral.”

Since he’s been back in the Oval, it’s got even worse.

After Charlie Kirk was assassinated last September, Trump blamed a “radical left bunch of lunatics” for the killing. Vice President JD Vance, parroting Trump, vowed to “punish these radical leftist lunatics.”

As Democratic Senator Chris Murphy noted at the time, “Kirk’s assassination could have united Americans against political violence, but the Trump camp seems to be preparing a campaign to destroy opponents.”

When a federal judge ruled in March that Trump didn’t have authority to send National Guard troops into Los Angeles, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly — in language typical of what we hear from the Trump regime — called him a “rogue judge” and claimed Trump “saved Los Angeles” from “deranged leftist lunatics sowing mass chaos.”

After ICE agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Kristi Noem, Trump’s former secretary of Homeland Security, called the two of them “domestic terrorists.”

Since then, the Department of Homeland Security has sent out a steady stream of tweets — catching some 380 million views on X — claiming that its agents have been under attack by U.S. citizens whom it describes as “terrorists,” “rioters,” and “agitators,” and asserting, among other things, that “Americans are fed up with rampant criminality ruling this country.”

Meanwhile, Trump has been threatening to cut off funding for various programs that help poor Americans by vilifying them as “fraudsters” and withholding money from Democratic-led states.

A few days ago, Vance charged that Medicaid and food assistance programs were rife with fraud perpetrated by “bad actors in our society … who take the goodwill and trust of the American taxpayers and use it against us, [who] decide to make themselves rich.”

***

For almost a decade, Trump has told us that certain other Americans should be feared: among them, Democrats, liberals, Mexican Americans, Muslim Americans, Black Americans, transgender people, and LGBTQ+ people. All are presumed to be the “enemy within.”

As Barack Obama said at Jesse Jackson’s memorial on March 6, “Each day, we’re told by those in high office to fear each other and to turn on each other, and that some Americans count more than others, and that some don’t even count at all.”

Is it any surprise that a majority of Americans now describe the morality of other Americans as “bad?”

But I can’t help wonder: How much of our distrust and resentment is the byproduct of something more fundamental that’s been unfolding in America for over four decades — something Trump took exploited but that would have invited a hateful demagogue like Trump eventually: the increasing concentration of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands?

Trump took advantage of anger and distrust that had been building for years — at a system increasingly seen as rigged against most of us.

What do you think?

  • Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org

Trump has massively misjudged the American people — and it could be his downfall

U.S. missiles and bombs have so far caused at least 1,168 civilian deaths in Iran, including 188 schoolchildren. Seven American service members have perished.

A direct line connects this violence with the U.S. government’s violence over the past year against people in Minneapolis, Chicago, and other American cities. And with the violence at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Behind it all is the vicious bully now occupying the Oval Office.

If you’re feeling angry, you’re not alone. I see it in your comments. I’m struck by how you are fighting back against this tyranny, nonetheless.

Sue Fraser Frankewicz, age 80, suggests we connect with the nearest Indivisible group “and get outside — march or witness or go to meetings with similarly disgusted smart people like yourself. Get yourself a button-maker and then find some great sentiments and make them into buttons and give them away.” She says such activities give her energy and hope and she’s “not giving up the fight!”

Martin asks us to “help vulnerable and needy people in our communities, who are now more vulnerable than ever.”

Jonni says she finds it useful to “focus on the consequences for the midterms” and know that “every evil thing this administration does has the silver lining of creating a blue wave. Each of us can make a contribution to end this regime.”

Klare K wants so many of us to march and protest on March 28 — the next No Kings Day — that “Trump’s head will explode.”

Jane, who describes herself as disabled and practically housebound, says she “keeps calling, texting, and emailing” her congressional representatives. And although they don’t respond, she “won’t give up on this battle to save our country.”

Others of you are protecting immigrants in your community from ICE.

You’re helping people get to polling places in special elections.

You’re organizing and mobilizing the grassroots of America.

I take great comfort from your courage and tenacity — turning your anger into positive action, fighting against the loathsome sociopath and his dreadful regime.

I’ll continue to support you in every way I can.

We will get through these dark days. In fact, I believe we’ll be stronger for having gone through them. We’ll have a sharper sense of what we value, and why.

Hopefully, we’ll also understand how we arrived at this cataclysm, how America got so badly off track that we allowed a dictator to take over this nation. And we’ll make necessary changes so it never happens again.

Polls show most Americans are now firmly against Trump. Most of us don’t want this war. Most of us reject his brutal immigration dragnet. Most of us are against his usurping powers that belong to Congress and the people. Most of us are appalled by his corruption, self-dealing, and brazen ignorance.

We will continue to resist, with ever more resolve. We will continue to protest and march, in even greater numbers. Our voices will grow even louder.

And when the darkness lifts, we will rebuild.

We’ll get big money out of our politics. We’ll tax concentrated wealth and use the proceeds for affordable child care, elder care, and universal health care. We’ll have a living wage. We’ll bust up monopolies and strengthen unions. We’ll seek to restore America’s moral authority in the world.

We will honor those who stood up to this tyranny. And we will hold accountable those who have enabled it, who have broken the law, trod on our Constitution, and made themselves rich while causing needless suffering.

In all these ways, my friends, we will prevail.

  • Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org

There's one question that makes me vow to fight Trump even harder

It happened again, the other morning.

I was in the locker room of a local gym when someone I didn’t know asked me: “So, are you retired?”

I mumbled something indecipherable and looked away.

I hate that question. Just as bad is: “So, you still working?”

They make me feel ancient. Why would anyone ask them of a complete stranger unless the stranger looked like a small dried-up fossil?

I admit I’m an an older person, but I don’t like to think of myself as old. Old and retired? Old and not working? S---, man.

It’s okay that they don’t read my Substack or watch my videos. I’m not insulted. But if they feel entitled to approach me as if they know me, I’d at least hope for some tiny recognition that I’ve been busting my ass.

Besides, the word “retired” conjures up someone who’s been put out to pasture. Or plays golf.

I don’t mean to demean older golfers. My father retired when he turned 65 and played golf for the next 30 years. When I phoned him on Sundays I asked about his game and he was eager to tell me. When he was 95 he made a “hole in one” — when he teed off, his golf ball sailed through the air and onto the green and then rolled directly into the hole on the green. At which point he promptly and happily retired from the game.

Thereafter, he stopped talking about golf. When I asked how he was doing, he always said cheerfully “still here!” He was still there until two weeks before his 102nd birthday, and then he wasn’t. I miss him.

But I don’t play golf.

When my grandfather — my father’s father — retired, he spent his days watching television (yes, there was television in the mid-1950s). He watched baseball during the day and at night watched Lawrence Welk, Jackie Gleason, and Danny Thomas. When I spent weekends with him and my grandma Minnie, I was bored to tears.

I watch almost no television.

I don’t recall my mother or grandmother ever being asked if they were retired or “still working.” Even women my age seem to avoid these questions. Is it because of a sexist assumption they don’t or didn’t have careers outside the home? Or fear they’d be insulted if thought old enough to formally retire?

The term is applied to angry players who leave a match before its scheduled conclusion, as when Buffalo Bills cornerback Vontae Davis “retired” at halftime in a game against the Los Angeles Chargers, taking off his jersey and leaving the stadium in a huff.

Well, I’m not an angry player, and I’m not leaving this match before it ends. As long as Trump continues to try to pull America into a s---hole, I’m fighting back.

I’ll keep fighting Trump and all other authoritarian scumbags until my last breath.

Meanwhile, the next person who asks me if I’m retired or “still working,” I’m going to ask if they still have all their marbles.

  • Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org

The Trump MAGA media monopoly is here — but you can still stop it

Last Sunday, CBS’s erstwhile flagship newsmagazine, 60 Minutes, opened with an extended adulatory interview of Reza Pahlavi, son of the late exiled Shah of Iran, whom Trump presumably is auditioning to be Iran’s post-invasion leader.

Although Pahlavi is in Paris and hasn’t lived in Iran for nearly a half-century, CBS’s Scott Pelley fed the exiled prince softball questions and allowed him to avoid talking about his father’s record of brutal repression. Pelley even added, in a wishful voiceover, that “Pahlavi told us that there are units within the military and the police that would turn on the hardline government. He says that many but not all troops could be given amnesty in a process of national reconciliation.”

This isn’t news. It’s pablum from the White House. 60 Minutes was once a reliable source of tough reporting. Now it’s becoming a shill for the Trump regime.

It soon could get far worse. CBS News is on the verge of becoming part of the largest pro-Trump media monopoly in America.Two of the nation’s biggest news organizations — CBS and CNN — along with CBS entertainment (home to Stephen Colbert) and Comedy Central (home to Jon Stewart) and HBO (John Oliver) and TikTok (where 1 out of 5 Americans now get their news) — are all about to become one giant mega-media monopoly under the control of Trump allies and suck-ups: multibillionaire Larry Ellison and his son, David.

It’s not too late to stop this, and I’ll tell you how in a moment, but I’d like you to pause and imagine how readily this new pro-Trump media giant can mislead America about what Trump is doing and silence criticism of Trump.

It could make Rupert Murdoch’s media empire of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post look scrupulous by comparison.

Trump cares more about TV news than he does about his presidency. In fact, TV news is his presidency. He chose his cabinet members on the basis of their total loyalty to him and how they look and sound on TV. He spends all day watching coverage of himself on TV. And now he’s on the verge of having effective control over a gigantic media monopoly.

I don’t believe Stewart or Oliver will be silenced, but their contracts may not be renewed. After all, look at what CBS did to Colbert, whose show will end in May.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the algorithm on TikTok is adjusted to reduce Trump criticism.

And a small army of producers and correspondents at CNN are likely to be more careful about what they report. Stories critical of Trump may be axed, as is now occurring at the late, great CBS News.

How did this happen? Think greed, money, power, and Trump.

Trump and the Ellisons take over Warner Bros. Discovery

When the dark history of this sordid era is written, among the most shameful culprits — who put making humongous amounts of money for themselves above the common good — will be Larry and David Ellison; Shari Redstone, former owner of Paramount; and David Zaslav, the current CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Zaslav is now being lauded by the business community as a genius for selling Warner Bros. Discovery (in turn the owner of CNN, CNN International, and HBO) to the Ellisons’ for $111 billion, more than double its valuation in September. But he’s couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the common good. (Zaslav filed to sell just over $114 million worth of Warner Bros. stock less than a week after Warner Bros. clinched the deal.)

Why would the Ellisons spend billions (and go deep into debt) to buy Warner Bros. Discovery? Wealth and power — along with additional wealth and power that Trump can deliver.

Larry Ellison is the second-richest person in America. He owns Oracle, which runs much of the digital backbone of the nation’s commerce and government.

But the Ellisons, per et fils, couldn’t have created their new right-wing media empire without Trump. They needed Trump just as Trump has needed Larry Ellison (who’s been one of Trump’s strongest backers, dating back to the early days of Trump’s presidency).

Even before the Ellisons sweetened their offer for Warner Bros. Discovery and pushed Netflix out of the running, they proclaimed their “confidence in the speed and certainty of regulatory approval” for the deal. Translated: Don’t worry that we’re creating a gigantic media monopoly. Antitrust laws won’t touch us. We’ve got Trump’s Justice Department in the bag.

Trump and the Ellisons got several Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds to join in the deal (making me wonder whether such funding will complicate, or compromise, CBS News’s and CNN’s coverage of Trump’s war in Iran and of the Middle East in general).

Trump takes over CNN

For years Trump has blasted CNN as “fake news” and publicly demanded it be bought by new owners. “It’s imperative that CNN be sold,” Trump said in December, signaling he favored the Ellisons’ takeover proposal.

In December, according to the Wall Street Journal, “David Ellison offered assurances to Trump administration officials that if he bought Warner Bros. Discovery, he’d make sweeping changes to CNN.”

To be sure, CNN was moving rightward even before the Ellisons got their hands on it.

In 2022 Zaslav put Chris Licht in charge, who told CNN’s staff he wanted less criticism of Trump and the Republican right — instructing them to stop referring to Trump’s “Big Lie” because he thought the phrase sounded like a Democratic talking point, telling producers to downplay coverage of the first hearing of the congressional committee investigating January 6, and arranging Trump’s infamous CNN town hall, which gave the twice-impeached felonious ex-president a platform to make his comeback.

CNN’s rightward lurch caused CNN’s primetime show ratings to fall 25 percent and contributed to Licht’s firing after just 13 months.

Since then, CNN has undergone rounds of cuts under a series of owners seeking to reduce debt. Paramount and the Ellisons (and Trump) will be its fourth corporate parent in under a decade.

Trump takes over CBS

Last summer, as Redstone and other of Paramount’s previous owners sought federal approval to sell Paramount (owner of CBS) to the Ellisons, they sucked up to Trump by settling Trump’s baseless lawsuit against CBS News for $16 million. (He had sued over how 60 Minutes had edited an interview with former vice president Kamala Harris.)

Late night host Stephen Colbert called the settlement a “big fat bribe,” which it was.

To win further support from Trump for the sale, they announced the end of Colbert’s show (which, as I said, will finish its run in May). They cited economics, but Colbert’s has been the top-rated late night show on network television. The real reason for the cancellation was obvious: Colbert’s biting satirical criticism of Trump.

To cinch the deal, David Ellison promised to end diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at CBS. He hired a right-wing “ombudsman,” Kenneth Weinstein, the former head of a conservative think tank. And he named as the new editor-in-chief of CBS News Bari Weiss, founder of the center-right opinion and news site The Free Press.

Trump was delighted. “They’re friends of mine. They’re big supporters of mine. And they’ll do the right thing,” he said, praising the acquisition and adding that CBS News had “great potential” with Weiss in charge and that he expected it to be “fairer.”Fairer? Since Weiss took over, almost half of CBS News producers have walked, including legendary veteran Mary Walsh, who began her career under Walter Cronkite. As Walsh explained, “We’ve been told to aim our reporting at a particular part of the political spectrum. Honestly, I don’t know how to do that."

Weiss named a bunch of new contributors — many of them retired military or ex-intelligence officials or conservative pundits, including the anti-aging influencer Peter Attia (who has subsequently resigned over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein).

Weiss declared “We love America” a guiding principle and changed the CBS style guide to replace “assigned sex at birth” with “biological sex at birth” when referring to trans people.

She’s also defanged 60 Minutes. In December, Weiss axed a report about Venezuelans being deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison hours before it was set to air — a move that Sharyn Alfonsi, the long-standing correspondent who reported the segment, claimed was for “political” reasons. (The segment later aired on Jan. 18, drawing more than 5 million viewers.)

Weiss replaced Evening News anchors John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois with Tony Dokoupil — best known for hassling the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates for his “extremist” belief that apartheid is morally wrong.

As Trump told Dokoupil recently in a rambling nearly 13-minute interview, had Kamala Harris won the presidential election in 2024, “you probably wouldn’t have a job right now.” Exactly. (Moments after that rambling interview, not incidentally, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt conveyed Trump’s threat that “if it’s not out in full, we’ll sue your ass off.”)

How you can help stop this

All this has happened so suddenly that most Americans still haven’t noticed the emergence of this new pro-Trump media empire — CBS, CNN, HBO, Comedy Central, and TikTok — all under the control of Trump cronies Larry and David Ellison.

Billionaires are flipping media companies like playing cards. They don’t give a fig for the common good, or about the producers, correspondents, journalists, and investigative reporters whose lives are being turned upside-down. To them, it’s all about accumulating more wealth and power.

But it’s bad for the economy, bad for our democracy, and bad for America.

The Ellisons’s new mega-media monopoly would never pass muster if America still had antitrust enforcers. Media mergers and acquisitions deserve even stricter scrutiny than normal deals. But Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice is as likely to stop this deal as she is to enforce criminal laws against ICE agents.

So who can stop this?

State attorneys general. They can go to federal court to enforce federal antitrust laws. They have legal standing and necessary resources to challenge this monstrosity.

California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, has already made clear he will take it on.

“The California Department of Justice has an open investigation, and we intend to be vigorous in our review,” he says.

Good luck to him.

I hope other state attorneys general join in. You can help by contacting your state AGs and suggest they join this lawsuit. Contact information for your state’s AG is here.

Please do. The last thing America needs is a giant pro-Trump media monopoly.

  • Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org

Trump went to war to bury his 2 biggest political nightmares — and they're both worsening

The purpose of Donald Trump’s war in Iran is to deflect our attention, especially from two big things Trump wants banished from the headlines and erased from the our collective consciousness. Which means we need to focus on them like lasers.

1. The affordability crisis. It’s worsening.

Prices were rising even before Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu attacked Iran — which was one reason for him plunging America into war. He wanted to remove “affordability” from the news (he called it a “Democratic scam”) .

But Trump’s war is causing prices to rise even faster.

About 20 percent of world oil and gas production passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which is now essentially closed to shipping. This means higher prices at the pump. As of this morning, oil prices were approximately $15 to $16 a barrel higher than they were in mid-February, which will add roughly 40 cents to the price of a gallon of gasoline. If the war continues for a month or more, oil (and gas) prices could go much higher.

The war is also causing food prices — which were also high before the war — to rise even faster. That’s because roughly a quarter to a third of the global trade in ammonia and nitrogen, the critical raw materials for making fertilizer, must also pass through the strait. Without fertilizer, crop yields fall.

Fertilizer prices are already rising, as they did in early 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Likewise, anticipated lower crop yields are already raising the prices of household staples such as bread, pasta and potatoes to rise, and making animal feed more costly.

Adding to these are larger risks to the nation’s financial stability created by a regional war whose aim continues to be vague. The private credit market poses one vulnerability; the AI bubble, another. The result is uncertainty that causes lenders to demand a higher premium to cover extra risks.

Already, fears of more serious inflation are driving up interest rates on ten-year Treasury bonds. I expect rates on mortgages and car loans to rise in tandem.

Oy.

2. Epstein

The other thing Trump wanted to deflect our attention from is the Epstein files. But they won’t go away, either.

After the Wall Street Journal earlier this week identified more than 40,000 files that appeared to be missing from documents posted to the Justice Department’s website, a Justice Department spokeswoman today admitted that “47,635 files were offline for further review” and “should be ready for re-production by the end of the week.”

Further review? Sure looks like a cover-up. The withheld files include FBI notes on a series of interviews a woman gave to agents in 2019 in which she alleged sexual misconduct by both Trump and Epstein when she was a minor in the 1980s.

By law, the Justice Department was required to release the Epstein files in full by Dec. 19, 2025. (The Epstein Files Transparency Act (EFTA), which Trump signed into law in November, required that all the documents be made public within 30 days, with some limited exceptions.) So far, only about half the files have been released, and many are heavily redacted.

Even House Republicans are becoming upset about this, presumably because the Republican base wants it cleared up.

“AG Bondi claims the DOJ has released all of the Epstein files. The record is clear: they have not,” House Republican Nancy Mace wrote on X. She continued:

“The Epstein case is one of the greatest cover-ups in American history. His global sex trafficking network is larger than what is being revealed. Three million documents have been released, and we still don’t have the full truth. Videos are missing. Audio is missing. Logs are missing. There are millions more documents out there. We want to know why the DOJ is more focused on shielding the powerful than delivering justice.”

Fighting words, and from a Republican. On Wednesday, by a vote of 24-19, the House Oversight Committee agreed to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi to testify about the release of the Epstein files. Five Republicans voted in favor, including Mace, who put the motion forward, along with Tim Burchett of Tennessee, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Michael Cloud of Texas, and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania.

After the vote, Mace told reporters:

“I know that Bondi has testified before the Judiciary Committee, but she’s not testified before me or the Oversight Committee. I need to get to the bottom of this for other survivors of Jeffrey Epstein. I have a lot more questions, and I don’t expect to be talking about the stock market [which she did when she testified before the Judiciary Committee] so she better not bring those notes when she comes to the Oversight Committee.”

Mace said the subpoena is for closed-door testimony with video that will be released to the public afterward.

**

One more thing, which Trump probably doesn’t want us to pay much attention to, either.

On Thursday afternoon, he finally fired Kristi Noem as Homeland Security Secretary. What put him over the brink was not the murder of two Americans by Noem’s immigration agents, or ICE’s brutality, or the unconstitutionality of arresting and detaining people without due process. No, what really got him riled up (according to several sources) was Noem’s combative hearing on Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee in which she alleged that Trump had signed off on a $220 million self-promotional ad campaign featuring her appearing on horseback against the background of Mt. Rushmore.

If there’s one thing Trump can’t stand, it’s someone else’s self-promotion. Besides, he wants his face on Mt. Rushmore.

  • Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org

These spineless cowards must act before Trump's madness spirals out of control

NATO is now involved. It has shot down an Iranian missile heading into Turkish airspace. Turkey is a NATO member housing a major U.S. military base where the U.S. has nuclear weapons, including B-61 thermonuclear bombs. NATO’s Article 5 says an attack on one member of the alliance is considered an attack on all.

The United Kingdom has granted the U.S. access to its military bases for strikes on Iran. France is building a coalition to protect commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, the Red Sea, and the Suez Canal. The Netherlands is weighing France’s request to help secure these shipping routes. The White House says Spain will cooperate with the U.S. military (Spain disputes this). Greece is sending planes and warships to its neighbor Cyprus. Lebanon is ordering a mass evacuation in the country’s south.

Meanwhile, Russia, which has a strategic partnership treaty with Iran, is accusing the U.S. of using an “imaginary threat” from Iran as a pretext for overthrowing its constitutional order. Putin calls the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei a “cynical violation of all norms of human morals and the international law.”

Russia, Iran, and Venezuela are the world’s top producers of heavy crude oil that’s exported to dozens of nations to be processed by their refineries. This means that, with the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed and much of Iran’s oil-producing capacity under attack, China — which had been the largest buyer of Iranian oil — will almost surely become more dependent on Russian oil, drawing the two superpowers closer.

Iran reports that more than 1,000 people have been killed by Israeli and American strikes. So far, 11 people have died in Israel as Iran has fired back. Six U.S. service members have been killed. We don’t have reports on the numbers injured.

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war is rapidly escalating into a global conflict.

What about you and me and every other American? Who is representing our interests? Let me remind you, the U.S. Congress has not declared war, even though Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution expressly grants this power to Congress — not to the president.

It is part of what are known as “Enumerated Powers” — powers reserved to Congress, to the people’s representatives. Only Congress is authorized to “declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.”

So why are we at the precipice of World War III? What is our reason for committing so many troops at such great cost and risk? What is America’s interest?

Trump isn’t saying, except to talk in vague generalities about Iran’s nuclear capacities — which experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency and in our own intelligence community say have been grossly exaggerated by Trump.

Where are the progressive voices warning of how a war like this can so easily escalate out of control? Where are the historians telling us how other such calamities have begun? Where are voices explaining all the domestic needs we are sacrificing to finance the U.S. military machine?

I’m no isolationist. I believe America has responsibilities around the world. But I’m not even hearing much from the “America First” gang on the right reminding Trump’s MAGA base that the war he is pulling us into violates a basic tenet of why he was elected.

Trump has launched a war in the Middle East that is already killing and wounding large numbers of men, women, and children. But he’s done it without our consent, without a plan, without a strategy, and without any clear idea about where it leads or how it ends.

***

On Wednesday afternoon, Senate Republicans voted to block a measure from advancing that would limit Trump’s power to continue waging war against Iran without congressional authorization, turning back an effort by Democrats to insist that Congress weigh in on a sweeping and open-ended military campaign.

The 53-to-47 vote against taking up the measure was largely along party lines. (Democratic Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania voted with Republicans against the measure, while GOP Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky was the sole Republican who voted with Democrats in favor if it.)

Today’s vote was just the latest in a series of failed war powers resolution efforts in both the House and Senate as Democrats have tried, but repeatedly failed, to rein in Trump’s ability to act without consulting with Congress.

It is still important to call on your members of Congress to use their power to put a stop to this deadly war. Contact them now at: (202) 224-3121.

  • Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org

This Trump boss from hell​​​ is now buried under her own mess

Donald Trump says he’s not responsible for what happens next in Iran. “It’s up to the Iranians.”

He acts as if he’s not even responsible for what’s happening in his own government. After federal agents murdered two people in Minneapolis and Border Patrol head Greg Bovino was sacked, Trump lamely explained, “Bovino is very good, but he’s a pretty out there kind of a guy. It some cases that’s good, maybe it wasn’t good here.”

Yesterday, the White House quietly removed Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s two top aides at the Labor Department because, well, they were pretty out there, too.

To paraphrase Daniel Webster when speaking to the Supreme Court about Dartmouth College in 1819, the DOL is a small department, but there are those who love it.

I loved it from the moment I entered the Frances Perkins Building on Constitution Avenue as secretary of labor in January 1992.

I loved its mission: to protect and raise the standard of living of working Americans.

I loved its history. The first secretary of labor, Frances Perkins — appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 — was also America’s first female Cabinet secretary. She was the guiding light behind the creation of Social Security, the 40-hour workweek, the National Labor Relations Act, and much more.

Her painting hung behind my desk in my huge second-floor office. Whenever I felt discouraged, I looked at her, and she bucked me up. (Although I’m Jewish, I called her Saint Frances.)

I admired the Department of Labor’s career staff, who were dedicated to helping American workers. I was deeply impressed by the assistant secretaries, the deputy secretary, the chief of staff, and other appointees with whom I toiled, often six or seven days a week from early morning to late at night.

Never before or since have I had the privilege of working with such talented people who cared so much about what they were accomplishing for the American people, and who made such a positive impact on so many lives.

We raised the minimum wage for the first time in many years, even under a Republican-controlled Congress. We implemented the Family and Medical Leave Act. We fought against sweatshops. We took on big corporations that were cheating their employees. We kept workers safe. We … well, I could go on and on. (And I have, in my book Locked in the Cabinet, which you can also find here, but please don’t order from here.)

Why am I telling you all this? Because I’m heartbroken. The wonderful department I once loved is being turned to s---.

I blame Trump. He’s the one who nominated Chavez-DeRemer to be his labor secretary.

Is it inappropriate for a former labor secretary to criticize a current one? Maybe, but I don’t care. She deserves it.

As I’ve noted, the White House yesterday told her two top aides — chief of staff Jihun Han and deputy secretary Rebecca Wright — to resign or be fired.

Investigators say the pair created a “toxic” work environment. Allegedly, they verbally abused staffers, silenced critics within the department, and concocted taxpayer-funded pleasure trips for Chavez-DeRemer by seeking out conferences or speaking engagements where she could make an appearance and then duck out.

I think Han and Wright are taking the rap for Chavez-DeRemer, who’s still facing allegations of drinking during the workday from a “stash” of alcohol in her office, taking subordinates to an Oregon strip club while on an official trip, and having an affair with a member of her security team.

In January, unnamed sources described Chavez-DeRemer as the “boss from hell,” saying she demanded staffers run personal errands for her or perform other menial tasks unrelated to their government jobs.

Meanwhile, her husband has been barred from the Frances Perkins Building after female staff accused him of unwanted sexual advances. His lawyer says the accusers are in cahoots with department employees to force Chavez-DeRemer out of office.

More than two dozen department employees from across the political spectrum describe in interviews with the New York Times a toxic workplace characterized by an absentee secretary, hostile aides, and a deeply demoralized staff.

It’s a f---ing mess.

From what I hear, other departments are nearly as bad. Pete Hegseth’s Department of “War” suffers ongoing turmoil. Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security is in shambles. Pam Bondi’s Justice Department is a wreck.

Almost every department and agency of the federal government has become a back-stabbing rat’s nest. Total pandemonium. Career staff against political appointees and vice versa, political appointees against other political appointees. Blatant misuses of taxpayer dollars, self-dealing, conflicts of interest, sexual predation, abuses of lower-level employees.

This is what you get when you have a president and White House staff who don’t give a rat’s ass about who they appoint to positions of power except for their loyalty to Trump and how they look on television. Along with Republicans in Congress who don’t oversee these departments because they couldn’t care less.

The only reason the White House booted Chavez-DeRemer’s deputy and chief of staff was to protect her ass, in order to protect Trump.

Trump and his White House assistants are fine with his appointees wrecking our government because they don’t care about government. Hell, they came to government to wreck it. If the public loses confidence in, say, the Department of Labor, that’s perfectly fine. If Congress slashes its funding, so much the better.

It infuriates me because I’ve seen government work for the people. I’ve witnessed public servants who care deeply and bust their asses in service to this country. I know how important government can be if it’s doing the job it should be doing.

I loved the Department of Labor because it has improved the lives of millions of Americans. I worked like hell as secretary of labor because I believed in what we were doing. That it’s now being treated like crap is an insult to generations of hardworking DOL employees, to American workers, to America.

The least we can all do is flip Congress in November, so senators and representatives who care about this country can oversee these departments and try to remedy some of the wreckage that Trump and his appointees have wrought.

  • Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org

This catastrophic mistake may prove Trump's final undoing

Trump said Monday that the United States would continue attacking Iran for “whatever it takes.”

But what’s the “it” in that sentence?

He also said: “We’re destroying Iran’s missile capability” and “annihilating their navy” and ensuring that “this sick and sinister regime” in Iran “can never obtain a nuclear weapon.”

But how will we know when we’ve achieved any of this?

American intelligence officials say Iran has not tried to rebuild its main nuclear sites since the U.S. attack in June. Iran’s stockpiles of enriched uranium are still buried deep under rubble. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency says his agency has found no evidence that Iran resumed enriching uranium since June.

Yet even more U.S. forces are headed to the Middle East, and Trump says bigger waves of airstrikes are coming. He hasn’t ruled out sending in ground troops.

Neither Trump nor anyone else in his regime has provided any clarity about how we’ll know whether we’ve “won” this war.

He has no endgame. He’s given out different timelines and goals, depending on when and to whom he’s speaking. Asked by NBC News what his objectives are, he said, “Number one is decapitating them, getting rid of their whole group of killers and thugs.” He told the Washington Post, “All I want is freedom” for the Iranian people.

Trump told ABC News’ Rachel Scott on Sunday that he had a “beautiful plan” for Iran’s future. He told other outlets there were “good” candidates to take over, but later told ABC’s Jon Karl that the people he had in mind were all dead.

I can’t help thinking about the Vietnam War, which preoccupied much of my youth (and, since he’s almost exactly my age, presumably Trump’s as well). There was no clear endgame there, either.

The biggest difference between Trump’s Iran war and Lyndon Johnson’s in Vietnam was that during Vietnam, America had a draft — which meant the administration had to repeatedly justify the war to the American people. As that misbegotten war escalated and its justification became ever more elusive, it grew to become a central focus of American politics, eventually causing LBJ to drop out of the 1968 presidential race.

But Trump feels no pressure to justify or explain anything. He has no f---ing clue what he’s doing in Iran. He’s winging it. He believes he can somehow pull it off because he thinks he’s invincible.

It’s Trump’s M.O. He loves to create chaos because chaos allows him to improvise — to impose his own narrative on a flood of events, dodge responsibility for failures, take credit for successes, and create illusions of glory and victory.

But the chaos he’s ignited in the Middle East is so large that the narrative may already be out of his control. The conflagration is escalating and spreading too fast. Just three days in, he’s making conflicting and inconsistent decisions and providing conflicting accounts.

He assumed a war would be helpful to him. It would justify emergency measures at home. It would deflect attention from his multiple failures. It would make him seem larger.

But it is already making him smaller, more hostage to what’s occurring than leader, more Benjamin Netanyahu’s patsy than senior partner, another American president sucked into the giant maw of the Middle East.

Americans have short memories, but they do recall that Trump was reelected to accomplish three things.

  • First, to get prices down. He hasn’t done this. Inflation is growing at an annualized rate of nearly 3 percent. Oil prices are about to go through the roof because of the war he’s ignited in the Middle East.
  • Second, he promised to get control of the nation’s southern border. He’s done this by unleashing immigration agents inside America on people here legally, and doing so with such barbarity — including at least two murders — that most Americans think he’s gone too far.
  • His third promise was to avoid foreign entanglements. He said during the 2024 campaign that he’d “break the cycle of regime change” and avoid “reckless” policies. He noted that toppling regimes without plans creates “power vacuums that are filled simply by terrorists.” He wanted to shift America away from being “the policeman of the world.” He repeatedly promised to “expel the warmongers” from government. On election night in November 2024, he declared, “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”

Trump has broken this pledge with astounding negligence. He has launched a war in the Middle East without a plan, without a strategy, and without any clear idea about where it leads or how it ends.

Even absent a draft, Americans will not tolerate this for long. If Trump’s War costs many American lives, they will not forgive him.

For all these reasons, Trump’s War may be his undoing. I pray it’s not also the undoing of America.

  • Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org

Trump and Netanyahu don't want you to see the true reasons for their attack on Iran

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s attack on Iran is premised on a gossamer web of assumptions and inferences.

Trump says Iran has enough nuclear material to build a bomb within days, will soon have long-range missiles capable of hitting the United States, and plans an attack. But he has offered no evidence. Most experts say he’s wrong.

Here’s the real reason for this war. Trump wants it to divert Americans’ attention from everything that’s gone to s--- on his watch: the economy, ICE’s cruel raids and murders, the crisis in public health as exemplified by the measles epidemic, our loss of friends and allies around the world, his boundless corruption, and his increasing unpopularity as shown in plummeting polls.

Oh, and there are the Epstein files, rapidly closing in on the man whose history of sexual assaults and braggadocio make his complicity highly likely.

Netanyahu is also using this war as a giant diversion. He doesn’t want the world to dwell on the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank.

As former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert wrote recently, “A violent and criminal effort is under way to ethnically cleanse territories in the West Bank. Gangs of armed settlers persecute, harm, wound and even kill Palestinians living there.”

Like Trump, Netanyahu has been trampling constitutional rights — seeking a judicial coup to eliminate the separation of powers, purging Israel’s independent attorney general of his powers, trying to dismiss his own corruption trial, and politicizing appointments to what had been a neutral civil service.

Trump and Netanyahu are using the same authoritarian playbook.

A big part of that playbook is war. War takes over the news. War blots out criticism. War divides a nation’s people, subjecting those against it to being called unpatriotic. War grants leaders all sorts of emergency powers. War consumes everything else.

We mustn’t let this war do so.

I finally watched a tape of Trump’s State of the Union address (I couldn’t bring myself to watch it at the time). It was even more horrendous than I’d imagined.

What stood out for me was all the important problems Trump didn’t mention, as if they didn’t exist. Climate change. Widening inequality. Monopolies driving up prices. Declining real incomes. The growing scourges of poverty — homelessness, hunger, disease, and violence — in America and around the world. Unregulated AI.

If and when he ever mentions them, he calls them “hoaxes.”

Instead, he’s worsened all of them — helping fossil fuels while killing off wind and solar, eviscerating antitrust enforcement and letting monopolies consume entire industries, giving the rich more tax cuts while cutting back Medicaid and food stamps, destroying USAID and discouraging lifesaving vaccines while letting measles run rampant.

And he’s trying to divert attention to fake problems: non-Americans voting in elections (they don’t), Greenland and Venezuela (they pose no threat), “disloyal” Americans who criticize him or judges who try to hold him accountable (thank goodness they’re still trying).

And now, the biggest diversion of all: full-scale war in the Middle East.

Hopefully, the casualties will be limited. Hopefully, Americans will see through this. Hopefully, this will strengthen the resistance to Trump. Hopefully, it will lead to an even greater landslide victory for Democrats and independents in the midterm elections — if Trump allows midterm elections.

Please remain hopeful. Don’t give in to war fever. Stay strong. Be safe. Hug your loved ones.

  • Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org

This is Trump's war — and he will own all that comes next

The United States is now at war with Iran.

A single person — Donald J. Trump — has released the dogs of war on one of the most dangerous countries in the world, and done it without the consent of Congress or our allies, or even a clear explanation to the American people.

Just four days after delivering a State of the Union address in which he spoke of ending eight wars — spending just three minutes discussing Iran and a preference for “diplomacy.”

Anyone who has doubted Trump’s intention to replace American democracy with a dictatorship should now be fully disabused.

I share your despair, sadness, and fear. Even if our president was a wise and judicious man, surrounded by thoughtful advisers with impeccable integrity and wisdom, this would be a highly dangerous move.

Trump is facing the consequences of his decision in his first term to abandon the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action negotiated with Iran by Barack Obama and backed by France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia, and China.

Trump walked away from that treaty because it was Obama’s — and he hates Obama because Obama negotiated safeguards against Iran enriching uranium to weapons grade. Obama also got Obamacare through Congress, addressed climate change and nuclear proliferation, and was rewarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Obama was a winner. Trump is a loser. Trump cannot stomach this.

But why should America and thousands if not millions of innocent people pay the price of Trump’s egomaniacal stupidity?

Trump claimed in June to have disarmed Iran. He claimed again in his State of the Union last Tuesday to have “obliterated” the Iranian nuclear weapons program (an assertion rejected by the International Atomic Energy Agency).

Since then, Iran has taken steps to dig out the nuclear facilities hit during those strikes and it has resumed work at some sites long known to American spy agencies.

But those same spy agencies say there’s no evidence that Iran has made active efforts to resume enriching uranium or trying to build a mechanism to detonate a bomb.

Iran’s stockpiles of enriched uranium remain buried after June’s strikes, making it nearly impossible for Iran to build a bomb “within days,” as Trump and his lapdogs claim.

Trump says he wants “regime change.” But unlike Venezuela, the Islamic Republic has nearly a million men under arms. Any attempt to overthrow that regime will require American troops on the ground, and almost surely inflict mass casualties on Americans and on Iranians.

Besides, Trump won a second term promising “no regime change” and in 2024 he campaigned as “the first president in decades who started no new wars.”

He hasn’t prepared the American people for this. In his State of the Union he bragged again about having ended eight wars. He spent just three minutes discussing Iran and his preference for “diplomacy.”

He said Iran has refused to foreswear any nuclear weapons ambitions. Yet just hours before his address, Iran’s foreign minister reaffirmed on X that his country would "under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon."

Trump noted the Iran regime’s killing of thousands of protesters, but this hardly justifies a war that may cause the deaths of thousands more innocent civilians. (On Saturday morning, Iran’s Red Crescent said more than 60 children were killed in the strike on Shajarah Tayyebeh school in the southern town of Minab (a toll that has since been raised to 85.)

Make no mistake. The costs of this war — mayhem and deaths in the Middle East, higher oil prices (as Iran closes the Straight of Hormuz), increased risk of terrorism in Europe and the United States — could be catastrophic.

Yet Americans don’t support this war. They haven’t been told why we’re waging it. Trump’s MAGA base doesn’t want him to engage in regime change. Congress hasn’t approved this war.

Trump is going to war for himself and his boundless, malicious ego.

  • Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org

America's crazed new obsession is nothing more than a tall tale

I’m very short. At my zenith I was 4 feet, 11 inches.

From time to time, worried parents of abnormally short children phone or email me seeking reassurance. I tell them that if they or their children are desperate, they can resort to limb-lengthening surgeries, growth hormone treatments — humatrope — with unknown and potentially dangerous side effects, or a wide variety of homeopathic and crank remedies. But I discourage this.

The newest craze is height surgery, a procedure in which the leg bones are fractured and implanted with devices that slowly stretch them over several months. It can add three or so inches per procedure to a person’s height.

Mario Moya, chief executive at the LimbplastX Institute in Las Vegas, says demand for height surgery has been surging. Dr. S. Robert Rozbruch, an orthopedic surgeon at Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, says he used to see about 10 cases a year; last year, his clinics had 155 cases.

Last week, the New York Times ran a long feature on height surgery. The procedure was even used recently as a plot point in the film Materialists.

Why are so many parents worried about their child’s height these days? Maybe because, in this era of record-breaking inequality, they believe greater height will give their kid a leg up.

I gently urge the parents of short children not to seek height surgery or anything else to make their children taller.

I tell them to love their short kids, to inundate them with affection, and they’ll be okay.

I should know. I was bullied and ridiculed as a young kid, as I’ve recounted in my memoir, Coming Up Short.

Starting when I was around six years old, my mother and grandmother Minnie told me not to worry that I was at least a head shorter than other kids my age because I’d “shoot up” when I got to be 13 or 14 years old. I pictured a magic beanstalk; one morning, I’d wake up and be 6-foot-10. But by the time I was 15, I remained an inch under five feet, and I never got any taller.

Soon after John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961, when the whole country seemed to be bubbling with optimism, my optimistic mother took me to see a doctor in New York who specialized in bone growth. He took a bunch of measurements, asked questions about the heights of my grandparents and great-grandparents (they were all normal), made some X-rays, drew some blood samples, and three weeks later phoned to say he had no idea why I was so short.

Reluctantly, I gave up waiting to shoot up. By that time I wasn’t particularly worried about being bullied or ridiculed. But being a very short man wasn’t especially helpful when it came to dating. A few years later, Dartmouth College, which was then all-male, seemed comprised almost entirely of big young men able to swoop the inhabitants of women’s colleges literally off their feet. (When I swooped in, they seemed to flee.)

That’s where things stood, as it were, until I was in my 30s, when my then wife (about five inches taller than I) and I contemplated having children. Medical science had advanced considerably over the two decades, because there was an answer to why I was so short.

I inherited a mutation called Fairbanks Disease, or multiple epiphyseal dysplasia, a rare genetic disorder that slows bone growth. (The actor Danny DeVito also has this condition.) Normal bones grow when cartilage is deposited at their ends. The cartilage then hardens to become additional bone. But my cartilage didn’t work that way.

Not only were my bones short, but the experts predicted I’d also have pain in my joints. I’d often tire, they said, and have problems with my spine. I’d have arthritis all over, and I’d waddle when I walked. Other things would go wrong as well.

Their predictions were accurate. I have had problems with my hips, and in my late 30s had to replace both. I had a bout of grand mal seizures in my late 30s, which neurologists couldn’t explain. There’s no need to bore you with my aches and pains. But the geneticist I consulted explained that the odds of passing this mutation to my children were very small. Even if they had it, the odds that it would slow their bone growth or cause any other irregularities, or be passed on to their own children, were minuscule.

We decided to have kids. And our sons turned out perfectly normal. But what’s “normal” anyway? And why is normal so important? I’ve had a wonderful life. I have a loving family. I’ve had good friends, work that I consider satisfying and important, reasonably good health except for the above-mentioned problems. So what if I’m very short?

Researchers have correlated being taller with greater income, high-status jobs, and positive perceptions of leadership. And it can be a tricky issue in an era of dating apps that can filter for height preferences.

Yet David Sandberg, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, studied hundreds of children in the Buffalo area and found no real problem with being short and little benefit to being tall. In fact, height didn’t affect the number of friends those kids had, or how well they were liked by others, what others thought of them, or even their own perception of their reputation. But when psychologists Leslie Martel and Henry Biller asked several hundred university students to rate the qualities of men of varying heights on 17 criteria, short men were assumed to be less mature, less positive, less secure, less masculine, less successful, less capable, less confident, less outgoing, more inhibited, more timid, and more passive. In another study, only two of 79 women said they’d go on a date with a man shorter than themselves (the rest, on average, wanted to date a man at least 1.7 inches taller).

Heightism has even infected our language. Respected people have “stature” and are “looked up to.” People are more likely to make disparaging cracks about short people because nobody gets pulled up short for doing it — except for Randy Newman, who went too far with his “Short People (Got No Reason to Live)” song, which he has apparently regretted ever since.

When it comes to choosing leaders, our society is exceptionally heightist and seems to be getting more so. My dear friend and mentor, the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith, was 6-foot-8. He once said that favoring the tall was “one of the most blatant and forgiven prejudices in our society.” (When we walked around together, chatting away, people stared at us as if we were a carnival act. We laughed it off.)

When I ran for the Democratic nomination for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, it seemed that the only attribute reporters wanted to cover was my height. Regardless of what I said in my speeches, the Boston Globe ran photos of me standing on boxes so I could see over the podium. The right-wing Boston Herald ran a headline on its front page charging “Short People Are Furious with Reich” because I had joked about my height on the campaign trail. None of it helped me with that election. But I didn’t lose because of my height. I lost because I was a lousy campaigner.

Research shows that voters do prefer taller candidates. A paper published in 2013 by psychologists at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands analyzed the results of American presidential elections dating back to 1789. They found that taller candidates received more votes than shorter ones in roughly two-thirds of those elections. And the taller the candidates were relative to their opponents, the greater the average margin of their victory. Among presidents who have sought a second term, winners have been two inches taller, on average, than losers. The authors conclude that height may explain as much as 15 percent of the variation in election outcomes. Presidents are becoming taller relative to average Americans (as measured by army records of recruits of the same age cohort). The last president shorter than this average was William McKinley, elected in 1896.

A survey of the heights of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies showed they were on average six feet tall, about 2.5 inches taller than the average American man.

Why are we so heightist? Probably because of some genetic trigger in our brain that told early humans they needed the protection of very big men. Other things being equal, large males are more to be feared, and they live longer. An impulse to defer to them, or prefer them as mates, makes evolutionary sense.

In Size Matters, Stephen S. Hall writes that in the 18th century, Frederick William of Prussia paid huge sums to recruit giant soldiers from around the world, thereby giving tangible value to matters of inches, and revealing “the desirability of height for the first time in a large, post-medieval society.”

But hey, I’m okay with being protected by giant soldiers, big security guards, and massive first responders. I don’t want to do these sorts of jobs anyway. I’m fortunate to have grown up (or at least grown upward) in a society that values brains at least as much as brawn. And to have had parents who loved me for who I was.

  • Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org

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