Robert Reich

Friends,

Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders voted last Thursday on the Ellison family’s purchase of the company. Some 1.743 billion shares were cast in favor of the sale; 16.3 million were cast against it, a ratio of roughly 99 to 1.

1. Great for a Handful of Super-Wealthy, but Bad for Workers and Bad for America

This vote came soon after more than 4,000 workers in the media industry — directors, screenwriters, producers, actors, editors, cinematographers, musicians, and composers — signed a letter predicting an industry disaster if the sale went through.

That’s because, as my friend Harold Meyerson from The American Prospect has noted, such deals typically saddle the purchased companies with gigantic debts that buyers incur to make the deal — in the case of Warner Bros. Discovery, $79 billion — and this debt, in turn, requires that buyers slash costs (especially payrolls) to pay off some of it.

More than 70 percent of all the shares in Warner Bros. Discovery are held by institutional investors — including the Vanguard Group, BlackRock, and State Street. These institutions voted for the sale because they believe it will make their shares more valuable.

The sale will also make certain individuals a lot of money. David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, stands to collect some $886 million for shepherding it, in addition to his regular pay package (which was $51 million in 2024). Oracle’s Larry Ellison and his son, David, the new owners of Warner Bros. Discovery, are already among the richest people in the world.

But what about the workers in the industry who’ll lose their jobs as a result of the sale? What about all the people whose wages will be slashed? What about Los Angeles, which may lose a sizable portion of its major industry?

And what about the concentration of so much of the news business — so much of what Americans learn about what’s happening — under these two Trump suck-ups?

If Trump’s Justice Department approves the deal (do birds fly?), CBS News and CNN — along with CBS entertainment (home to Stephen Colbert, whose contract is about to run out and who will be taken off the air because of his criticisms of Trump) 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, the Ellisons.

2. The Moral Bankruptcy of Shareholder Capitalism

At the heart of modern American capitalism is the assumption that a corporation exists for only one purpose: to make its shares more valuable.

That goal trumps (excuse me) all other goals — such as raising workers’ wages, improving workers’ job security, creating more jobs, enhancing the quality of life for the community where a company is headquartered or does business, making life better for the inhabitants of the nation and the world, even protecting democracy.

In fact, if shareholders can make more money by shafting these other “stakeholders” and destroying these other values, that’s thought to be perfectly fine. It’s simply the way “impersonal market forces” work. It’s “efficient.”

Before the 1980s, American capitalism ran on a very different principle: that large corporations had responsibilities to all their stakeholders. “The job of management,” proclaimed Frank Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, in a 1951 address, “is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly affected interest groups … stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.”

The sentiment may seem quaint or inauthentic today, but in the three decades after World War II, it laid the basis for rapid economic growth and, with strong unions, an equally rapid expansion of the American middle class.

It reflected the sincere views of corporate executives. Many had endured the Great Depression and the war and felt some responsibility for America’s future well-being. These views helped legitimize the role of the large corporation in the public’s mind.

Today, shareholder capitalism has replaced stakeholder capitalism — and most Americans are excluded from its benefits.

Over 92 percent of the value of all the shares of stock owned by Americans is owned by the richest 10 percent. More than half is owned by the richest 1 percent. And even they have turned over their votes to giant institutions like Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street, which have no concern for the well-being of anyone or anything other than the short-term value of the shares they buy or sell.

We are witnessing the logical ending point of shareholder capitalism.

As the share values of America’s biggest corporations continue to soar — even as (and in many cases, because) they eliminate tens of thousands of jobs — the goal of “maximizing shareholder returns” is revealing itself to be morally bankrupt and economically rotten.

And as Artificial Intelligence takes over a growing amount of the work Americans do, the gap between share values (including the wealth of top investors and executives) and the incomes of most Americans will widen into a chasm.

3. Toward a New Stakeholder Capitalism

But here’s the good news: We don’t have to stick with shareholder capitalism. We don’t have to be victims of “impersonal market forces” over which we supposedly have no control.

We can have control. The market is a human creation. It is based on laws that humans devise. We can make laws that alter market forces to serve the interests of the vast majority instead of mainly the oligarchs at the top.

Over the last four decades, corporate laws have been shaped by wealthy individuals to channel a large portion of the nation’s total income and wealth to themselves.

If America’s super-wealthy continue to have unbridled influence over laws and gain control over the assets at the core of Artificial Intelligence, they will end up with almost all the wealth, all the income, and all the political power. Under such conditions, our economy and society simply cannot endure.

Laws can and should be changed to produce a new version of stakeholder capitalism that shares the wealth more widely.

How? For example, corporations could be required to provide long-term employees with the same number of shares as are held by investors. Profitable corporations could be required to provide their workers a portion (a quarter?) of their profits.

Corporations whose highest-paid executives earn more than 100 times their lowest-paid employees should have to pay a surtax. Corporations over a certain size (worth, say, $1 trillion or more) or having more than a certain share of their markets (say, 25 percent) should be broken up. Unfriendly (hostile) takeovers should be banned (as they were, in effect, before 1980).

The “stepped-up basis” rule that allows the wealthy to pass assets to their heirs without ever paying capital gains taxes on them should be eliminated. Vast accumulations of private wealth (say, in excess of a billion dollars) should, after a certain number of years, automatically be turned over to a fund providing subsistence incomes — a universal basic income.

State corporate laws shouldn’t empower corporations to make any campaign donations (effectively reversing Citizens United).

Sound radical? Maybe it is. But shareholder capitalism doesn’t work — as illustrated by the Warner Bros. Discovery fiasco. Unless radical changes are made, that fiasco is just a taste of what’s to come. If Artificial Intelligence isn’t to destroy capitalism and obliterate democracy, we’re going to have to come up with something that does work, and soon.

Happy May Day, 2026.

• 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

Friends,

I was driving my car yesterday, heading home after doing some errands, when someone ran a red light and just about hit me. I swerved to avoid him, then stopped my car, got out, and stood in the middle of the road screaming at the vanishing a--hole and giving him the finger.

Are drivers becoming more belligerent, or am I becoming grouchier?

Not just drivers. A few days ago, I was waiting in line at a bakery when someone broke in line ahead of me without even a “Please excuse me.” I tapped him on the shoulder and told him in no uncertain terms to get back in line.

Is our civic life becoming more brutish, or am I becoming angrier about it?

I’ve been seeing more people dump their trash on the street, and telling them to stop. I’m watching parents scream at their kids with a ferocity I’ve rarely witnessed before, and occasionally I suggest they treat their kids better. My neighbor has started using a loud power tool in the evening, and I’ve asked him to keep it down.

I’m aware of more shoving and pushing — in a department store, at a local restaurant, at an airport — which p---es me off. I hear more people using racial, ethnic, and sexist insults, which I just won’t tolerate. Yesterday’s errands included a stop at the neighborhood Safeway, where someone called the cashier a “b---h.” I told him he shouldn’t say that.

Are such small acts of bullying on the rise, or am I becoming less tolerant of them?

Okay, maybe I am turning into a grouchy old man. But there’s another old man in the White House who has lowered the moral tone of the nation. His selfish, bigoted belligerence has signaled to America that it’s okay to disregard social norms in pursuit of whatever you want.

He’s signaled it’s okay to disregard norms, not just in social interactions but in the system as a whole.

CEOs of hugely profitable firms are now laying off large numbers of workers — not because they have to, but because they figure they can make even more money that way. Until recently, highly profitable corporations didn’t do mass layoffs; it was considered bad form.

A Wall Street Journal story calls the past few months “the era of the mega-layoff,” citing Amazon’s recent reduction of its workforce by 30,000 and Oracle’s laying off many thousands of its employees. As the Journal reports,

“Instead of laying off people in more incremental—and less disruptive—waves, employers are seizing on the potential financial upsides of severing swaths of their workforces at once. That is a departure from not long ago, when mass layoffs registered as a sign of trouble or mismanagement and that a company needed to take drastic measures to right its performance. Now, such a company is more likely to get a big stock bump and praise from investors for acting boldly.”

Wall Street, meanwhile, is investing in crypto and private credit, in apparent disregard for the dangers they pose to the financial system. It’s as if the Street is saying: Who cares, if there’s money to be made?

We’re in a wave of selfish assertiveness even worse than the “greed is good” days of Gordon Gekko.

Trump is not singularly responsible for every such breach of public morality, of course. But a president inevitably influences the character of a nation. We’re continuously bombarded by how he acts, what he says and does, the ways he treats others, his style, his attitude.

Trump behavior is disgusting.

This coarsening of American life should be counted among the myriad ways Trump has worsened America.

I for one am going to resist this degradation of our civic life, even if it earns me a reputation of being an old grouch.

Even if it makes me one.

• 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

Friends,

As much as he’d love to be, Trump is not king of America. Which makes Charles III’s visit here a bit odd. It’s billed as a state visit but Charles isn’t a head of state; his function is purely symbolic.

Most Americans disapprove of Trump but there’s something special about the relationship between the Brits and their Royal Family. For it is in fact their royal family – not just an archaic symbol of what remains of the British Empire but a living, breathing, soap-opera of a family that in the minds of many Brits represents modern-day Britain.

To those who say it’s bizarre for one of the world’s major democracies of the twenty-first century to cling to the fiction of royalty — and it is indeed a fiction because Charles III has no tangible political power — I say this: It’s a relatively harmless fiction, and one that arguably meets the needs of people to gossip about, project upon, and vicariously live the lives of a storybook family that tries to be of service of their nation.

Here in America — at least before Trump — some of us romanticized our presidents and their families. Remember Camelot?

But because our presidents also run the executive branch of our government, the two roles – the projected glamor and the political reality – have often gotten confused, leaving us disappointed on both grounds.

After Camelot came Lyndon Johnson who pulled up dogs by their ears. And then, eventually, Donald (“Grab ‘em by the p---y. You can do anything”) Trump. You can’t get any further from a romanticized Camelot.

Britain’s government may seem drab and boring, but is at least free to do its drab and boring best.

Here, we demand that our presidents and their spouses throw formal balls (Trump is trying to build the biggest ballroom anywhere) and state dinners, decorate the White House like a castle, appear in person at every major national anniversary or memorial or funeral, and always symbolize the nation.

I’m certainly not suggesting America should have a royal family. Count me in the “No Kings” camp.

It’s just that Britain’s infatuation with its own royalty may have some social utility there that we Yanks don’t fully understand. Keeping the trappings of royalty separate from the daily slog of governing makes some sense.

• 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

Friends,

You can be Secretary of Defense (War) and cause the mightiest military in the world to be brought to its knees, and still keep your job in the Trump regime.

You can be in charge of public health and cause measles to reemerge as a major hazard to Americans, and still keep your job.

You can be illegally enriching yourself and your family as Commerce Secretary, and still keep your job.

But you’ll be fired for actively and unnecessarily getting bad press.

A few days ago, a senior White House official told Politico that FBI director Kash Patel’s bad press was “not a good look for a Cabinet secretary” and had frustrated Trump. “It’s only a matter of time,” they said, before Patel is canned.

Like Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Patel has been his own worst press agent.

He filed a $250 million defamation claim against The Atlantic magazine over its April 17 report claiming that his FBI colleagues were alarmed by his excessive drinking and unexplained absences. The report included claims that his security detail struggled to rouse him due to intoxication several times in the past year and that he drank heavily at a private club in Washington. Bureau employees expressed concerns that his behavior posed a threat to public safety.

I doubt it’s Patel’s excessive drinking and absences that are making Trump upset; it’s that they’re being reported, and that Patel has made them even bigger stories by suing The Atlantic over them.

Last week, Patel added to the drinking story when he erupted at NBC’s Ryan Reilly who asked Patel at a press conference whether, as The Atlantic also reported, he feared he had been fired when he was unable to log into his government computer.

“The problem with you and your baseless reporting is that is an absolute lie,” Patel shot back. “It was never said. It never happened. And I will serve in this administration as long as the president and the attorney general want me to do so.” Patel added, “you are off topic,” and “the answer to your question is you are lying.”

Worse yet, from Trump’s viewpoint, is that some of Patel’s drinking has been in the public eye. One video showed him drinking a beer, banging his fist on a table and celebrating with the US men’s hockey team at this year’s Winter Olympics in Italy.

Nothing gets Trump angrier than when one of his underlings is caught doing something stupid on videotape. After the video of Patel spread on social media, Trump called Patel to convey his discontent, Politico reported.

Soon after Patel sued the Atlantic, the New York Times reported that the FBI had been investigating Elizabeth Williamson. Williamson was the New York Times journalist who revealed that Patel had used a swat team to protect his country singer girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, when she was invited to sing the national anthem at the annual convention of the National Rifle Association. And that Patel had “ripped into” the swat team’s commander when the team left after it became apparent there was no threat to her.

It’s not that Patel misused government funds on his girlfriend. Or that Patel exploded at the FBI swat team’s commander. Or even that Patel ordered an investigation of the journalist who reported this. No, it’s that all of this became a national story — twice. Such self-generated negative press infuriates Trump.

The same day that the Times reported on the FBI’s investigation of Elizabeth Williamson, NBC reported that a federal judge in Texas had tossed out a defamation case brought by Patel against former FBI assistant director-turned-MSNBC contributor Frank Figliuzzi. Patel had brought the case over Figliuzzi’s remark on “Morning Joe” that Patel had been “been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building.”

More self-generated negative press: Not that Patel has been doing the nightclub circuit and disregarding his job, but that he invited a story about it by suing Figliuzzi.

Similarly, it’s not that Patel has repeatedly wrongly accused people of federal crimes (announcing someone had been arrested for the murder of right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk when the real murderer hadn’t yet turned himself in, and that a person of interest had been detained in the Brown University shooting, only for that individual to be released hours later).

It’s that Patel’s wrong accusations were widely reported, making Patel — and, indirectly, Trump — look dumber than dirt.

Patel simply doesn’t know how to keep a low profile. Like so many others in the Trump regime, he made his name by promoting himself. As a frequent guest on right-wing programs before Trump appointed him FBI director, he pushed conspiracy theories about the “deep state,” the 2020 presidential election, and the January 6 Capitol attack.

But the occupant of the Oval Office doesn’t want his underlings engaging in self-promotion and vindictive lawsuits. If anyone’s going to be self-promotional and vindictive, Trump wants it to be himself.

Patel has been trying to win back Trump’s favor by escalating FBI investigations into Trump enemies. But so far, the investigations haven’t yielded adequate evidence to indict, another mark against him in Trump’s book.

A week ago Sunday, Patel promised that the Justice Department would soon make arrests related to the 2020 election, stating on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that “We’ve got all the information we need, we’re working with our prosecutors at the Department of Justice under [acting] Attorney General Todd Blanche, and we are going to be making arrests, and it’s coming, and I promise you, it’s coming soon.”

Patel’s plea was obviously directed at Trump.

I doubt it will work. Patel will soon be locked out of his computer for good.

• 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

Friends,

For as long as I can remember, the White House Correspondents dinner was where the Washington press corps and Washington officials basked in each other’s celebrity.

Last night’s ended abruptly with gunshots, Secret Service officers screaming at attendees to “get down,” Trump and other officials being rapidly ushered out of the ballroom, plates crashing and chairs falling, and general pandemonium.

Last night, the celebrities became normal people feeling panic and fear.

Most of the time, Washington is a stage on which actors take on roles and dress up for assigned parts. I remember wearing an uncomfortable tuxedo to the White House Correspondents' Dinner, trying to make pleasant conversation with people who had skewered me that very morning.

The glamor and swish of the event was at such sharp odds with the hard daily slog of my job that the event seemed strangely disembodied, as if everyone had been given a script that they knew was total nonsense.

Trump has changed much of this. He has brought a grim hostility to the jobs of doing the public’s work and reporting on those who do the public’s work. This was the first White House Correspondents' dinner he agreed to attend, and by all accounts he was prepared to give the media pure hell in his remarks.

And then hell erupted in the form of another crazed gunman. As I write this, it appears that one Secret Service agent was injured but none of the luminaries were hurt.

There is a close relationship between Trump and violence — not just the attempts on his life but also the violence he’s unleashed on the world, the violence his ICE and Border Patrol agents have caused inside America, the violence he has incited among his followers. (A few of last night’s attendees were in Congress on January 6, 2021, when Trump’s thugs attacked the U.S. Capitol.)

Trump’s violence has resulted in thousands of deaths and injuries. That is no justification for last night’s attack, of course, but it is part of what he has wrought in America. He has changed the script in Washington.

It is no longer the hard slog I remember. The drama in Washington is now a chaotic tragedy, most of whose actors — those who make the news and those who report it — live in continuous uncertainty and turmoil.

• 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

Friends,

Today’s question: Why did Trump on Wednesday post the video and transcript of a bigoted podcaster who used racist tropes against Chinese and Indian immigrants?

In it, Michael Savage says:

“A baby here becomes an instant citizen, and then they bring the entire family in from China or India or some other hellhole on the planet. … [T]here’s almost no loyalty to this country amongst the immigrant class coming in today. No, they’re not like the European Americans of today and their ancestors. … We’ve gone from the melting pot to the chamber pot.”

Savage also derides American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Cecillia Wang, a U.S. citizen who argued before the Supreme Court against Trump’s executive order banning birthright citizenship. Savage claims she is “pushing to destroy our national identity” and to “turn us into a colony of China.”

Why did the president of the United States repost this excrement?

The easiest answer is Trump wants to stir up America’s bigots to support his executive order against birthright citizenship, as the Supreme Court considers its constitutionality.

But this can’t really be the reason. Not even the high court’s most dishonest and stupid rightwing justices would be swayed by messages coming from bigots stirred up by Trump’s repost.

Could it be that Trump just wants to stir up racism and bigotry because he likes stirring it up? (Hours before reposting Savage’s sewage, Trump posted disparaging remarks about the Supreme Court, singling out Justice Ketanji Jackson Brown as a “Low IQ person,” a critique he often directs toward Brown and Black people.)

But why would Trump want to stir up racism and bigotry right now? Doesn’t he have enough of a problem on his hands with his war in Iran going so badly that even his MAGA base is starting to unravel over it? (Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and other MAGA luminaries have recently broken with Trump over the war.)

Bingo. This is exactly why he wants to stir up racism and bigotry now.

Trump knows that the way to keep his base together — to stop it unraveling over his war in Iran — is to stoke fear of “them.” His MAGA base may not like never-ending wars in the Middle East, but they dislike immigrants of color even more.

This is Trump’s M.O., friends. Every time he needs to strengthen his base, he feeds it more bigotry.

After the Justice Department released millions of pages of Jeffrey Epstein-related documents in January and February, including thousands of references to Trump — which shook the MAGA base — what did Trump do? He re-posted a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.

Following the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law on Nov. 19, 2025, what did Trump do? He described Somali immigrants living in the U.S. as “garbage” who “contribute nothing” to society.

Every instance of Trump reposting bigoted filth follows some potential crack in the MAGA base. Trump’s tried-and-true method of recharging the base is to give them some more reasons to fear “them.”

This was also the purpose of his executive order against birthright citizenship, which he signed on Jan. 20, 2025, his first day in office.

Officially titled "Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship," its purpose wasn’t so much to get the Supreme Court to overturn birthright citizenship — highly unlikely, given the express language of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Its real purpose was to reassure his base, on his first day back in the White House, that he was on their side, and against “others,” whom he had spent almost his whole campaign demonizing.

• 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

Friends,

Trump’s domestic and foreign policies — ranging from his attempted coup against the United States in January 2021, to his ICE and Border Patrol excesses (including murders in Minnesota), to his incursion into Venezuela and abduction of its president, to his attack on Iran, and his threats against Cuba, Colombia, and Greenland — all undermine the rule of law, domestically and internationally.

But that’s not all. They threaten what we mean by civilization.

The moral purpose of civilized society is to prevent the stronger from attacking and exploiting the weaker. Otherwise, we’d be permanently immersed in a brutish war in which only the fittest and most powerful could survive.

Trump believes that might makes right — that the stronger are entitled to attack and exploit the weaker. Violence against those who are or appear weaker is a hallmark of his presidency and his outlook in general.

He is profoundly and dangerously wrong.

In January, he called the unilateral military intervention that ended in the kidnapping of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro an example of the “iron laws that have always determined global power.”

What “iron laws” is he referring to? “Might makes right” is not an iron law. It marks the destruction of the rule of law.

When challenged about the Maduro operation, White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller mocked Jake Tapper on CNN for his apparent naïveté about “international niceties” like the United Nations charter. “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” said Miller.

Sorry, Stephen. Strength, force, and power do not “govern” anything. They’re the exact opposite of governing. They’re survival of the fittest — the law of the jungle.

On April 7, Trump told the Iranian regime to surrender to American might or “a whole civilization will die tonight.” That kind of talk doesn’t enlarge American power. It delegitimizes American power.

In reality, Trump is destroying any remaining faith that the United States can be trusted to exercise power responsibly. He is also, not incidentally, erasing any distinction between the exercise of American might and Russian conduct in Ukraine and Chinese behavior in the South China Sea or (potentially) over Taiwan.

If the United States stays on this course, it will find itself bereft of allies and friends, a lonely superpower in a lawless international system it has helped to create.

The genius of America’s post-1945 foreign policy was to embed America’s power in international institutions and laws, including the UN charter, emphasizing multilateralism, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.

America didn’t always live up to these ideals, of course. But all nations, regardless of their size or power, had a stake in them. They not only helped legitimize American power but also maintained international stability and avoided another world war.

The same moral underpinning provides the foundation for a good society. To be morally legitimate, any system of laws must be premised on preventing the stronger from attacking and exploiting the weaker. If a system is to be broadly accepted and obeyed, the entire public must believe that it is in their interest to support it.

But this aspiration is easily violated by those who abuse their wealth and power. Maintaining it requires that the powerful have enough integrity to abstain from seeking short-term wins, and that the rest of us hold them accountable if they don’t.

Yet we now inhabit a society grown vastly more unequal. Political and economic power are more concentrated and less constrained than at any time since the first Gilded Age. This invites the powerful to exploit the weaker because the powerful feel omnipotent.

The wealth of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Charles Koch, and a handful of others is almost beyond comprehension. The influence of Big Tech, Big Oil, and the largest aerospace and defense corporations extends over much of America and the globe. AI is likely to centralize wealth and power even more.

Meanwhile, Trump — enabled by cowardly congressional Republicans and a pliant majority on the Supreme Court — has turned the U.S. presidency into the most powerful and unaccountable agent of American government in history, arrayed on the side of the powerful, domestically and internationally.

A direct line connects Trump’s attempted coup in 2020 and January 2021 to his capture of Maduro, to his attack on Iran without congressional authority, to his blatant corruption. All are lawless. All are premised on the hubris of omnipotence.

You see much the same in Putin’s war on Ukraine. In Xi’s threats against Taiwan. In global depredation and monopolization by Big Tech and Big Oil. In Russian, Chinese, and American oligarchs who have fused public power with their personal wealth.

But unfettered might does not make right. It makes for instability, upheaval, depravity, and war.

History shows that laws and norms designed to constrain the powerful also protect them. Without such constraints, their insatiable demands for more power and wealth eventually bring them down — along with their corporations, nations, and empires. And threaten world war.

Trump’s blatant lawlessness is already bringing him down. It will haunt America and the world for years to come.

• 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

Friends,

The fog of war is getting thicker.

According to the Washington Post, a “U.S. delegation was expected to depart Tuesday for a second round of face-to-face peace talks with Iran” but “was delayed for ‘additional policy meetings’ involving Vice President JD Vance.”

So, the reason for the delay was additional policy meetings in Washington?

Not quite. According to the New York Times, Vance’s trip was “suspended because Tehran did not respond to American negotiating positions.”

Well, not really. The Wall Street Journal reports that plans for negotiations are “in flux” because “Tehran hasn’t yet decided on sending a delegation.”

Wait. According to CNN, Iran isn’t participating in peace negotiations because of “contradictory messages, contradictory behaviors, and unacceptable actions by the American side.”

These are just the latest in a series of confused reports.

Why the confusion? Is it because these news organizations are getting inconsistent information? Because the U.S. is getting inconsistent messages from Iran? Because U.S. decision makers don’t themselves know what’s happening? Or because no one on the U.S. side is in charge?

It’s probably all of the above, but I fear it’s largely the last — no one on the U.S. side is in charge.

On April 18, the Journal reported:

“After the president learned that an American jet had been shot down in Iran, with two airmen missing … Tump screamed at aides for hours….
Aides kept the president out of the room as they got minute-by-minute updates because they believed his impatience wouldn’t be helpful, instead updating him at meaningful moments, a senior administration official said ….
Six hours later, the chest-thumping president was back with another audacious gamble to loosen Iran’s grip on its most powerful point of leverage, the Strait of Hormuz. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell,” he blasted on social media Easter morning from the White House residence, adding an Islamic prayer to the post.
A president who thrives on drama is bringing an even more intense version of his unorthodox, maximalist approach to a new situation—fighting a war. He is veering between belligerent and conciliatory approaches and grappling behind the scenes with just how badly things could go wrong.
At the same time, the president sometimes loses focus, spending time on the details of his plans for the White House ballroom or on midterm fundraisers—and telling advisers he wants to shift to other topics.”

I’ve served three presidents and advised a fourth. I’ve been in and around several White Houses. When presidential aides tell reporters that they’ve had to keep a president out of the room because they believed his impatience wouldn’t be helpful, what they’re really saying is they’re dealing with someone who’s so irrational they don’t trust his judgment.

This is the most chilling thing I’ve heard so far about Trump and his war in Iran. It means Trump isn’t in charge. But neither, presumably, is anyone around him — neither JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, Dan Caine, or the staffers clustered around each ot them. Even assuming that each of them is trying to do the best job they can, even assuming they’re trying to coordinate with each other, the most likely scenario is an ongoing mess.

At best, the fog of war causes many to lose sight of where they are and what their priorities should be. At worst — when the judgment of the commander-in-chief isn’t trusted — the fog is impenetrable. I fear that’s where we are now.

• 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

Friends,

I’ve long assumed that Samuel Alito was the worst.

Alito — who authored the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022), the case that ended constitutional abortion rights by merely asserting that the high court’s prior opinion in Roe v. Wade (1973) was wrongly decided; who accepted a 2008 luxury fishing trip to Alaska, including private jet travel, from hedge fund billionaire and GOP donor Paul Singer yet failed to disclose it on Alito's financial forms and didn’t even recuse himself from decisions involving Singer’s subsequent business before the Supreme Court; who hoisted an inverted American flag outside his Virginia home shortly after the January 6 Capitol riot, a symbol of support for Trump's false claims of a stolen 2020 election — has the moral and intellectual stature of a poisonous toad.

But I’ve come to revise my view of the court’s worst Justice.

Clarence Thomas is 77 years old. He has now served on the Supreme Court for over 34 years, making him the longest-serving member of the Court. He is a bitter, angry, severe hard-right, intellectually dishonest, ideologue. After reading his latest thoughts on America, I’ve concluded Thomas is even worse than Alito.

Last Wednesday, Thomas gave a rare public address at the University of Texas in Austin that began as a banal tribute to the Declaration of Independence before degenerating into a misleading screed against progressivism.

“At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream,” Thomas intoned. “The proponents of this new set of first principles, most prominently among them the twenty-eighth president, Woodrow Wilson, called it progressivism.”

Thomas went on to blame progressives for the worst crimes of the 20th century, insisting that “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao” were all “intertwined with the rise of progressivism,” as was “racial segregation,” “eugenics,” and other evils.

This is pure rubbish.

In reality, America’s Progressive era emerged at the start of the 20th century from the corruption and excesses of America’s first Gilded Age (we’re now in the second, if you hadn’t noticed) — its record inequalities of income and wealth, its “robber barons” who monopolized industries and handed out sacks of money to pliant legislators, it’s dangerous factories and unsafe working conditions, its violent attacks on workers who tried to form unions, its corporate control over all facets of government, its widespread poverty and disease, and its corrupt party machines.

In many ways, the Progressive Era — whose most prominent leader was Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, not Woodrow Wilson, by the way — saved capitalism from its own excesses by instituting a progressive income tax, an estate tax, pure food and drug laws, and America’s first laws against corporate influence in politics.

Then, under Teddy Roosevelt’s fifth cousin (Franklin D.), came Social Security, the 40-hour workweek (with time-and-a-half for overtime), the right to form unions, and laws and regulations that limited Wall Street’s ability to gamble with other people’s money.

Clarence Thomas got it exactly backwards. Had we not had the Progressive Era and its reforms extending through the 1930s, America might well have succumbed to fascism — as did Germany under Hitler, and Italy under Mussolini, or to communist fascism, as did Russia under Stalin. Progressive and New Deal reforms acted as bulwarks against the rise of fascism in America.

In fact, it’s been the demise of such reforms since Ronald Reagan that have opened the way to Trumpian neo-fascism.

Over a third of American workers in the private sector were unionized in the 1950s, giving them bargaining leverage to get higher wages and better working conditions. Now, fewer than 6 percent are unionized, which has contributed to the flattening of wages, a contracting middle class, inequalities of income and wealth rivaling the first Gilded Age, and an angry and suspicious working class that’s become easy prey for demagogues.

Wall Street has been deregulated — allowing it to go on gambling sprees such as the one that produced the financial crisis of 2008, which claimed millions of working peoples’ homes, savings, and jobs.

America’s social safety nets have become so frayed that almost a fifth of the nation’s children are now in poverty. Yet Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump have slashed taxes on the rich and on big corporations and have allowed giant corporations to merge into giant monopolies rivaling the trusts of the first Gilded Age. And Trump has ushered in an era of corruption the likes of which America hasn’t seen since that earlier disgraceful era.

Thomas claims that, “The century of progressivism did not go well.” Baloney. It helped America create the largest middle class the world had ever seen, while also extending prosperity to millions of Black and brown people.

The tragedy is that America turned its back on progressivism and on social progress, in part because of the Supreme Court and Justice Clarence Thomas.

Flashback: I was in law school in 1973 when the Supreme Court decided Roe, protecting a pregnant person’s right to privacy under the 14th amendment to the Constitution.

Clarence Thomas was in my law school class at the time, as was Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Clinton) and Bill Clinton.

The professors used the “Socratic method” — asking hard questions about the cases they were discussing and waiting for students to raise their hands in response, and then criticizing the responses. It was a hair-raising but effective way to learn the law.

One of the principles guiding those discussions is called stare decisis — Latin for “to stand by things decided.” It’s the doctrine of judicial precedent. If a court has already ruled on an issue (say, on reproductive rights), future courts should decide similar cases the same way. Supreme Courts can change their minds and rule differently than they did before, but they need good reasons to do so, and it helps if their opinion is unanimous or nearly so. Otherwise, their rulings appear (and are) arbitrary — even, shall we say? — partisan.

In those classroom discussions almost 50 years ago, Hillary’s hand was always first in the air. When she was called upon, she gave perfect answers — whole paragraphs, precisely phrased. She distinguished one case from another, using precedents and stare decisis to guide her thinking. I was awed.

My hand was in the air about half the time, and when called on, my answers were meh.

Clarence’s hand was never in the air. I don’t recall him saying anything, ever.

Bill was never in class.

Only one of us now sits on the Supreme Court. And he has shown no respect for stare decisis.

Nor has he respected judicial ethics.

A federal law — 28 U.S. Code § 455 — requires that “any justice, judge, or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Thomas’s wife, Ginni, actively strategized with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on overturning the election results. Between Election Day 2020 and the days following the January 6th attack on the Capitol, she exchanged 29 text messages with Meadows, in which she spread false theories about the election, urged Meadows to overturn the election results, and called for specific actions from the White House to help overturn the election. She also served as one of nine board members of a group that helped lead the “Stop the Steal” movement and called for the punishment of House Republicans who participated in the U.S. House Select Committee investigating the January 6th attack.

Yet Clarence Thomas has repeatedly participated in cases that have come to the high court directly or indirectly involving the 2020 election results, refusing to disqualify himself.

In addition, he failed to disclose his wife’s income from her work at the Heritage Foundation, in violation of the Ethics in Government Act.

Finally, there’s his speech last week in Austin. How can Americans be expected to believe in the impartiality of the Supreme Court in general and Clarence Thomas in particular when he condemns an entire philosophy of government — progressivism — and all the people who continue to call themselves progressives, in effect labeling them neo-fascists?

At the start of his speech last week in Austin, Clarence Thomas noted that “My wife Virginia and I have many wonderful friends and acquaintances here, and it is so special to have our dear friends Harlan and Kathy Crow join us today.”

He was, of course, referring to the Republican mega-donor who has spent the last twenty years lavishing Thomas with personal gifts, luxury yacht trips, fancy vacations, and funding for Ginni Thomas’s political organization.

Small wonder that Clarence Thomas prefers the Gilded Age over the Progressive Era. He’s the living embodiment of The Gilded Age’s public-be-damned excesses.

Hence, he’s my nominee for the worst justice in modern Supreme Court history.

• 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

Friends,

I want to make sure you know that Lori Chavez-DeRemer has resigned as Secretary of Labor [translated: she was told to resign by the White House], after facing investigations by the Department’s inspector general into multiple allegations of misconduct.

She’s alleged to have been drinking during the workday from a “stash” of alcohol in her office, arranging official trips for herself that were extended vacations, taking subordinates to an Oregon strip club while on one such trip, showing no interest in the work of the department, and having an affair with a member of her security team.

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

In other words, Chavez-DeRemer was turning the great department I once headed and loved into s--t. And I hold Trump responsible because he appointed her.

As I shared with you a few weeks ago, I loved the Department of Labor 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.

I hung the painting of Frances Perkins 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.)

But like so much else Trump has done, he’s turned what was once a great department into a f---ing mess. And it frankly breaks my heart.

It’s what you get when you have a president and White House staff who don’t give a rat’s a-- about whom they appoint to positions of power except for their loyalty to Trump and how they look on television.

Trump and his White House assistants don’t mind if his appointees wreck 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.

What they do mind is if a cabinet member makes Trump look bad, which is why Krisi Noem and Pam Bondi are now history — along with Chavez-DeRemer.

It infuriates me because I’ve seen government work for the people. I’ve witnessed public servants who care deeply and bust their a--es 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 been 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 the departments of the government and try to remedy some of the wreckage that Trump and his appointees have wreaked on America.

In the meantime, goodbye and good riddance to Madam Secretary Chavez-DeRemer.

• 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

Friends,

You’ve got to hand it to Pope Leo, who used a speech Thursday in Cameroon to express “woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”

I can’t imagine who Leo was talking about, can you?

In case there was any doubt, the pope added: “The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants, yet it is held together by a multitude of supportive brothers and sisters.”

The tyrant in the Oval Office has been trying to portray his war in Iran as a “just war” backed by the will of God and Jesus Christ. Pope Leo disagrees. Jesus, he says, “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.”

Pete Hegseth, Trump’s self-described secretary of war, has promised to give “no quarter” to the “barbaric savages” of the Iranian regime, and called on the American people to pray for victory “in the name of Jesus Christ.”

At a worship service at the Pentagon on March 25, Hegseth asked God for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

Hegseth’s words apparently provoked Pope Leo to preach on Palm Sunday that God ignores the prayers of those whose “hands are full of blood” from making war.

This past Sunday, Trump attacked the pope on social media as “terrible on foreign policy,” and suggested that Trump himself was the reason Leo was selected to be pope in the first place.

On Tuesday, JD Vance said the pope should be more “careful when he talks about matters of theology.”

Hello? What in heaven’s name is the vice-president to the least-careful-of-what-he-says president doing telling the pope to be more careful of how he interprets Catholic theology?

I’m not Catholic, but I always thought the pope’s words about matters theological were considered by Catholics to be as close to God’s own words as humans can get.

Yesterday in Cameroon, the pope also said: “The masters of war pretend not to know that it takes only a moment to destroy, yet often a lifetime is not enough to rebuild. They turn a blind eye to the fact that billions of dollars are spent on killing and devastation.”

At this rate, Trump is going to demand the Justice Department open a criminal investigation of the pope. Trump will get hold of all the bills for restoring the Sistine Chapel and claim the pope misappropriated funds. He’ll have Jeanine Pirro seek an injunction against the pope to block any further papal statements. He’ll threaten that unless the pope stops criticizing him, he’ll get God to reconvene the College of Cardinals and fire Leo.

So far, though, Pope Leo isn’t backing down.

Praise the Lord.

• 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

Friends,

Trump’s chief bigot, Stephen Miller, said on Fox News that immigrants to the United States bring problems that extend through generations.

“Not only is the first generation unsuccessful,” Miller claimed. “You see persistent issues in every subsequent generation. So you see consistent high rates of welfare use, consistent high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.”

Bulls---. The children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of most immigrants are models of upward mobility in America.

In a recent paper, researchers found that immigrants today are no slower to move into the middle class than immigrants were a century ago. In fact, no matter when their parents came to the U.S. or what country they came from, children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than their U.S.-born peers.

Stephen Miller’s great-great-grandfather was born in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl in what is now Belarus. He came to America in 1903 with $8 in his pocket and spoke no English. Three generations later, little Stephen was born in 1985 to American parents but somehow developed a visceral hatred for immigrants.

Miller and Trump have been dealing with immigrants the same way Pete Hegseth and Trump have been dealing with Iran and the Strait of Hormuz — inflicting pain on both them and the United States, in the hope their pain will be worse than the pain we endure.

Wednesday’s Tax Day was supposed to be a big PR boon for Trump, in which he touts his “no taxes on tips” and other ersatz tax “cuts” for average working Americans (while hiding that his Big Ugly bill actually gave most of its benefits to the wealthy and big corporations, and paid for them by taking money from Medicaid and food stamps and other programs the working class and poor rely on).

But the war in Iran has made everything — even Stephen Miller’s war on immigrants — feel like the Strait of Hormuz.

Consider that before Miller ordered the Internal Revenue Service to give ICE officials the addresses of people subject to deportation, undocumented immigrants had been paying roughly $60 billion annually in federal taxes, much of it going into Social Security and Medicare — programs from which they don’t benefit.

Now, tax experts fear many immigrants won’t file returns, and those who formerly had their taxes withheld in every paycheck will shift into under-the-table jobs. The Yale Budget Lab, a nonpartisan research center, projected lost tax revenue of about $300 billion over a decade.

Meanwhile, Miller’s vast, sadistic crackdown on undocumented workers is causing significant pain for the U.S. economy. There aren’t enough workers in construction, hospitality, and agriculture to keep these sectors going. Another Strait of Hormuz situation.

Let’s be clear. Apart from Native Americans, we are all immigrants — all descended from “foreigners.” Some of our ancestors came here eagerly; some came because they were no longer safe in their homelands; some came enslaved.

As Ronald Reagan put it in a 1988 speech,

You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won’t become a German or a Turk. But … anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American. A person becomes an American by adopting America’s principles, especially those principles summarized in the “self-evident truths” of the Declaration of Independence, such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Reagan understood that America is a set of aspirations and ideals more than it is a nationality.

Miller and Trump, on the other hand, want to fuel bigotry. Their entire project depends on hate. Like dictators before him, Trump’s road to tyranny is paved with stones hurled at “them” — whether “they” are immigrants, Iranians, or anyone else who doesn’t fit the white Christian nationalist mold.

America is better than Trump and his chief bigot.

• 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