Robert Reich

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

We have invented a threat so lethal this Trump stooge should not be allowed near it

Which is more important to you? Allowing Pete Hegseth to use artificial intelligence (AI) however he wants, OR preventing AI from doing mass surveillance of Americans and creating lethal weapons without human oversight?

That’s the stark choice posed by the intensifying fight between an AI corporation called Anthropic and Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Secretary of “War.”

AI is dangerous as hell. I view it as one of the four existential crises America now faces — along with climate change, widening inequality, and the destruction of our democracy.

To be sure, AI is capable of changing human life for the better. But if unregulated, it could be a destructive nightmare — giving government the power to know everything about us and suppress all dissent, distorting news and media to the point where no one can distinguish between lies and truth, and threatening human beings with bots that could decide we’re unnecessary obstacles to their taking over the earth.

Now is the time we should be putting guardrails in place. But two forces are making this difficult if not impossible.

The first is corporate greed, which is why OpenAI, Elon Musk’s xAI, and Google have jettisoned all precautions. Several AI researchers have left AI companies in recent weeks, warning that safety and other considerations are being pushed aside as their corporations raise billions of dollars and in preparation for initial public offerings that will make their executives hugely wealthy.

The second is the Trump regime, which doesn’t wants any restrictions on AI — including state government’s. That’s largely because the AI industry has become a powerful force in Washington, throwing money at politicians who’ll do its bidding (including Trump) and against politicians who want guardrails. And because so many Trump officials are corrupt, with their own financial stakes in AI.

Anthropic has been one of the most safety-conscious of all AI companies. It was founded as an AI safety research lab in 2021 after its CEO Dario Amodei and other co-founders left OpenAI, concerned that OpenAI’s ChatGPT wasn’t focused enough on safety.

Amodei has argued that A.I. needs strict guardrails to prevent it from potentially wrecking the world. In 2022, he chose not to release an earlier version of Anthropic’s AI software Claude, fearing it would start a dangerous technology race. In a podcast interview in 2023, he said there was a 10 to 25 percent chance that A.I. could destroy humanity.

In January, Amodei argued in an essay that “using A.I. for domestic mass surveillance and mass propaganda” was “entirely illegitimate,” and that A.I.-automated lethal weapons could greatly increase the risks “of democratic governments turning them against their own people to seize power.” Internally, the company has strict guidelines barring its technology from being used to facilitate violence.

Over the past year Anthropic has battled the Trump regime by pushing for state and federal AI guardrails.

In recent weeks, Hegseth and Amodei have been fighting over the Pentagon’s use of Anthropic’s AI, called Claude. Amodei has stuck to his demands: no surveillance of Americans, and no lethal autonomous weapons lacking human control.

The fight started when Palantir helped the Pentagon capture Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Palantir is a Pentagon contractor that uses Anthropic’s Claude. (Palantir, co-founded by far-right billionaire Peter Thiel and now headed by Alex Karp, is my candidate for the worst corporation in America because it allows governments, militaries, and law enforcement agencies to quickly process and analyze massive amounts of your personal data.)

When top executives at Anthropic asked executives at Palantir if Claude had been used in the Maduro operation, the Palantir execs became alarmed that Anthropic might not be a reliable partner in future Pentagon operations. They contacted the Pentagon and Hegseth.

Last Tuesday, Hegseth issued Anthropic an ultimatum: It must allow the Pentagon to use its AI for any purpose or the Trump regime will invoke the Defense Production Act — forcing Anthropic to let the Pentagon to use Claude while also putting all Anthropic’s government contracts at risk.

The Pentagon already has agreements with Musk’s xAI to use its AI Grok, and is closing in on an agreement with Google to use its own AI model, Gemini. But Anthropic’s Claude is considered a superior product, producing more accurate information.

What’s at stake here? Everything.

Pentagon officials have said that they have the right to use AI however they wish, as long as they use it lawfully.

But because AI has so much political power, Congress and the Trump regime won’t enact laws to prevent it from doing horrendous things. That in effect leaves the responsibility to private AI companies such as Anthropic. Anthropic says it wants to support the government but must ensure that its AI is used in line with what it can “responsibly do.”

Hegseth and the Trump regime have given Anthropic until this Friday at 5 pm to consent to letting the Pentagon use its AI however it wishes or it will simply take it.

Friends, this isn’t just a dispute between two people — Hegseth and Amodei. Nor is it a fight between the Pentagon and a single corporation. The issue goes way beyond this particular controversy. I don’t want to be overly alarmist about it, but the outcome could affect the future of humanity.

What can you do? Call your senators and representatives now, today, and tell them you don’t want the Defense Department to take Anthropic’s AI technology, and you do want them to enact strict controls on the future uses of AI.

Visit www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member and type your address into the search box. A list of your representatives and their contact information will appear. Or you can call the Capitol switchboard directly at 202-224-3121 to be connected to your members’ office.

As I’ve said before, congressional staffers log every single call that comes into their office in a database that informs the member of the issues their constituents are engaged with, and they use this data to inform their decisions. Staffers answering the phones are trained to talk with constituents, and they do it all day. They won’t be debating you about your position, and are likely to be primarily listening and taking notes.

Please. Today.

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 monstrous right-wing ruling may have finally met its match

Good news.

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

A similar bill has just been introduced in California.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sound farfetched? Not at all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump will go nuts if this happens after his big State of the Union speech

I’m not going to watch the State of the Union address Tuesday night. I urge you not to, either.

I hope Nielsen (or whoever makes such estimates these days) will find that far fewer Americans watched Trump’s State of the Union than have watched any other State of the Union in recent memory. It will drive Trump nuts.

There are plenty of other reasons for not watching.

First, he doesn’t deserve our attention. He’s abused and defiled the American presidency, even worse than he did in his first term.

He’s openly taken bribes. He’s blatantly usurped the powers of Congress. He has overtly used the Justice Department to punish people he considers his enemies and pardon people loyal to him. He has willfully rejected the rule of law, broken treaties, literally destroyed part of the White House, thumbed his nose at our allies (including our closest and heretofore loyal neighbors), and utterly failed his constitutional duty to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. He lies like most people breathe. He’s a fraud and a traitor.

Second, we already know what he’s going to say because he’s already stated and restated his lies every chance he gets. He says the economy is in wonderful shape, that he’s settled six wars, that he’s brought peace to the Middle East, that he’s made America safer and more secure, that the 2020 election was stolen from him, ad nauseam.

He assumes that if he repeats these lies often enough, people will believe them. Why should we give him more of an audience for his lies?

Third, he refuses to be president of the United States but only of the people who voted for him in 2024.

He talks in glowing terms about “my” people while denigrating “them” — those of us who didn’t vote for him, who still disapprove of him, or who refuse to give him whatever he wants.

He won’t even fund so-called blue states. So far this year he’s axed over $1.5 billion in blue-state grants, contrary to the wishes of Congress.

If he doesn’t believe he’s my president, why should I treat him as my president and watch his State of the Union?

Fourth and finally, I already know the real state of the union. It sucks.

The economy has been good for big business and wealthy Americans but shitty for small businesses and average working Americans.

Although Trump repeatedly promised that his tariffs would reduce U.S. imports, shrink the trade deficit, and lead to a revival in American manufacturing, the opposite has happened. The annual trade deficit in goods last year hit a record high. And U.S. manufacturers cut 108,000 jobs.

In the 2024 election, Trump also promised to bring down prices, but inflation is still steaming ahead. Prices grew at an annual rate of 3 percent in December. He’s so out of touch with what most Americans are enduring that he calls the crisis of affordability “fake news.”

He promised to control immigration, but 6 out of 10 Americans think he’s gone “too far” by sending federal agents into American cities who have caused mayhem and murder.

He promised to avoid foreign entanglements, but he abducted the president of Venezuela, killed more than 150 Venezuelans, and is now planning to attack Iran.

His menacing the Middle East has created another inflation risk: The possibility that a key oil export route will be disrupted has caused the price of Brent crude to soar.

For all these reasons, I’m not going to watch Trump’s State of the Union. I recommend that you don’t, either.

Your senators and representatives in Congress should boycott it, too. You might call their offices to suggest this. (Some Democrats are already planning to skip it, opting instead for a counter-programming event on the National Mall dubbed “The People’s State of the Union.” Good!)

And why the hell should justices of the Supreme Court show up, especially after he says he’s “ashamed” of the six who decided his tariffs exceeded his authority — calling the three Democratic appointees a “disgrace to our nation” and the three conservatives who voted against him “fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats,” “very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution,” “swayed by foreign interests,” and “an embarrassment to their families”?

Boycott the State of the Union. It’s the least we can do.

***

PS: On a not unrelated point, I asked many of you on Friday for your advice on whether I should accept a dinner invitation, knowing that “Jim,” a strong Trump supporter, would be there. 31 percent of you thought I should go but not talk about Trump, while 29 percent of you recommended I send regrets.

Well, I accepted the invite and went to the dinner party. It was a disaster. I tried not to talk about Trump, but Jim goaded me into it. I won the argument but made an ass of myself. I should have listened to those of you who advised me against going.

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

Clear evidence shows Trump is in steep decline — but we should still fear worse to come

I’ve always been a cup-half-full kind of guy, even when the cup is a tenth full.

So I’m delighted that federal troops are leaving Minneapolis. Also that communities across America are mobilizing to block ICE warehouses. And that Democrats have temporarily stopped the funding of the Department of Homeland Insecurity.

I’m pleased that the Supreme Court has struck down Trump’s tariffs.

And that some Republicans in Congress have stopped doing whatever Trump tells them to do.

And I couldn’t be happier that Trump’s approval rating continues to plummet. More voters now disapprove than approve of his job performance in all of the seven swing states he won in 2024!

So, I’d like to believe the worst is over. I wish I could tell you (and myself) to relax.

But I have to be honest with you: I fear worse is to come.

Why? Because ICE is recruiting like mad in a massive $100 million effort targeting military and gun enthusiasts, NASCAR attendees, and users of tactical gear, while utilizing “wartime” rhetoric and neo-Nazi imagery in its advertisements.

Because Trump’s billionaire backers and sicko sycophants know they have only 11 months to do their worst before Democrats might take control of at least one chamber of Congress and stop them.

Because Trump also knows this and will do whatever he can do to intimidate Democratic voters in the midterms, fiddle with ballots, change results, or prevent certifications to avoid a Democratic takeover. He has already demonstrated he has no compunction about trying to destroy electoral processes to get his way.

There is also the U.S. armada now stationed in the Middle East. Although Trump lacks congressional authorization to go to war, he told reporters on Friday that he was considering a “limited” military strike to pressure Iran into a deal.

But mostly I fear worse to come because time and again — especially when he feels like he’s losing — Trump doubles down on stupid. (He just announced, for example, that in light of the Supreme Court’s tariff decision, he’s imposing a 15 percent tariff on every country we trade with around the world.)

And his toadies — Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — double down on their cruel mindlessness, if only to demonstrate to Trump their kindred stupidity.

ICE has left downtown Minneapolis but has reportedly increased its activities in the suburbs of the Twin Cities. “As far as Homan’s announcement of a drawdown, there’s no difference,” said Alex Falconer, a Democratic state representative for Minnetonka and Eden Prairie. “In fact, it’s become a little worse.”

Due to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vax campaign, the U.S. is experiencing a surge in measles. South Carolina is the epicenter of the outbreak, with over 960 confirmed cases, and the virus continues to spread, with 26 states reporting new cases this year. Last year, two children in the U.S. died from measles. Both were unvaccinated.

The United States continues to strike small fishing boats in waters around Central America, alleging without proof they are smuggling drugs into the United States. Three people were killed Friday in the eastern Pacific.

Trump continues to use racist memes, as he did two weeks ago when posting an AI-generated depiction of former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as apes.

The corruption, too, is worsening.

This means you and I and all sane Americans cannot relax our vigilance. In fact, we must mount an even more powerful resistance to this ongoing calamity.

We are in a de facto war for freedom and democracy, and Trump and his regime have shown themselves to be a bunch of gangsters — racists, misogynists, nativists, traitors, and murderers.

As Abraham Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural: “The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation … We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth.”

Be well. 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 key factor is fueling rampant inequality under Trump

I was secretary of labor 30 years ago when the U.S. economy was producing an average of 200,000 new jobs a month.

I remember holding news conferences on “jobs days” each month. I felt confident about the strength of the economy. What worried me then was that the new jobs didn’t pay well. (A disgruntled worker once called out to me, “Sure, Mr. Secretary, lots of new jobs. I’m doing three of them to make ends meet!”)

Last Wednesday, the Labor Department reported that the United States produced an average of just 15,000 new jobs per month last year — a record low. And most paid sh--.

January showed an uptick in jobs, but almost all of the new jobs were in health care and construction. The rest of the economy seems to be shrinking. And wages are still stuck in the mud.

Profits of big corporations have soared. The stock market values attached to these profits have risen even more. Yet average workers are barely making it.

The U.S. economy is more distorted than ever.

The widening gap between corporate profits and average workers — between capital and labor — helps explain the disconnect between a buoyant economy and pessimistic households. Consumer confidence is in the basement.

The gap was widening before Donald Trump was elected. It explains in part the rise of MAGA and why Trump won in 2016 and again in 2024.

But Trump hasn’t done a thing to alter these trends. In fact, since he became president again, corporate profits (and the stock market) have done even better than before, while average workers have seen almost no gains in jobs or wages.

“I think we have the greatest economy actually ever in history,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business’s Larry Kudlow that aired Tuesday.

That’s not what most Americans think. Even most young men — central to Trump’s wins in 2016 and 2024 — now believe they were better off under Joe Biden.

We’re not powerless to alter these trends. The “free market” doesn’t run on automatic. The rules of the economy depend on political decisions — such as tax laws, antitrust laws, and labor laws.

Since Ronald Reagan was president, the nation has lowered taxes on the wealthy and raised them (especially Social Security and state sales taxes) on average Americans.

America has also allowed big corporations to monopolize the economy — which has given them the power to raise prices without worrying that a competitor will grab consumers away.

And what about labor laws?

Take a look at this chart.

The blue line represents the percentage of the national income going to the richest 10 percent — that is, how much of every dollar earned in the United States goes into the pockets of the wealthiest tenth of Americans.

The red line represents the percentage of workers that belong to a union.

Notice a pattern?

The 1940s and 50s saw a dramatic rise in union membership. Laws and public policies encouraged unionization.

That was also a time when a growing portion of the nation’s income went into the pockets of ordinary working people instead of the pockets of the richest 10 percent.

That’s because unions give workers more bargaining power to get a larger share of the profits they helped generate. The benefits of unions helped nonunion workers too. In order to attract workers, corporations that didn’t have unions had to increase the pay of their workers, too.

As a result, by the mid-1950s, America’s economy was powered by the biggest middle class this nation had ever seen. Racial and gender disparities were still a big problem, but America was making progress on them as income inequality trended downward.

So what happened?

As you can see, union membership started to decline in the 1970s.

That was after Lewis Powell — soon to be a justice on the Supreme Court, then an attorney in Richmond, Virginia — urged the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the leaders of American corporations to pour great wads of money into American politics.

Corporations doubled-down on busting unions, while their allies in government weakened labor laws.

Then, starting with Reagan in the early 1980s, corporate attacks on unions got turbocharged. Reagan fired the striking air-traffic controllers. Legally, they had no right to strike, but Reagan’s move legitimized a far broader assault on American unions.

Since then, unions have steadily shrunk, and the gap between the rich and everyone else has taken off. I saw it when I was secretary of labor in the 1990s. I was worried then. I’m far more worried now.

Today, the top 10 percent are doing okay, largely because they own 92 percent of the value of all the shares of stock owned by Americans, and the stock market is doing just fine. The real wealth of the nation has now concentrated in the richest one-tenth of 1 percent.

And the bottom 90 percent are barely holding on.

My friends, this is not bad only for the bottom 90 percent. It’s also bad for the economy and dangerous for our democracy. If unaddressed, it could lead to more demagogues like Trump as far as the eye can see.

As the great jurist Louis Brandeis is reputed to have said: America has a choice. We can have great wealth in the hands of a few, or we can have a democracy, but we cannot have both.

If we want to make sure our economy works for everyone, not just the super-rich, we need to build back union power.

A resurgence of labor unions would go a long way toward fighting inequality, rebuilding a large and vibrant middle class, and making life better for all Americans.

Which is why it’s vital that we support unions.

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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 almighty blow to Trump is about much more than tariffs

A 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court decided yesterday that Donald Trump cannot take core powers that the Constitution gives Congress. Instead, Congress must delegate that power clearly and unambiguously.

This is a big decision. It goes far beyond merely interpreting the 1997 International Emergency Economic Powers Act not to give Trump the power over tariffs that he claims to have. It reaffirms a basic constitutional principle about the division and separation of powers between Congress and the president.

On its face, this decision clarifies that Trump cannot decide on his own not to spend money Congress has authorized and appropriated — such as the funds for USAID he refused to spend. And he cannot on his own decide to go to war.

“The Court has long expressed ‘reluctan[ce] to read into ambiguous statutory test’ extraordinary delegations of Congress’s powers,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for himself and five other justices in the opinion released yesterday in Learning Resources vs. Trump.

He continued: “In several cases involving ‘major questions,’ the Court has reasoned that ‘both separation of powers principles and a practical understanding of legislative intent’ suggest Congress would not have delegated ‘highly consequential power’ through ambiguous language.”

Exactly. Trump has no authority on his own to impose tariffs because the Constitution gives that authority to Congress.

But by the same Supreme Court logic, Trump has no authority to impound money Congress has appropriated because the Constitution has given Congress the “core congressional power of the purse,” as the Court stated yesterday.

Hence, the $410 to $425 billion billion in funding that Trump has blocked or delayed violates the Impoundment Control Act, which requires Congressional approval for spending pauses. This includes funding withheld for foreign aid, FEMA, Head Start, Harvard and Columbia universities, and public health.

Nor, by this same Supreme Court logic, does Trump have authority to go to war because Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution grants Congress the power to "declare War … and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water" — and Congress would not have delegated this highly consequential power to a president through ambiguous language.

Presumably this is why Congress enacted the War Powers Act of 1973, which requires a president to notify Congress within 48 hours of deploying troops and requires their withdrawal within 60 to 90 days unless Congress declares war or authorizes an extension. Iran, anyone?

The press has reported on yesterday’s Supreme Court decision as if it were only about tariffs. Wrong. It’s far bigger and even more important.

Note that the decision was written by Chief Justice John Roberts — the same justice who wrote the Court’s 2024 decision in Trump v. United States, another 6-3 decision in which the Court ruled that former presidents have absolute immunity for actions taken within their core constitutional powers and at least presumptive immunity for all other official acts.

I think Roberts intentionally wrote yesterday’s decision in Learning Resources v. Trump as a bookend to Trump v. United States.

Both are intended to clarify the powers of the president and of Congress. A president has immunity for actions taken within his core constitutional powers. But a president has no authority to take core powers that the Constitution gives to Congress.

In these two decisions, the Chief Justice and five of his colleagues on the Court have laid out a roadmap for what they see as the boundary separating the power of the president from the powers of Congress, and what they will decide about future cases along that boundary.

Trump will pay no heed, of course. He accepts no limits to his power and has shown no respect for the Constitution, Congress, the Supreme Court, or the rule of law.

But the rest of us should now have a fairly good idea about what to expect from the Supreme Court in the months ahead.

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 shocking arrest proved the president isn't invincible

Police in the United Kingdom have arrested Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Prince Andrew and Duke of York, on suspicion of misconduct in public office — after the disclosure of emails between Mountbatten-Windsor and the late disgraced banker Jeffrey Epstein.

We don’t know yet the specific charges. But we do know that the late Virginia Giuffre, an Epstein victim, accused Mountbatten-Windsor of raping her.

We also know that Mountbatten-Windsor was the U.K.’s trade envoy between 2001 and 2011 and appears to have forwarded to Epstein confidential government reports from visits to Vietnam, Singapore, and China, including investment opportunities in gold and uranium in Afghanistan.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer says, “No one is above the law.” The family of Virginia Giuffre says, “No one is above the law, not even royalty.” Britain’s chief prosecutor says, “No one is above the law.”

All of which raises awkward questions about the people implicated on this side of the pond, including the person in the Oval Office who loves to be treated like a king, and who appears in the Epstein files 1,433 times (that is, in the files that have been released so far). Prince Andrew appears in them 1,821 times.

America likes to believe we gave up kings almost 250 years ago and adopted a system in which “no one is above the law.”

But Trump’s foreign policy has become a personal tool for him to channel money and status to himself and his closest associates. Since the 2024 election, the Trump family’s personal wealth has increased by at least $4 billion.

As with the British royalty of the 16th century, it’s all personal with Trump — all about expanding his power and enlarging his and his family’s wealth. Proceeds from the sale of Venezuelan oil? “That money will be controlled by me,” he says. The gift of a plane from Qatar? “Mine.” Investments by Middle East kingdoms in his family’s crypto racket? “Perfectly fine.”

Like the British royalty of yore, King Trump has arbitrary power. He raises Switzerland’s tariff from 30 to 39 percent because its former president Karin Keller-Sutter “just rubbed me the wrong way.” He imposes a 50 percent tariff on Brazil because Brazil refused to halt its prosecution of a Trump political ally, the former president Jair Bolsonaro, who was found guilty of plotting a coup. Vietnam fast-tracks approval of a $1.5 billion Trump family golf course at the same time it seeks to reduce its tariff rate.

Trump claims that Greenland is “psychologically needed,” although the United States already has a military presence there and an open invitation to expand its bases. He muses about making Canada the “51st state.” These are throwbacks to the 16th-century age of empire.

***

Meanwhile, Trump has created a system of tribute and allegiance that would make Henry VIII jealous.

Apple’s Tim Cook delivers a gold-based plaque and a donation to Trump’s planned ballroom. Swiss billionaires bring a gold bar and a Rolex desk clock to the Oval Office. Jeff Bezos backs a vapid movie of Melania and hands her a check for $28 million.

Trump pardons Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire mogul who pled guilty to money-laundering violations in 2023, after which time Zhao’s Binance digital-coin trading platform becomes the engine of the Trump family’s crypto business, World Liberty Financial.

Elon Musk’s humongous quarter-billion-dollar contribution to Trump’s 2024 campaign earns Musk a dukedom — a “department of government efficiency”— and the keys to the kingdom in the form of sensitive U.S. Treasury Department software systems used to manage federal payments.

But when the Duke of DOGE starts becoming more visible than King Trump, the king banishes him and revokes his dukedom. When the banished Musk begins openly criticizing Trump, the king threatens to cut off Musk’s head in the form of cutting him and his SpaceX off from valuable government contracts. This puts an end to Musk’s impertinence.

The new TikTok (on which Trump has more than 16 million followers) will continue operating in the United States — but now with the financial backing of Trump ally Larry Ellison’s Oracle, Trump’s allied Emirati investment firm MGX (which has already invested in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company), and Silver Lake, teamed up with the private equity firm founded by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Trump allows Nvidia to sell chips to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and extends military guarantees to Qatar — all of which have invested in the Trump family empire. (Emirati-backed investors plowed $2 billion into World Liberty Financial.)

Instead of national glory, Trump demands personal glory — to get the Nobel Peace Prize, to put his name on the Kennedy Center, Penn Station, and other major monuments and buildings.

If his commands are not met, he punishes. Because Norway didn’t give him a Nobel (it wasn’t Norway’s to give anyway), he “no longer feels obliged to think only of peace.” Because performers refuse to appear at the “Trump-Kennedy” Center, he shutters it.

Instead of bureaucracies, America now has a royal entourage. Instead of institutions, we now have royal prerogative. Instead of legitimacy based on the will of the people, there’s divine right (“I had God on my side,” “God was protecting me,” “God is on our side”).

***

We will march against King Trump on the next No Kings Day on March 28 — hopefully making it the biggest protest in American history.

But the arrest of the former Prince Andrew raises an issue that goes way beyond protesting and marching. King Trump was evidently involved in Jeffrey Epstein’s nefarious doings. We don’t know exactly how because there’s been no criminal investigation. Shouldn’t there be?

Trump has also been enriching himself and his family through his public office, violating multiple laws about conflicts of interest.

If the U.K. can arrest the former Prince Andrew on evidence of this sort of wrongdoing, why shouldn’t America arrest King Trump? If no one is above the law in the U.K., not even royalty, presumably no one is above the law in the U.S., not even a president.

Pam Bondi obviously won’t investigate Trump, because she’s part of King Trump’s court. But what about a group of state attorneys general?

Almost 250 years after we broke with George III, the question must now be faced: Are we a monarchy or a nation of laws?

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