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These men can hit Trump where it hurts. Do they have the courage?

On Monday, as more than 3,000 ICE and Border Patrol agents — possibly joined by 1,500 active duty military, as Donald Trump threatened — patrol Minneapolis, hundreds of global CEOs and titans of finance and more than 60 prime ministers and presidents gathered in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual confab of the world’s powerful and wealthy, called the World Economic Forum.

This year’s Davos meeting occurs at a time when Trump is not just unleashing his brown shirts on Minneapolis but also dismantling the international order that’s largely been in place since the end of World War II — threatening NATO, withdrawing from international organizations including the UN climate treaty, violating the United Nations Charter by invading Venezuela and abducting Nicolás Maduro, upending established trade rules, and demanding that the U.S. annex Greenland.

He’s even hiked tariffs on Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland — fellow NATO members that have expressed solidarity with Denmark in its refusal to yield to Trump’s demand to annex Greenland.

According to a text message Trump sent to Norway’s prime minister over the weekend, Trump says one reason he’s seeking to acquire Greenland is he didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize.

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America,” Trump wrote.

I hope the leaders now assembling at Davos speak out against Trump’s tyrannous assault on international laws and rules, and his contempt for every institution established to maintain peace.

Their collective repudiation of Trump would give other CEOs and world leaders cover to express their opposition as well. It could be a tipping point.

Will they? Trump is trying to stop them from doing so.

For example, he announced Saturday that he’s suing JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States, headed by one of the most prominent CEOs in the world — Jamie Dimon — who is now in Davos.

Trump said he’s suing JPMorgan “for incorrectly and inappropriately DEBANKING me after the January 6th Protest, a protest that turned out to be correct for those doing the protesting – The Election was RIGGED!”

Rubbish. There’s no evidence that Chase “debanked” Trump. (And obviously no evidence that the 2020 election was “rigged.”) Besides, if Trump thought the bank acted improperly, why would he be suing it now, five years later?

In reality, Trump’s lawsuit has nothing to do with any so-called “debanking.” Trump is suing JPMorgan Chase because last week Dimon came out publicly against Trump’s criminal probe of Fed Chair Jerome Powell, and apparently Trump worries about what Dimon might say at Davos.

Dimon’s opposition to the criminal investigation was couched in the mildest of terms: “Anything that chips away at [the Fed’s independence] is not a good idea. And in my view, will have the reverse consequences. It’ll increase inflation expectations and probably increase rates over time.”

Yet Dimon’s comment infuriated Trump.

Presumably, the reason Trump says he’ll sue JPMorgan “over the next two weeks” rather than immediately is because Trump wants to maximize the pressure on Dimon.

Dimon has a major speaking role at Davos. If Dimon uses it as an opportunity to blast Trump for taking a wrecking ball to the world economy as well as democracy, he gives cover to every other CEO and many heads of state to criticize Trump, too.

But if Trump can intimidate Dimon into silence, it’s unlikely any other CEO will risk it.

Hence, Trump’s shot across JPMorgan’s bow — aimed not so much at winning a lawsuit against the bank as silencing Dimon and others.

Does Dimon have enough integrity to put the bank’s profits and his own compensation ($770 million for 2025) at risk by speaking the truth — that Trump must be opposed by anyone still possessing power and integrity?

We will see, but I’m not betting on it. Dimon has shown time and again that he has more loyalty to JPMorgan than to the United States. His mild criticism of Trump for undermining the independence of the Fed could reflect no more than concern for his bank’s bottom line.

But who knows? Dimon will soon be retiring. This is his opportunity to be on the right side of history.

To ensure that the assembled CEOs and heads of state are cowed, Trump is traveling to Davos himself and taking with him the largest U.S. delegation ever to attend the meeting, including five Cabinet secretaries and other senior officials.

Will any prime minister or other head of state attending Davos dare repudiate Trump, when Trump is showing no qualms about raising tariffs on, or otherwise punishing, countries that oppose him?

Perhaps, but at most meekly and indirectly. Who wants to taunt the bear?

Yet Dimon and others at Davos must speak out against what is occurring. If there were ever a time for world leadership, it is now.

Davos’s excuse for existing is supposed to be world leadership — although its attendees have not exactly distinguished themselves in the past by their fealty to democracy, social justice, or the rules of international law. Some are directly benefiting from Trump’s tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks. Many occupy their positions precisely because of their reluctance to cause any trouble.

Yet if there were ever a time for them to speak out, it is now. This is their opportunity. It is also their duty. The world needs to hear from world leaders a clear and firm denunciation of the havoc Trump is wreaking.

  • 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/.
  • Robert Reich's 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 crazy old man can be stopped in his tracks — here's how

Today, we honor the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.

Trump has removed MLK Jr.’s birthday from the National Park Service’s fee-free days and substituted his own birthday of June 14 as a fee-free day.

I write this more in sorrow than in anger

All told, I feel profound sorrow for America. Sorrow for the people of Minneapolis who are enduring this Trump-made hell. Sorrow for Renee Nicole Good’s three children and wife.

I also feel sorrow for Greenlanders and Venezuelans and others around the world fearing what the sociopath in the Oval Office may do next. Sorrow for everyone justifiably worried about the future of America and the planet because of him.

I’m old enough to remember when Martin Luther King Jr.’s mission seemed impossible. Just as the mission you and I must now engage in — defeating Trumpism and creating a new and better America out of the rubble and chaos he is wreaking — may seem impossible at this moment.

Martin Luther King Jr. accomplished more than anyone thought he could when he began. He did it with patience and perseverance, with the strength of conviction. He did it with calmness, reason, and quiet passion.

And he did it with civil disobedience — what one of his assistants, the late great congressman John Lewis, called “good trouble.”

Good trouble meant mobilizing the nation against racial injustice by making sure almost everyone saw its horrors. Night after night on the news — watching peaceful civil rights marchers getting clobbered by white supremacists.

I remember watching Bull Connor, commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, and his goons use firehoses and attack dogs against Black people — including children — who were peacefully standing up for their rights.

The scenes horrified America and much of the world. Yet were it not for our painful national exposure to racist brutality, we wouldn’t have gotten the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act.

I’ve been thinking of those scenes as I’ve watched ICE thugs patrolling Minneapolis. Watched armed agents pulling people out of cars, using chokeholds, demanding proof of citizenship. Masked agents in unmarked vehicles grabbing neighbors off the streets, using tear gas and pepper spray, shooting innocent people exercising their First Amendment rights to protest.

This time it isn’t Bull Connor and his racist goons. It’s Donald Trump, JD Vance, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and their fascist goons. It’s armed agents of the president of the United States who are bullying and brutalizing people. Committing a cold-blooded murder of a middle-class white woman in broad daylight who tried to get out of their way. Shooting and injuring others.

This time it’s Trump and the thugs around him making up stories to justify this brutality, lying about the protester’s motives, and threatening even more brutality.

Take a wider look and you see their lawless bullying on a different scale: a criminal investigation of the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board for failing to lower interest rates as fast as Trump wants. Criminal investigations of U.S. senators and representatives for telling America’s soldiers that they don’t have to follow illegal orders. Criminal investigations of the governor of Minnesota and mayor of Minneapolis for refusing to cooperate with Trump’s brown shirts.

The Justice Department searching the home of a Washington Post reporter and seizing her laptops and other devices.

Trump raising tariffs on our trusted allies — until and unless they support him in taking over Greenland. Greenland!

A crazy old man saying “f--- you, f--- you” and giving the finger to an American factory worker who criticizes him in public. The crazy old man is president of the United States, and the worker has lost his job because he dared criticize that crazy old man.

I remember the good trouble that occurred 65 years ago. I believe it’s time for it again. Time for all of us — everyone of us — to cause it.

What kind of good trouble?

A huge national demonstration, far larger than anything before. Everyone in the streets.

A giant general strike where we stop purchasing all products for two weeks (stocking up beforehand).

A massive boycott of all businesses sucking up to Trump.

A coordinated effort to get all our employers, our churches and synagogues, our unions, our universities to condemn this madness.

A loud demand that our members of Congress impeach and convict him of his high crimes.

There is no longer any neutral place to stand. Either you’re standing up for democracy, the rule of law, and social justice, or you’re complicit in the fascist mayhem Trump has unleashed.

That, for me, is the lesson of all this.

Trump and his thugs have brought us to this point. They are the Bull Connors of today.

We stand with the people of Minneapolis and with the people of every other town and city where Trump’s thugs are prowling or will prowl, and where people are resisting.

We stand with the citizens of Greenland and Venezuela. With Canadians and Europeans. With every nation now threatened by Trump’s lawless abuses of power.

We stand proudly and sturdily everywhere the bright lights of freedom and truth still shine.

We will overcome the darkness of Trump’s fascism. We reject the hate, the bigotry, the fear, and the murderous lawlessness of his regime. We dedicate ourselves to causing good trouble -- ending this mayhem, and building a new and better 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/.
  • Robert Reich's 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's Gestapo can be defanged

ICE and Border Patrol agents must be reined in. I’ll tell you how in a moment.

Since Renee Nicole Good’s death, clashes between ICE and the residents of Minneapolis have escalated. On Wednesday night, an ICE agent shot and wounded someone who, ICE claimed, was fleeing arrest. (Sure, just like Good supposedly was trying to run them over when she turned her car away from them and said, moments before an agent fired three bullets into her chest and arm, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.”)

I’ve always loved Minneapolis. Its people have midwestern common sense. They also have a deep sense of fairness and justice.

On Wednesday, Trump threatened that if Minneapolis and the state of Minnesota didn’t stop the protesters, whom he referred to as “insurrectionists,” he would “institute the INSURRECTION ACT … and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State.”

Let’s be clear. The problem is not the protesters. It’s the armed thugs who are shooting and murdering them. (Trump seems capable of seeing a similar dynamic playing out in Iran and vows to protect the protesters there, but not in America.)

A friend who knows a lot more than I do about America’s armed forces recently wrote:

“There are four kinds of people who join the armed forces: those from a traditional military family, true patriots who want to serve their country, those with no other prospects who need a job, and psychotics who just want to kill people.

“The armed services do a pretty decent job of screening out the fourth group, but that group is now the prime recruitment pool for ICE. Racists, haters, gun nuts, and cage fighting fans who want to shoot anyone the least bit different from them. They are becoming America’s Gestapo. That is no exaggeration. We’re slipping into Nazi Germany.”

He’s exactly right.

ICE is reportedly investing $100 million in what it calls “wartime recruitment” of 10,000 new agents, in addition to the 20,000 already employed.

It has lowered its recruitment standards to meet the deportation targets set by Stephen Miller (Trump’s deputy chief of staff for promoting bigotry and nativism), thereby increasing the numbers of untrained and dangerous agents on the streets.

ICE’s recruitment is aimed at gun and military enthusiasts and people who listen to right-wing radio, have gone to Ultimate Fighting Championship fights or shopped for guns and tactical gear, live near military bases, and attend NASCAR races.

It’s seeking recruits who are willing to perform their “sacred duty” and “defend the homeland” by repelling “foreign invaders.”

If I had my way, ICE would be abolished and Border Patrol agents sent back to the border. But this isn’t going to happen under Trump and his Republican lapdogs in Congress. Too many Democrats are almost as spineless when it comes abolishing ICE.

But Congress can still take action to rein in ICE. At the very least, it must disarm ICE.

The Trump regime is allowing ICE officers to use lethal force in self-defense. But we’ve seen how readily ICE and Border Patrol agents claim self-defense when they’re shooting our compatriots.

How do we disarm ICE?

Congress is now considering the appropriations bill for the Department of Homeland Security, whose funding runs out at the end of January.

Please demand — call your members of Congress and tell them in no uncertain terms — that the DHS spending bill prohibit ICE and Border Patrol agents from carrying guns and that it unambiguously declare that agents do not have absolute immunity under the law if they harm civilians.

Do this as soon as you can.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), the senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee (and an old friend), said Tuesday that she’s seeking to put limits on ICE in the DHS spending bill. “I am looking for policy riders in the Homeland Security bill to [be] able to rein in ICE.”

House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said Wednesday that Democrats will oppose the bill unless Republicans agree to new rules governing ICE officers: “ICE cannot conduct itself as if it’s above the law.”

There is no reason for ICE agents to be armed. If they are shot at — and there’s no record of this ever actually happening — they could readily summon state or local police to protect their safety.

ICE was designed to be mainly an investigative agency, not a militarized arm of the presidency. ICE agents are not adequately trained to use deadly force.

In addition, ICE agents prowling our streets in unmarked cars, wearing masks, clad in body armor and carrying long guns, are a clear provocation to violence — both by them and by otherwise law-abiding residents of our towns and cities who feel they must stop their brutality.

Trump, Vance, and Miller want to provoke violent confrontations so they can justify even more oppression — including invoking the Insurrection Act, which would allow Trump to call in the regular military.

“I’d be allowed to do that,” Trump said in October, referring to the act, “and the courts wouldn’t get involved, nobody would get involved, and I could send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, I can send anybody I wanted.”

Please: tell your members of Congress not to vote for the DHS spending bill unless it stipulates that ICE be disarmed.

Also tell them that the bill must restrict ICE and Border Patrol’s ability to conduct dragnet arrest operations and target people based on their race, language or accent. And the bill must clarify that ICE agents are liable under civil and criminal law if they harm civilians.

The Trump regime is telling agents they have “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution or civil lawsuits if they kill or maim or otherwise hurt civilians. “That guy is protected by absolute immunity,” JD Vance said of the ICE agent who killed Renee Nicole Good. “He was doing his job.”

DHS went so far as to post a clip of Miller saying, “You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one — no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist — can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties.”

Rubbish. There’s no such absolute immunity under the law. Regardless of what the FBI concludes, I hope and expect the state of Minnesota will open a criminal investigation of the agent who murdered Renee Good and, on the basis of the evidence uncovered, prosecute him for murder under state law.

It would be useful for Congress to make it crystal clear in the DHS spending bill now under consideration that ICE agents do not enjoy absolute legal immunity.

Please call your representative and senators today and tell them not to vote for the DHS spending bill unless it (1) disarms ICE agents, (2) prevents them from targeting people based on their race, language, or accent, and (3) stipulates that agents who harm civilians are liable under criminal and civil laws.

To reach your representative or senator, call the U.S. Congressional Switchboard at (202) 224-3121. Tell them the state and city where you live. They will connect you to any member’s office.

  • 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/.
  • Robert Reich's 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

Silence in the face of Trump's catastrophe is complicity

This is a national emergency. Donald Trump is off the rails. His ICE and Border Patrol goons are loose on America. The havoc in Minneapolis will worsen and will occur elsewhere. Yesterday, someone else was shot there.

His military is loose on the world. Now Venezuela and the Caribbean, at any moment Iran or Cuba or Greenland. (European nations are at this moment sending troops to Greenland, presumably to defend it from Trump’s America.)

You may feel helpless — a powerless observer of this hurricane of violence and stupidity.

You may be experiencing the kind of despair that immobilizes the brain and numbs the senses.

You may want to scream but can’t find your voice because you’re so shocked and frightened.

Please do not succumb to helplessness, despair, or fear.

You are needed. Desperately.

What more can you do beyond protesting, calling your members of Congress, and (if you can afford to) writing checks to candidates who can flip seats?

Stay politically engaged, but don’t wait for the Democratic Party to get a spine or hope that the Republican Party discovers integrity. We are moving beyond party politics.

Here’s what you can also do: Mobilize your employers, your organizations, and your congregations — anywhere you work, any group of which you’re a member — and get them to use their influence to end this barbarity.

Organize your fellow employees, retirees, alumni, and congregants. Get them to help you pressure trustees, directors and heads of every major university, professional association, charity, and foundation. Every corporate CEO or managing director. Every religious leader.

Push everyone with any formal authority in this nation to speak with clarity and conviction against what is happening, and to commit themselves and their organizations to ending this scourge.

Help them understand that silence in the face of this catastrophe is complicity. That there is no longer any excuse for them to be “prudently cautious,” no longer any justification for them to wait until “others take the lead.”

The emergency is now.

Help them see that as America slides further into this authoritarian nightmare, their own organizations are on the line. No group is secure. No corporation is immune. There is no place to hide.

You can be a leader by getting the formal leaders of America to exercise their formal leadership and power.

The heads of American corporations and financial institutions need to issue strong rebukes of this regime. Corporations and banks that pride themselves on their responsibilities to the American public have a special role — Patagonia, TOMS, Ben & Jerry's, Salesforce, Adidas, Microsoft, Google, JPMorgan Chase.

We also need to hear from leaders of America’s great foundations which, after all, are organized to pursue the public interest — Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Bill and Melinda Gates, J. Paul Getty, Robert Wood Johnson, Kellogg.

We need America’s religious leaders to condemn this brutality — bishops of the Catholic Church, the United Methodist Church, and the General Convention of the Episcopal Church; pastors of the Southern Baptist Convention and National Baptist Convention; president and counselors of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; rabbis in the Central Conference of American Rabbis, Union of Reform Judaism, and the Orthodox Union; imams in the Islamic Society of North America.

We need America’s great nonprofits to repudiate what’s occurring — League of Women Voters, Salvation Army, Common Cause, National Urban League, Public Citizen, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Hispanic Federation.

Also the American Bar Association, American Medical Association, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, American Association of University Professors, National Library Association — all must loudly condemn Trump’s lawless reign of terror.

We need every labor union in America and its leadership to denounce what is happening and organize against it.

All must use their voices and their influence in this fight, because no other fight is as crucial at this point in the history of America and the world.

Make them see this. Deliver this message to them: If these organizations and these leaders stand up against what is occurring and use their considerable influence to stop it, history will praise their leadership and courage.

If they fail to do so, history will condemn their cowardice and complicity.

  • Robert Reich is a emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
  • Robert Reich's 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 issue hurts Trump more than any other. His panicky lies show he knows it

The latest gauge on inflation, released on Monday morning, showed prices increasing 2.7 percent in December compared with the same period a year ago. Food prices were up 3.1 percent. (Reminder: Trump was elected on two issues: bringing prices down, especially food, and avoiding foreign entanglements.)

On Tuesday, Trump traveled to Detroit to deliver an address to the Detroit Economic Club. It was about “affordability” and he filled it with lies — such as Americans aren’t paying for his tariffs (of course they are) and inflation was “way, way, down” (it’s about the same as it was when he took office).

And he insisted that “affordability” is a “fake word by Democrats.” Unfortunately for Trump, “affordability” has become even more politically potent than immigration or crime. And in his first year at the helm, he’s made America less affordable.

He’s also been putting forward some ass-backward ideas for bringing down prices that will actually increase them. His biggest: Fire the current chair of the Federal Reserve Board and install a chair who’ll lower interest rates and thereby, in Trump’s addled brain, bring down the costs of borrowing to buy homes and cars. (In his speech on Tuesday, he called Fed chair Jerome Powell Powell, a “jerk.”)

Trump’s decision to open up a criminal investigation of Powell is a bizarre escalation of his pressure campaign against the central bank to cut interest rates. And it’s truly ass-backwards. Without an independent Fed committed to using interest rates to fight inflation, everyone who buys or sells or invests will have to assume the risk of runaway prices in the future. The result is a risk “premium” that makes everything more expensive instead of more affordable.

What should be done to make America more affordable? Ten commonsense initiatives:

1. Get rid of Trump’s tariffs

Trump’s blanket, unpredictable, on-again-off-again, gigantic and then sometimes modest tariffs have caused prices to jump on just about everything. That’s because tariffs are import taxes that are paid by the companies that do the importing and by their consumers.

Tariffs can be a tool to create American jobs, but only if they’re used in a targeted and responsible way. Targeted and responsible are two adjectives that no one uses in describing Trump’s tariffs.

The first step to make life more affordable for the average American is to get rid of them.

2. Bust up monopolies

Trump’s overriding goal is to boost share prices. He doesn’t seem to understand that most Americans aren’t directly affected by share prices: Over 90 percent of the value of shares held by Americans is held by the richest 10 percent; over half by the richest 1 percent.

In pursuit of high share prices, Trump has essentially given up on antitrust enforcement. Big corporations are now merging and buying up potential competitors at a rapid rate. But this means less competition, and less competition results in higher prices.

It’s another ass-backward approach to affordability. Trump’s overriding goal of high share prices collides with what should be the real goal: keeping prices low.

A real affordability agenda would bust up big corporations that dominate their industries and prohibit price gouging.

3. Fight for stronger unions

Trump hates unions and has done everything he can do to weaken the National Labor Relations Board and the Labor Department. He’s given free rein to corporate union-busting.

Here again, Trump’s goal of high share prices and corporate profitability is at direct odds with the needs of average workers for higher wages, which are necessary if the goods and services they require are to become more affordable to them.

Workers need more bargaining power to get higher wages. Unions do that. A real affordability agenda therefore would make it easier for workers to start or join them.

4. Raise the national minimum wage

For the same reason Trump believes unions and higher wages are bad for the economy — that is, his definition of the economy, which is the stock market — he’s been dead set against raising the national minimum wage.

But the federal minimum wage has been stuck at a measly $7.25 since 2009. Raise the damn wage. And raise it even higher for employees of big corporations that pay their top executives hundreds of times more than their workers.

5. Pass Medicare For All

Trump has been trying to destroy the Affordable Care Act because it was passed under his predecessor, Barack Obama. His latest gambit has been to block any extension of the subsidies that Americans need to be able to afford health insurance under the ACA. (The fight over this issue resulted in the longest government shutdown in history.)

Without those subsidies, the typical American will be paying 30 to 100 percent more for health insurance this year than last — which is already driving many people out of the ACA marketplace and forcing them to live without health insurance at all.

Extending ACA subsidies is necessary but not sufficient. A real affordability agenda would make Medicare available to all Americans. This will bring down health care costs for everyone, because Medicare is cheaper and more efficient than for-profit health insurance.

6. Make housing more affordable

Last Wednesday, Trump called for a ban on institutional investors buying single-family housing. I suppose it’s nice that he’s finally gotten around to this, but I’ll believe it when he actually signs the legislation.

A real affordability agenda would ban Wall Street firms from buying up housing, crack down on corporate landlords that collude to jack up rent prices, get rid of zoning laws that make it harder to build homes, and increase funding to boost the construction of housing in cities that need it most.

7. Make child care and elder care more affordable

The costs of child care take a third of the incomes of parents with young children, on average. The costs of elder care can be even higher for working people with elderly parents. Both are essential for working families.

An affordability agenda would include a universal child care program for parents and boost funding for caregivers of aging parents.

8. Give Americans paid leave

Here again, the goal of fat corporate profits and high share prices collides with what American workers need. Trump consistently opts for the former and argues that the nation “can’t afford” paid family leave.

Baloney. We’re the richest country in the world. Every other advanced nation provides paid leave. Working Americans need it. We should provide it, too.

9. Stop Big Finance siphoning off people’s incomes

Trump has deregulated big banks and allowed them to charge up to 30 percent interest on credit cards. (The banks love it because credit cards provide them with four times the return of any other line of business.) Trump has gotten rid of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which stopped other sleazy financial practices. And he’s allowed more consolidation of big financial institutions, which means even less competition, higher prices, and shadier deals. (His Justice Department recently approved the merger of Capital One and Discover, which will pile even more debt on low-income consumers.)

The captains of Wall Street have never had it so good. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon made $770 million last year. But average working people are being shafted.

A real affordability agenda would cap credit card interest rates at 5 percent, stop the banks from charging late fees on unsuspecting consumers (Trump’s OMB director, Russ Vought, withdrew the late fee rule in April), and bust up the biggest banks whose market power is allowing them to charge absurdly high interest rates on all borrowing.

10. Raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations

Besides tariffs, Trump’s economic policy has cut taxes mainly on wealthy individuals and big corporations. He’s imbibed the “trickle-down” Kool-Aid that assumes tax cuts at the top make everyone better off.

The reality, as we’ve learned since Trump’s first tax cut mostly benefiting the wealthy and big corporations (as we should have learned from Ronald Reagan’s and George W. Bush’s trickle-down tax cuts also mainly benefiting the rich and big corporations) is that nothing trickles down. Trickle-down economics is a cruel sham.

The cumulative effects of all these tax cuts has been to make America’s rich far richer — now owning a record share of the nation’s wealth — and big corporations far more profitable (corporate profits are also near record levels), while dramatically enlarging the national debt.

And what do we get with a bigger debt? More inflation, which makes everything less affordable. Again, Trump has it ass-backward.

It’s time we ended the trickle-down hoax once and for all.

Besides, it’s only fair that the super rich pay more in taxes so that the rest of America can afford what Americans need: housing, health care, child care and elder care.

And by the way, even after paying more in taxes, the rich will still be richer than they’ve ever been, and giant corporations will still be exceedingly profitable.

***

These 10 steps are crucial for making America affordable again. Don’t fall for Trump’s ass-backward agenda, which will only make the rich richer and big corporations more profitable. You and I and everyone who wants to lower the cost of living for Americans should back the real affordability agenda.

Please share this with any Democrat or independent (hell, share it with any Republican) interested in running for office and improving Americans’ standard of living.

  • Robert Reich is a emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
  • Robert Reich's 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's regime just sent us all a terrifying message

If agents of the federal government can murder a 37-year-old woman in broad daylight who, as videotapes show, was merely trying to get out of their way, they can murder you.

Even if Donald Trump and his vice president and his secretary of homeland security all claim, contrary to the videotapes, that Renee Nicole Good was trying to kill an agent who acted in self-defense, they could make up the same about you.

Even if Trump describes her as a “professional agitator” and his goons call her a “domestic terrorist,” they could say the same about you regardless of your political views or activism. If you have left-wing political views and are an activist, you’re in greater danger.

How can we believe what the FBI turns up in its investigation, when the FBI is working for Trump and is headed by one of his goons, and is investigating possible connections between Renee Good and groups that have been protesting Trump’s immigration enforcement?

What credence can we give federal officials who are blocking local and state investigators from reviewing evidence they’re collecting?

You could be murdered because Trump’s attorney general has defined “domestic terrorism” to include impeding law enforcement officers. What if you’re merely standing in the way — in the wrong place at the wrong time? Or maybe you’re engaging in non-violent civil disobedience?

In October, Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen in Chicago, was in her car trying to warn people about ICE when she collided with a Border Patrol vehicle. Federal officials say she “rammed” the car. Her lawyers say she was sideswiped by it.

The agent then got out of his car and shot her five times. She survived. The Justice Department then charged her with assaulting a federal officer.

You could be next. All of us need to realize this. The people who are being assaulted and murdered are abiding the law.

The regime has also been grabbing people from their homes who are legally in the United States with permanent status — not just visas permitting them to work or study here but green cards — and whisking them away to prison because they’ve engaged in constitutionally protected speech the regime doesn’t like.

This is what happened to Mahmoud Khalil — who graduated from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, has a green card, and whose wife is an American citizen.

Plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents appeared at his apartment building on March 8 and then detained him without charges in a Louisiana ICE detention facility for three and a half months. (He missed his graduation and the birth of his first child.)

The Trump regime continues to try to deport him. A federal court heard arguments on Oct. 22 in the regime’s ongoing deportation case against him but has not issued a verdict.

Khalil did nothing illegal. He was in the United States legally. He has never been charged with a crime. He expressed his political point of view — peacefully, non-violently, non-threateningly. That’s supposed to be permitted — dare I say even encouraged? — in a democracy.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump conceded Khalil was snatched up and sent off because of his politics.

“This is the first arrest of many to come,” wrote Trump. “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”

Trump could just as well arrest and expel permanent residents who voice support for, say, transgender people or DEI or “woke” or anything else the regime finds “anti-American” and offensive.

What’s to stop the Trump regime from arresting you for, say, advocating the replacement of Republicans in Congress in 2026 and electing a Democrat to the presidency in 2028?

Renee Nicole Good was murdered. Marimar Martinez was shot, but survived. Mahmoud Khalil was arrested and jailed, and is still fighting deportation. There are many others. The next could be you or someone you love.

What’s at stake isn’t just American democracy. It’s also your safety and security and that of your friends and loved ones. This is personal — to every one of us.

A dictatorship knows no bounds.

We must commit to peacefully fighting this regime, to ending Republican control of Congress in 2026, and to sending this dangerous gang packing in 2028 — assuming we’re still free and alive by then.

  • Robert Reich is a emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
  • Robert Reich's 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 spelled out his dire threat with these 8 maniacal ideas

At the same time agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol are swarming into Minnesota and other states and cities, Trump is planning bombing raids on other countries.

Domestically and internationally, he is putting America on a war footing.

ICE is reportedly investing $100 million on what it calls “wartime recruitment” of 10,000 new agents, in addition to the 20,000 already employed. Its recruitment is targeting gun and military enthusiasts, people who listen to right-wing radio, who have gone to Ultimate Fighting Championship fights or shopped for guns and tactical gear, live near military bases, and attend NASCAR races. It’s calling for recruits willing to perform their “sacred duty” and “defend the homeland” by repelling “foreign invaders.”

Meanwhile, Trump has announced that he’ll ask Congress for a $1.5 trillion defense budget for the next fiscal year — a 66 percent increase over the 2026 defense budget Congress just authorized.

There’s coming to be no difference between Trump’s foreign and domestic policies.

Both are based on the same eight maniacal ideas:

  1. Might makes right.
  2. Law is irrelevant.
  3. America is at war with the world’s “radical left,” who are defined chiefly by their opposition to Trump.
  4. Fear and force are better weapons in this war than hope and compromise.
  5. The U.S. stock market is the best measure of Trump’s success.
  6. Personal enrichment by Trump and other officials is justified in pursuit of victory.
  7. So are lies, cover-ups, and the illegal use of force.
  8. Trump is invincible and omnipotent.

These ideas are at such fundamental odds with the norms most of us share about what America is all about and how a president should think and behave that it’s difficult to accept that Trump believes them or that his White House thugs eagerly endorse them. But he does, and they do.

Rather than some “doctrine” or set of principles, they’re more like guttural discharges. Trump is not rational, and the people around him trying to give him a patina of rationality — his White House assistants and spokespeople — surely know it.

The media tries to confer on Trump a coherence that evaporates almost as soon as it’s stated. The New York Times’s breathless coverage of its recent Oval Office interview with Trump — describing his “many faces” — is a model of such a vapidity.

According to the Times, Trump “took unpredictable turns” during the interview. But instead of seeing this unpredictability as a symptom of Trump’s diminishing capacities and ever-shorter attention span, the Times reported it as “a tactic he embraces as president, particularly on the world stage. If no one knows what you might do, they often do what you want them to do.”

Attempts to show inconsistencies or hypocrisies in Trump’s domestic or foreign policies are fruitless because they have no consistency or truthfulness to begin with.

Nor is it possible for the media to describe a “big picture” of America and the world under Trump because there is nothing to picture other than his malignant, impulsive, unbridled grandiosity all the way up and all the way down.

Trump has unleashed violence on America’s streets for much the same reason he has unleashed violence on Latin America and is planning to unleash it elsewhere: to display his own strength. His motive is to gain more power and, along the way, more wealth. (On Sunday, he even posted an image referring to himself as the “Acting President of Venezuela.”)

“Policy” implies thought. But under Trump, there is no domestic or foreign policy because it is all thoughtless. It is not even improvised. It is just Trump’s ego — as interpreted by the toadies around him (Miller, Vought, Vance, Kennedy, Rubio, Noem) trying to guess what his ego craves or detests, or fulfilling their own fanatical goals by manipulating it.

We must stop trying to make rational sense out of what Trump is doing. He is a ruthless dictator, plan and simple.

All analyses of what is happening — all reporting, all efforts to understand, all attempts at strategizing — are doomed. The only reality is that an increasingly dangerous and irrational sociopath is now exercising brutal and unconstrained power over America and, hence, the world.

Trump is putting America on a war footing because war is good for him as it is for all dictators. War confers emergency powers. It justifies ignoring the niceties of elections. It allows dictators to imprison and intimidate opponents and enemies. It enables them to create their own personal slush funds. It distracts the public from other things (remember Jeffrey Epstein?).

War gives dictators like Trump more power and more wealth. Period.

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

Why Trump's assault on blue states is blatantly illegal

What does Donald Trump have against Minnesota? Not only is ICE causing mayhem in Minneapolis, but Trump is halting hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for social services programs there, according to a Tuesday announcement from the Department of Health and Human Services.

It’s not just Minnesota. Trump is also stopping billions in funding for social services in Colorado, Illinois, New York, and California.

Why? Could it be because all of them are led by Democrats and inhabited by voters who overwhelmingly rejected Trump in 2024?

It’s not the first time Trump has openly penalized “blue” states. What’s new is how blatant his vindictiveness toward blue states has become.

Angry at Colorado’s votes against him in three successive elections and at its refusal to free Tina Peters — the former clerk of Mesa County, who was convicted in 2024 of tampering with voting machines under her control in a failed plot to prove they had been used to rig the 2020 election against Trump — Trump has cut off transportation money to Colorado, relocated the military’s Space Command, vowed to dismantle a major climate and weather research center located there, and rejected disaster relief for rural counties hammered by floods and wildfires.

Two weeks ago Trump used the first veto of his second term to kill a pipeline project that had achieved bipartisan congressional support, to provide clean drinking water to Colorado’s parched eastern plains. (Trump’s action enraged Republican congresswoman and formerly dedicated Trumper Lauren Boebert, who stated: “Nothing says America First like denying clean drinking water to 50,000 people in southeast Colorado, many of whom voted for him in all three elections.”)

If there were any doubts about Trump’s sentiments toward Colorado, he posted a New Year’s Eve message telling Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, and Daniel P. Rubinstein, the Republican district attorney in Mesa County who prosecuted Ms. Peters, to “rot in Hell,” adding “I wish them only the worst.”

Is it even legal for Trump to reward red states and penalize blue ones? In a word: No.

In early December, Justice Department lawyers openly admitted that Trump withheld Department of Energy grants to Minnesota and other states according to “whether a grantee’s address was located in a State that tends to elect and/or has recently elected Democratic candidates in state and national elections.”

It’s the first time the Trump regime clearly acknowledged in court that which states get what depends on whether most people in a state voted for or against him.

What’s the legal argument? Trump’s Justice Department lawyers claim that such overt political vindictiveness “is constitutionally permissible, including because it can serve as a proxy for legitimate policy considerations.”

This, my friends, is utter rubbish.

Punishing states based on whom their residents voted for directly violates the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, which requires that the government treat citizens equally under the law: No “State [shall] deprive … to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Penalizing a state for how its citizens vote also violates the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech. Voting is one of the most basic forms of speech in a democracy; it cannot be abridged or punished depending on for whom one votes.

And it violates a president’s duty under the Constitution to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” At the least, this requires that a president apply the law in a nonpartisan way. Congress may award grants or benefits to certain states and not others, but this power is reserved for Congress, not the president.

The issue will almost certainly end up in the Supreme Court. Although my expectations for our highest court could not be much lower, I’d be surprised if the justices sided with Trump here.

Any other result would effectively allow Trump to pit red states against blue and wreak havoc on the very idea of a national government.

Trump has made it clear he regards himself as president only of the people who voted for him. But that’s not how the Constitution works. Nor is it how American democracy works.

  • Robert Reich is a emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
  • Robert Reich's 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 disgrace was almost as chilling as Renee Good's murder

In Minneapolis on Wednesday, an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three. The shooting occurred on a residential street in the south of the city, less than a mile from where George Floyd was killed by police in 2020.

Donald Trump claimed that Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over” the ICE agent.

Kristi Noem claimed that “our officers were out trying to get a car stuck out of the snow when they were surrounded and assaulted and blocked in by protesters.”

Several videos taken from different angles (see, for example, here) and several analyses of the videos (see here) make it clear that Trump’s and Noem’s descriptions of what occurred are blatant lies.

According to an eyewitness, ICE agents yelled contradictory instructions at Good — one telling her to leave and then, as she complied, another tried to open her door and told her to get out, while a third shot her in the face.

As horrific as this murder is, Trump and his regime’s response has been almost as chilling.

Trump accused Good of being a “professional agitator” and blamed the tragedy on “the Radical Left Movement of Violence and Hate.”

Noem accused Good of being engaged in “an act of domestic terrorism.”

JD Vance called her “part of a broader left-wing network” and said the killing was “a tragedy of her own making and a tragedy of the far left.”

I don’t know Renee Good’s politics. But why would her political leanings be relevant to her murder? Are Trump and his sycophants suggesting that it’s okay for federal agents to murder someone based on their political beliefs?

Minnesota’s investigators have been told by the FBI that they will not be allowed to investigate; only the FBI will investigate. As Governor Tim Walz noted, it will be “very difficult for Minnesotans to think in any way this is going to be fair when Kristi Noem is judge, jury, and basically executioner.”

A cold-blooded murder was committed inside the United States by an agent of the United States federal government acting under the authority of Donald Trump.

That is cause for deep concern by us all — right and left, Democrat and Republican.

During a conversation with the New York Times that was reported on Thursday, Trump said, “the only thing that can stop me” is “my own morality. My own mind.”

Trump was responding to a question about checks on his power to attack nations around the world. But his response is increasingly relevant to his power domestically.

Dictators murder whomever they choose. That’s not how the United States is supposed to work.

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

Another day, another horror, another grim step in Trump's war on humanity itself

It seems appropriate right now to try to clarify one of the most basic questions America is (or should be) struggling with: What does it mean to be a human being?

The confusion is mounting.

Three illustrations:

1. Corporations

Corporations are not human beings. That should be self-evident.

But in 2010, the Supreme Court ruled (in its Citizens United case) that corporations are the equivalent of “people” under the First Amendment to the Constitution, with rights to free speech.

This ruling has made it nearly impossible for the government to restrict the flow of money from giant corporations into politics. As a result, the political voices — and First Amendment rights — of most real human beings in America are being effectively drowned out.

But in coming years, states will have an opportunity to circumvent Citizens United by redefining what a “corporation” is in the first place.

Absent state charters that empower them to become “corporations,” business organizations are nothing more than collections of contracts — between investors and managers, managers and employees, and consumers and sellers.

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 [that] possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it …. The objects for which a corporation is created are universally such as the government wishes to promote.”

Montana is now readying a proposition for its 2026 ballot that would empower organizations that sought to be corporations there to do many things — except to fund elections. (I’ve written more on this, here.)

2. Artificial Intelligence

AI is not human, although it’s becoming increasingly difficult for many real people to tell the difference between “artificial general intelligence” and a real person.

As a result, some real people have lost touch with reality — becoming emotionally attached to AI chat boxes, or fooled into believing that AI “deepfake” videos are real, or attributing higher credibility to AI than is justified — sometimes with tragic results.

In his typically ass-backward pro-billionaire way, Donald Trump has issued an executive order aimed at stopping states from regulating AI. But some governors — most interestingly, Florida’s Ron DeSantis — have decided to establish guardrails nonetheless.

DeSantis is calling on Florida’s lawmakers to require tech companies to notify consumers when they are interacting with AI, not to use AI for therapy or mental health counseling, and to give parents more controls over how their children use AI. DeSantis also wants to restrict the growth of AI data centers by eliminating state subsidies to tech companies for such centers and preventing such facilities from drying up local water resources.

In a recent speech, DeSantis said:

“We as individual human beings are the ones that were endowed by God with certain inalienable rights. That’s what our country was founded upon — they did not endow machines or these computers for this.”

I never thought I’d be agreeing with Ron DeSantis, but on this one he’s right.

Corporations are legal fictions. Human AI is a technological fiction. Neither has human rights. Both should be regulated for the benefit of human beings.

3. Non-Americans and suspected enemies

The third illustration of our current confusion over what is a human being is endemic in Trump’s policies toward immigrants and many inhabitants of other nations, now especially in and around Venezuela.

On Wednesday, a federal agent shot and killed a 37-year-old woman during an immigration raid in Minneapolis. Despite what Trump and Kristi Noem say, a video at the scene makes clear that the shooting was not in self-defense.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said: “We have been warning for weeks that the Trump administration’s dangerous, sensationalized operations are a threat to our public safety,” adding that it cost a person her life.

ICE agents are arresting and detaining people on mere suspicion that they are not in the United States legally — sometimes deporting them to foreign nations where they’re brutalized — without any independent findings of fact (a minimum of “due process”).

Meanwhile, Trump and Stephen Miller, his assistant for bigotry and nativism, are busy dehumanizing immigrants. For example, Trump describes Somalian-Americans as “garbage.”

Last weekend, the U.S. killed an estimated 75 people in its attack on Venezuela, as it abducted President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. The U.S. has been bombing and killing sailors on small vessels in the Caribbean and off the coast of Venezuela on the suspicion they’re smuggling drugs into the United States — on the vague pretext that they’re “enemy combatants,” although Congress has not declared war.

Trump’s justification for all such killings has shifted from preventing drug smuggling to “regaining control” over oil reserves that Venezuela nationalized 50 years ago.

In all these cases, the Trump regime is violating fundamental universal human rights considered essential to human dignity.

Corporations and AI are not human beings, but people who come to the United States seeking asylum indubitably are human. So too are undocumented people who arrived in the United States when they were small children and have been here ever since. As are our neighbors and friends who, although undocumented, are valued members of our communities.

As are the Venezuelans who have been murdered by the Trump regime.

So, what does it mean to be a human being?

It means the right to be protected from the big-money depredations of giant corporations, and from the emotional lure of AI disguised as a human.

And it means to be treated respectfully — as a member of the human race possessing inherent, inalienable rights.

These are moral imperatives. But America is doing exactly the reverse.

  • Robert Reich is a emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
  • Robert Reich's 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 cowardly 'leaders' are bending to Trump and selling out the American people

While Trump and his henchmen are stripping Americans of our constitutional rights and illegally taking over other nations, America’s supposed leadership class is silent. Or worse, they’re helping Trump.

Too many university presidents are silent or caving to Trump’s demands. Too many senior managers of law firms have surrendered to his tyranny. Too many directors of large nonprofits are remaining silent. Almost all Republican leaders are rubber stamping his authoritarianism. Too many Democratic leaders are barely putting up a fight.

The worst offenders are the CEOs of some of America’s most powerful and influential corporations.

Some stood up with the rest of America against Trump when he tried to overturn the 2020 election. Now they’re silent about what Trump is doing to our democracy and international law. Or they’re actively enabling him in order to protect and pad their bottom lines.

Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, recently said that he “fully supports” Trump and would welcome National Guard troops in San Francisco. (He later walked back his comments on the National Guard but continues to back Trump.)

Follow the money: Salesforce’s biggest customer is the federal government. Trump has shown how eager he is to use federal contracts to reward his friends — and Benioff doesn’t want to piss him off.

Benioff is also seeking even more massive federal contracts to help ICE hire thousands of agents at a time when ICE is disappearing people off the streets and violating due process.

Or look at Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, who recently gave Trump a plaque with a 24-karat golden base and then showered him with praise at a convening of Big Tech billionaires at the White House.

Apple followed up by removing an ICE tracking app from its app store at the request of Trump’s Department of Justice.

Why would Cook suck up to Trump? Because Trump has given Apple special exemptions from his tariffs. And of course, both Cook and Apple benefit substantially from Trump’s latest round of tax cuts.

Then there’s Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta.

Zuckerberg has ended Facebook and Instagram’s fact-checking policies, parroting Trump’s claims that the practice censored conservative views. And Meta shelled out $25 million to Trump to settle a lawsuit claiming the company censored him when it removed his accounts. Facebook has also removed an ICE tracking page.

Why? Meta is investing billions in AI and the power-hungry data centers that fuel it, and the company needs a friendly White House to ramp up development.

And whatever happened to Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorganChase, the largest bank in the United States, who relishes his position as “spokesman” of the American business community? What has he said about Trump’s lawlessness?

He’s nowhere. He’s said nothing.

In October, Dimon and JPMorgan announced what they called the Security and Resiliency Initiative, with the bank pledging $1.5 trillion to “facilitate, finance and invest in industries critical to national economic security and resiliency.”

Pure fluff and corporate PR — a repackaged set of aspirations. Just like Dimon and his bank’s $2.5 trillion Sustainable Development Target, unveiled with much self-gratulation in 2021 — a package of hoped-for environmentally related investments that, as The Wall Street Journal recently noted, “the bank doesn’t talk about that much anymore.”

Dimon also used to talk about the wide-ranging benefits of diversity and inclusion. No longer. His bank basks in Trump’s good graces — and the tax cuts and financial regulatory rollbacks that accompany them.

You see the pattern.

Benioff, Cook, Zuckerberg, Dimon, and all the other billionaires and CEOs selling out to Trump are happy to back his anti-democracy agenda as long as their businesses keep raking it in.

They get tax cuts, federal contracts, and deregulation, and Trump gets to trample on our fundamental rights and on the basic tenets of international law with no pushback from America’s so-called “leaders.”

They’re showing us a reality we should have known years ago, but many of us didn’t want to see: America’s leadership class no longer leads. It hides. It enables. It sucks up.

If they were true leaders, they’d speak out and speak up against Trump. But they won’t and don’t. They go along with Trump’s authoritarian agenda so they can enlarge their wealth and power.

How do we fix this?

Courageous politicians would call out this ugly alliance between the so-called “leadership class” and Trump’s anti-democracy agenda.

But too many politicians eagerly take money from billionaires and big corporations to keep winning elections. Yet what’s the point of winning if they’re in the pockets of the powerful?

We must support only politicians who swear off big money and fight for the people who don’t have power.

Some politicians are already doing this, but too few.

What else can we do to fix this?

We don’t have to wait around for politicians or other formal leaders to grow spines. We can be that spine.

You can run for office.

Even if you don’t hold a formal office or have official authority, you can still organize your community, your workplace, or your campus.

Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King Jr., Dolores Huerta, and countless others who have moved the world held no official authority or formal position of power. They had moral power to tell the truth and mobilize others to fight back.

At a time in our nation’s history when America desperately needs leaders but too many official leaders are intimidated or have been bought off — it’s up to the rest of us to step up.

We are the leaders we’ve been waiting for.

- YouTube www.youtube.com

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

Trump is now a cornered animal — and the worst is still to come

Yesterday I ran into a friend who expressed relief that “the worst is over” from Trump.

I asked him why he thought so.

He became animated. “The courts are stopping him! Republicans are in shambles! His MAGA base is furious with him! The Epstein scandal is growing! His polls are in free fall. Dems are winning elections! It’s over!”

I told him that all of that was true, but the worst is not over. In fact, this year is likely to be even worse than the last.

Trump’s real base of support — the billionaires, Big Oil, Big Tech and AI, Big Crypto, defense contractors, and Wall Street — know that the midterm elections may limit what they and Trump can get away with starting a year from now.

So, 2026 could be the last year they can cash in. This means they’re likely to loot America even more this year than in 2025.

Big Oil just cashed in big. By taking over Venezuela, Trump effectively gave America’s biggest oil companies the world’s largest proven oil reserves — estimated at around 303 billion barrels, roughly one-fifth of total global oil reserves.

It’s part of the deal he struck with Big Oil in the 2024 campaign, when it agreed to back him in return for his rolling back environmental regulations.

Big Oil has continued the gusher — contributing to his ballroom, his PAC, and his investments. Ditto Big Tech and AI, Big Crypto, the biggest banks, biggest defense contractors, and so on.

The pattern we observed in 2025 is ramping up: Trump destroying public institutions, preventing and rolling back regulations and public protections, privatizing public functions, and siphoning off big profits to wealthy individuals and industries from which he extorts huge sums of money.

I say this not to depress or alarm you but to warn you against the kind of complacency I heard in my friend yesterday.

Yes, the courts are limiting him, the Republican Party is cracking up, his MAGA base is disillusioned, his polls are dropping, Democrats are winning elections.

All true, but these have made Trump and the oligarchs behind him even more determined to loot America.

These have also made Trump even more dangerous — like a cornered animal. He views the political backlash as challenges to his power. So he’ll seek to display even more power — lashing out at perceived enemies, foreign and domestic.

This means it’s more important than ever for us to be vigilant, to protect democracy and the rule of law, and to fight back against his authoritarianism (including the steps I outlined a few days ago).

I know it’s exhausting. I know it’s stressful and time-consuming. I know you’re sick to death of Trump. I am, too.

But as he revealed early Saturday morning when he had the president of Venezuela and his wife dragged out of their bed, arrested, sent to the United States and put in the Municipal Detention Center in Brooklyn to await trial — there is no limit to what Trump will do to assert his power.

Your activism and courage are needed.

  • Robert Reich is a emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
  • Robert Reich's 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 direct line links Jan 6 to Trump's attack on Venezuela

Donald Trump’s domestic and foreign policies — ranging from his attempted coup against the United States five years ago today, to his incursion into Venezuela last weekend, to his current threats against Cuba, Colombia, and Greenland — undermine domestic and international law. 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.

This principle lies at the center of America’s founding documents: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. It’s also the core of the post-World War II international order championed by the United States, including the UN Charter — emphasizing multilateralism, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.

But it’s a fragile principle, easily violated by those who would exploit their power. Maintaining the principle 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.

Every time people or corporations or countries that are richer and more powerful attack and exploit those that are not, the fabric of civilization frays. If such aggression is not contained, the fabric unravels. If not stopped, the world can descend into chaos and war. It has happened before.

We now inhabit a society and world grown vastly more unequal. Political and economic power are more concentrated than ever before. 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 the globe. AI is likely to centralize wealth and power even more. The destructive power of the United States, China, and Russia is unmatched in human history.

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.

Put it all together and you see the threat.

A direct line connects Trump’s attempted coup five years ago to his capture of Nicolas Maduro last weekend. Both were lawless. Both were premised on the hubris of omnipotence.

That same line extends to Trump’s current threats against Cuba, Colombia, and Greenland.

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, 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, or empires. And threaten world war.

Trump’s blatant lawlessness will haunt America and the world — and civilization — for years to come.

  • Robert Reich is a emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
  • Robert Reich's 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 brutal and incoherent Trump action bodes ill for the whole world

The story of what’s happening in Venezuela is unfolding quickly and big questions are mounting. The immediate danger in Venezuela (and potentially in Colombia and Cuba) is chaos.

Asked who’s in charge of Venezuela, Trump answered: “We’re in charge.”

What the hell does this bluster really mean?

U.S. troops are not prepared to occupy Venezuela. Trying to do so would be a disaster.

Maduro’s system of oppression is still entrenched there. It includes the national guard, the army, the national police, the intelligence service, and the Colombian guerrilla group ELN. All remain intact.

Maduro’s top lieutenants also remain, including several who were involved in his alleged crimes. Not to mention his thugs and narco-traffickers who have been controlling Venezuela through violent repression and stolen elections.

Venezuela has roughly 28 million people. There’s no way to determine the emerging balance of power between pro- and anti-Maduro camps, but it’s a safe bet that any power void is likely to be filled with violence.

On Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke of “coercing” the Venezuelan government to make policy changes over its oil reserves, rather than “running” the country: American forces will prevent oil tankers from entering and leaving Venezuela until the government opens up the state-controlled oil industry to foreign investment — presumably giving priority to American companies.

But since August, America has had an arsenal of warships, jet fighters, and some 15,000 troops on Venezuela’s doorstep, which hasn’t stopped oil shipments. How big must the arsenal be to do the job? How long will it remain there? At what cost? Will we bomb Russian or Chinese tankers coming into or out of Venezuela?

Rubio emphasized that “the national interest of the United States … is No. 1.” But what exactly is the “national interest” of the United States here? Big Oil? Chevron has been in Venezuela for years. Do we declare victory when Exxon-Mobil is there, too? Do we insist that Venezuela not charge America oil companies any extraction fees? How profitable must Big Oil’s extractions of oil from Venezuela become before Trump is satisfied?

Rubio says Trump hasn’t ruled out troops on the ground. But does anyone remember what happened in Iraq after the U.S. invasion there? Libya? Syria? Hello? How many failed states do we need to create before we understand their danger to the stability of an entire region of the globe?

Meanwhile, the Trump regime is fanning the flames of anti-Americanism, both in Venezuela and elsewhere in Latin America.

Asked tonight whether the United States would conduct an operation against Colombia, Trump said, “it sounds good to me.” He also suggested Mexico could be another target, saying the Mexican cartels are “very strong,” drugs are “pouring” through the country, and “we’re gonna have to do something.” As to Cuba, it “looks like it is ready to fall.”

He didn’t even stop with Latin America. Trump made clear he also wants to take control of Greenland. “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security and the European Union needs us to have it and they know that,” he told reporters on Air Force One.

This is nuts. Trump is already on his way to destroying the rule of law in America. Now he’s destroying the rules-based system of international law and diplomacy that the United States created in the wake of the horrors of World War II.

“America is respected again,” he gloated in his address to the nation on Dec. 9. For Trump, “respect” means the power to bully, regardless of law. “Our nation is strong, and America is BACK.”

Wrong. What’s back is lawless gunboat diplomacy.

  • 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/.
  • Robert Reich's new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org

The most shameful day in American history

Five years ago tomorrow was the most shameful day in American history.

We must not allow Trump to persuade America that it did not happen or that he was innocent, or let him deflect the nation’s attention from the fifth anniversary of what occurred that day.

Less than three weeks ago, Jack Smith, the former special counsel to the Justice Department, appeared before the House Judiciary Committee and testified under oath:

“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power.”

The sole reason Donald Trump is not now behind bars is that Smith dropped the case after Trump was elected to a second term, because the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States — written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by five other justices, three of whom were nominated by Trump — prevented the prosecution of a sitting president.

Let us ponder this for a moment.

Although the peaceful transfer of power lies at the heart of American democracy, Trump sought to overturn the result of the 2020 election. He is now president once again.

Five years ago tomorrow, on January 6, 2021, when Vice President Mike Pence walked into the Capitol, he faced a withering pressure campaign by Trump.

Trump and his henchmen had already twisted the arms of governors and election officials around the country to change the result of the election in his favor. They had coaxed loyalists in five swing states to submit signed certificates falsely claiming they were “duly elected and qualified” members of the Electoral College.

Pence was about to throw out the slates of false electors. As he began the electoral vote count, thousands of Trump supporters — many of them armed — stormed the Capitol. Some chanted they wanted to “hang Mike Pence” for refusing to block the certification.

They came directly from a rally Trump held on the Ellipse, in which Trump repeated his false claim that the election had been stolen and told the crowd, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

According to the criminal indictment,

“After it became public on the afternoon of January 6 that the Vice President would not fraudulently alter the election results, a large and angry crowd — including many individuals whom the Defendant had deceived into believing the Vice President could and might change the election results — violently attacked the Capitol and halted the proceeding.”

The FBI estimated that between 2,000 and 2,500 people entered the Capitol Building in the attack, some of whom participated in vandalism and looting, including of the offices of members of Congress. Rioters also assaulted Capitol Police officers. They occupied the empty Senate chamber while federal law enforcement officers defended the evacuated House floor.

Within 36 hours, five people died. One was shot by Capitol Police; another died of a drug overdose; three died of heart attacks or strokes, including a police officer who died the day after being assaulted by rioters. Many were injured, including 174 police officers. Four other officers who responded to the attack died by suicide within seven months.

“President Trump was wrong,” Pence said subsequently. “I had no right to overturn the election. And his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day, and I know history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”

A week after the attack, the House of Representatives impeached Trump for incitement of insurrection. In February 2021, after he left office, the Senate voted 57–43 in favor of conviction but fell short of the required two-thirds majority, resulting in his acquittal.

Senate Republicans then blocked a bill to create a bipartisan independent commission to investigate the attack, leaving the House to organize its own select committee.

After an 18-month investigation including more than 1,000 witnesses and nine televised public hearings, the House’s select committee identified Trump as the “central cause” of the Capitol attack by the pro-Trump mob.

The panel, made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans, voted unanimously to recommend charges to the Justice Department to prosecute Trump for seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Following a special counsel investigation by the Justice Department, Trump was indicted on four charges in August 2023.

As I’ve noted, all charges against Trump were dismissed after his reelection to the presidency.

Of the 1,424 people charged with federal crimes relating to the riot, 1,010 pled guilty and 1,060 were sentenced and served time in prison. Enrique Tarrio, then the chairman of the Proud Boys, received the longest sentence, a 22-year prison term.

Upon retaking the presidency, Trump pardoned them all.

***

Trump and his lackeys in the Republican Party have since promoted a revisionist history of the event — downplaying the severity of the violence, spreading conspiracy theories, and portraying those charged with crimes as hostages and martyrs.

Trump has tried to recast the violent events as a “day of love.”

On December 8, 2024, in his first broadcast news interview since the 2024 election, Trump said members of the House committee that investigated the riot “should go to jail.”

***

We must never forget. We must teach our children and our children’s children and all future generations of Americans what happened on January 6, 2021— so that, as Mike Pence hoped, “history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”

January 6, 2021 was the most shameful day in American history. It should live in infamy, as should the traitor who refused to accept the election results and incited the attack on the U.S. Capitol — Donald J. Trump.

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

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