Thom Hartmann

Yesterday at the White House, Trump held a photo op with a 16-year-old lifeguard, Ryder Williams, who’d pulled a drowning 10-year-old out of a dangerous surf in Santa Cruz. For any other president, it would have been a sweet, feel-good moment. Trump, though, turned it into something dark — and most of our press either missed it or politely pretended to.

After giving the award, Trump looked at the blonde teen’s parents and said:

“You did a good job. It’s good genetics. When you look at him, you can see, really good.”

People in the room chuckled nervously as some probably realized what Trump was really saying. Others seemed clueless. Mediaite wrote the story up and wondered out loud if Trump was trying to invoke the infamous Sydney Sweeney “great jeans” commercial.

But Trump wasn’t riffing on the jeans ad. He was sharing, in the Oval office and on camera, something he’s been saying for 40 years, his racist “racehorse genetics” theory of human evolution. And it’s something that, when it comes out of other people’s mouths, has ended careers.

For example, back in 1988 on Martin Luther King Day, CBS’s sports commentator Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder was asked by a reporter about the progress that Black people were making in the field of sports.

Snyder told the reporter that Black athletes were doing well because “the slave owner would breed his big black to his big woman so that he could have a big black kid,” and that a Black athlete was better than most whites “because he’s been bred to be that way.”

CBS fired him the next day because everybody in America understood instantly what he had said and where it came from.

Thirty-eight years later, the President of the United States says essentially the same thing about human beings in the White House and gets laughs and a write-up about denim.

This was not a slip of the tongue. The same year Jimmy The Greek was fired, Trump told Oprah on her show that his success was the result of being “born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.” (Forget the fact that his father gave him ~$400 million.) He told a rally audience in 2016 that, with him, “winning is innate” and some people just “have the winning gene.”

Michael D’Antonio who wrote one of the early Trump biographies and knew the family, told PBS’s Frontline program that they all subscribed to the so-called “racehorse theory of human development.”

That theory says that because breeding top racehorses with each other produces more top racehorses then, similarly, a superior man and a superior woman will produce superior children. He even once complimented a roomful of British businessmen on their superior “bloodlines” and praised notorious antisemite Henry Ford’s “good bloodlines” while touring a Ford plant.

Talking to an all-white audience in Bemidji, Minnesota in 2020, Trump warned about the Black Somali refugees who’d settled in that state, saying:

“You [white people] have good genes, you know that, right? A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”

On rightwing talk host Hugh Hewitt’s hate radio show, he said:

“Now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

Trump’s “racehorse theory” isn’t just some throwaway line or colorful figure of speech; it’s from the foundational myth of one of the darkest times in American history, the eugenics (“racial hygiene”) movement that reached its peak during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, a notorious racist who screened the Klan recruiting film Birth of a Nation at the White House. Hitler based his “final solution” on American and British eugenics literature that encouraged the isolation and sterilization of “inferior” people.

That led to the racist 1924 Immigration Act that later turned away Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s death camps, and the Supreme Court blessed a model sterilization law for “inferior” humans in their 1927 Buck v Bell decision. German lawyers translated that decision and used it as the framework for the Third Reich’s own 1933 sterilization law that preceded and ultimately set up the Holocaust.

Tens of thousands of Americans were sterilized against their will back then, and at the Nuremberg trials multiple German defendants argued that they were “simply following American science.”

But the racehorse theory of humanity wasn’t even new in the 1920s: slavery was justified in this country for centuries based on the supposed inferiority of Black people. Crainiometry — the “science” of determining how “advanced” a person is by measuring their skull — was rolled out in the 19th century as a way of proving whites were the most advanced race.

In 1851, a Louisiana physician named Samuel Cartwright published a nationally distributed pamphlet claiming that enslaved people who’d run away from their plantations were doing so because they suffered from a mental illness he called “drapetomania.” He explicitly wrote that God had made Black people “naturally submissive,” so when they rose up or escaped, it was because they were expressing symptoms of that mental pathology.

Southern politicians trying to justify Jim Crow after the failure of Reconstruction used the same trick MAGA racists use today, citing crime and imprisonment statistics by way of “proving” that Black people are simply “born bad.” As noted Substack author Rohn Kenyatta writes:

“The manifestation of this racism and white supremacy need not be blatant as it is often cloaked in stories on crime, poverty, voting rights, illiteracy and ‘civil rights.’”

The whole point of Trump’s racehorse theory is to provide a pseudo-scientific explanation for the outcome of centuries of institutionalized racism. Today, while the median white family has assets of around $285,000 (home and car ownership, retirement funds, etc.), the median Black household is only worth $45,000.

Trump doesn’t want you to know why, and his good or bad genes proclamations are designed to make us ignore everything from unequal access to the GI Bill and Redlining to plain old racism.

Trump’s complained that the Smithsonian dwells too much on “how bad slavery was” and his executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” nailed eight Smithsonian museums under White House review for having displays about “how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been” without, presumably, discussing the failure of their genes.

As a result of his administration’s racist pressure, the National Park Service is rewriting its exhibits on slavery at Independence Hall, one of the more prominent places where George Washington held people in slavery. It wasn’t that Washington was a racist, Trump would presumably tell you, but that the people he enslaved deserved it because of their inferior genes.

And much of the GOP is right there with him. Congressman Steve King spent years babbling about how white people have contributed more than “any other subgroup of people” to western civilization, warning that “we can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

Tommy Tuberville, when asked whether white nationalists should be allowed to serve in the military, answered, “I call them Americans.” Steve Scalise became House Majority Leader after bragging that he’d spoken to a 2002 convention of Klan Grand Wizard David Duke’s European-American Unity and Rights Organization. A reporter said he’d called himself “David Duke without the baggage,” although Scalese disputes it.

When Politico exposed a group of Young Republican leaders having a group chat that was filled with jokes about gas chambers and Hitler admiration, JD Vance called the negative reaction “pearl clutching.” Tucker Carlson hosted open racist Nick Fuentes on his show for a friendly hour, and the president of the Heritage Foundation went so far as to defend them both.

Trump’s acting undersecretary for public policy, Darren Beattie, says America should “pay smart people to have more kids, disincentivize stupid people from having kids,” and Bob Kennedy is pushing changes in Title X to implicitly encourage white women to have more babies.

None of this is new even to the modern GOP. In his first campaign stop after winning the Republican nomination for president, Ronald Reagan spoke to an all-white audience near Philadelphia, Mississippi, a few miles from where Klansmen sheriff’s deputies had brutally murdered 3 civil rights workers (it was made into the movie “Mississippi Burning”). His topic? “State’s rights.” And we all know what that means, as did his audience.

And in July 2016, Donald Trump Jr. stood on that same stage stumping for his father, and proudly bragged that Reagan had launched his campaign from it.

Trump’s “racehorse theory” of humanity is a racist lie that was built to justify slavery and Jim Crow, and then paved the road to Auschwitz.

Democrats and the media need to start saying so out loud every time he invokes it.

“People are disappearing into this no man’s land. They have no connection to their new country, and they also apparently have no legal rights.” —Immigration rights attorney Alma David, quoted in The New York Times

“Terrible things are happening outside... poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.” — Anne Frank diary entry January 13, 1943

Authoritarianism doesn’t just begin when a government embraces brutality. It steps in on cats’ feet when brutality becomes politically useful, legally routinized, and morally acceptable because a government has first declared its victims undeserving of our empathy. When average people in the bureaucracy just “do their jobs” inflicting horrors on other humans simply because they’ve been declared “the other.”

Outside of military coups like Pinochet’s Chile, countries don’t generally slide from republican democracies into totalitarianism and fascism in a single step. There’s a process, and it always begins with the government deciding that some people simply don’t deserve the basic human rights that have been foundational to western civilization for centuries.

The Trump regime’s treatment of Roberto Mosquera, profiled at length in the New York Times by Nicholas Casey, shows just how far down this terrible road we’ve already traveled.

Mosquera has been held for a year without trial or legal due process in a maximum security prison in the tiny landlocked southern African country most people have never heard of, Eswatini, one of the world’s few remaining pure kingdoms that was formerly known as Swaziland. The 59-year-old father of four is slowly going blind from untreated glaucoma, and apparently will be held there for the rest of his life.

He first came to America at the age of 12 as part of the 1980 Mariel boatlift from Cuba. He fell in with a local Hispanic gang and ended up being accused of shooting a member of a different gang in the leg (he insists he didn’t do it and wasn’t there at the time). He served his time in an American prison and, when he got out, reinvented his life.

He became a born-again Christian, got married and had four American citizen daughters, and became a plumber, rising through the ranks to foreman. The Times quoted his former boss as saying he’d turned his life around and:

“He wasn’t just a hard worker; he inspired the guys around him,” he said.

He was also in the United States legally (in part because Cuba isn’t accepting deportees), and checked in with the feds every year to renew his work permit. The last time he showed up, however, he was told his permit was being withdrawn and he was seized and taken through a series of brutal detention facilities and eventually put on a plane to Africa, a continent he’d never visited. As the Times notes:

“That was more than a year ago. Mosquera still sits in that same maximum-security prison with nowhere to go. No charges against him. No way to appeal his predicament. No sign that he will ever be freed. Cuba has not signaled any willingness to take him, and Mosquera says he has no desire to go there. Eswatini will not release him from prison, even though he served his time in the United States and committed no crime in Africa.”

In other words, we’re watching the creation of human beings who can be pushed outside the normal protections of law, geography, community, and ultimately even public attention. Roberto has been “disappeared” by Trump and Miller and is now in prison for what may be the rest of his life, and this all happened without his ever having stood before a judge or jury.

Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution were grounded in the idea that all humans are born with human rights, even though it took this nation centuries to get seriously close to living by its own creed.

Instead of referring to “citizens,” the Constitution repeatedly mentions “persons,” a word that encompasses all humans. Consider, for example, the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, part of the Bill of Rights:

4th Amendment: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

5th Amendment: “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury…; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” (emphasis added)

These, in part, constitute what’s called due process, which is repeated in the Fourteenth Amendment’s first section “…nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Most of the tens of thousands of people ICE is now holding in its custody or who have been deported are there without ever having stood before an actual Article 3 judge. Their rights are being ignored.

The process the Trump regime is now pursuing is to obliterate what Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt called, “The right to have rights.” In Chapter 9 (“The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man”) of her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, she elaborated on what happened when the butchers, bakers, and shopkeepers got jobs in the Nazi detention camps:

“The conception of human rights based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships—except that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.”

She realized that the gravest crisis of human rights is grounded in a government arguing, in its behavior, that some humans aren’t fully human and therefore aren’t entitled to basic human rights. A stateless person herself for 18 years, this idea of governments denying the basic humanity of less-favored groups was at the core of much of her writing.

With Roberto Mosquera and the thousands of others Trump and Miller are paying millions of our taxpayer dollars to foreign prisons to hold until they die, we’re watching play out here in America that very transition from a decent, rights-respecting government into a rogue and lawless regime.

We’ve danced with this before, of course. The entire history of the institution of slavery was grounded in the proclamation of the southern states that Black people weren’t fully human. More recently, George W. Bush humiliated America on the world stage by sanctioning torture and murder in Abu Ghraib and other foreign prisons and black sites, along with its assertion that Gitmo was beyond the reach of American human rights law or the US Constitution.

But this is a modern, whole-of-government approach to dehumanizing nonwhite people in the name of immigration enforcement, with a hundred-billion-dollar budget. And now ICE is buying electric shock gloves for themselves, to ratchet up the brutality.

Republicans in Congress funded, and the Trump regime has built, a massive machine to Make America White Again, considerations of “woke” concepts like rights be damned. And it’s growing and becoming more hostile to average Americans and their concerns by the day.

Nobody in a democratic republic should have the power to make people disappear. It’s antithetical to the very idea of our form of government.

When this regime has been relegated to the dustbin of history, we’ll have a hell of a big job reestablishing this country’s once-vaunted embrace of human rights. There will have to be either full-on trials or something like the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

We should be doing the planning now.

Trump just took steps to make it very difficult to prosecute money laundering, a crime he and his real estate buddies may well have been committing much of their felonious lives.

This month, we learned that Capital One Bank closed more than 300 Trump Organization accounts back in 2021 because, they said, their internal fraud department had flagged illegal money-laundering activity. But on who’s behalf?

We know from the Mueller Report and public reporting that Putin spent millions and did his best via social media and hacking the DNC to get Donald Trump into the White House in 2016, and was probably doing the same in 2020 and 2024.

But what if there was a way for him to simply drop, say, $100 million right into political campaigns here in America that would back up or benefit Trump and his notorious crime family? Or simply give the money to Trump himself as thanks for screwing Ukraine and destroying America?

While federal law prohibits foreign governments, citizens, and corporations from spending money to influence our elections, the reality is that laws only work when there’s somebody to investigate crimes and enforce them.

And Trump is, right now, tearing apart the very institutions and transparency rules that we’d need to expose such a crime.

Specifically, our Treasury Department — run by Trump’s billionaire crony Scott Bessent — just this week put into place a new rule that would hand Putin that ability. Or any other foreign oligarch who wanted to use a shell corporation to buy his very own American politician.

Senator Sherrod Brown’s Corporate Transparency Act required corporations and LLCs to tell the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, FinCEN, who actually owns or controls them. That remote control, often handed through multiple shell companies, is called “beneficial ownership.” It’s all about finding out who, ultimately, benefits from the corporation or LLC’s activities.

This week, though, Bessent issued a new rule that not only ends that requirement but also directs the agency to delete all the beneficial-ownership information they currently hold on U.S. persons (like Donald Trump and his kids) that could be used to prove past money laundering crimes.

This is critical stuff because money laundering is how drug money, bribes, stolen government money, tax evasion proceeds, or money belonging to a sanctioned oligarch can be pushed through corporations, trusts, real estate, banks, casinos, and multiple transactions until figuring out who originally supplied it becomes extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible.

And money laundering via real estate in America is a big, big business. As the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project notes in a report titled “U.S. Real Estate is No 1 Destination for Laundered Dirty Money,” we have “the weakest regulatory framework to counter real estate money laundering” among all of the G7 nations. They add:

“At least US$2.3 billion has been laundered over the past five years through U.S. real estate…” and “More than 80% of all U.S. cases involved money coming from abroad, and in 82% of cases, anonymous shell companies or complex corporate structures helped mask the identity of the property’s real owners.”

Most countries made this illegal decades ago, in some cases generations ago. And in the past decade, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom have tightened their own requirements to prevent this kind of money laundering, which in each of those countries and the U.S. was mostly done through anonymous or all-cash real estate transactions done by shell companies.

And Trump and Bessent just killed off the cops on the beat here.

Trump’s apparently been up to his eyeballs in money laundering for much of his business career. As he wasted the ~$400 million he got from his father, he repeatedly turned to Russian and other oligarchs to prop him up after multiple bankruptcies via these very kinds of real estate transactions that the Treasury will no longer be looking at.

In 2015, Trump’s Taj Mahal casino admitted to willful and repeated violations of federal anti-money-laundering laws. FinCEN fined Trump $10 million because, for some unknown reason (wink, wink), he failed to even bother to keep the required records that would have revealed criminal money laundering being done through his casinos.

Then there’s all that Russian money. Back in 2008 as Putin was consolidating his iron grip and quickly becoming a billionaire bloated with ill-gotten gains himself, Uday — er, Don Jr. — bragged to an audience at a real estate conference that Russians were “a pretty disproportionate cross-section” of the money flowing into the Trump Organization, adding:

“We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Qusay — er, Eric Trump — similarly bragged to Golf writer James Dodson, according to Dodson, that:

“We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”

Reuters looked into it all in 2017 and found that at least 63 people with Russian passports or addresses had bought $98.4 million worth of property from Trump, roughly a third of that being owned by LLCs that were so impenetrable that Reuters couldn’t discover who was actually behind the Russian front men. (This sort of deal is exactly why Congress passed the Corporate Transparency Act in 2021.)

Trump’s SoHo property is another example. A lawsuit brought by Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank alleged that Trump associate Felix Sater helped Ilyas Khrapunov disguise about $3 million as down payments on three Trump SoHo condominiums as part of an alleged international money-laundering scheme involving money stolen from Kazakhstan.

And now the Trump administration is weakening the exact system designed to tell investigators who is actually behind these opaque corporations that serve as real estate money-laundering fronts for offshore criminals like Putin and his cronies.

Treasury has now not only eliminated their previous domestic beneficial-ownership reporting, FinCEN has also given banks a pass on beneficial-owner verification requirements when companies open additional accounts, and Bessent delayed until 2028 a separate anti-money-laundering rule for investment advisers.

And if a foreign actor wants to use his ill-gotten gains to influence an American election? Thanks to Trump refusing to appoint a needed member, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) doesn’t even have the quorum it needs to conduct its own enforcement of rules against foreigners jumping into our elections. Its own website repeatedly says it can’t function again until “the Commission regains a quorum.”

So, suppose Putin or one of his buddies throws millions of dirty Russian money into a corporation in that country, which then transfers that money into an American shell company run by a Trump crony, which then “legally” (under Citizens United) puts that money into a Trump-aligned SuperPAC, say “Patriotic Americans for Freedom LLC,” to pay for political advertising, on-the-ground operations, etc.

The required FEC filing says that the money came from “Patriotic Americans for Freedom LLC,” but who’s behind that company that’s funding the campaign? That’s exactly the question that the “beneficial ownership” laws were designed to answer, and will now lead to a door slammed shut in the face of any reporter, investigator, or law enforcement agency that tries to look into it. And the FEC itself is paralyzed from doing anything about it.

So, here we have a regime headed by a guy who made much of his fortune via opaque foreign money — apparently much of it from Russia — and now he’s dismantling our ability to see who’s behind it. And deleting all the previous records that might have offered a clue to his own past crimes.

For Putin, throwing a few hundred million dollars into an American election would be pocket change, as it would be for the murderous dictator of Saudi Arabia or any other country that wanted a particular outcome from Trump or his corrupt lickspittles in the GOP.

And we know these foreign billionaires and dictators have a vested interest in how our system works; if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be throwing literally billions of dollars into Trump family operations, from Trump’s crypto to Jared’s investment fund.

Forget making America great again; Trump is doubling down on making money laundering — which may have been the source of his financial survival throughout his 90s and early 2000s bankruptcies — great again.

This is truly the single most corrupt administration in American history.

Back in the days when conservatives were so hungry for media platforms that they’d come on progressive shows, I used to regularly debate Wayne Allen Root (here and here, for example). Instead of trying to convince me, though, Root has recently taken to giving Trump ideas about things to do, like stealing the election this fall.

On his show on “Real” America’s Voice, Root told Trump:

“Let me put an idea in your head. Because it’s so hard to get the Senate to do anything, now they’re on recess, they never get anything done. If they never get the SAVE America Act done, you have the right to declare a national security emergency for elections. …

“And the Supreme Court ruled in 1983, under Reagan, in INS vs. Chadha that if you declare a national security emergency as the President of the United States, they can’t challenge it. It can only be overturned by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress.

“So if you do this in the next month, we will get photo ID, proof of citizenship, and a limit to mail-in ballots, and you don’t even need the Senate’s vote.”

Trump seemed both unsurprised and unfazed, as if this were a regular topic of conversation in the White House.

“Let me just say that stranger things have happened,” he replied, adding, “OK, I’ll leave it at that.”

Since 1968, stealing elections has become a sport for Republicans. That was the year that Nixon was running for president against VP Hubert Humphrey — who had just successfully negotiated peace between North and South Vietnam — when Nixon had his people reach out to the leaders of South Vietnam and promise them riches if they’d refuse to go to Paris and sign the deal.

When the FBI informed President Johnson about it, he correctly called it “treason,” although we didn’t learn about it until years later when the LBJ Library released the tapes.

In 1980, it was Reagan’s turn to steal an election. Jimmy Carter was riding high in the wake of Nixon’s resignation and VP Agnew’s stepping down to avoid a bribery prosecution, but then the Iranians seized the American embassy in Tehran.

The president of Iran, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, wanted to release the hostages and had worked out a deal with Carter to do just that, but the Reagan campaign met with the Ayatollah’s people and promised to sell them weapons and military spare parts if they’d just hold the hostages until after the election, destroying Carter’s re-election chances.

The hostages were released, by way of sealing the deal, at the exact moment when Reagan put his hand on the bible to be sworn in, and for years Reagan shipped them banned weaponry until the deal was busted wide open as the Iran-Contra Scandal.

In 2000, Republicans knew the election would probably come down to Florida, the state then run by candidate George W. Bush’s brother Jeb, so Jeb had his secretary of state purge at least 50,000 Black people from the voting rolls just months before the election. His brother won the state, and thus the White House, by 537 votes: it would have been an epic loss without that last-minute voter purge. And then five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court shut down the Florida Supreme Court-mandated recount, which would’ve revealed the purge.

None of these Republican election thefts are controversial; all are well-documented.

As was Trump’s willingness to see his own Vice President, Mike Pence, hanged by an angry mob if that was what it’d take to keep Donald in the White House for another four years. It’s safe to assume that if he was okay with that, there’s nothing off the table for this fall.

While Trump’s legal power to seize control of our election this fall is in dispute, his ability to disrupt it isn’t.

— He’s already issued an executive order directing the Post Office to refuse to deliver ballots to or from citizens not on his approved voter list or in states that refused to give him their voter rolls. Postmaster General David Steiner says he’s willing to do what Trump wants.
— A federal judge back last October ordered ICE to provide his court with the details of ICE’s plans for this fall’s election and, 10 months later, they’re still stonewalling, refusing to turn over any internal documents.
— Reuters reported last month that White House officials had already discussed declaring a national emergency and creating a federal voting task force, including ways of bypassing the Election Assistance Commission and seizing control of voting and vote-tabulating machines.
— Voters in 41 states have election deniers on the ballot this fall, while dozens of known election deniers have taken control of election-running positions across the country.

So, given that the feds are not only not going to help but are actively working toward rigging or even seizing control of this November’s election, it’s going to be up to us and the individual states to make sure our voices are heard and our votes are properly counted.

We should be thinking of this as an election continuity exercise that may not be necessary but, like wearing a seatbelt, could be essential if Trump tries to repeat 2020 in some way. At the moment, he’s essentially a cornered rat.

Therefore, Democrats must:

— Educate Americans about the Constitution, which hands elections off to the states exclusively with only minimal federal standards.
— If Trump tries to claim a national emergency — even if it has a real basis, like Iran hitting us hard or some other 9/11-type event, Americans need to know that we held elections through the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Republican Great Depression, both World Wars, and through other times of national crisis, and 2026 must not be an exception.
— States need to prepare for litigation with complaints, TRO motions, and even appellate briefs composed and ready to file on a moment’s notice. Taking days to fully respond to a Trump attempt to blow up our elections could be disastrous, as Al Gore learned 26 years ago.
— Involve Republicans when we can find the rare ones who will put country above party. Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia pushed back in 2021 when Trump tried to get him to “find” roughly eleven thousand ballots; we must be looking for other Republicans who may have enough integrity to resist a Trump-led coup attempt.
— Steel the spines of our election administrators by having their backs, both legally and physically. Secretaries of state, county clerks, election boards and governors should all know in advance exactly who has authority to order what. The last thing we want are thousands of local election officials asking, “Are we supposed to comply?” on Election Day. When coup attempts work it’s typically because they used the element of surprise to their benefit; we need to blunt that weapon.
— Prepare for Trump’s goons — federal (like ICE or the National Guard) or Proud Boys/Klan-types — around polling places. This is a violation of a federal law that dates back to the Civil War; it’s illegal for “troops or armed men” to show up at any polling places in the country, and the penalty is five years in prison.
— Encourage early voting and other ways to build redundancy into our election systems, and tell people to check their voter registration now at vote.org, particularly if they live in a Red state, as those states have been actively and aggressively purging their voting rolls for months now, especially in their blue cities.
— Be prepared for the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court to intervene, as they did in the 2000 election, to try to hand various elections to Republicans. They’ve already granted Trump sweeping immunity from criminal acts, presumably including election fraud.
— Finally, as Al Gore can tell you from sad experience, we need to prepare for the inevitable onslaught of rightwing propaganda calling elections into question and claiming fraud.

People old enough to remember how the GOP gamed this in Florida in 2000 know what I’m talking about; Republican congressional staffers flew down to Florida (along with John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett) to pound on counting center windows and demand the election Al Gore won be given to the “rightful winner,” George W. Bush.

While Trump can’t legally cancel the election, the more he and his toadies can cast doubt on its legitimacy, the more likely it is that they can pull off the same type of coup as Republicans did in 1968, 1980, and 2000.

For over a decade now, close races immediately produce Republican claims of fraud: lawyers, election officials and communications systems must be fully prepared to deal with lies and propaganda long before November.

Contact your local elections office and volunteer to help out if you can; rightwingers are doing so right now, particularly in places where they can challenge mail-in vote signatures. We need to be there, too.

Better safe than sorry, as the old saying goes. Pass it along…

With all but two Republican senators voting to make Todd Blanche our Attorney General, Donald Trump just walked away from a $100 million fine for tax fraud that the IRS has been trying to collect from him for over a decade. This was the centerpiece of the “settlement” that Blanche wrote up that says that Trump, Uday and Qusay, Jared and Ivanka, Tiffany and Boulos, and even Barron will never again have to worry about paying taxes or ever being audited. It may well even extend to their business partners.

Meanwhile, last week Capital One bank submitted sworn testimony to a court that back in 2021 they shut down and closed 385 Trump-owned businesses because their fraud department — and its leader, a man with “extensive financial fraud law enforcement experience” — believed Trump’s businesses were engaging in illegal money laundering and the bank wanted nothing to do with it.

Even more astonishing, neither of these revelations from the past two weeks made more than the tiniest stir in our corporate media, which is increasingly afraid of crossing Trump or his neofascist billionaire buddies. There’s a meme that’s traveling around the internet right now that’s shockingly on-the-nose:

“It’s so weird how everybody simply accepts that Trump is a criminal and a Russian stooge and then goes on about their days.”

Setting aside the legal horror show this all represents for a moment, this mind-boggling level of corruption is political gold that will destroy Trump — and today’s Democratic leadership is wasting it.

Democrats are (continuously, it seems) debating what should be their campaign strategy, their main through-line message, for the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election. Every faction and special interest group in the country is pushing their own idea, but there’s one overarching concept — one word — that can encompass most all of them and do so with a proven political punch:

“Corruption.”

At every level, ever since the Reagan Revolution, the heart of Republican policies has been the naked corruption of our American political and economic systems by billionaires and giant corporations. Since the 1980s, Republicans have sold their corruption with slogans like, “Government is the problem, not the solution,” and “Let the market decide,” but their real message is, “Turn it all over to billionaires and their corporations.” The result has been:

— Tax cuts and loopholes for billionaires and big corporations that, in aggregate since 1981, add up to more than our total national debt of $39 trillion (in other words, Republicans borrowed $39 trillion in our names that our kids will repay and gave all of it to the morbidly rich).
— Reagan’s 1983 suspension of enforcement of the anti-trust laws that has caused every industry in America to become a form of monopoly dominated by five or fewer massive corporations, gutting small business competition and raising prices.
— Five on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court ruling that corporations are persons and money is the same thing as “free speech,” handing our elections over to the highest bidders.
— Virtually every legacy federal regulatory agency being run today by industry insiders working on a revolving-door basis.
— Members of Congress and the corrupt Trump regime engaging in insider trading with impunity; for $100,000 a month, Trump‘s Nazi-infested social media site will even sell you insider information.
— A GOP-aligned military-industrial complex that’s essentially taken over Pentagon procurement.
— An anti-labor Labor Department; an anti-education Education department; an anti-civil rights Civil Rights enforcement agency; an anti-environment Environmental Protection Agency; etc…
— Trump’s mysterious pardons that always seem to go to people who’ve given him millions of dollars (after Giuliani claimed he and Trump were selling pardons for two million each and splitting the money).
— Gutting of the Internal Revenue Service so that wealthy tax cheats and multinational corporations can more easily evade taxes with near-impunity.
— The systematic sabotage and even privatization of public institutions — from the US Postal Service to public schools to prisons — so Republican-donor corporations can profit off the essential services that used to be considered part of the commons.
— The rivers of dark money after Citizens United that’re letting billionaires and corporations secretly pour functionally unlimited amounts of cash into our elections with zero accountability.
— Using the Federal Communications Commission to loosen media ownership rules for Trump’s billionaire and nepo-baby buddies while, at the same time, threatening to shut down or force sales of those outlets that don’t sing Trump’s praises.
— Red-state and federal voter suppression laws that make it harder for poor, young, female, and minority voters to have a say in our democracy.
— The Republican Party’s multi-decade refusal to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices causing Americans to pay the highest prescription costs in the developed world.
— Paralyzing the Federal Election Commission so even the most bizarre and blatant violations of what’s left of our election laws by Republican politicians are never even investigated, much less prosecuted.
— The use of tax havens and trade policy to encourage offshoring American jobs while bigshot executives reap record profits and bonuses, hollowing out the American middle class.
— The Republican normalization of lobbyists literally writing legislation via groups like the Koch-funded ALEC, ensuring laws are crafted to benefit industries and billionaires rather than the public.
— Rewriting environmental and labor rules for the benefit of polluting industries, often done brazenly and in the open by Trump appointees with direct financial stakes in the companies or industries they’re supposed to regulate.
— The strategic packing of the federal courts with hardcore rightwing/neofascist judges that ensures decades of rulings that favor corporate and billionaire power, weakens labor and consumer protections, and shields Trump’s corruption from any kind of meaningful accountability.

Republicans understand the power of mobilizing the public’s outrage against the corruption that they themselves have participated in for over 40 years. Astonishingly, cynically, that’s the meta-message to Trump’s main campaign slogan each of the three times he’s run for president: “Drain the swamp.”

And it worked, even though it was an outrageous lie.

Democrats, who have actually been trying to do something about corruption for years, need to appropriate the anti-corruption theme as their main message for 2026 and 2028. Because, universally, it works.

— When working in Russia, I witnessed the way Alexi Navalny came so close to taking down Putin that the Russian dictator ordered him murdered; it was done via Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. It systematically and relentlessly exposed the ways Putin and his cronies were looting their nation’s government while passing out favors to oligarchs willing to align themselves with them.

— In the 1980s, I was working for a German international relief organization in The Philippines when Cory Aquino mobilized an anti-corruption message against the Marcos dynasty; the week Marcos and his wife fled the country I was bumped off Philippine Airlines flights five days in a row because so many of their cronies were appropriating all the seats (the airline was run by a crony).

— When Jair Bolsonaro first successfully ran for president of Brazil it was on a campaign against the corruption that “Operation Car Wash” had exposed in the Lula administration. When elected, Bolsonaro, instead of ending the corruption, slid right into the system and expanded it, leading to his own ultimate downfall and current imprisonment.

— In Delhi, activist Anna Hazare’s 2011 anti-corruption hunger strike ignited a nationwide movement that helped spur passage of India’s Lokpal anti-corruption law and led his former allies to found the Aam Aadmi Party, which rose from scratch to power in Delhi on a clean-government platform.

— And, of course, it was the anti-corruption message of the EuroMaidan “Revolution of Dignity” in 2014 that lifted then-comedian and TV star Volodymyr Zelenskyy into the presidency of Ukraine.

From Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Era of the early 20th century to the present, anti-corruption messages have repeatedly proven to be one of the most potent forces in American politics, too.

— In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt built a foundation of mass support by casting monopolies as a “corrupt alliance” between the morbidly rich and our government, while the exposure of William M “Boss” Tweed’s graft by Thomas Nast’s biting cartoons helped bring down New York’s Tammany Hall.

— The Watergate scandal turned corrupt abuse of power into a national reckoning that forced Richard Nixon from office and fueled sweeping electoral gains for reformers like Jimmy Carter, while more recent scandals like George Santos’ lies and loss reinforced “clean government” as a winning local message.

— At the national level, Donald Trump’s “drain the swamp” campaign and the “rigged system” critiques by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren show that, across the ideological spectrum, framing political battles as struggle against entrenched, self-dealing elites remains one of the most consistently reliable ways to get energized voters to the polls and win power.

It makes perfect sense that this should be the Democrats’ main strategy: the core philosophy of the GOP that was first made explicit by the Reagan administration — “greed is good” — openly invites corruption.

As we’ve seen in virtually every congressional vote over the past four decades, Republican politicians are now entirely in the pockets of the fossil fuel, health insurance, tax preparation, and weapons industries, among others.

Whether it’s the corrupt collusion between the Kushner and Netanyahu families that helped lead us into an illegal war against Iran, the billions Trump’s family has made in crypto and other schemes, the insider trading on the war, putting industry insiders in charge of regulatory agencies, or the DeSantis and Paxton/Abbott corruption scandals, there are vivid examples of Republican corruption laying on the public ground all over the country in plain sight.

Every Democrat in America should scan their local horizon for examples of corruption they can use against Republicans because, for the GOP, corruption has become a way of life.

The words “Republican corruption” should be continuously on Democrats’ lips, whether campaigning, speaking to constituents, or making media appearances.

Hammer these corrupt SOBs with their own crimes against democracy and the middle class, and Democrats will see results like Magyar, Zelenskyy, Aquino, and so many others have achieved.

It’s simple, easy, and powerful: “It’s the corruption, stupid!”

The Third Way has functionally declared its intention to purge the Democratic Party of progressives. They will not, in my opinion, get us the things progressives are working for and most Americans and the large majority of Democrats want:

— A national healthcare program that covers everybody
— Free or affordable college
— A clean environment and relief from climate wilding
— Reasonable taxation for billionaires and corporations
— Affordable housing and groceries
— Widespread unionization and an increased minimum wage
— An end to the brutality of ICE and the frantic construction of concentration camps.

These corporate Democrats just formally declared war on those candidates who eschew corporate money, and that has the potential to destroy our chances this fall. But to understand how this tear in the Democratic Party came about and why, a bit of history is vital:

In 1961, President John Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon Johnson had been pushing hard for expansion of the New Deal, with their centerpiece being a new program to provide healthcare for seniors that could eventually serve all Americans.

The program’s author, Robert Ball, was emphatic that his new “Medicare” program was designed so it could easily become a national healthcare system simply by reducing the eligibility age by a decade every year or two until everybody was covered.

This alarmed the crap out of Republicans and the insurance industry that backed them so much that actor Ronald Reagan — then working for General Electric doing a weekly GE Theater program beamed into millions of American homes nationwide — recorded a 33 RPM LP album called “A Time for Choosing” that argued that Medicare would cement the communist/socialist takeover of America.

My dad, a Republican activist, got a copy in the mail and I listened to it several times that year. I can still remember Reagan intoning with his so-smooth and authoritative radio announcer’s voice:

“One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. …
Behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country until one day, as Norman Thomas said, we will awake to find that we have socialism.”

It was an all-out call-to-arms for Republicans to flood Congress with letters and calls opposing this new “socialist” program that the young Democratic president was advocating.

Reagan traveled over 250,000 miles across America that year, speaking to business groups from coast to coast, and his message was consistent with one of the last statements he made on that record:

“If you don’t do this and if I don’t do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”

Kennedy was assassinated before he could get the legislation passed and, in the wake of that, as the nation mourned, LBJ got both Medicare and Medicaid through Congress and into law.

Now convinced that America was on an irreversible path to tyranny, Republicans began looking for ways to finally, once and for all, destroy the Democratic Party that had so heartily embraced “socialism/communism.” Their target would be the single largest source of funding for Democratic candidates: labor unions, which had been legalized in 1935 by FDR.

That effort became real in 1981 when a newly elected President Reagan kneecapped PATCO, the air traffic controllers union, destroying it in a single week as he kicked off the Republican War on Labor™ that continues to this day.

Their explicit goal was to turn America into a single-party state with Democrats never again holding power in a meaningful way; this, the Brahmins of the Republican Party argued, would prevent the “creeping socialism” of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society from ever expanding any farther.

By 1985, Reagan’s Republican War on Labor™ had reduced union membership in the private sector from a high of 34.8% to a mere 14.6% of American workers. Democratic politicians were panicking, so a group of them got together and basically decided that there was merit to be found in the old cliché, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”

That year they created the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), with its leadership made up of Al From (the principal founder), Bill Clinton, Sam Nunn, Chuck Robb, and Joe Lieberman.

They called the DLC strategy a “third way” to do politics; its program included:

— welfare “reform” to push people back to work
— free trade (NAFTA)
— deficit reduction by cutting social programs
— financial deregulation for banks and real estate
— support for globalization and shipping factories overseas
— partnership with corporate America

That last part — the partnership with corporate America — became the cornerstone to Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign; by that time the unions had been so badly gutted that corporate money authorized by the Supreme Court’s 5-4 Bellotti decision became the key to funding his successful effort to become president. In the UK, Tony Blair was traveling down the same path.

Democratic politicians started choosing which industries to get into bed with. White collar industries were most favored, particularly banking, insurance, and pharma. The middle class was slipping away, but with the unions still largely dead there wasn’t a viable alternative to corporate support until the internet matured in the early 2000s.

Which came along during George W. Bush’s presidency, as social media grew and politicians took to the worldwide web in huge numbers.

Facing the possibility that Democrats might be able to fundraise directly from the public with this new internet thing, in 2005 a group of people including Jonathan Cowan, Matt Bennett, Jim Kessler, and Nancy Hale founded a new group associated with the Democratic Party called the Third Way.

Describing themselves as committed to “democratic capitalism,” they explicitly recommend Democratic politicians maintain relationships with wealthy donors, use capitalism as the framework for Democratic governance, create “partnerships” with business, and push “market-oriented solutions.”

And now they’re going to war with those Democrats who want to take the Party back to its FDR/LBJ New Deal/Great Society roots.

In an article titled “Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left,” The New York Times reports:

“‘We are preparing for the next war that is coming,’ said Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way, a leading centrist Democratic group, revealing to The New York Times a new $15 million effort between now and 2028 to discredit democratic socialism.”

Third Way founder Cowen added, referencing Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan:

“It is deeply troubling to see radical, far-left candidates winning in places that are potentially presidential swing states.”

The simple reality that Third Way understands is that on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court have — in 5-4 all-Republican-appointee decisions — legalized a corrupt oligarchic system where massive corporations, foreign governments, and morbidly rich individuals can essentially buy elections for their favored candidates.

What they miss is that most Americans — and a majority of Democrats (as we can see by recent progressive wins) — are absolutely sick of and disgusted by this system.

Instead of joining progressives in working to tear it down, they’re choosing to work to keep the corporate-owned Democrats in power and keep those unwilling to take PAC money out.

The majority (56%) of Americans and 77% of Democrats would like, for example, for the “socialist” Medicare program that Reagan warned us about to be available to all Americans.

But a recent Third Way memo, titled “Read This Before Supporting Medicare for All,” argues that Medicare for All has repeatedly failed politically, cites unsuccessful state-level efforts in Vermont, Colorado, California, and Oregon, and concludes that instead we should build on the corporate-run status quo:

“The Affordable Care Act is popular and provides a strong foundation on which to build.”

Democratic candidates have enough of a struggle against the hundreds of billionaire families who’ve thrown in with the GOP without their corporate-funded “allies” stirring up more controversy and dissension.

I’ve written before about how Greens and the Working Families Party have helped Republicans win elections; in this critical year when the future of American democracy is hanging by a thread, Democrats shouldn’t also have to be looking over their shoulders from Clinton’s Third Way wing of the party.

Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan, declared Thursday morning, seems to have broken the brains of Republicans and the chattering class.

Donald Trump’s pathetic bleats notwithstanding, people voting for progressive Democrats and “democratic socialists” aren’t voting for communism or even socialism; they’re trying to get America to the same sort of economy and form of government that works for everybody — a system somewhat like the one a majority of us had before Reaganism, and that most other developed countries enjoy right now. That includes:

— A healthcare system that covers every American as a right of citizenship, where injury or illness won’t break a family. A half-million of our families lost everything to bankruptcy last year just because somebody got sick; that literally does not happen in any other developed country on Earth, just America. And wanting to free us all of that fear isn’t “communism.”

— An education system that really works for young people, instead of barely maintaining 70-year-old schoolhouses and slapping the Ten Commandments on the wall as if “Thou shalt have no other gods before me … for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me” is going to incentivize students (it won’t).

— A college system like in every other developed democracy in the world where everybody, if they’re capable of handling the work, can get an education and graduate into the working world without debt. And an end to the existing ~$2 trillion in student debt, a crime visited on the generations coming up today by a handful of rich bankers and their Republican buddies.

— A political system where a foreign government, massive corporation, or a greedy billionaire can’t simply buy elections, legislators, and judges. Where citizens can easily vote without having to jump through a million hoops designed to drive down the participation of low-income people and women. Where people can trust that the government and its spokespeople are telling the truth under all circumstances.

— An environment where we can breathe the air and drink the water, the food is safe, and our collective actions have reduced the methane and CO2 that are driving climate change.

— An immigration system that reflects America’s embrace of diversity as “the great melting pot,” a phrase that was popular in the mid-20th century and is now derisively called “DEI.” No more masked secret police, no more concentration camps that lock up children and brutalize people who’ve never committed a crime (immigration violations are civil, not criminal). No more violations of the 4th and 5th Amendments, no more killing Americans for protesting, and no more arrests based on the color of a person’s skin.

— A tax system where the morbidly rich pay their fair share, instead of throwing that burden on working class people and the upper middle class — who often are now seeing their combined federal, state, and local tax rates run over 50% — while billionaires pay a fraction of 4% and absolutely nothing on literally trillions in unrealized wealth gains.

— Respect for international law, particularly the laws against violently attacking countries like Iran, Venezuela, or individuals in boats in the Caribbean who haven’t attacked us first. Defense of those countries who are under attack by Trump’s owner, Vladimir Putin, and his buddy President Xi. And respect for the human rights of Palestinians and acknowledgement of the criminal, genocidal slaughter they’ve faced under international war criminal Netanyahu.

— An economy where at least two-thirds of all American families can have what they had in 1981: the ability to buy a home, a car, take an annual vacation, put their kids through school, and have enough for a comfortable retirement. Instead, as Robert Reich points out:

“Household electricity costs are up 18%, ground beef prices are up 22%, gas prices are up 40%, ACA out-of-pocket premiums are up 58%, [and] inflation is at a three-year high.”

Americans aren’t really asking for that much: Canada has it all. England has it all. France has it all. Germany has it all. Spain has it all. As do dozens of other countries, all the way down to little Costa Rica.

This isn’t rocket science. People simply want a government that will help them and their children achieve their highest potential, an economy that’s not rigged by and for the morbidly rich, and a job that pays enough to sustain a middle-class lifestyle.

The problem we face today is that a large cohort of our billionaire and CEO class are suffering from the mental illness commonly known as hoarding syndrome, a subset of obsessive-compulsive disorder. There’s never enough for them, no matter how much they have, so they don’t care how many people must die or live in poverty for them to maintain their (tax-deductible) islands, palaces, bunkers, yachts, and private jets.

It’s like that popular meme you find these days all over the Internet:

“If a monkey hoarded more bananas than it could eat while most of the other monkeys starved, scientists would study that monkey to figure out what was wrong with it. When humans do it, we put them on the cover of Forbes.”

Those billionaires and CEOs, following the 1971 advice of notorious tobacco lawyer and sociopath Lewis Powell, built out a massive think tank and media infrastructure to transform America from a middle-class nation into a full-blown oligarchy, where every decision made by the Supreme Court, Congress, and most state legislatures would take care of their wants and desires before those of anybody else.

Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court in 1972 and, in 1978, he authored the Bellotti decision, saying that corporations are “persons” and money is the “free speech.” That let Reagan float into the presidency two years later on a tsunami of oil industry money (along with the treasonous deal he cut with Iran’s Mullah’s to hold the American hostages until after the election), remove Jimmy Carter’s solar panels from the roof of the White House, and kill his plans for solarizing America.

Billionaires began immediately spiffing and sucking up to the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, who returned the favor in 2010 by doubling down on Bellotti with Citizens United. Now fortunes are spent on every election cycle, including tens of millions from groups representing the interests of foreign countries.

A few hundred billionaire families, representing considerably less than one ten-thousandth of 1 percent of the American population, supplied roughly one-sixth of all the money spent on the 2024 federal elections and, in the presidential race, put down 44.5% of all the money spent by outside groups, virtually all of it for fellow billionaire Trump.

As Jimmy Carter told me almost a decade ago, America is no longer a democracy:

“Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery...”

This is what Americans are voting against this year in massive numbers, and no amount of name-calling and red-scare tactics by on-the-take Republicans and corporate Democrats, or hand-wringing by TV pundits and podcasters, is going to stop it.

Voters want fighters, and El-Sayed is a fighter. As are so many others in the Progressive Caucus and among the Zoomers, Millennials, and Gen X’ers now coming up into politics.

Americans know they’ve been screwed over the past 45 years since the GOP’s Reagan Revolution stopped seriously taxing the morbidly rich, killed off our unions, and sent our jobs overseas. And they’re rapidly waking up to exactly who it is who screwed them.

As my dear old friend Dick Gregory told me one brutally hot afternoon in Kampala as the two of us were touring Africa together in 1981 and discussing progressive change and US foreign policy:

“When you’ve got something really good, you don’t have to have to force it on people. They will steal it!”

American voters are in the process of stealing back their democracy and their middle class. Call it what you want, but it won’t be stopped.

It seemed so trivial. Trump ordered the Interior Department to post signs along the walkways leading up to several of the museums that make up the Smithsonian system in Washington, D.C., warning people that they’d find “inaccurate information” therein. It was based on a bizarre “report” written by the White House’s Domestic Policy Council and released without fanfare on the 4th of July.

The council itself was packed by Trump with leftovers from right-wing think tanks and activist groups like American Compass, Heritage, the Manhattan Institute, and Stephen Miller’s America First Policy Institute.

It claims that the American Museum of American History has displays that cover the fights for women’s and civil rights and to end slavery, along with the positive role immigrants, women, and queer people have played in our country, which it finds deplorable and un-American. It wrote that Smithsonian leadership and museum curators:

"Have directed the museum’s mission away from historical education and scholarship of a shared national inheritance to be celebrated, and toward extreme political activism, rooted in Marxism, to divide, dispirit and discourage Americans. … [And have] denigrated and displaced whites, males, Christians and Americans” while focusing on “race in areas where it has little to no historical relevance.”

Wild, over-the-top nonsense complaints that our museums are accurately portraying American history notwithstanding, this is far more sinister and dire than it seems.

Pretty much every dictator in history, both ancient and modern, has rewritten his nation’s history because, as Orwell noted, those who control the past can use it to reprogram the future.

Dictators and wannabe dictators rewrite the past to legitimize their rule, typically portraying themselves as representing the inevitable culmination of history, as the nation’s savior (“I, alone, can fix it!”), and as the rightful heir to a mythical glorious tradition like Trump is doing by trying to reinvent America as an exclusively white Christian nation.

In the process, they typically erase their rivals (Trump has replaced Biden’s picture in the White House with a photo of an autopen), reframe negatively their political opponents (ditto), and use the threat of erasure from history as a weapon against their own allies to keep them bowing and scraping (ditto).

Dictatorial regimes frequently use rewritten history to justify wars of aggression, suppress minorities, and gut civil liberties. Modern American examples include how Sam Alito cited a 17th-century witch-hanging British judge to justify ripping the right to abortion away from women, or how Trump has reinvented (with extensive lies) Obama’s peace deal with Iran to justify his and Netanyahu’s illegal war.

They rewrite history to bind themselves to the country’s majority group with simplified stories of the nation’s “glorious” past, claiming members of that group must rally around them to maintain national unity, strength, and a shared destiny. Diversity, in this context, is seen as a weakness as it doesn’t support this kind of dictatorial framing, which is why Trump called Kamala Harris “a DEI hire” on the campaign trail and has essentially criminalized the phrase.

Rewriting history is also a powerful way to shift the Overton Window to the right, causing the previously unthinkable to become “common sense.” When the history of protest, democratic movements, and civil rights efforts are reframed as chaos or crises in the nation’s history, young people are less likely to engage in them. When citizens fail to learn about successful alternatives to authoritarian rule, it can make democracy or pluralism seem unnatural or even impossible, particularly to young people.

— When Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 BCE, he rewrote Egyptian history to make himself the son of the god Amun, the seniormost of the gods and arguably the one we acknowledge to this day when we end a prayer by invoking his name.
— Joseph Stalin removed purged officials from photographs, rewrote textbooks, and reshaped official government accounts of the Russian Revolution and WWI to magnify his own role.
— Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime taught a racialized version of German history that portrayed Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, and other racial and political minority groups as enemies and Germany as the victim of a “stabbed in the back” betrayal after World War I.
— Mao Zedong oversaw repeated revisions of Chinese history, especially after the Cultural Revolution, with history textbooks and official records regularly being edited or radically changed to meet his political needs. To this day, for example, they’ve elided the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
— Even small-timers like Saddam Hussein do this; he linked himself to ancient Mesopotamian rulers and promoted a personality cult through museums, monuments, giant banners with his face on them hanging from federal buildings, and school curricula.

The simple reality is that in democracies it’s historians, journalists, courts, archives, universities, and scholars who write history and can challenge official narratives. Debate is expected, and interpretations can change as new evidence comes to light.

In dictatorships, on the other hand, the state typically monopolizes education, media, and archives, suppresses competing interpretations of history, and punishes those who publicly contradict the official version.

All of which is why it’s so important that we don’t treat the efforts by Trump and his neofascist lickspittles to rewrite America’s history into a sanitized white male supremacist mold as if it’s just some sort of aberration or sick joke.

This is serious stuff, and serious people within this administration are dedicated to destroying our and — particularly — our children’s understanding of the truly revolutionary and progressive history of this nation.

They’re trying to induce a national amnesia, stretching back through the history of the Klan, the Civil War, and even the American Revolution.

We must push back against them boldly and loudly, and when they’re gone we’re going to have a huge job cleaning up the fascist mess they’re making.

Trump, his billionaire buddies, and his Republican lickspittles appear to be setting up a possible massive fraud with regard to this fall’s election. It could signal the end of American democracy.

We democracy-loving Americans have fought oligarchy three times on these shores, roughly every 80 years. Each time, we defeated the morbidly rich and established or re-established popular democracy and a government that put working-class people ahead of the oligarchs.

This time, the oligarchs are behaving like they believe they can win, and the measures our billionaire oligarch-in-chief is taking right now should put every American on alert, if not provoke immediate impeachment.

First, some background.

While the Founders like Jefferson and Washington had large plantations and exploited the labor of enslaved people, they weren’t the truly rich, the oligarchs, of their era. Both those men, in fact, died in bankruptcy or its near-equivalent. The richest man to sign the Declaration of Independence was John Hancock, whose “fortune” was only worth about a million dollars in today’s money; like every other Founder, he left no fortune or family dynasty.

But there were real oligarchs in America in the 1770s, universally aligned with the British king, and they hated the idea of democracy and independence.

In The Rise of American Civilization, historian Charles Beard’s most famous work, he notes that on the banks of the Hudson River:

“From mansions that were castles, the Johnsons ruled in the Upper Mohawk Valley with a sway that was half feudal and half barbaric, relying on numerous kinsmen, armed Negro slaves, trained bands of Gaelic retainers, and savage allies from the dread Iroquois to maintain their sovereignty over forest and plain.”

It was the wealthiest families of the colonies who most strongly opposed both the Revolutionary War and the Constitution, because both endangered the stability of their fortunes, which were grounded in trade or relationships with England. Thousands of these families fought for and with the British, and fled the colonies after the Revolutionary War, both to England and Canada.

In the 1780s, we defeated oligarchy and established a fledgling, albeit imperfect, democracy, the world’s first at that scale.

Eighty years later, the plantation oligarchs of the Old South had amassed such fortunes that only a few hundred families essentially controlled the economy and politics of that entire region.

By the early 1850s, they’d outlawed democracy, rigging elections, imprisoning or killing pro-democracy newspaper writers and publishers, and turning their slave patrols against even white men who dared challenge their power.

In 1861, after declaring their independence from the United States, they turned their guns on the rest of America in an effort to finally end democracy on this continent. Abraham Lincoln defeated them and reestablished (a still-imperfect) democracy in America.

Eighty years after the end of the Civil War, oligarchs had once again seized control of the American economy and government during the part of the Gilded Age known as the Roaring 20s.

President Grover Cleveland had pointed to its early stages, warning Americans:

“As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

The oligarchs’ excesses, though, crashed the economy, leading to the Republican Great Depression and the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. He challenged his era’s oligarchs head-on, saying, “They hate me, and I welcome their hatred.”

With his New Deal and his 90% top income tax rate, he broke them, and both reestablished our democracy as well as building the first middle class in world history that was more than half of a nation’s population.

So here we are now, 81 years after the end of World War II, and the oligarchs have once again seized control of our economy and our government. As President Jimmy Carter told me 10 years ago on my radio program:

“It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery… So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.”

And now we learn that the billionaire oligarch in the White House has gutted every one of the federal agencies designed to protect this fall’s election, as if embracing the mentality of the old Confederate oligarchs who’d essentially outlawed voting by anybody who may have opposed them.

Since taking office, Trump has:

— Frozen and defunded the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) election security division,
— Cut off the threat-sharing network serving 1,300 state and local election officials,
— Disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force,
— Gutted the intelligence community’s Foreign Malign Influence Center,
— Shuttered the State Department’s counter-disinformation office,
— Reduced the Justice Department’s voting rights section from 30 lawyers to 3,
— Fired the head of the NSA Cyber Command who caught indications of Russian meddling,
— Left the Federal Election Commission (FEC) without a quorum,
— And this month fired every remaining commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) just four months before the midterms.

Something big is up, and they’re not even bothering to be subtle about it.

This week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergy Lavrov in the Philippines; Trump’s been having hour-plus-long phone conversations with Putin on average every two weeks since his inauguration; and FBI director Ka$h Patel is planning a trip to Russia a month before the election.

Russia, of course, intervened massively in the 2016 election, Trump’s “Russia, Russia, Russia” attempts at minimizing their role notwithstanding.

The Mueller Report identified 10 specific instances of Trump criminally trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Michael Flynn after his dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

Robert Mueller’s two-volume report found that Russia had attacked the 2016 election in what he called a “sweeping and systematic fashion,” through the Internet Research Agency’s social media operation and the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation's hacking of Democratic emails, and that the Trump campaign “expected to benefit from the stolen material.”

The second volume laid out roughly 10 episodes of criminal obstruction of justice committed by Trump, and Mueller only declined to prosecute Trump because Justice Department policy barred indicting a sitting president, writing that while the report doesn’t conclude the president committed a crime, it also doesn’t exonerate him.

Along the way, his team criminally charged 34 individuals and three Russian companies, including 26 Russian nationals and six former Trump advisers, and won eight convictions or guilty pleas from Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Michael Cohen, Roger Stone, Alex van der Zwaan, and Richard Pinedo, with five of them sentenced to prison. Trump later pardoned five of those eight.

The problem Trump and his morbidly rich oligarch buddies are facing is that oligarchy — including the oligarchy they’ve reestablished here, where the needs of average Americans are gutted as the top 1% are taking deep dives into their money bins — is always a transitional form of government.

Throughout centuries of modern history, oligarchy has rarely lasted more than a single generation. When people realize that the oligarchs have taken over their government and are bleeding average working people dry, they push back hard.

Which forces the oligarchs and the government they control to choose one of two options: give in and revert back to democracy, keeping some or much of their riches but allowing a middle class to re-emerge, or come down hard on the people with an iron fist and crush the opposition.

In Hungary this year, that oligarchy chose the former path, as did the oligarchs in America in 1933. In Russia, Putin chose the latter path, as did Egypt’s el-Sisi and Turkey’s Erdoğan (among others).

In apparent preparation, Trump is building a massive masked secret police force worthy of the Shah’s SAVAK, he’s building detention centers as fast as humanly possible, he’s identified people who “oppose” “traditional American views” as “domestic terrorists” along with anybody he labels “Antifa." He is now openly calling Democrats communists and has suggested some should be deported or imprisoned.

Yesterday, Republicans (with the help of 13 turncoat Democrats: Reps. Kathy Castor, Henry Cuellar, Don Davis, Jared Golden, Vicente Gonzalez, Josh Gottheimer, Marcy Kaptur, Susie Lee, Jared Moskowitz, Chris Pappas, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Darren Soto, and Derek Tran) passed legislation out of the House that would make it wildly more difficult for millions of low-income Americans and married women who’ve changed their names to vote.

Reporter and statistician Greg Palast has documented — using nothing but official government figures — that the 2024 Republican voter suppression efforts prevented around 4 million American citizens from either voting or having their votes counted; had that GOP effort been unsuccessful, Kamala Harris would today be president and Democrats would control the House and probably the Senate.

This time, it appears, they’re trying to disenfranchise millions more and, given the flaccidity of Democratic leadership’s response, it appears they’ll pull much of it off. Those same Dem leaders, after all, allowed all that suppression to happen in 2024 — over loud objections by people like Stacy Abrams who were documenting it in real time — with nary a peep in the press.

Imagine how Republicans would have reacted if the documentary evidence actually showed Democrats had stolen a national election from them!

Which leaves it to us. The only way out of this will be for us to show up this fall in massive numbers, to refuse to be intimidated or frightened away from the polls, and to support folks like Marc Elias who are fighting voter suppression every step of the way.

Pass it along. This may be America’s last chance to preserve the democracy we’ve shed so much blood and treasure to gain and keep these past two-and-a-half centuries.

We have a lot of metaphors for it; the camel’s nose under the tent, the foot in the door, where there’s smoke there’s fire, and the handwriting on the wall, among others. Every police state in history started this way. As the White House declared last week in a press release:

“Under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump, far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”

First, they built the infrastructure based on what the public widely perceived as a real public safety and economic problem.

People had been pouring into the United States for centuries, looking for economic opportunity and a new life. Some were criminals, and Trump and the GOP highlighted their presence as the reason why it was so imperative to “build the wall” to seal the border and then begin aggressive mass deportations.

The majority of Americans (81% of Republicans and 49% of Democrats) rated border security as “important” in 2016, so Trump began by building his wall and expanding the detention centers that pre-existed from Reagan’s 1981 opening of them to detain Black Haitian refugees. (The detention firm CoreCivic got its first immigration detention contract in 1981, and another, GEO Group, was founded in 1984.)

The story Trump campaigned on and used as an excuse to massively expand arrests and detentions was the widely popular notion that they were hunting down and imprisoning “the worst of the worst.” Even many Hispanics voted for him thinking he would clean up their neighborhoods of criminals.

Trump rarely referenced immigrants without including words like “rapists” and “murderers”: he kicked off his 2016 campaign with such a speech after coming down the escalator at Trump Tower.

Then came the first policy turn that showed the lie and exposed what may have been their plan all along. Instead of arresting immigrants who’d committed crimes (or were even accused of having committed crimes), they went after Jose the gardener and Maria the maid.

Quickly, with encouragement by Supreme Court Justice Brett “Beer Bong” Kavanaugh, the system turned into a mass arrest and deportation program for people with brown and black skin rather than genuine “bad guys.”

This was the first point where Democrats began to publicly back away from the policy as white supremacist Republicans and racist independents embraced it more vigorously.

Then came the second policy turn, taking Trump, Vance, and Miller the next step toward their ultimate goal of turning America into a modern police state. In March 2025, during Trump’s second term, ICE agents began to mask up to conceal their identities and started using explicit and deadly violence against not only people of color suspected of being undocumented immigrants but also against anyone demonstrating against Trump and his ICE.

In the 16 months since, ICE officers have shot at least 30 people, killing at least eight that we know about and, as of last month, at least another 50 people have died in ICE custody. There have been no meaningful investigations of any of them and no prosecutions of ICE officers whatsoever for these “routine” actions.

And routine is exactly what they’ve become.

Which brings us to the next step, their third turn in the road: arresting and imprisoning legal immigrants for their words rather than their actions.

The Guardian reported this week that Salah Sarsour, the president of Wisconsin’s largest mosque, a green-card-holding business-owning legal permanent resident of the United States for over 30 years with six U.S. citizen children and nine citizen grandchildren, was arrested by ICE and held in a brutal detention center for 80 days where he lost 30 pounds and was denied monitoring for his diabetes:

“On 30 March, he was on his way to see his elderly mother when he was surrounded, he said, by at least 10 unmarked vehicles and armed agents in civilian clothing and whisked away, first to a detention center near Chicago and later miles away at a facility in Indiana. …

“When Sarsour, who has no criminal record in the US, was first detained, he thought the agents had mistaken him for someone else. When they tried to get him to sign paperwork agreeing to being deported, he refused.

“‘I was very confused,’ he said. Only as his ordeal protracted into days did he realize he had been targeted for his activism. ‘That really shocked me, to be honest,’ he said.”

Sarsour was only released because U.S. district judge James Patrick Hanlon concluded he’d been held because of his outspoken support of Palestinian rights and not because of any crime he’d committed, immigration status or otherwise. He had another court proceeding Wednesday in Chicago — he's waiting to find out if he will be fully freed or re-imprisoned.

But now Trump’s concentration camps have officially been used to hold people whose views the administration dislikes.

Trump’s September 25th National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” identified as potential “domestic terrorist” threats those Americans who espouse:

“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”

It was used last month to indict 15 protesters in Minneapolis. And now Secretary of State Marco Rubio has essentially declared that it’s a loaded gun pointed at anybody who opposes Trump or is even a progressive member of the Democratic Party. The excuse/weapon they’re apparently planning to use is Cuba.

For Rubio, it’s a two-fer. He wants to run for president and thinks taking Cuba will get him there…but he needs an excuse. And that excuse will also provide Trump, Vance, Miller, et al with a fine opportunity to start rounding up American progressives.

Labeling Cuba as “The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” Rubio issued a 140-page document which claims that that poverty-stricken island nation:

“…has infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists, backed an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil, and carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history.”

He claimed, to an audience including representatives from 66 countries and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Education Secretary Linda McMahon:

“The Cubans devoted themselves to recruiting, cultivating and mobilizing a global coalition of activists, intellectuals, and political groups around this cause, building a sprawling revolutionary network that shaped a disproportionate share of America’s most famous and influential extremist movements, from the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground through to Antifa.

“Today, that network continues to maintain ties to powerful leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations across the United States.”

The document names American citizens, just as the new White House website is now naming individual American reporters, who are essentially accused of being communist/“leftist” collaborators.

They include my colleagues David Pakman and Amy Goodman, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, influencer Hasan Piker, and nineteen others, including two other members of Congress.

The 20 organizations named include the Amazon Labor Union, Black Lives Matter, Democratic Socialists of America, the National Lawyer’s Guild, and “Antifa.”

So now the architecture is in place. ICE has billions to expand their concentration camps, they’ve spread their secret police across every corner of America, they’re tied into Flock cameras and Palantir’s databases on pretty much every American citizen, and they’ve demonstrated they’re invulnerable to local law enforcement and can abuse or even kill people who resist them at will.

And now the Trump regime, like Putin and Hitler before them (among dozens of others), have identified “the enemy within” who must be purged and separated from society.

It might be good time to reach out to our elected officials and demand action. The phone number for Congress is 202-224-3121 but don’t forget your local officials, too, as it appears they’ll soon be dealing with ICE or ICE-affiliated federal goons coming for the “domestic terrorists” who defy “traditional American views.”

Last week, Donald Trump essentially told us exactly what he will do this November. When reports start coming in that the Democrats are winning, he will send in the troops.

He’ll point back to last week's national address and tell the nation:

“I told you so. I warned you. They rigged the election for the Democrats and now I have to stop it.”

He’ll mobilize ICE and the National Guard’s “Rapid Reaction Force” that he’s assembled over the past six months to seize ballot boxes and crush the inevitable “insurrection” — protests in the streets against his seizing ballot boxes — by “left-wing communist radical domestic terrorists.”

He’ll declare a state of emergency, invoke his NSPM-7, and blame it on a foreign country and/or “Antifa.” He’ll declare protesting a crime, and tear gas will fill our streets.

This is easy for me to imagine: I was there in 1967 when Lyndon Johnson did nearly the same thing, although for an entirely different purpose, and I’ve worked in several countries where this very scenario had already played out.

And those same white supremacists Trump has already pardoned can also easily imagine how it should play out when he calls them out to attack protesters; they’ve been terrorizing minority communities for centuries and are very good at it.

This includes his tens of thousands of well-armed loyalist cult members who’re salivating at the idea of splitting that $1.776 billion they believe they’ll get when he seizes absolute control of the country.

As Senator Amy Klobuchar said on MSNOW:

“This is a man desperate to hold onto his power and he will do anything to keep that power.”

Would he actually be so audacious as to try that? Could he actually pull it off?

He could, he will, because he’s already tried it once.

The difference is that six years ago — the last time he tried to overturn an election he lost — his Attorney General, FBI Director, Director of National Intelligence, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, DHS Secretary, and Chief of the National Guard would all have refused such an order, so he called on thousands of violent thugs to attack the Capitol, stop the election certification, and murder the vice president.

This time, in a classically Putin-esque move, he’s replaced all of those people with lickspittles like Blanche and true believer fanatics like Miller and Homan who’ll do exactly what he tells them to.

Many of them sat in the room with him, in the front row in front of the teleprompter, watching and nodding along with his lies. They know that if Democrats win and the election is certified this fall many of them, too, will end up on the wrong end of civil and criminal investigations.

Trump has recently declared, officially, that Democrats are traitors, communists, potential terrorists, and should be deported. The only thing he hasn’t demanded is for Democrats to be arrested for our politics, and that may well come in just a few months.

After all, he can’t afford to allow the House or Senate to fall into Democratic hands, because then he’ll be investigated with the power of law and subpoena for the many crimes he is currently committing.

He wouldn’t survive that politically, and he believes the Senate this time will actually convict him: they know that once he’s convicted and has thus lost his power, there’s no way he can regain it and he’ll no longer represent a threat to their political careers.

This is all why he’ll say or do anything to hang onto his power, because he knows if he loses that power his entire house of cards collapses.

He and his children go to prison or are forced into exile. His wife gets to reinvent her life the way she wants. What’s left of his properties gets sold off at auction like his casinos were the last time he went bankrupt.

This is what he’s imagining at 2 o’clock in the morning when he’s rage-tweeting. He’s also remembering the terrifying hours he spent sitting in a courthouse charged with 34 felonies for which he could go to prison.

It’s easy for him to imagine, because it’s exactly what he constantly tries to do to people he thinks have slighted him, from Jim Comey to Letitia James to Adam Schiff and dozens of others: he tries to break them financially while threatening them with long and brutal imprisonment.

He’s done this repeatedly, and his most recent threat to break or jail somebody was issued just last week.

But none of what he’s planning works without a lot of ordinary people saying, “Yes,” and that’s also where we may have a say.

That’s the thing about these operations that gets lost when we talk about them as if they’re just the work of one man, America’s Hitler, to quote JD Vance. It’s never one man who pulls the whole thing off, although it does take a lying psychopath with charisma and some leadership skills to get the process rolling.

Ultimately, though, it can’t work without the National Guard captain who decides the order is lawful enough, the county clerk who hands over the machines because a federal agent showed her a piece of paper, the local cop who puts on the riot gear because his sergeant did, and the poll worker who turns his ballots over to masked ICE agents because it feels safer.

My friends who were there in Germany in 1933 told me, as does history, that that country didn’t fall to a majority; the Nazis never got a legitimate victory at the ballot box.

That nation fell, as others have throughout history, because tens of thousands of people in unremarkable jobs did the small thing that was asked of them in the moment it was asked, and told themselves it was only temporary, and it must be okay because somebody higher up must know something I don’t.

Every one of those people made that decision cold, under pressure, with a stranger in a uniform standing in front of them and about four seconds to think.

Which is why the useful work right now isn’t reactive, and it isn’t something we do in November. It’s finding out, before November, what the people around us are going to do.

— Go meet your county election officials; they’re mostly your neighbors, and in a lot of counties they’re the ones who’ll be standing between a federal agent sent by Trump and a ballot box with nobody backing them up.

— Ask your sheriff, on the record, at a public meeting, whether he takes orders from Washington or from the county.

— Ask your state legislators what the plan is if the National Guard shows up, because most of them probably haven’t thought about it and they damn well should. Ask your governor and state attorney general.

— Find out which lawyers in your town do election work and whether they’re organized. Get to know the people on your block well enough that you can call them at midnight, if necessary.

— Get to know your local elected officials and, in the few months ahead, show up at your local Democratic Party meeting.

People who’ve already decided what they’ll do, and who know that the folks around them decided the same thing, behave completely differently when the moment arrives than people who are trying to figure it out on the spot.

That’s not optimism. It’s just how it’s always worked, in Selma and Kiev and Manila and everywhere else people have looked at an illegal order or an out-of-control authority figure and said, “No.”

What matters most in the next four months is going to happen at the local level, in county commission meetings and election offices that nobody’s watching.

Go be somebody who’s watching.

Tonight at nine o’clock Eastern, Donald Trump will look into a television camera and tell America he’s rescuing democracy. He teased the address to reporters this week, promising “really big news” about “free and fair elections” and adding that “it doesn’t get bigger.”

For once, he and I agree. It doesn’t get bigger.

An administration official told Reuters that the speech will center on newly declassified intelligence about the 2020 election and what the White House calls voting machine vulnerabilities open to foreign hackers; multiple election experts quoted in that same reporting warn he’s laying the groundwork to contest Republican losses this November.

To understand what we’ll actually be watching Thursday night, we have to go back to 1973, to a Manhattan night spot called Le Club, where a 27-year-old Donald Trump, freshly sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent apartments to Black families, met the most feared lawyer in New York. It’s a story I tell in detail in The Last American President.

Roy Cohn had made his reputation as Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel, wrecking careers with accusations he never had to prove. His advice to young Trump, as Cohn’s own cousin later recalled it, was blunt: “You might be guilty; it doesn’t matter.” Don’t settle. Don’t apologize. Attack the accuser.

So instead of quietly signing the consent decree his father’s regular lawyers recommended, Trump called a press conference and countersued the federal government for $100 million. A judge tossed the countersuit, the Trumps eventually signed roughly the deal they’d been offered at the start, and Cohn declared total victory anyway.

He understood something that’s become the operating system of Donald Trump’s entire life: the court of public opinion matters more than any court of law, and a lie defended with absolute commitment will usually beat a truth defended halfheartedly.

Over their 13 years together, Cohn drilled three rules into his student: Attack, never defend. Deny everything, admit nothing. Claim victory no matter what actually happened.

When Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation in 2017, Trump reportedly demanded of his aides, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” He was mourning a fixer who’d been dead for three decades.

It took him eight more years, but he’s finally found his Roy Cohn. He’s found several of them, in fact, and he’s installed them at the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

That’s the machinery humming behind today’s speech. The acting Director of National Intelligence is now Bill Pulte, a nepo-baby real estate guy with no intelligence experience who referred Trump’s political enemies for criminal prosecution based on mortgage records he pulled from government databases, and who Democrats say was installed precisely to help Republicans rig the midterms.

A White House task force has been combing through thousands of pages of classified documents, timed to land in the middle of an election season. Federal agents have already raided the Fulton County elections office and carted off 700 boxes of 2020 ballots, something I covered here at the Hartmann Report earlier this year.

Steve Bannon has promised ICE agents at the polls come November, and Trump’s new Postmaster General has confirmed the Postal Service won’t deliver mail-in ballots from states that refuse to hand over sensitive voter data to the federal government. And Jay Clayton, Trump’s pick for permanent DNI, faced his Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday, one day before the speech, having already auditioned for the job by echoing Trump’s phony claims about “election integrity” on CNBC.

Standing in front of Mount Rushmore on the third of July, Trump told the crowd that if Senate Republicans kill the filibuster and pass his SAVE America Act, with its proof-of-citizenship, driver’s license-must-match-birth certificate (that kicks off millions of married women), and photo ID requirements, then Republicans “will not lose an election for 100 years.”

He tried holding a bipartisan housing affordability bill hostage to force the Senate’s hand, and now GOP leadership is trying to attach SAVE to the national security spending bill this week. Even Dan Abrams, hardly a flamethrower, opened his radio show this Monday by saying it’s time to admit the president of the United States is “trying to cheat” in the midterm elections.

One detail gives the whole con away: Tulsi Gabbard, before she resigned as DNI last month, commissioned a forensic analysis of voting machines seized in Puerto Rico. That analysis, Reuters reports, found security flaws but no evidence of hacking — none — and Gabbard’s own follow-up report recommending fixes has been sitting unreleased at the White House for months.

They went looking for proof of fraud, found none (but perhaps a way to hack machines in the future), buried the report that could have helped states harden their systems before November, and are now preparing a primetime address built on the fumes of the very investigation that came up empty.

Roy Cohn would be proud. Claim victory no matter what the facts say. When you’re in the wrong and on the defensive, lie and attack.

I lived in East Germany’s shadow for a year in the 1980s, working for an international relief organization in a small village a few miles from the border, and in 1986 I passed through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin. Most Americans probably don’t remember or even know that the DDR held elections; regular ones, with polling places and ballots and officially reported turnout levels that were typically north of 98 percent.

What they didn’t have was any possibility of a surprise. The regime had hollowed out every institution that could have made the outcome uncertain, so the election became theater, a ritual performed to legitimize a result already decided.

Putin ran East Germany’s KGB at the time, and he’s now Trump’s mentor. Authoritarians rarely abolish elections. They keep the shell and kill what’s inside it, and it appears that Trump is following the path Putin blazed at multiple levels.

So will it work here? There’s no secret button that flips vote totals: more than 98 percent of American ballots are cast in jurisdictions with paper records, and when Trump signed an executive order that would have forced the decertification of voting machines, a federal judge permanently blocked it based on the Constitution handing the running of elections to the states.

The weapon Trump and his corrupt GOP will use is chaos, not hacking: seizures of ballots and equipment, decertification fights, litigation that delays counts past deadlines, ICE vans parked outside polling places in Democratic neighborhoods, and a pre-built national narrative, launched tomorrow night, that gives every Republican candidate permission to refuse to concede when they lose.

David Becker, a former Justice Department voting rights attorney, thinks the document dumps will fall flat with most Americans, and the primary results this spring suggest voters aren’t buying what Trump’s selling.

But Roy Cohn’s method never needed a majority to believe the lie. It only needed enough confusion, enough delay, and enough intimidation to change who shows up and what gets counted. It’s worked for Donald Trump for 50 years.

Remember, though, how it ended for the teacher. Roy Cohn died in 1986, disbarred just weeks earlier for dishonesty, fraud, deceit, and misrepresentation, abandoned by nearly everyone he’d ever helped, including Trump, who dumped him when he got sick.

The con, in other words, always works right up until the moment it doesn’t.

Whether tonight marks the beginning of the biggest con in American history or the beginning of its collapse depends less on what Trump says than on what tens of millions of us do between now and the first Tuesday this coming November.

Congress is voting this week on whether to bolt the SAVE Act onto the national security spending bill, so call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your senators and representative where you stand, and don’t forget to mention Todd Blanche to your senators.

Check your voter registration right now at vote.org, because purges are already underway in Red states, and track what your own legislature is doing to protect or restrict your ballot at openstates.org.

Democracy has survived con men before, but only because ordinary Americans refused to become the mark. As Jefferson told us, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty…”

Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill — which gave the top 1% fully $118 billion this year in tax cuts — turns a year old this week and Republicans in Congress actually celebrated the largest cuts to food assistance and Medicaid in American history.

They told us it was about fraud, about lazy people gaming the system, about restoring the dignity of work. Exactly a year later, we can now see what it was really about in a line of cars outside a food bank in Phoenix.

That’s where ProPublica found Ana Alvarez on a recent morning, a single mother of five who works at a restaurant and lost her family’s SNAP benefits last September. She reapplied in December and the government still hasn’t processed her application.

She calls the agency every week and gets told to keep waiting, so she clips coupons, her kids don’t go to the zoo anymore, and as the summer heat bears down, she’s doing grim arithmetic on rent, the car payment, and the electric bill that keeps the air conditioning running. She’s one reason Arizona has lost more than half of its SNAP recipients in a single year.

In Michigan, a widow named Sarah works two food service jobs to raise her 9-year-old daughter on $219 a month in food assistance, help she’s needed since her husband died suddenly six years ago. Last Christmas one of her employers wrote a single number wrong on her renewal paperwork, one missing zero, and the state cut her off.

And in Atlanta, Human Rights Watch documented a 36-year-old supermarket cashier who was working and meeting every requirement until she gave birth in late 2025, at which point Georgia shut off both her Medicaid and her food stamps, claiming she’d failed to report the job she was standing at every day. She’s spent the months since trying to get her coverage back while the medical bills pile up. In the party of family values, apparently, having a baby is now a firing offense.

None of these women are cheats or freeloaders. They’re workers, mothers, widows: exactly the people these cynical Republicans swear they’re protecting. But the numbers tell the story: more than 4 million Americans have been pushed off SNAP since the bill passed, the steepest drop since Clinton’s 1996 welfare cuts, and in just the 13 states that publish the data, roughly 808,000 children have lost food assistance.

The Congressional Budget Office projects millions more will lose Medicaid as the work requirement paperwork machine grinds through the states, even though more than nine in 10 of the people targeted are already working, in school, caring for family, or disabled.

The cruelty built into the bill isn’t a side effect: it’s the whole reason for the “enhanced” paperwork requirements. Every mother who gives up in frustration, every widow tripped up by a typo, every application left to rot in a backlog is a line item of savings that can translate into a larger tax cut for Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg while the poorest households actually see their taxes go up.

That’s the morality of today’s GOP laid bare. They looked at Ana Alvarez’s five kids and Sarah’s daughter and that new mother in Atlanta, and they decided the billionaires needed the money more.

Every day, it seems, we see or hear about another way in which Trump and his lickspittles in Congress and the various federal agencies are tearing down our country, weakening our defenses, pitting Americans against each other, looting our government, and making life harder for everybody except the morbidly rich.

The question nobody seems to have an answer to is, “Why?”

— Is it that, as Craig Unger seems to suggest, that Trump’s been a Russian agent for decades and is setting us up to lose to the newly-forming Axis of Russia and China?
— Is it that he spent so many years burning with rage and embarrassment at not being accepted by New York high society that he’s just come to hate America?
— Could it be that American-values-hating foreign powers that have poured literally billions of dollars into the Trump family are paying him to tear us apart so they’ll never again have to endure the humiliation of having their human, civil, and women’s rights records called out by a future administration?
— Is it possible it’s all just to pay for tax cuts for billionaires?
— Or are his, Vance’s, and Musk’s white supremacist, Christian nationalist, libertarian, and/or neo-Nazi ideologies so intense that they’re willing to essentially burn the country down just to expel immigrants, deny benefits to people of color, elevate the rich, crush unions, and re-subordinate women?

These are serious questions for which I can’t find credible answers that explain the entire spectrum of their behavior. Why would Trump and the GOP:

— Condemn 12 million Americans to sickness and early death by gutting Medicaid (and the biggest cuts don’t even kick in until right after this fall’s election)?
— Destroy American soft power by killing USAID, thus condemning millions to death?
— Fire so many workers at the Social Security Administration that just getting through to sign up or get help has turned into a multi-day slog?
— Gut the State Department at a time diplomacy is most needed for world peace?
— End food assistance (SNAP) for millions when one-in-five American children experience hunger?
— Refuse to enforce laws and rules that allow workers to form unions in their workplaces?
— Propose forcing all new Medicare recipients onto Medicare “Advantage” corporate scam plans?
— Refuse military aid to Ukraine for over a year to give Russia time to finish off their genocidal job?
— Stop the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from going after fraudsters and banks when they rip people off?
— Eliminate a major NOAA program designed to warn communities about the dangers of flooding and other extreme weather crises?
— Politicize the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Election Commission?
— End net neutrality so none of us are safe online?
— Shut down anti-cyber-warfare operations in the federal government?
— Defund university research that leads to innovation and saves lives?
— Cut unemployment insurance benefits across Red states?
— Terminate support for people with student loans and gut scholarship programs?
— Slash Affordable Care Act outreach budgets and allow junk insurance plans?
— Reverse over 100 environmental rules, including those on clean air, clean water, and chemical safety?
— Weaken Dodd-Frank, including gutting oversight of “too big to fail” banks and stress tests for mid-size financial institutions?
— Dial back OSHA workplace safety standards and inspections?
— Cut taxes to rich people while raising them via tariffs on working class folks?
— Change the Federal Trade Commission to allow more monopolistic, rip-off corporate behavior?
— Make it harder to vote and harass Blue states by demanding their voter information?
— Work to prosecute women who have miscarriages or abortions?
— Make it harder to qualify for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI)?
— End auto emission standards and increase our reliance on fossil fuels?
— Pack the courts with judges the American Bar Association says are “unqualified”?
— Destroy our faith in our elections and set up election workers for harassment?
— Fire the Inspectors General (who find waste, fraud, and abuse) across multiple federal agencies?
— Weaken whistleblower protections?
— Put the military on the streets of our cities in violation of Posse Comitatus?
— Use state power to punish political opponents and those who’ve investigated Trump’s crimes, alleged Russian collusion, and corruption?
— Create a network of concentration camps across America?
— Allow a shadow cabinet of billionaires and theocrats via Project 2025?
— Attack judges and prosecutors, leading to violence and threats of violence?
— Foment violence (like on January 6th) as a political strategy?
— Destroy our asylum and refugee systems?
— Pardon insurrectionists, rapists, cybercriminals, and other wealthy criminals?
— Defund the IRS so they can no longer audit the morbidly rich, leading to the loss of hundreds of billions in federal revenues?
— Ban books and censor libraries?
— Criminalize trans and queer people?
— Roll back gun safety measures?
— Defund the arts, humanities, and public media?
— Gut vaccine and other programs that keep Americans healthy?
— Nakedly politicize the military?
— Expand federal surveillance powers while kneecapping oversight?
— Criminalize free speech, particularly on college campuses?
— Attempt to revoke birthright citizenship?
— Attack press freedom and bar the Associated Press from the White House?
— Sabotage the US Postal Service?
— Undermine the census?
— Scale back civil and women’s rights enforcement?
— Normalize autocratic language like “vermin,” “scum,” and calling immigrants “animals”?
— Expel millions of brown-skinned immigrants who’ve already gone through the legal process to get work permits and are on a path toward citizenship?
— Create international fiscal chaos with an on-again, off-again TACO tariff policy?
— Cancel the suicide hotline for queer kids?
— Gut our national parks and sell off our federal lands to wealthy friends of the administration?
— Create a vast, secret, unaccountable police force with masked officers whose identity is concealed?
— Allow the president to accept hundreds of millions in obvious bribes from foreign powers in violation of the Constitution?
— Work so hard to conceal the crimes of a notorious sexual predator?

And this, of course, is just a partial list of the ways Trump and the GOP have weakened our nation, reduced our standing and prestige in the world, corrupted our government, and immiserated working-class families.

Many of the theories about why Trump and the GOP would enthusiastically do so much damage to our people, our military, and our democracy contradict others.

For example, why would billionaires want tax cuts at the expense of damaging the economy that made them rich? Why would we promote a muscular military policy like bombing Iran while simultaneously destroying morale within the ranks of our military and kneecapping our intelligence agencies?

“Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is,” sang Bob Dylan back in the 19

In the winter of 1986 while living in West Germany I visited East Berlin with my oldest daughter, who was still a teenager, and on the far side of Checkpoint Charlie we were picked up by a young man named Torsten who ran a gypsy cab. Before we’d gone more than a block he had the two of us rehearsing a story, that we were his long-lost cousins over from the West, so we’d all say the same thing if the Volkspolizei or Stasi stopped the car.

He couldn’t have been much past 20, and he was kind to two strangers all afternoon (and grateful for the 20 Deutschmarks I gave him), but under all of it he was afraid the entire day, because in the country he lived in a man could be hauled in for the crime of driving people around and not being able to account for himself.

That fear, the quiet hum of it running beneath an ordinary afternoon, is exactly what a “papers, please” society feels like from the inside.

I’ve been thinking about Torsten all week, because the reporting now says that immigration checkpoints are being set up within the United States, and that more than 213 million of us Americans live inside a hundred-mile band running inward from every land border and coastline where federal agents can now stop your car and demand proof of your immigration status. No international crossing required.

That zone, first drawn by a federal regulation back in 1953, swallows 10 entire states and cities like New York and Los Angeles, and the libertarians at the Cato Institute, who are nobody’s idea of open-borders radicals, call it the “Constitution-free zone” and have gone to the trouble of mapping the checkpoints one by one.

It’s “Constitution-free” because ICE has decided that the Fourth Amendment, which reads, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…” is just a suggestion, rather than one of the foundational guarantees of American liberty; just an obstacle standing between the Trump administration and the police state it’s steadily but relentlessly building.

In Washington, D.C., for example, a construction worker got waved over by the Park Police for a minor traffic matter, and within a minute ICE agents had surrounded his truck, asking where everyone was from and whether they were in the country illegally. Two of his passengers were taken away, and nobody would tell him where.

ICE is also now paying state and local police to help, and the money is staggering. One estimate says the total could hit two billion dollars this year alone. In Florida, police departments pocketed nearly forty million dollars for vehicles and gear. In the Florida Keys, agents threw up a checkpoint on the only highway in and out, a tourist route, and made more than three hundred arrests.

They’re stationed at courthouses, bus stations, train terminals, and airports too, snaring domestic travelers who never came near a border. The ACLU’s Naureen Shah put it plainly. “We’ve never seen this financial incentive scheme exist.”

When the Supreme Court first blessed these interior checkpoints in the 1976 Martinez-Fuerte decision, it authorized a brief stop and a question or two about citizenship, nothing more, no searches, no fishing expeditions. What Cato and others have documented in the years since is a steady drift into prolonged detentions, questioning about anything and everything, and drug dogs brought out with no particular reason.

And this past September five neofascist Republicans on the Supreme Court (led, in this case, by “Pillsbury Doughboy Brett Kavanaugh”) went further, clearing agents in the Los Angeles area to treat the color of your skin, your Spanish or accented English, the kind of work you do, or even the corner where you wait for it as reasons enough to stop you. They now call them “Kavanaugh Stops.”

One of the citizens swept up before that ruling was a young brown-skinned man born in East L.A. who kept shouting that he’d been born right here as agents pinned his arm behind his back. And if you try to flee one of these checkpoints by car at speed, a federal statute makes that its own felony punishable by up to five years.

Earlier this week, masked, armed, anonymous ICE thugs snatched and handcuffed a nun off the street in Texas and threw her into a “detention” cell; she was a nurse dressed in a full habit, but her skin was brown, an apparent violation of the new Trump doctrine of Make America White Again.

If this seems to you like something out of the old world, you’re right, but we didn’t need to import it from the Nazis or the Soviets. We built our own version early and often, and Trump and his Republican lickspittles on the Court and in Congress seem determined to reinvent it here in the 21st century.

Prior to the Civil War, enslaved people in this country couldn’t travel a country road without a written pass, and, as I document in detail in The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment, the slave patrols that were ubiquitous across the Old South would stop any Black person and demand to see it.

After emancipation, the Black Codes and the vagrancy laws did the same work under new rationalizations. And in 1892, racists in Congress passed the Geary Act, which ordered every Chinese resident in America to carry a photographic “certificate of residence” at all times or face arrest, hard labor, and deportation.

It was the first time this country made illegal presence a federal crime, and Chinese immigrants understood exactly what it was, calling the papers “dog tags” because a Chinese laborer now carried his number in his pocket the way a licensed dog carried his on a collar, and any white man who felt like it could stop him and demand to see it.

It was “Papers, please,” made in America from the start of our republic, aimed at whoever white men decided didn’t belong.

Then there’s what I saw for myself living overseas. For part of our years in Germany, my family lived right on the East/West German line, in the little town of Höchheim, where I worked for the international relief organization Salem.

A few hundred feet from our house stood two enormous fences, both built on Eastern soil, with a raked strip of sand between them so the guards could read a single footprint, and watchtowers rose some thirty feet with men and machine guns inside. When we walked near the road, they’d swing the guns toward us.

Now and then someone trying to cross got shot dead in that sand. The border towns we could see on the far side were lit up all night so no one could slip out in the dark, and in the spring, when the thaw shifted the ground, we’d be woken by the muffled thump of land mines going off on their own.

Years later we took a train through East Germany and the police came down the aisle with machine guns and dogs, demanding to see everyone’s papers, and when my eight-year-old son lifted a camera to take a picture they threatened him until he put it down.

That same instinct built the apartheid pass laws of South Africa, where every Black adult had to carry a passbook they bitterly nicknamed the dompas, the “stupid pass,” and where in 1960 police shot sixty-nine people dead, most of them in the back, outside a police station in Sharpeville for the crime of showing up without one.

The Soviets ran their whole country on internal passports that told you where you were allowed to live and work, just like they erected statues to Joseph Stalin everywhere you went.

Every one of these systems existed for a single purpose: to monitor, intimidate, and control the movement and behaviors of people the state had decided it couldn’t trust to be compliant. And Trump, Miller, et al apparently believe they should be the model for the new America they’re trying to build with the help of rightwing media oligarchs, toadies hanging banners with his face on them across federal buildings, National Guard patrols in our cities, and compliant Republicans on the Court and in Congress.

Which is why today the Trump regime no longer even needs a man in a uniform to stop you and ask who you are and what you’re up to. Last spring, researchers pulled apart the official White House app for Trump’s MAGA loyalists and found it capable of tracking a user’s precise location every few minutes, shipped with a privacy disclosure that falsely told Apple it collected nothing, while routing most of its traffic to private third-party servers to get around the Fourth Amendment.

When a security firm actually ran the app on real phones they didn’t catch it broadcasting locations, so the code could do the tracking even if no one saw it happen: the Trump regime built a tool capable of following you everywhere you go and then lied to the app store about what it collected.

As I wrote in The Hidden History of Big Brother in America, the surveillance state rarely arrives announcing itself. And the irony in this one is that the app wasn’t initially aimed at immigrants or dissidents but at the administration’s own supporters, the people who downloaded it to feel close to Trump with regular rants and updates straight from the Oval Office.

Somewhere along the way we even turned “papers, please” into a video game, a Cold War diorama you boot up for the pleasant shiver of it, and now REAL ID has quietly added a document check to the airport line you already dreaded.

The old checkpoint needed a guard to ask to see your papers: the new one just scans your face and instantly identifies you, a feature that’s now also available to police watching people drive or walk along the streets in most big American cities.

ICE is now using it to monitor protestors. As The Washington Post documented earlier this year:

“Federal immigration officers fanning out across Minnesota and other parts of the country are newly equipped with an array of state-of-the-art surveillance technologies, thanks to a bill passed last summer that transformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement into the country’s most highly funded law enforcement agency.

“ICE has wasted no time spending its war chest, buying new tools ranging from biometric trackers to mobile phone location databases, spyware and drones, while loosening restrictions on how it uses some of these technologies.

“These new surveillance powers come at a time when ICE is also pushing the bounds of its traditional role of immigration enforcement. In recent months, ICE leaders, backed by top Trump administration officials, have asserted the authority to use all available tools to monitor and investigate anti-ICE protester networks, including U.S. citizens.”

The freedom to move through our own country without stopping to account for ourselves, without proving to a masked, armed, anonymous officer answering to Trump that we have permission to be on the street, is one of the most ancient things — from the days of the Roman republic to 1980s East Germany to today — that separates a free people from a police state.

Torsten understood that in 1986, which is why he was scared even while he was being decent to two strangers who could have gotten him arrested.

We’ve come here in America from the slave pass to the Chinese dog tag to biometric surveillance, facial recognition, automatic license plate readers, cellphone location tracking, and immigration checkpoints miles from any border. The through-line never changes, only the tools and the intentions of the government that uses them.

So don’t let this one slide past as somebody else’s problem just because you were born here and can carry the right documents. Call your representatives through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them to rein in interior checkpoints and roving patrols and to restore the Fourth Amendment inside that so-called “hundred-mile zone.”

There’s also increasing resistance to Trump’s police state instincts and programs among the more progressive members of Congress and candidates for office: support them any way you can.

Learn your rights before you’re standing at a checkpoint rather than after, and if you see a neighbor stopped, film it and bear witness. Support the groups suing to hold the line, from the ACLU to the immigrant-defense networks and civil liberties groups in your own town.

And if this piece helped you see the shape of the thing more clearly, share it, forward it, and send people to hartmannreport.com, because the whole goal of Trump’s “papers, please” state and the assassinations of Renee Good and Alex Pretti is that everyone learns to keep quiet, and the surest way to refuse it is to keep talking to each other out loud.

The “partisan split” of Americans showed up in a big way at Fourth of July celebrations and backyard barbecues last week, but the media, while noting or even complaining about it, rarely mentions exactly why it’s happening.

A few weeks ago, Louise and I were having coffee with an old friend who’s known us since the early days of the radio show, and somewhere between the second cup and the muffins she said something that’s been rattling around in my head ever since. Her sister, a three-time Trump voter, had finally called — after months of silence — and demanded to know why our friend had stopped returning her calls.

“It’s just politics,” the sister said. “Why are you taking this so personally?” Our friend, who is queer and married, listened for about 30 seconds and then said, very quietly, “Because you voted for the people who want me to disappear, and you knew that when you did it.”

Then she hung up. She told us she felt awful about it for about an hour, and then she felt nothing at all, and the nothing was almost worse than the guilt would’ve been.

I’ve heard variations on that story dozens of times in the past year, and apparently so have a lot of other people, because a piece making the rounds on Daily Kos a few weeks ago by the writer Vyan put words to something that’s been building in millions of American households since January of 2016.

The piece is bracing and worth reading in full, but the core observation is one that the right-wing media ecosystem genuinely can’t process: their voters are suddenly discovering that their daughters and sons and nieces and old college roommates no longer want to come to July 4th, Thanksgiving, and other holidays.

They’re treating this as some inexplicable “progressive cruelty,” as if the rest of us simply woke up one morning and decided to be petty.

Greg Gutfeld did a whole monologue on it on Fox “News.” The framing, of course, is that you’re the unreasonable one for refusing to “look past” a single political choice your father or your uncle made:

“Can’t you just love them anyway? Why are you being so hateful?”

Here’s the thing they can’t quite bring themselves to say out loud, because saying it out loud would require admitting what they actually did: they didn’t vote for lower egg prices, although that’s the cover story most of them have settled on by now.

They voted for a man who descended an escalator in 2015 and called brown-skinned Mexicans rapists, who described non-white immigrants as “vermin” who were “poisoning the blood of our country,” language historians of fascism noted at the time was lifted almost verbatim from Mein Kampf.

They voted for him again in 2024 knowing exactly who he was, knowing what he’d promised to do, knowing that Stephen Miller had spent two years describing on podcast after podcast a deportation operation that would, in Miller’s own words, require building “very large staging facilities” and deploying the military against the civilian population.

They knew.

The Heritage Foundation published a 900-page blueprint to, in my words, “Make America White Again.” Miller did the interviews. JD Vance called Trump “America’s Hitler” before he became his running mate, and then ran with him anyway, and the voters knew that, too.

So what they got is exactly the hate and racism they voted for, and now, 17 months into the second Trump administration, more than 675,000 people have been deported, the ICE detention population has swelled to over 68,000 — a 70 percent increase over where it stood at the end of the Biden years — and people are dying inside those facilities at a rate this country has never seen before.

The Kaiser Family Foundation tracked 46 deaths in ICE custody between January 2025 and March 2026, with annual deaths roughly tripling from the 11 recorded in 2024 to 33 in 2025, and 2026 already on pace to exceed even that.

The ACLU now estimates someone is dying in immigration detention roughly every six days, and a CNN investigation a few weeks ago found that at least a dozen of those deaths were directly attributable to medical neglect, understaffing, and the cascading failures that happen when for-profit concentration camp operations double the detained population without doubling the doctors.

Three of the six deaths in a single recent month were suicides. The administration’s response has been to point out that the death rate, expressed as a percentage of the swollen detained population, comes to 0.009 percent, which is the sort of statistic you cite when you’ve already decided the people doing the dying aren’t quite people.

And Miller isn’t slowing down. He’s spoken openly about a vision of removing as many as 100 million people from the United States, a number that mathematically can’t just describe the undocumented, because there aren’t 100 million undocumented people in this country and there never have been.

That number describes naturalized citizens, mixed-status families, the U.S.-born children of immigrants, and anyone whose skin is dark enough that their presence Miller and his ideological allies consider an affront to what they keep calling “Heritage Americans,” aka “white people.”

Since the law changed in 1965 and we ended racial immigration quotas, the majority of immigrants to America have not been white, but white people (from South Africa, for G-d’s sake) are all the Trump administration now encourages to come into the US.

Too many Black and brown people have already arrived from “s---hole countries,” they say, and it’s time for them to leave. Stephen Miller’s white supremacist project to ethnically re-engineer the country runs faster every week.

If you’re a white person who voted for this administration and you’re now telling your gay nephew or your Korean-American daughter-in-law or your Mexican-American grandkids that you don’t see what the big deal is, you’re asking them to make peace with the fact that the people running the country have, on the record, in their own voices, described a future in which they don’t exist here.

The economic case the administration likes to make is that all of this cruelty is somehow “necessary” because immigrants are “draining the country.” But that, in particular, is simply an establishing lie.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022 alone, and that in 40 states they pay a higher effective state and local tax rate than the top one percent of households living alongside them. Every million undocumented people deported represents about $8.9 billion in lost annual tax revenue, money that funds the schools and hospitals and roads in the very communities now cheering ICE on.

And the criminal rationale, the one that animates every Fox “News” chyron about “foreign rapists,” collapses just as fast: ICE’s own fiscal year 2025 enforcement data shows 127 sexual offense arrests in a country where the FBI logged roughly 127,000 reported rapes by US citizens, and the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network estimates closer to 443,000 actual incidents of sexual violence every year.

Meanwhile, Trump has issued an executive order labeling Americans dissenting from his racist, fascist, so-called “Christian” policies as domestic terrorists, and they’ve begun investigating, prosecuting, and imprisoning people for being anti-fascist, or “antifa” when the organization doesn’t even exist.

We’re dismantling due process, abandoning habeas corpus and the Fourth Amendment, and building concentration camps against a population that accounts for less than a tenth of one percent of the sexual violence in this country. The numbers don’t support the policy, though, because the economics were never the point, other than the number of Black and brown people arriving on our shores since 1965.

This is why people are walking away from their relatives and didn’t show up for July 4th picnics, and why the people walking away aren’t, in fact, “being petty.”

When someone you love votes for a candidate who has promised, in plain English, to do something cruel and unconstitutional and historically catastrophic, and then he does exactly that, and they still defend him, the relationship isn’t being broken by your refusal to overlook it.

The relationship was broken when they cast the vote. You’re just the one acknowledging the damage.

Gutfeld and his colleagues want to frame all of this as “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” as a kind of emotional incontinence on the left. But there’s a much older word for refusing to extend warmth and intimacy to people who’ve signed off on the persecution of your neighbors and those who stand for democracy against authoritarianism, and it’s not derangement.

It’s conscience.

The Germans who quietly stopped inviting their Nazi-sympathizing brothers-in-law to dinner in 1934 weren’t being dramatic. They were doing the only honest thing left to do, and most of them, looking back from the rubble in 1946, wished they’d done it sooner and louder.

We’re not in 1934 yet. The midterms are five months away. The country still has somewhat functioning courts (other than SCOTUS), a free press that’s bruised but breathing, and the kind of organized opposition that can flip a House and possibly even Senate majority if enough of us show up.

Look up the local organizations doing rapid-response work for detained families through groups like the Detention Watch Network.

And when the MAGA friend or relative in your life asks why you’ve gone quiet, you don’t owe them a fight and you don’t owe them an apology. You owe them, if you choose to give it at all, the truth: that you saw what they helped build, and you’ve decided you’d rather associate with someone else.

The rest of this year is going to demand more of us than ever before. Pretending otherwise is no longer an option.