I just saw the movie that will define our age — you can tell because right-wingers hate it

This week has felt like one battle after another. We all watched video after video of ICE agents dropping from helicopters onto a Chicago apartment block, kicking in doors and terrorizing Black and Hispanic American and immigrant families, then trashing and stealing their possessions without ever presenting a warrant signed by a judge.

The GOP pushed the country to the brink again with another government shutdown threat while right-wing legislatures redrew districts to erase the votes of millions. We heard more talk of arresting journalists for doing their jobs, and watched as the military rolled through American cities as if people here are the enemy.

Each day has felt like a slow-motion assault on democracy itself.

Louise and I went to see Leonardo DiCaprio’s new movie, One Battle After Another, last weekend, and I was stunned. It’s a film of rare courage and artistry. From the first scene to the last, Paul Thomas Anderson reminds us that cinema can still tell the truth about power and conscience. It’s a film that demands attention, not permission.

The movie runs about two-and-a-half hours, but it’s so action- and drama-packed that it felt like it flew by in less than an hour. I knew people similar to those characterized in this movie when I was in East Lansing SDS back in 1968-69: seeing them portrayed like this was a hoot! This is truly brilliant film-making.

Predictably, conservatives rushed to condemn it. Some labeled it “irresponsible” or claimed it “glorifies violence.” What they really mean is that it unsettles them. They prefer art that flatters authority and soothes the comfortable. This film refuses to do either.

The world Anderson portrays is not a fantasy. When federal agents execute suspects, when protests are manipulated to justify repression, when truth is distorted by propaganda, that is not simply fiction. It reflects the deep anxiety of a society that’s watched Trump’s executive power become far too concentrated and way too cruel. Anyone paying attention to the news knows how real that danger feels.

The rightwing National Review published a piece titled “There Will Be Bloodlust in ‘One Battle After Another’” that accused Anderson of romanticizing 1960s radicalism. Yet DiCaprio, who stars in the film, called it a “timely satire.” Speaking to Reuters, he said, “It’s not a film where people are imposing any political beliefs on anyone else. It’s satire on both ends.”

That contrast says everything. Conservatives want to see chaos; Anderson and his cast are inviting reflection. The violence in the film is not triumphant; it’s painful, personal, and tragic. It shows what happens when injustice festers until ordinary people begin to break, as I saw in the people I knew in the Weather Underground back in the day.

History reminds us that art has always frightened the powerful. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was banned in the South because it forced them to confront slavery. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was smeared by industrialists for revealing the cruelty of unregulated capitalism. Protest music of the 1960s and artists like Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger were condemned as “unpatriotic” by the same crowd that called Dr. King a radical.

When art tells the truth, power always howls.

Today the same pattern repeats. The same rightwing billionaires funding “outrage” over this film are working to silence teachers, censor libraries, and rewrite history to protect privilege. They fear a nation that can still feel empathy; they fear what happens when people start asking why power serves so few.

One Battle After Another is not a call to arms. It is, instead, a warning about what happens when corruption becomes normal and compassion becomes rare. It asks us to look at the machinery of cruelty and decide whether we’ll stand by or resist. That choice is the same one that generations before us have faced.

If this film makes people uncomfortable, that’s its purpose. Democracy doesn’t survive by comforting the powerful. It survives when ordinary people demand justice and truth, even when it stings.

One Battle After Another will be called divisive by those who profit from division. They’re wrong. The real division in this country is between those who believe art should serve power and those who believe art should challenge it.

I stand with the challengers, because when we fall silent, we serve power; when we speak, we hold it to account.

Are Trump's masked thugs the new Ku Klux Klan?

Masked, armed law enforcement agents who regularly violate the law and strip people of their constitutional rights is nothing new in America. They have, in fact, a long and well-documented history, including states — after years of abuse by masked men — passing laws specifically to prevent them from concealing their identities when performing law enforcement operations.

In this era, we call them Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. In the late 19th and early to mid-20th centuries they called themselves the Klu Klux Klan. They often operated with the blessing of both federal and state governments, often deputized and given badges and guns, and “enforced the law” while wearing their famous white hoods to conceal their individual identities.

ICE operates today with a level of anonymity, impunity, and intimidation that closely parallels the Ku Klux Klan’s tactics as masked, semi-official enforcers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Both used legal or quasi-legal authority, masked identities, and violent or coercive tactics to carry out their missions, all without individual accountability while targeting vulnerable minorities and subverting legal norms to do so.

Because their violence and brutality so often broke the law, the Klan’s hoods prevented victims from identifying them. This allowed them to operate with near-complete impunity, knowing that individually they’d never be held to account.

To this day, we generally only know the names of their public leaders or of those who’d taken over regular law enforcement bureaus, like the five Klan members who murdered three voting registration/civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964.

Operating under the authority of the Neshoba County Sheriff’s office, Edgar Ray Killen, a local Ku Klux Klan organizer, planned and orchestrated the murders; Cecil Ray Price, a Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff and Klansman, arrested the three men on a fabricated speeding charge; Alton Wayne Roberts was the Klansman who shot and killed Schwerner and Goodman; Samuel Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of Mississippi’s Klan, ordered the killings; James Jordan was the Klansman who confessed to shooting Chaney.

Today — to avoid the accountability that Killen, Price, Roberts, Bowers, and Jordan faced — ICE agents routinely conduct operations while masked, concealing faces and badge numbers. This is framed as a “safety” measure, but it’s pretty clear that the real motive is to shield agents from accountability, mirroring practices by the Klan, who wore hoods to intimidate, avoid arrest, and facilitate mob violence without risk of personal consequence.

The Klan’s power was rooted in violence without accountability. And the mask was its shield. When historians write about the so-called “Second Klan” of the 1920s, they point out its members’ obsession with law and order and masked morality enforcement.

Some jurisdictions openly deputized them to “assist” in enforcing segregation laws and even liquor laws — principally raiding Black-owned speakeasies — during Prohibition. In Indiana and Oregon, the Klan effectively ran the entire state’s politics.

Eventually, states had enough and outlawed Klan members from wearing hoods or kerchiefs, even when executing the law. New York, a “free state,” was an early adopter. In 1845, before the Klan was formed, the state made it a crime for a law enforcement officer or anybody else to appear “disguised and armed.”

An Indiana version of that law was overturned by an Indiana Federal District judge who found that forcing Klan members to remove their hoods could subject them to harassment and impinge on their “right to anonymity when past harassment makes it likely that disclosing the members’ [identities] would impact the group’s ability to pursue its collective efforts at advocacy.”

It’s Tom Homan and Kristi Noem’s argument today.

In addition to New York and Indiana, 17 states passed laws against armed men wearing masks to conceal their identities, including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, Oklahoma, Texas, Connecticut, Ohio, Mississippi, Kentucky, Tennessee (law later struck down), Arkansas (local ordinances), and Maryland (various forms).

California has an 1872 ordinance that outlaws “mask, false whiskers, or any personal disguise (whether complete or partial)” when “evading or escaping discovery, recognition, or identification in the commission of any public offense.”

Connecticut law (1949) makes it illegal to wear a mask “with the intent” to deprive another of “any rights, privileges or immunities” on account of race, something it appears that ICE officers are doing daily, particularly since Brett Kavanaugh said they can racially profile people in so-called “Kavanaugh Raids.”

Delaware outlaws (1953) wearing masks “while congregating in public and depriving another of rights.” DC outlaws wearing masks “to avoid identification” while committing a dangerous or violent crime, theft, or “threats to do bodily harm.”

Florida outlaws (1951) wearing a mask “while intimidating others.” Ditto for Georgia, Massachusetts (“while obstructing police”), Michigan (“in commission of a crime”), New Mexico (“while obstructing police”), North Dakota (“while in commission of a crime”), Ohio (“while in commission of a misdemeanor with others so masked”), and Oklahoma (“while in commission of a crime or to harass”).

Most of these laws could be used to prosecute ICE officers when they wear masks while committing assault, kidnapping, and vandalism, should any state or city governments choose to make the arrests.

The most recent and most specific law was passed this year by California’s legislature, called the No Secret Police Act (SB627). It’s main author, State Senator Scott Weiner, notes:

“As this authoritarian regime seeks to demolish our constitutional rights and engages in a straight up terror campaign, California is meeting the Trump Administration’s secret police tactics with strength and defiance. …
“ICE’s secret police tactics, under Trump and Stephen Miller, are raining fear and aggression down on California and requiring us to adapt in real time. …

“No one wants masked officers roaming their communities and kidnapping people with impunity. As this authoritarian regime expands its reach into every aspect of daily life — including terrorizing people where they work, where they live, where they go to school, where they shop, where they seek health care — California will continue to stand for the rule of law and for basic freedoms.”

So far, Governor Gavin Newsom has chosen not to enforce the law that he pushed through his own legislature, although ICE seems to be focusing their “Kavanaugh Raid” abuses of Black and Hispanic people on Chicago — where they’ve already shot two people, killing one — and Portland right now.

The question isn’t whether ICE agents today share the Klan’s ideology. Some may not, although recruiting pitches seem directed toward those sympathetic. The question, instead, is whether our government has once again created a Klan-like system in which anonymous armed men can break into homes, detain people, and abuse families without being individually answerable to the law.

That is what the hood and mask have always symbolized in America: they mean rightwing thugs can do whatever they want and walk away untouched, no matter how heinous their crimes.

We’re told that if we have nothing to hide we have nothing to fear. But when armed officers of the government hide their identities from the public they claim to serve, they’re telling us exactly what to fear.

History has already written the first draft of this story once before. We’d be fools to let it play out again.

This is who's next on Trump's list. It's horrifying

Remember the old TV crime/drama shows? A cop would bang on a suspect’s door and the suspect would say, through the door, “Do you have a warrant?” The officer would then walk away, promising to come back later with the requisite paper signed by a judge.

No more. Now they’re kicking in doors, shooting pepper-gas balls into the open windows of cars driven by reporters, smashing windows and furniture, and concealing their faces and identities like the Klan did in days of old. In Chicago, they’ve shot two unarmed people, killing one. And there wasn’t a warrant signed by a judge to be seen anywhere.

People ask, “Are we there, yet? Has America gone fascist? Are we now in a militarized dictatorship?”

Last week’s illegal, unconstitutional military assault on an apartment building in Chicago argues “Yes.” And if it doesn’t stimulate a similar level of public outrage as the Jimmy Kimmel suspension did, we’re all screwed.

And by “all” I mean you, too. None of us are safe if all of us aren’t safe. We have to stand up and speak out now.

Trump, Vance, Hegseth, and Noem carefully selected a low-income apartment building filled with Black and Hispanic people, correctly believing that the American mainstream media wouldn’t give it the coverage they would if ICE and our military had instead kicked in the doors of a building full of middle-class white people.

Soldiers rapelled from Black Hawk helicopters as some 300 masked agents ran throughout the apartment building kicking in doors, dragging American citizens out (including near-naked children) into the street and zip-tying them for hours.

They then trashed multiple apartments, ripping up furniture, smashing windows, breaking and scattering possessions, and removing and carting away phones and laptops. No warrants signed by judges were presented and one ICE thug, when asked about the shivering American citizen kids standing in the freezing cold, said, “F--k the children.”

This is the exact same sort of thing that British forces did against the colonists in the 1770s that provoked our nation’s Founders to write in the Fourth Amendment to our Constitution:

“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.”

MAGA is delighted; puppy-killer Noem claims people were “clapping in the streets,” although there doesn’t appear to be any evidence of that. MAGA folks seem to think that because they’re white they’re safe from attack by this regime.

But when they’re done with the brown folks, they’ll be coming for the white people next. They’ll start with Democrats — Trump called them “Satan” last week — but history shows they won’t stop there.

It’s already started, with Trump’s most recent National Security Directive that instructs the 200-plus local police/FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces all across the country to begin investigating anybody or any group that exhibits or has ever given a donation to any group showing “indicia of terrorism” including being anti-Christian; anti-capitalism; extremism on migration, race, or gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional views on family, religion, or morality.

Do you have a queer kid? A Black or Hispanic friend? Are you a union member? Have you failed to attend church over the past few years? Are you Jewish or Muslim? Unitarian? Ever donated to a civil rights group? Voted Democratic? Or voted for a Republican who Trump despises, like Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger?

You’re next.

They may have already started surveilling you, tapping your phone, reading your emails, collecting your browser and location history.

This isn’t the first time masked, armed agents of the government have terrorized American citizens. In the late 1870s and the 1920s, in Portland, Oregon (among other cities) armed, hooded members of the Klu Klux Klan were deputized and unleashed against racial minorities, Catholics, Jews, union members, and other “criminals and undesirables.”

Oregon had been so taken over by the Klan that in the election of 1876 their electoral college votes were challenged by both parties in Congress, leading, in part, to the election being handed to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes.

Eventually, Oregon and the rest of America rejected masked secret police and vigilantes in our streets. Now, in this generation, it’s our turn.

Christopher Armitage, on his Existentialist Republic Substack newsletter, argues forcefully that masked federal agents committing crimes should be arrested by state and local police:

“Here’s what you need to know: Federal agents are committing state felonies every day. Breaking and entering. Kidnapping. Assault. When they kick down doors without judicial warrants, when they detain citizens without probable cause, when they point guns at children, these are crimes under state law. And Democratic governors have the power to prosecute those crimes …

“When ICE agents face potential state prosecution for breaking down doors, they’ll start getting real warrants signed by real judges. When pointing guns at families could mean assault charges, they’ll think twice. When detaining U.S. citizens could mean kidnapping prosecutions, they’ll check IDs more carefully.” (emphasis added)

And Trump can’t pardon state crimes; those convicted end up in state prisons. It’s probably why, like the Klan of old, they conceal their identities.

ICE isn’t bothering to get the kinds of warrants required by the Fourth Amendment, instead they’re using “administrative warrants” signed by ICE officials; these are just window-dressing paperwork and are not legal warrants.

Armitage points out:

“So when ICE breaks down a door with only administrative paperwork, that’s burglary under California Penal Code 459. When they haul away citizens without probable cause, that’s kidnapping under Penal Code 207. When they point weapons at unarmed families, that’s assault under Penal Code 245.”

He correctly tells us all to contact our state and local elected officials and demand that they enforce the laws of our states.

You can duckduckgo.com search for your town’s mayor’s office, your state representative and senator, and you can call your House and Senate members at 202-224-3121.

This brutal, illegal attack on American citizens last week was the Trump regime’s most visible “crossing the Rubicon” moment. If it stands, it will become normal and none of us are safe.

When the government becomes the criminal, silence is complicity. The Fourth Amendment is not a relic or a privilege; it’s the firewall between freedom and tyranny. If we allow it to burn, we’re setting fire to the idea of America itself.

Every citizen, every journalist, every elected official who still believes in the rule of law must speak out, organize, and demand accountability before this becomes irreversible. History does not forgive those who stayed quiet while justice was destroyed in plain sight.

The time to speak out and demand action is now.

Step by awful step — Trump is using this 12-stage plan to seize total control

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” —Abraham Lincoln

“The greatest good we can do our country is to heal its party divisions and make them one people. To render us again one people, acting as one nation, should be the object of every man really a patriot.”—Thomas Jefferson

People are baffled. Why are Trump and his Republican lickspittles so intent on gutting our government, destroying our alliances and reputation around the world, and screwing working class people while transferring over $50 trillion to the morbidly rich?

Historian Kevin M. Kruse captured the zeitgeist brilliantly, reflecting widespread public bewilderment when he posted over on BlueSky:

“We’ve had fuckups in the White House before, but never a president who seemed so deliberately intent on being a fuckup. It’s been said before, but if these people were actual agents of an enemy power seeking to divide, dismantle and destroy the USA they wouldn’t be doing anything different.”

So, let’s engage in a simple thought experiment. If you or I were hired by Vladimir Putin, an angry group of billionaires who want to end democracy, or a wealthy serial killer, and our orders were to tear our country apart and make us vulnerable to foreign takeover, what would we do? What steps would we take?

As I mentioned a few days ago, if we follow the Dictator’s Playbook there actually is a simple, 12-step formula to make that happen.

The first step would be to turn Americans from E Pluribus Unum (“Out of Many, One”) into hate-filled warring factions. Turn us against each other. Divide us by race, religion, gender, region, education, income, and whether we live in cities or rural areas.

In Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace (1795), he described the first three strategies that “despotic moralists” use to rip apart the fabric of a society. They were Fac et excusa (“Act now, and make excuses later”), Si fecisti, nega (“If you commit a crime, deny it”), and Divide et impera (“Divide and conquer”). Jefferson perhaps inspired Kant when, in 1787, he wrote, “Divide et impera [is] the reprobated axiom of tyranny…”

When Hitler claimed that Jews, Gypsies, and queer people weren’t “real Germans,” he was invoking that principle. Joe McCarthy tried to divide us by political ideology. David Duke said we should be separated by skin color.

Its most recent invocation was just this week when Trump and Pete Hegseth told our nation’s generals that most Black, Hispanic, and female officers were only in their positions because of their gender or skin color. “Whiskey Pete” was blunt, claiming that Ronald Reagan’s invocation of America’s traditional belief that “our diversity is our strength” was an “insane fallacy.”

Next, we’d want to immiserate as many Americans as possible, creating a huge pool of mostly white men who are pissed off because they’d been left behind economically and feel locked out of the American Dream.

That strategy would include several steps:

  • Destroy unions that bind workers together with their employers and raise standards of living.
  • Gut programs that lift people out of poverty and into the middle class, including high-quality universal public education, low-cost college, and inexpensive access to healthcare.
  • Ship manufacturing overseas to low-wage nations while using incoherent, ever-changing whim-based tariffs to batter the domestic economy.
  • Build media operations that demonize “the other,” telling them Blacks, Hispanics, queer people and women are the cause of their troubles.
  • Ban books that embrace diversity and teachers who use them.
  • Spread hate and conspiracy theories via powerful social media and search engine algorithms that make them seem normal, coarsening the entire culture.
  • Throw people off programs offering healthcare, student debt repayment, and housing subsidies.

Third, we’d want to destroy people’s faith in straightforward news. Loudly proclaim that it all has a “leftwing bias” and can’t be trusted, that reporters are elite “enemies of the people,” and attack the media relentlessly.

Fourth, shatter people’s faith in reality itself. Challenge science and expertise. Flood the zone with conspiracy theories. Convince citizens to stop taking commonsense steps to protect themselves and their children including vaccinations, precautions against airborne diseases, or measures to slow climate change. Sow confusion until they no longer know who to believe, and then offer yourself as the only source of truth.

Fifth, deconstruct international alliances that go back centuries by alienating traditional friends and embracing openly hostile foes while tearing up norms of defense, trade, and commerce.

Sixth, fracture citizens’ faith in their elected officials and the government itself. Legalize the practice of morbidly rich people and giant corporations buying legislation and the loyalty of politicians with cash by claiming that “money is speech” and “corporations are persons.” Define opposition political parties as “radical,” “dangerous,” and “outside the mainstream.”

Seventh, turn the military and police forces of the nation against its own people, making them terrified of challenging armed, masked men in the streets, kicking in their doors at midnight. Start with vilified minorities like immigrants and, when they’re “under control,” turn those forces against anybody who dissents from the new single-party rule.

Eighth, demolish faith in the nation’s currency by seizing political control of the central bank while villainizing its leadership.

Ninth, run scams to accumulate as much wealth as possible in the hands of Dear Leader and his close cronies while refusing to raise the minimum wage so as to keep people in poverty.

Tenth, use the power of government to force institutions — corporations, universities, law firms — into complete submission and even explicit collaboration in the enshitification of the nation.

Eleventh, seize control of the legislative and judicial branches so your law-breaking, election-rigging, and bribe-taking is never held to account. Openly and brazenly break laws like the Hatch Act that forbids the use of any government agency or property for political or commercial purposes.

Force agencies to make illegal, partisan statements denigrating the opposition party and defy anybody who calls out that naked criminality. Sneer and laugh at those who demand that people committing crimes in office should be held accountable.

Twelfth, turn the nation’s premiere law enforcement agencies into tools for punishing political enemies while ignoring the crimes of friends of the regime, thus destroying faith in equality under the rule of law and terrorizing anybody who speaks out.

All of these 12 simple steps have been used by every despot in history, from the ancient Roman Empire through the kings of the Dark Ages to the fascists of early 20th century Europe to today’s strongmen including Orbán, Putin, Erdoğan, El-Sisi, Maduro, Netanyahu, and Modi.

Whether Trump has put America on this road at the insistence (or by the payment from) Putin, rightwing American billionaires, or just his own authoritarian impulses and with strategies he’s learned from Orbán and Putin, it doesn’t have to end with America resembling today’s Russia or Hungary.

The good news is that multiple countries have elected men to leadership who tried to run through this list and were stopped before they could finish the job. Instead of letting their leaders turn their nations into permanent autocracies, the people rose up and took the power back for themselves and their democracies.

They include Ukraine, the Philippines, Brazil, Poland, Zambia, Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Peru, South Korea, Romania, North Macedonia, Slovakia, Gambia, Malawi, Moldova, and South Africa.

History shows that any democracy can fall into tyranny if its citizens grow cynical, give up, or look away. The question — the only question that matters now — is whether enough of us will choose to stand up, to act, and to reclaim what generations before us fought and bled to pass along, like the citizens of those countries listed above have done in the recent past.

If they can do it, so can we. Tag, we’re it!

There's a way to counter the GOP firehose of lies — will the media grasp it?

Recently, I mentioned that when I was 13 years old I went door-to-door with my dad for Barry Goldwater. Three years later I was living on my own in East Lansing, getting tear gassed and beaten for demonstrating against the Vietnam War and continuing segregation in the South. In other words, I’ve seen — and participated deeply — in both the right and left sides of American politics.

Although his position against the Civil Rights Act was reprehensible, I took Goldwater at his word that it was based on his concern about federal overreach and the 10th Amendment. Having read both his books, I came to deeply respect his principled stands, even though I also deeply disagreed with most of them.

As most historians will confirm, Barry Goldwater believed what he said, and never, so far as I can find, knowingly lied to the American people.

That was my dad’s Republican Party. They’d spin or shade the truth, but rarely told what they knew were naked lies. And many among them deeply believed in the principles they espoused.

That party is dead.

Today’s Republican politician quite literally lies for a living, as you can see on any of the Sunday political shows or whenever a Republican is interviewed on CNN or Morning Joe. Consider just a handful of the pre- and post-Trump versions of the GOP.

Before Trump, Republicans largely only shaded the truth:

  • Ronald Reagan repeatedly claimed his tax cuts “paid for themselves,” a misleading but not entirely fabricated notion since some revenue returned via economic growth, though far less than claimed.
  • George W. Bush’s administration asserted “we know” Iraq has WMDs. The statements danced on ambiguous intelligence, carefully presenting suspicions as certainties.
  • Their “War on coal” job-loss talking points made blanket claims that Environmental Protection Agency rules would “kill jobs” even though labor data and research consistently showed EPA regulations were a minor layoff driver relative to collapsing demand for coal in the face of a gas fracking boom.
  • Reagan’s “welfare queen” rhetoric was based on one egregious fraud case (Linda Taylor) but was then generalized to stigmatize all welfare recipients and wielded as a racialized caricature.
  • Republican pitches for the Keystone XL pipeline claimed it would create “42,000 jobs,” but those were just short-term construction and support jobs; the long-run permanent jobs were only in the dozens.
  • The Bush administration defined “torture” in legal terms that excluded waterboarding, technically denying “torture” while knowingly permitting harsh practices.
  • Paul Ryan’s claims about Obama “raiding Medicare” to fund the Affordable Care Act gracefully omitted that Obamacare’s cuts were to overpayments, not to benefits.
  • Sarah Palin’s “death panels” warning about Obamacare referenced end-of-life planning provisions, not anything like “death panels,” but skirted the border of outright fabrication.
  • GOP messaging around the Clinton tax hikes of the 1990s predicted economic downturns, assertions based on selective economic forecasting, not contrary evidence.
  • Republican officials regularly portrayed the estate tax as a “death tax hitting family farms.” Cases of family farms being lost were extremely rare, but not fabricated entirely.
  • President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner described the end of major combat in Iraq, failing to clarify that significant fighting remained; it was misleading but not untrue.
  • Claims that the ACA was a “government takeover of health care” overstated federal involvement but weren’t outright invented; private insurance remained intact.

But then Trump came into office and started lying on his very first day as president.

On Jan. 20th and 21st of 2017, he claimed as many as 1.5 million people attended his inauguration, far above all official estimates; lied that it never rained during his speech, though weather reports and visual evidence proved otherwise; accused journalists of deliberately misreporting on crowd size “to sow discord;” suggested a rift with the intelligence community that was not supported by evidence; and, most disgustingly, at CIA HQ lied about disagreements with the intelligence agencies and the number of times he had appeared on magazine covers.

As the Washington Post documented, during his first four years in office Trump told 30,573 verified lies, a record he’ll probably easily beat in his second term. And Republicans in Congress clearly got the memo. Lying was to be the GOP’s political strategy.

Consider their record with these Post-2016 direct, easily disprovable lies:

  • Trump and top Republicans lied that millions of illegal immigrants voted in the 2016 election even though there’s not a shred of evidence to supports the claim.
  • Lies that Democrats want to “open borders” and “abolish ICE” are utterly false but have become standard Republican Party rhetoric.
  • Lying that Biden had hired 87,000 “new IRS agents to harass you.” (This lie was often told using the phrase “jackbooted thugs,” compounding the damage to the agency.)
  • Trump repeatedly lied that he “created the greatest economy ever,” contradicting all metrics.
  • To this day they lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump, a story invented out of thin air and repeatedly disproven.
  • Repeated lies — now being used to push back against the government shutdown — that Democrats want to “give a trillion dollars to illegal aliens for health care” was invented without referencing a single actual legislative proposal or law.
  • Lies of “total exoneration” by Robert Mueller’s probe of Trump’s many connections to Russia are easily contradicted by simply reading the actual contents of the report.
  • Stating that windmills cause cancer and kill birds, coal is “clean,” and climate change is a “hoax” are all baseless lies presented as facts during speeches including Trump’s at the United Nations last week.
  • Lying that COVID-19 was “totally under control” at the start of 2020, leading to the unnecessary deaths of a half-million Americans, despite internal warnings and contrary facts.
  • Lying that they “passed the Veterans Choice” law when it was enacted under Obama.
  • Insisting Mexico would pay for the border wall when they knew full well that Mexico never agreed nor would pay a single penny.
  • Trump, Republicans, and Fox “News” personalities repeatedly lied that “Dominion voting machines switched votes,” knowing there was no evidence; Fox hosts internally acknowledged the lies and it cost the company hundreds of millions.
  • They repeatedly lied that “China pays the tariffs” when anybody paying attention knew import tariffs are always paid by Americans and American companies.

For reasons unknown, our mainstream media is allergic to using the words “lie,” “lies,” and “lied.”

They overlook the fact that telling lies is a classic fascist strategy to so confound the public that it becomes impossible to know what’s real and what’s not, causing people to check out of following politics or challenging them.

They also overlook the fact that the last time Democrats engaged in systematic lying was when LBJ got us into the Vietnam War. That burned the party badly, and they’ve largely kept to the truth ever since.

That’s not to say Democrats are perfect, blameless, or the solution to all our nations problems. But at the moment, they’re what we have. We need to push them hard.

Nonetheless, like the media, Democratic politicians until recently have kept talking about how their “friends on the other side of the aisle” are engaging in “falsehoods,” “deceptions,” or “misinformation.”

On Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer broke with that tradition, telling Joe Scarborough that Trump, Vance, Johnson, and other Republican politicians were “telling an effing lie” when they said Democrats were filibustering the Continuing Resolution to keep the government open because Dems were demanding “trillions for healthcare for illegal aliens.”

Bravo, Chuck. Hopefully it’s the beginning of a trend.

Not only that, Republicans could pass their continuing resolution through the Senate and reopen the government today without a single Democratic vote. All they need to break the Democratic filibuster is 50 votes to change the Senate rules, which they have, and they’ve used that process to break filibusters and install judges (both Supreme Court and lower) and executive branch appointments in the recent past.

They’re pretending to be helpless because they think this shutdown theater will help them and gives them a great excuse to eviscerate our government.

It’s way past time that Democrats, our news media, and the rest of us start telling the truth about the nearly-continuous firehose of modern Republican lies.

One appalling spectacle showed we are on the brink of true dictatorship

Most jobs have a “playbook,” a sort of instruction manual or checklist for how to do the job right, whether it’s running an assembly line, piloting an aircraft, or redoing a house’s plumbing.

Although our media seems oblivious to it, dictators have a playbook, too.

It’s one that’s been carefully followed in recent times by Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Rodrigo Duterte, Jair Bolsonaro, and numerous initially-elected leaders of other smaller nations. In previous generations the Dictator’s Playbook was followed, step-by-step, by Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, Ferdinand Marcos, Agustin Pinochet, Josef Stalin, and Hideki Tojo (among others).

And now it’s being followed by Donald Trump and JD Vance, who are a bit more than halfway through the list. Trump’s speech on Tuesday before our assembled generals and admirals — telling them they should use our American cities as “training grounds” for the military whose job is to “kill people and break things” — is getting us closer to the final steps.

“We are under invasion from within,” Trump said, “no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways, because they don’t wear uniforms. … We’re under invasion from within.”

And who is this enemy that’s so bad, so evil, that Trump just declared war against? He was explicit that the “enemies” are his political opponents and average people who live in our big cities:

“The ones that are run by the radical left Democrats ... what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places. And we’re going to straighten them out one by one. This is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.”

What’s most astonishing about the reporting on this meeting is that none of the media I follow have even once mentioned that militarizing the nation’s cities is one of the most significant steps in the Dictator’s Playbook.

Combine that with the demand for absolute loyalty to the Dear Leader — Trump told the generals “If you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room” — and he’s declared himself the absolute ruler of America wielding the most lethal military in the history of the world against our nation’s own citizens.

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow recently laid out five moves that dictators reliably make.

  • First, they identify an internal enemy to blame for social ills; Trump has spent years turning immigrants, big cities, and universities into scapegoats. Now, like every dictator listed above has done, he’s claiming that the opposition political party, the Democrats, are an “enemy within.”
  • Second, they turn security forces inward, exactly what Trump’s new call for turning our military against our cities represents. The moment a dictator turns military forces built to destroy foreign adversaries against his own people, the rest of the transformation becomes easier.
  • Third, they criminalize dissent and protest, insisting that when people show up in the streets it is not constitutionally protected free speech and the right “peaceably to assemble and petition the Government for a redress of grievances” but a security “threat” to be crushed rather than heard and responded to.
  • Fourth, they intimidate or capture the press and punish truth-telling, as we’re seeing now with rightwing billionaires capturing virtually every major traditional and social media source in America.
  • Fifth, they seize control of independent institutions like universities, law firms, or the civil service to eliminate any professional standards that interfere with Dear Leader’s will.

Overlay that list with the work of historians and political scientists like Timothy Snyder, Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Jason Stanley, and M. Gessen. Their research on how democracies die all point to the same ingredients:

  • Deny or rewrite election results to delegitimize democracy itself.
  • Declare political opponents enemies of the state.
  • Turn independent institutions like the Department of Justice, the civil service, and the military into personal tools.
  • Flood the public square with lies so thoroughly (Steve Bannon proudly called it “flooding the zone with shit”) that reality itself becomes negotiable.
  • Tolerate or celebrate political violence on behalf of the dictator, and demonize violence against his followers and mouthpieces as sedition and treason.
  • Demand personal loyalty instead of constitutional duty.
  • Invoke a mythic past and promise national rebirth if only the strongman is given total sovereignty.
  • Use his office to rapidly enrich himself and his family while creating a patronage network of loyalists who owe their fortunes to him.

There is also the money. Autocrats rarely forget to convert state power into private wealth. Trump’s hotels, golf courses, and commercial properties brought in millions from foreign governments during his first time in office, as documented by House Oversight Committee findings.

His son-in-law Jared Kushner secured a two-billion-dollar investment from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund almost immediately after leaving the White House. Ivanka Trump picked up fast-tracked Chinese trademarks while advising her father in government.

Kleptocracy is not a side effect of authoritarianism or fascism: it’s essential, particularly when some of that fortune is shared with those willing to break the law to support Dear Leader. So far, according to reporting, Trump and his family have made at least $5 billion from his 9-month-long presidency. It’s a core feature of the Dictator’s Playbook.

And when people protest the theft of the nation’s resources and the personal enrichment based on handing out favors, dictators go after them in the most brutal ways imaginable. It begins with investigations, but never ends there. Just look at what he’s doing to James Comey and Miles Taylor.

And now Trump has issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum that essentially says Democrats, atheists, Muslims, Jews, socialists, and queer people are terrorists. Not because of anything they’ve done, but because of who they are or what they believe.

It directs the FBI, DOJ, and over 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces coordinated with police forces across the country to investigate anybody who meet it’s “indica” (indicators) of potential terrorism. They include, as Ken Klippenstein reported:

“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, support for the overthrow of the United States Government, 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.”

Do any of those sound like you? If Trump and Republicans continue down this road, get ready to have your life turned upside down as they tear apart your social media profiles, search your email and postal mail, surveil you, and one day bang on your door in the middle of the night.

And you don’t have to have actually done a thing. Trump’s order explicitly calls on the FBI and local police coordinating with them to “intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”

To go after you before you do anything, based entirely on who you are, who you love, what you believe, and what you say.

That is not the America our Founders, or the men and women who’ve fought and died to keep us free for 249 years, envisioned. And, again, the mainstream media almost entirely missed it while rightwing media ignored it altogether. Even though one day it may be directed against them if they say or do anything to offend Trump or his henchmen.

When Trump told the generals he would remove anyone who does not “agree with everything I say,” he also embraced the logic of tyrants who treat disagreement as insubordination.

Democracies rely on officers sworn to the Constitution, not to one man. Trump is trying to undo that distinction. He’s demanding personal loyalty backed by the threat of firing, demotion, or public shaming. Civilian control of the military that George Washington and James Madison insisted on becomes a hollow phrase when the civilian in charge demands the military serve his whims.

What once sounded like fringe rhetoric is now proclaimed loudly to the uniformed leadership of the United States. The generals who heard him are not hypothetical. They command forces, oversee operations, and embody the principle that the military does not exist to occupy American streets.

The notion that they should roll tanks into urban neighborhoods to harden troops for foreign war is not law enforcement: it’s preparation for ruling America by force, a force that may well be preparing for the November 2026 elections.

This is the kind of moment historians point back to later with disbelief. The warnings have been clear for years, but now the mask is off.

Even though our media insists on ignoring it, the Dictator’s Playbook has always included using a nation’s biggest cities as the stage for demonstrating power. It’s always required replacing officers and officials who follow the laws and traditions of a nation with loyalists who obey without question. It’s always depended on turning people against one another so Dear Leader and his lickspittles can step in as the only source of safety or authority.

Nobody can say this is a surprise: Trump pretty much campaigned on exactly what he’s doing now, and people from former intelligence, military, and FBI leaders to scholars of fascism warned us this was coming if Republicans suppressed enough votes for him to win. (Without the GOP having prevented 4.2 million registered citizen voters from voting or having their votes counted, Kamala Harris would have won and the House and Senate would today be under Democratic control).

The question now is whether Americans will accept a president who treats their hometowns as battle simulations and sees disagreement by generals and agency leaders as an offense punishable by firing, imprisonment, or exile.

As I point out in my new book The Last American President, it’ll depend on whether we’ll stand up and speak out. Or whether, like our media and so many universities, law firms, media outlets, and giant corporations, we’ll cower in fear and submit to Trump’s demands.

That is not law and order, and it’s not democracy in a free republic. It’s the language of autocracy that yesterday was spoken out loud in front of the armed forces of the United States and is echoed every time Trump attacks a reporter, media outlet, or one of his many “enemies.”

Will American democracy survive this onslaught, straight out of the Dictator’s Playbook? To a large extent, that will depend on you, me, and our elected officials summoning the courage to resist and protest loudly. And our media to call it out for what it is.

The clock is ticking, and these guys are racing for the finish line.

Trump's new Big Lie is here — and it's already taking over our airwaves

Trump’s assault on our elections system and the GOP’s successful 2024 effort to deny at least (according to official US government statistics) 4.2 million Americans their right to vote (which gave Trump the election and Republicans the House and Senate) was based on his 2020 Big Lie that our elections were corrupted by “millions” of “illegals” voting, along with “massive” voter fraud.

They’re continuing that Big Lie (which the GOP first embraced in the 1960s with Operation Eagle Eye that intimidated mostly Hispanic and Native American voters) going forward, with some observers expecting as many as 10 million Americans being denied their vote in 2028.

But corrupting and stealing elections was just their first effort, the one that brought them to power. Now, with that power, they’re doing their best to gut the basic guardrails of our 250-year-old constitutional system with brand-new Big Lies.

The newest Big Lie for 2025 is that America is racked by “radical left violence” leading to the disintegration of law and order in our cities and the spread of terror among politicians and anybody else who dares speak out about the issues of our day.

They’re using this to censor speech, ban comedians and commentators, prosecute people (including lifelong Republicans like Comey, Krebs, and Taylor) who’ve spoken out against Trump, violently attack protestors, and to justify the monopolization of our media by rightwing billionaires.

Most recently, when a Trump-supporting (Trump sign in his yard, Trump “Make Liberals Cry Again” T-shirt) straight, white, self-proclaimed Christian who thought Mormons were the anti-Christ murdered worshipers in a Latter Day Saints church in Michigan, Trump’s first response was to claim it was “anti-Christian violence.”

Instead, it appears this former Marine war vet with PTSD thought he was defending Christianity. But instead of asking if he was “radicalized” by preachers like Trump’s guy “Pastor” Robert Jeffress (who goes on and on about how the LDS Church is a “false religion”) or the algorithms on YouTube, Facebook, or X, rightwing media is today filled with rants about “attacks on Christianity,” blaming “the left” even for this attack.

It echo’s the GOP’s efforts to portray the two people who tried to assassinate Trump, Charlie Kirk’s killer, the ICE shooter last week, and other political violence as originating from the “radical left.”

Which is really and truly another Big Lie.

First, there’s basically no “radical left” in America anymore. The anti-capitalist pro-violence subset of SDS that I knew back in the 1960s when I was part of MSU’s SDS are long gone and well discredited (and a few imprisoned).

Second, the “far left” folks who are still around aren’t violent, by and large. Lefties are more interested in protecting Social Security, getting a national healthcare system into place, raising taxes on the morbidly rich, and getting guns off the streets instead of pointing them at people. The last high-profile “leftie” shooter was the mentally ill guy who shot Republican Congressman Steve Scalise back in 2017.

Even the FBI and the Department of Justice themselves had acknowledged the fact that the vast majority of politically-inspired violence in America was coming from the right, at least until puppy-killer Kristi Noem or one of her lickspittles (or her boyfriend) ordered the reports removed from the government websites.

The independent and nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies analyzed 893 terrorist plots that took place between 1994 and 2020. Their report concluded:

“Rightwing attacks and plots account for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994.”

But don’t expect to hear that from anybody in the administration or on Fox “News” or other rightwing media outlets. Instead, they’re using “far left violence” as their excuse to dismantle our rights, impose soldiers on cities run by Democrats, and pour your tax dollars into extreme policing and militarization of our society.

This isn’t the first time the GOP has used the Big Lie technique to sway public opinion in a way that demonizes Democrats. On September 23, 1944 President Roosevelt addressed the Teamsters and said:

“The opposition in this year has already imported into this campaign a very interesting thing, because it is foreign. They have imported the propaganda technique invented by the dictators abroad.

“Remember, a number of years ago, there was a book, Mein Kampf, written by Hitler himself. The technique was all set out in Hitler’s book — and it was copied by the aggressors of Italy and Japan.

“According to that technique, you should never use a small falsehood; always a big one, for its very fantastic nature would make it more credible, if only you keep repeating it over and over and over again.”

He then did what Democrats — and what honest news media we have left — need to be doing today: he called out their lies and exposed their technique:

“Well, let us take some simple illustrations that come to mind. For example, although I rubbed my eyes when I read it, we have been told that it was not a Republican depression, but a Democratic depression from which this Nation was saved in 1933.

“That this Administration — this one today — is responsible for all the suffering and misery that the history books and the American people have always thought had been brought about during the twelve ill-fated years when the Republican party was in power.”

He followed that with a list of four other Republican lies, including their assertion that he’d tried to get America into WWII, that he was secretly planning to prevent GIs from leaving the service when the war was over, and even a lie about his dog (Fala, after which his speech was named in the press). He summed it up:

“Well, I think we all recognize the old technique. The people of this country know the past too well to be deceived into forgetting. Too much is at stake to forget.”

They’re still doing it. Which raises the question: What will be Trump’s and the GOP’s next Big Lie?

They’ve already tried convincing Americans that:

  • Immigrants are a major source of crime (when crime rates regarding immigrants are about half that of natural born Americans),
  • Democrats are the party of rapists and pedophiles (ahem…Trump’s “best friend” Jeffrey Epstein, E Jean Carroll),
  • Democrats want to defund the police (when they’re fighting for more cops in virtually every city in America),
  • Are in favor of abortion “after birth,”
  • That Biden wanted to ban gas stoves and gasoline cars,
  • Biden wanted to “ban meat,”
  • Democrats plan on huge tax increases on the middle class,
  • “Antifa” (“Anti-Fascist”) is a domestic terrorist organization,
  • Democrats are “deranged pieces of shit,”
  • And liberals want to “force taxpayers to fund transgender surgeries for minors’ nationwide” and, yesterday, Trump said Democrats want to “reopen the wall.“

This after promoting the Big Lie that got three police officers killed and 140 hospitalized on January 6 about the 2020 election was “stolen” and their Big Lie about immigrants voting that resulted in over 4 million citizens being denied their right to vote last year.

Republican Big Lies have caused enormous damage, from FDR’s era through Joe McCarthy’s witch hunts to George W. Bush lying us into two illegal and unnecessary wars to today.

It’s way past time that Democrats and the media start calling these Big Lies exactly what they are, and pointing out that the strategy originated in the modern era with Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler.

Enough is enough.

This chilling Trump directive is the thought police on steroids

Donald Trump and many of the people surrounding him have become explicit threats to what’s left of our democratic republic. And now they’re saying that my (or your) simply saying those words may be enough to get us locked up or otherwise legally, financially, or physically destroyed.

In 1964, like Hillary Clinton, I went door-to-door with my dad for Barry Goldwater, and later read both of his autobiographies, Conscience of a Conservative and With No Apologies. There’s no way Goldwater — or any Republican of that era — would tolerate the ways Trump and his toadies are ripping apart our constitutional order and flagrantly violating our laws and traditions.

And now he’s trying to pick a Made-For-Fox “News” fight in Portland. If one kid throws a Molotov cocktail, it will become the justification for another massive loss of our constitutional rights of free speech and assembly all across the nation. Cheered on by rightwing media for profit.

If Republicans don’t stand up soon and impeach Trump — and demand Vance reflect the traditional values of republican democracy or similarly face impeachment — history will judge them beyond harshly.

Trump is moving so fast, in fact, to turn America into an autocracy that this may be the GOP’s last chance to claw back the rule of law for our nation.

Democrats can’t do this themselves. Republicans control the House, Senate, and the Supreme Court, as well as a majority of the states. If our republic is to be saved, it’ll require at least a large handful of Republicans to step up and honor the oath to defend our Constitution they took when they were sworn into office.

Consider the ways Trump is tearing our nation apart, trying to pit us against each other and encouraging violence against constitutionally-protected free speech and protest.

Most recently, Trump signed a National Security Directive (this one is labeled as NSPM-7) saying that “anti-American” (aka “anti-Trump”) or “anti-Christian” rhetoric is — in Minority Report fashion — an indicator that a person may, in the future, commit a crime and therefore should be targeted now by our federal government at virtually every level.

National Security Directives are not like Executive Orders, which can be challenged. They’re often secret or even top secret documents that instruct the police and military branches of the federal government how to behave under certain circumstances.

Specifically, what they’re targeting with this one is our free speech right to criticize Trump and his administration. As journalist Ken Klippenstein reported on Saturday:

“The Trump administration isn’t only targeting organizations or groups but even individuals and ‘entities’ whom NSPM-7 says can be identified by any of the following ‘indica’ (indicators) of violence: anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, support for the overthrow of the United States Government, 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.”

This is the thought police, the speech police, the writing police on steroids. As Klippenstein notes, the directive says:

“The United States requires a national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts…” (emphasis Ken’s)

Impeachment at this point isn’t optional. It’s the one constitutional mechanism designed for exactly this type of assault on the foundations of our democracy.

Consider Trump’s record:

  • The January 6 insurrection and attempted assassination of our Vice President, incited by Trump himself, was an effort to overturn a lawful election. No greater betrayal of the Constitution exists.
  • Indicting former FBI Director James Comey — and going after other former Republican officials including James Clapper and John Bolton — as acts of revenge shows his willingness to weaponize justice.
  • Pressuring red states to gerrymander congressional maps reveals his contempt for free and fair elections.
  • Deploying troops and masked secret police to U.S. cities to intimidate citizens undermines civil liberties.
  • Harassing comedians like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert signals his hostility toward free speech.
  • Taking $2 billion from the UAE for his personal company as a blatant bribe in exchange for directing our government to sell that nation — which has joint military exercises with China — the AI chips that are forbidden to such foreign governments flaunts his corruption.
  • Disappearing protesters off the streets erodes due process.
  • Separating legal immigrant families and deporting brown-skinned legal residents tears at the moral fabric of our nation.
  • Elevating conspiracy figures like Bob Kennedy at the CDC undermines public health.
  • Rolling out the red carpet for Putin while abandoning allies like Ukraine weakens global democracy.
  • Destabilizing the economy with chaotic and unconstitutional tariffs hurts working families.
  • Escalating conflicts in Venezuela to the point of violence in international waters risks global war.
  • Burying the Epstein list raises questions about corruption and blackmail.

There comes a time when history demands a choice. For Republicans, that time is now.

Donald Trump has attacked America’s democratic institutions, unleashed chaos at home and abroad, and put his own personal power and family financial interests above the Constitution and the good of our nation.

The only remedy is impeachment. Anything less is complicity.

Republicans control the entire federal government: they can’t pass this buck to anyone else. If they refuse to impeach Trump, they’ll go down in history as the party that enabled an authoritarian coup and ended America’s 250-year experiment with democracy.

If they do impeach him, they may well save both our nation, democracy around the world, and their own integrity. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

We all must help Republicans understand the cost of inaction. By refusing to impeach, they aren’t simply protecting Trump; they’re aligning themselves with his crimes. They’re staking the future of their party, their reputations, and possibly their own freedom on a man whose every instinct is authoritarian.

Failure to stand up to Trump at this critical moment could spell the end of the modern Republican Party. Voters may forgive bad policies like tax cuts for billionaires or gutting healthcare for average Americans, but dismantling democracy itself is an unforgivable sin.

Like the leaders of the Confederacy, they’ll stain their own names forever. Just like McCarthyism and segregation taint the legacies of past politicians, Trump’s stench will follow them down the echoing halls of history for all time. Their children and grandchildren will carry that shame forever.

Cracks are already appearing: current Republican members of Congress Thomas Massey and Marjorie Taylor Greene are defiantly demanding the release of the Epstein files. Ted Cruz, Don Bacon, and Rand Paul took on Trump when they objected to his attempt at censoring late-night comedians.

Former GOP politicians openly calling out Trump’s authoritarianism or opposing his previous candidacy because of his antidemocratic and unconstitutional behavior include Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, John Boehner, Jeff Flake, Ben Sasse, Larry Hogan, Charlie Baker, Jeb Bush, Christine Todd Whitman, Tom Ridge, Charlie Dent, Barbara Comstock, Fred Upton, Joe Walsh, Will Hurd, Denver Riggleman, Susan Molinari, and Ken Buck.

Former senior Republican officials who’ve awakened to the danger Trump represents to our republic include James Mattis, Mark Esper, HR McMaster, John Bolton, Rex Tillerson, Bill Barr, John Kelly, Miles Taylor, Alyssa Farah Griffin, Olivia Troye, Stephanie Grisham, Sarah Matthews, and Anthony Scaramucci.

And former GOP leaders, strategists, consultants, and conservative thinkers who’ve called out Trump’s authoritarian behavior include Karl Rove, Bill Kristol, David Frum, Peter Wehner, Mona Charen, Charlie Sykes, Tim Miller, Amanda Carpenter, Lev Parnas, SE Cupp, George Will, Michael Steele, Joe Scarborough, Rick Wilson, Steve Schmidt, George Conway, Reed Galen, Mike Madrid, Jennifer Horn, Ron Steslow, Stuart Stevens, Tara Setmayer, Jeff Timmer, Chris Vance, and Fred Wellman.

As you can see, today’s elected Republicans — who hold the power of impeachment in their hands — are not without allies if they choose to take on Trump and impeach him from office.

And not without role models: from Theodore Roosevelt to Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan, no previous president has ever openly proclaimed their “hatred” of Democrats or non-Republicans and set about to openly destroy the lives of those who’d opposed them or called them out.

If Trump isn’t held accountable, these could become the new norms for America and shatter our constitutional order. Republicans have spent decades waving “Don’t Tread on Me” flags and wearing slogans against government that reaches into individual lives with threats and intimidation. Will they stand up for our nation now?

Impeachment isn’t just a political strategy; it’s the last defense of our Constitution. Elected Republicans must act now, decisively and unapologetically. If they do, they may yet save America and themselves. To let them know, the phone number for the congressional switchboard is 202-224-3121.

If they fail, their legacy will be sealed forever. Not as patriots or conservatives, but as cowards willing to abandon the American experiment in exchange for momentary power and the praise of an autocrat.

This alarming intel shows how TACO Trump will drag us into World War III

The world has often seen great wars ignited not by inevitability, but by weakness, hesitation, and betrayal. Cowards playing with matches.

History shows that one of the biggest risk factors for war is an autocratic leader who fears for his own future. Which is why the kind of pathetic incoherence we saw at the United Nations this week should concern us all.

This week’s news brings some alarming data points:

  • After four different Danish airports were buzzed by what many assume to be Russian drones (Danes are uncertain), a French airport was hit yesterday and a Norwegian airport was shut down by drones earlier in the week.
  • The US Navy fired Trident II D5 ballistic missiles from the coast of Florida, lighting up the sky as they were testing devices that could carry thermonuclear bombs deep into Russia.
  • A massive US Navy presence in the Caribbean and off the coast of Venezuela was just this week joined by F35s and Reaper drones as Trump has blown three Venezuela boats out of the water without congressional authorization.
  • In an absolutely unprecedented move, Pete “Kegger” Hegseth has ordered all the US military’s flag officers and their staffs to come to Virginia for a meeting with an unknown agenda. This is not normal military procedure; it has the stench of authoritarian consolidation, the kind of maneuver history has shown us precedes purges, coups, and crackdowns.
  • Russia is experiencing a nationwide fuel shortage (also in Russian-occupied Crimea) as the result of Ukrainian drones taking out refineries and depots across the nation. It’s so bad, the Kremlin has banned fuel exports until the end of the year. The nation’s economy is teetering and Putin is apparently in political trouble.
  • Taiwan’s deputy foreign minister Wu Chihchung warns, “China is preparing to invade Taiwan.”
  • Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, just said, “NATO and the European Union want to declare, in fact, have already declared a real war on my country and are directly participating in it.”
  • NATO notified Russia that they may shoot down planes that invade NATO airspace, and Russia replied that “would be war.”

As Russian jets cross NATO skies and intelligence warns of an impending strike, while Trump — desperate for a diversion from the Epstein/Trump sex scandal and a collapsing economy —appears to be trying to provoke a war with Venezuela, the question grows louder: are we watching the sparks of a new global conflict?

And is the dangerous bond between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump the match that could light the fuse of World War III?

Remember back in July when Trump told NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte (during a visit to the Oval Office) that if Europe would pay for the anti-missile defense systems Ukraine desperately needs he’d see to it that they were shipped over there promptly?

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tweeted:

“I’m grateful to our team and to the United States, Germany, and Norway for preparing a new decision on Patriots for Ukraine.”

Rutte coordinated with Germany and Norway (and later other NATO countries) to raise the billions necessary to pay for the systems to replenish stocks held by European nations, particularly France, Germany, and Denmark, that those countries are supplying to Ukraine.

The replacements should have arrived in Europe by now, a continent that’s increasingly on edge as Putin keeps flying MiGs over former Soviet client states in the Baltics.

As they supply Ukraine — which is suffering under unprecedented attacks with hundreds of missiles and drones every night — Europe’s own stockpiles that could be used to deter Russian aggression are vanishing.

Between that Oval Office meeting and now, however, Trump had his infamous red-carpet meeting with Putin in Alaska and apparently got different orders from his self-described friend and probable mentor.

As Vivian Salama reports for The Atlantic, there’s been a sudden change in the Trump administration’s position with regard to providing NATO or EU countries with defensive weaponry to replace what they’ve given to Ukraine:

“Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby said that he didn’t believe in the value of certain foreign military sales, according to two administration officials with knowledge of the discussion.”

Adding to European concerns, news broke last week that a Russian Major General who defected claims Putin is planning a full-on invasion of both Ukraine and parts of the Baltic states — all NATO members — “before Christmas.”

The British newspaper the Daily Express reported, in an article headlined “Russia's 'greyzone' invasion plan to start WW3 before Christmas revealed by defector”:

“Moscow is preparing a ‘greyzone’ attack on Poland before Christmas, a senior Russian military official has revealed.

“The warning, sent through an Eastern European ally during London’s DSEI arms fair last week, has triggered urgent discussions in the UK and US about the risk of a deniable strike aimed at fracturing NATO.”

Poland, Romania, and Estonia have all seen Russian MiGs violate their airspace in the past two weeks, scrambling NATO jets as Poland and Estonia have invoked NATO’s Article 4 process to stand up to potential aggression.

It appears to me (just my opinion) that when Putin met with Trump in Alaska either he ordered Trump to back away from Ukraine and NATO, or simply took the measure of the man and concluded he could launch an invasion of the Baltics with a low probability that the United States under the convicted felon would respond militarily. Trump’s recent blocking of Patriot systems to Europe suggests the former rather than the latter.

Europe is taking this threat seriously. Great Britain this past week dispatched Royal Air Force jets to Poland with backup from Voyager tankers; they join German, French, Swedish, and Danish jets that began patrolling the eastern flank of the Baltic nations after the first Polish incursions.

Donald Tusk, Poland’s Prime Minister, warned that his nation — and, implicitly, the region — is now closer to military conflict “than at any time since the Second World War.” The UK’s OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) Ambassador, Neil Holland, was explicit that these were not accidental incursions into NATO airspace:

“Either Russia has deployed systems it cannot control, or it is provoking us deliberately.”

According to the Express reporting, British intelligence isn’t expecting a full-on invasion of Eastern Europe but, instead — at least initially — the same sort of “deniable” pinpoint attacks Putin has used to precede his later, larger assaults on other nations including Georgia and Ukraine. One UK intelligence official said:

“There’s no suggestion of a full-scale invasion. But a calibrated strike – something deniable, something confusing – is exactly how Russia has operated in the past.”

He added:

“They’re probing NATO. If they can strike Poland and NATO flinches — even slightly — it undermines the whole alliance.”

At the same time, Russia has reportedly launched a full-scale “coordinated information warfare” assault on Finland via the internet and social media. Finland shares a 833-mile border with Russia, which, as the USSR, has invaded that nation twice in modern times, once in 1939 and again in 1941.

Marco Giannangeli, Defence and Diplomatic Editor for Express, pointed out:

“Western officials fear the disinformation campaign is intended to soften the ground for further provocations along the Gulf of Finland.”

Putin’s apparently taking Trump’s TACO (“Trump Always Chickens Out”) label to heart. Tragically, the entire world may soon see the consequence of a blustering, incompetent, race/deportation-obsessed, apparently terrified-of-Putin president who’s surrounded himself with people whose singular quality is not competence but loyalty and a willingness to break tradition and the law on the boss’ behalf.

History will not forgive miscalculation at this scale. With Europe bracing for attack, NATO stockpiles running dry, Trump near provoking war with Venezuela, and Putin — in deep trouble at home — probing for weakness, the world stands at a perilous crossroads.

The only question now is whether this moment will be remembered as the turning point that stopped another world war, or the disaster when Trump and Putin together opened the gates to it.

Trump's latest threat is nothing short of domestic terrorism

If Donald Trump's lips move, he’s lying. Or trying to solicit a bribe. Or slandering Democrats. Or, now, taking hostages.

Most recently, he’s started lying about what congressional Democrats are demanding in exchange for giving the GOP the votes they need in the Senate to keep the government open past Oct. 1.

And now, Trump has announced that he's taking hostages. Federal employees will be fired, rather than temporarily furloughed, if there is a government shutdown.

But I’ll get to that in a moment. It isn’t where he started lying, bribe-getting, and slandering Democrats this week.

That was when the entire world watched, aghast, as Trump fulfilled his commitment to the fossil fuel industry and repeatedly lied before the assembled United Nations about fossil fuels, renewable energy, and climate change.

Back in April of last year, he’d addressed a private group of fossil fuel executives and billionaires, and said that he was offering them a “deal”: if they’d give his campaign massive contributions, he’d do pretty much whatever they wanted. The Hill has documented almost $140 million in bribes/contributions that followed the speech, and there’s likely far, far more in dark money contributions that we’ll never know about.

Thus, an embarrassed America had to watch as the entire world was treated to the president of the United States lying repeatedly in exchange for over a hundred million dollars. After all, his lips were moving.

The Emiratis placed a bet recently when they put $2 billion into a little crypto company that the Trump family and Steve Witkoff's family had started. Apparently in exchange, Trump authorized the transfer to the UAE of about a half-million top-tech chips, that had been blocked by national security concerns.

Generally, that’s called a “bribe,” although without the FBI doing an investigation we won’t know for sure. At the very least, it’s a conflict of interest. Ryan Cummings of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy, said:

“If this is true, this is the largest public corruption scandal in the history of the United States and it’s not even close.”

As our Constitution says:

“The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” (emphasis added)

And now, on the verge of a government shutdown, Trump has rolled out one of the most audacious lies of the past … er … week. On his Nazi-infested failing social media site, he wrote:

“After reviewing the details of the unserious and ridiculous demands being made by the Minority Radical Left Democrats in return for their Votes to keep our thriving Country open, I have decided that no meeting with their Congressional Leaders could possibly be productive.

“They are threatening to shut down the Government of the United States unless they can have over $1 Trillion Dollars in new spending to continue free healthcare for Illegal Aliens (A monumental cost!), force Taxpayers to fund Transgender surgery for minors, have dead people on the Medicaid roles, allow Illegal Alien Criminals to steal Billions of Dollars in American Taxpayer Benefits, try to force our Country to again open our Borders to Criminals and to the World, allow men to play in women’s sports, and essentially create Transgender operations for everybody.”

Let’s examine that:

— “over $1 Trillion Dollars in new spending” is extraordinarily misleading. Even Republicans claim that would be the cost over 10 years to continue the Affordable Care Act subsidies, so people’s insurance costs don’t explode at the start of next year. And don’t forget that Republicans cut that trillion dollars in ACA and Medicaid spending so they could give a $3.5 trillion in tax breaks to Trump and his billionaire friends.

— “to continue free healthcare for Illegal Aliens” is up to the states, not the feds, as they control how their Medicaid dollars are disbursed. Most Blue states make their programs available to all legal immigrants, and some extend that to undocumented people, particularly pregnant women (and most Red states don’t). The reason is simple: we all share the same space. You don’t want the undocumented person standing behind you in line at the grocery store to have an active case of TB, for example; keeping everybody healthy is only common sense.

— “force Taxpayers to fund Transgender surgery for minors” is complete horses––t. The Democratic leaders’ public position in the shutdown talks is an “ironclad” extension of ACA premium tax credits and reversing recent Medicaid cuts, full stop.

— “have dead people on the Medicaid roles [sic]” is another lie. Democrats’ Continuing Resolution (CR) demand is entirely and 100% about health coverage affordability and undoing cuts, not “funding dead people.”

— “allow Illegal Alien Criminals to steal Billions of Dollars in American Taxpayer Benefits” is even beyond a lie, it’s a slander against both immigrants and Democrats. There is nothing even remotely close to letting anybody “steal” anything in their CR demand.

— “try to force our Country to again open our Borders to Criminals and to the World,” is another libel against Democrats and the Biden administration. No president of either party since the 1920s has tried to “open our borders” to anybody, particularly criminals. And, again, the only firm Democratic demand is to extend the ACA/Obamacare subsidies and undo the cuts to Medicaid.

— “allow men to play in women’s sports” is both another lie and an attempt to inflame his queer-hating base. There’s no mention of this anywhere in anything any Democrat has said with regard to the CR and it’s not in their formal proposal. And the official Democratic Party position is that officials with responsibility for every sport should be able to decide if they want to allow trans athletes to compete or not (would anybody care if the sport was a Chess tournament?). Ironically, that’s the “small government” position.

— “essentially create Transgender operations for everybody” is so absurd as to be laughable, if it wasn’t that so many Republicans actually believe things Trump and his lickspittles in the rightwing media sewer put out.

On top of all that, the Trump administration announced today that if Democrats won’t vote to help keep the government open, they will begin mass layoffs of federal employees. This is pure hostage-taking, and radically raises the stakes for the Democrats in the Senate.

At the moment, the only solid demands Democrats are making in exchange for their vote to keep the government open are to extend the Obamacare subsidies and eliminate the Medicaid cuts that will phase in during January, 2027 just after the 2026 midterm elections.

They should, in my opinion, add the release of the Epstein files and the unmasking of ICE to that list.

America deserves to know if, in addition to having had a jury already determine that this convicted felon committed sexual abuse, our president was also involved in the abuse of young girls.

And polling shows that Americans are increasingly uncomfortable with unaccountable, masked secret police patrolling our streets and violently attacking citizens and protesters.

Whatever they do, though, I agree with the comment former Republican Congressman Joe Walsh, now a Democrat, said on my SiriusXM radio program yesterday:

Every Democrat in the Senate should spend the next month in the reddest parts of their states doing town halls where Republicans refuse to, leaving the administration to twist in the wind of the bad publicity as the government shuts down and they begin firing federal workers.

Or conducting mock hearings about the UAE chips-bribery and the Epstein files.

What Trump’s doing with his mass firing threat is nothing short of economic terrorism against the American people.

For decades, government shutdowns meant temporary furloughs that were painful but reversible. Now, Trump and his cronies are using the threat of mass, permanent firings to gut the very institutions that protect our food, our air, our water, our workers, and our democracy itself.

This isn’t about budgets; it’s about power. It’s about dismantling the federal government so only Trump’s priorities — ICE, border patrol, and his authoritarian machinery — are left standing.

It’s a smash-and-grab of our constitutional order, a direct assault on Congress’s power of the purse, and an act of extortion against the American people: “Give us what we want, or we’ll torch the house.”

And here’s the bottom line: Democrats must never give in to hostage takers, because if you pay the ransom once, the next demand will be even bigger, the next threat even worse. Authoritarians don’t just bend the rules, they burn them down, and the only way to stop them is to refuse to play their game.

Courage!

Say it like it is — these Democrats are complicit in Trump's appalling scheme

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, wearing a gold pin of Donald Trump’s head that eerily resembles an old Chairman Mao pin I bought in Beijing in 1988, went after Jimmy Kimmel again just hours before he was back on the air on Tuesday night. Carr also mentioned station licenses again, in what seems like a thinly-veiled threat, when he tweeted:

“Democrats just keep digging themselves a deeper & deeper hole on Kimmel. They simply can’t stand that local TV stations — for the first time in years — stood up to a national programmer & chose to exercise their lawful right to preempt programming. We need to keep empowering local TV stations to serve their communities of license.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s revenge prosecutor is reportedly demanding information on the FBI agent who was first to see the Sandy Hook carnage and testified against Alex Jones.

As I lay out in my new book, The Last American President, this is how terror and intimidation work. This is how free speech and the rule of law die. It’s how kings rule, not elected presidents of democratic republics.

And this is how power enforces obedience: by making an example out of person after person, news outlet after news outlet, comedian after comedian, until the rest of us are too afraid to speak.

That’s the bigger story here. What Trump is doing isn’t politics. It’s the deliberate centralization of power, seizing it from the people and the media, silencing dissent, bending institutions to his will, and cloaking himself in immunity given him by six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court.

It looks less like a presidency and more like a throne.

  • He declared a “crime emergency” in Washington, D.C., despite crime being at a 30-year low.
  • He created permanent “quick reaction” National Guard units, ready to deploy into cities at his whim: a standing domestic army the Founders explicitly warned against.
  • He rolled the model into Memphis, calling it a “replica” of D.C., and bragged Chicago is next. Occupation, not governance.

Retribution is the centerpiece of his rule.

  • Security clearances stripped from John Bolton, Mark Milley, Anthony Fauci, and dozens of others who dared to oppose him.
  • Justice Department staff and prosecutors purged for doing their jobs.
  • A $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times designed to bankrupt it for printing facts.
  • After Charlie Kirk’s death, networks pressured to fire Kimmel and silence Stephen Colbert. Everyday people hunted down online and forced out of jobs, from a Nasdaq employee to a 23-year-old Idaho worker. Fear is the point.

The state itself is being weaponized.

  • The FCC warned ABC affiliates they could face investigations, fines, or even license loss after Kimmel’s jokes about MAGA. Within days, Jimmy Kimmel Live was yanked from the air. If ABC can be threatened — and Trump repeated that threat when Kimmel came back — what message does that send to every other network? Stay quiet or be crushed.
  • Sanctuary cities are being starved of funds. Immigrants and entire communities are criminalized under Executive Order 14159.
  • The administration promises a crackdown on “left-wing groups,” presumably meaning activists, unions, professors, nonprofits, anyone who resists.

And the ambitions don’t stop at America’s borders. Trump has mused openly about reshaping the map of the Western Hemisphere.

  • He’s revived his obsession with Greenland, backing a House bill to purchase or “otherwise acquire” it, renaming it “Red, White, and Blueland.” He’s refused to rule out military force if Denmark resists.
  • He’s declared the U.S. should reclaim the Panama Canal, calling Panama’s fees “exorbitant” and floating the idea of seizing control in the name of national security.
  • He’s even suggested Canada could become the 51st state, and slapped massive tariffs on Canadian goods to show he’s serious.
  • Mexico, too, is in his crosshairs: trade wars, tariffs, and rhetoric that treat America’s southern neighbor not as a sovereign nation but as territory to be coerced.
  • And now, in the Caribbean, Trump’s America has gone further: U.S. naval forces have literally blown up three Venezuelan boats. People have died. Maduro calls it aggression, militias are mobilizing, and the two nations are sliding toward war. This is what happens when unchecked power turns outward: war abroad becomes the mirror of repression at home.

Abroad, he crowns this vision by embracing Vladimir Putin.

  • A red carpet rolled out for Putin in Alaska, gifting him legitimacy amid his war on Ukraine and his penetration of NATO airspace in Poland, Romania, and Estonia.
  • Russian state media celebrates Trump’s dismantling of USAID and his praise for Putin.
  • Meanwhile, long-time allies are trashed and abandoned. America’s power abroad is being traded away for the company of strongmen.

Support for Ukraine and NATO is now treated as transactional, not principled. Aid is approved one week, paused the next. The administration signals that restoring Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is “unrealistic,” effectively rewarding Russian aggression.

NATO allies are pressured to “pay up” or risk abandonment, as if the alliance is a mob protection racket rather than a shared democratic defense. If America no longer defends democracy abroad, what confidence should we have that it will defend democracy at home?

The same coercive logic drives Trump’s use of tariffs.

  • He wields tariffs not as economic policy but as punishment, slapping Canada, Mexico, and Europe with sweeping trade taxes to force compliance.
  • Tariffs have become his political weapon: extortion dressed up as trade, a way to bend allies, neighbors, and even domestic industries to his will and intimidate them into giving him gifts like a multimillion dollar airplane or investing billions in his companies.
  • Just as troops in D.C. or the FCC threaten to silence dissent, tariffs silence resistance by making the cost of saying “no” unbearable.

And in Palestine, the U.S. has abandoned even the principle of self-determination.

  • Humanitarian aid is cut. Palestinian voices are dismissed. U.S. policy aligns squarely with occupation and repression.
  • This isn’t about building democracy; it’s about denying an entire people the right to decide their own future.
  • And when self-determination abroad is treated as expendable, it sends a clear warning at home: your rights, too, can be conditional, your voice too can be silenced when it no longer serves those in power.

The pattern is unmistakable: everything that disperses power — free media, independent science, civic education, state and local authority, progressive nonprofits, judicial independence — is under siege.

  • Scientists and public health experts are being fired, programs gutted, data suppressed.
  • Justice Sonia Sotomayor implicitly warns that Americans may no longer know the difference between a president and a king.
  • Courts face pressure, judges face threats, and rulings are bent to expand presidential immunity.
  • Election laws are being re-engineered to federalize control, cut access, and tilt outcomes.

This isn’t scattershot; it’s systemic. And here’s the truth history tells us: once power is seized, it is rarely given back.

If Trump normalizes troops in cities, that precedent will endure. If he silences networks with FCC threats, that precedent will endure. If lawsuits against journalists succeed, that precedent will endure. Each act rewires the presidency into a throne for a would-be king.

And yet some Democrats act as if this is business as usual while the ground is ripped out from beneath us. Their weakness is complicity.

But democracy is not passive. It has always been the people who’ve seizing power back from kings, dictators, and colonizers. The Founders understood this when they wrote the Constitution to divide power across three branches of government. They fought to prevent a new form of monarchy. And now it’s our fight again.

What we must do is clear:

  • Demand Congress block the abuse of emergency powers; contact your elect representatives every week.
  • Push courts to stop executive overreach before precedents harden.
  • Support independent journalism under attack.
  • Push back hard against censorship of the media and corporations that bow their knee to Trump.
  • Stand with those being punished: scientists, teachers, comedians, reporters, immigrants, protesters.
  • Mobilize peacefully but relentlessly in the streets; No Kings Day is in a few weeks.
  • Elect governors, legislators, and mayors who’ll serve as firewalls against federal occupation.

This is about power: who has it, who loses it, and whether it still belongs to the people.

If we do nothing, our children will ask what democracy was like, because they won’t have it. If we fight, we can still preserve the greatest system humanity has ever devised: a republic of laws, not autocrats.

Trump wants to be king. He’s already acting like one. The only question is whether we’ll kneel or rise, together, and take our democracy back.

The real reason the Supreme Court is on Trump's side is terrifying

Are they afraid Trump will get them killed?

Ninety years ago, President Franklin D. Roosevelt fired William E. Humphrey from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Humphrey sued to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the Constitution had never given “illimitable power of removal” to the president and that he couldn’t fire Humphrey. The case is called Humphrey’s Executor v US — Humphrey got his job back.

The unanimous decision of the Court was clear and explicit:

“We think it plain under the Constitution that illimitable power of removal is not possessed by the President in respect of officers of the character of those just named.

“The authority of Congress, in creating quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial agencies, to require them to act in discharge of their duties independently of executive control cannot well be doubted, and that authority includes, as an appropriate incident, power to fix the period during which they shall continue in office, and to forbid their removal except for cause in the meantime.

“For it is quite evident that one who holds his office only during the pleasure of another cannot be depended upon to maintain an attitude of independence against the latter's will.”

On Monday, without public argument, debate, or discussion, the Republican majority on today’s Court let Trump fire FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, a complete and obvious deviation from the Humphrey’s precedent. They gave no reasoning other than that they’d deal with the issue later.

Justice Elena Kagan was having none of it, issuing a blistering dissent that said, in part:

“Our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars. Still more, it should not be used, as it also has been, to transfer government authority from Congress to the President, and thus to reshape the Nation’s separation of powers,”

Why are these six Republican appointees deferring to Trump in such an obvious violation of precedent and the Constitution they’ve sworn to uphold? This, and a handful of other times they’ve rolled over for Trump, is quite literally unprecedented.

The six Republicans on the Supreme Court have been amazing, baffling, and horrifying Court-watchers and judges beneath them from across the political spectrum, as they use their so-called Shadow Docket to issue dictates that clearly contradict the Constitution, violate settled precedent, and even break black-letter law.

All, apparently, to appease Donald Trump.

As the famous conservative Judge Michael Luttig recently wrote:

“He has enthralled our Supreme Court, spellbinding it into submission to him and his will rather than to the Constitution and its will, and our Supreme Court has favored him with its affirmation and its acquiescence in his lawlessness.”

But why are these six justices going along with this?

Is it because, like is alleged of Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, they’re all on the take, benefiting from the largess of rightwing billionaires or the fundraising impresario Leonard Leo, powerful figures who are ordering them to violate the very oath they took when they assumed office?

Or is it because they’re so ideologically extreme, wed to a 21st-century form of neofascism, that they’re enthusiastic to overturn 249 years of our constitutional order?

Or could it be that they’re simply terrified to cross The Don, a man who told the world this weekend that he “hates” people who cross him? Look at what he’s doing right now to his former Republican colleagues and employees, James Clapper, James Comey, and John Brennan. And don’t forget Miles Taylor. It’s brutal.

Consider also what else they’ve done so far this year, handing down more shadow docket rulings in nine months than during the entire 16 years of the Bush and Obama administrations combined:

In US v Shilling they let Trump dismiss transgender individuals from the armed forces even though the ban clearly constituted invidious discrimination that violates the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection component and due process. They heard no arguments and gave no explanation.

In OPM v AFGE they blew up civil service protections for federal workers, creating a due-process debacle to let Trump fire pretty much anybody he wanted. They heard no arguments and gave no explanation.

In Dept of Education v California they allowed Trump to engage in illegal viewpoint-based retaliation against DEI-related content and violate the First Amendment and Spending Clause limits. They heard no arguments and gave no explanation; Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson were so furious they wrote two dissents.

In Noem v National TPS Alliance they trampled due process and undermined the law Congress had passed that allowed immigrants to have temporary protected status so Trump could pull that protection from any brown-skinned person he wanted (although this was specifically about Venezuelans). They heard no arguments and gave no explanation.

In Noem v Svitlana Doe they allowed across-the-board termination of “humanitarian parole” and work authorizations for hundreds of thousands of people here legally from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, trashing the Constitution’s requirement for individualized process and to avoid disparate impact. They heard no arguments and gave no explanation; Justices Sotomayor and Jackson were so angry they wrote a joint dissent.

In Trump v CASA de Maryland they allowed Trump to start narrowing birthright citizenship in what the dissenters said “directly contradicts the text and original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.” Civil rights groups called Trump’s executive order “flatly unconstitutional” but they heard no arguments and gave no explanation.

In Noem v Vasquez Perdomo they allowed ICE to seize, search, and detain people based on their race, language, accent, or job description, in clear violation of both civil rights laws, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Fourth Amendment protections of privacy and the requirement for a warrant to be judge-issued based on reasonable suspicion and witness testimony. They heard no arguments and gave no explanation; Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson were so furious they wrote a dissent.

In Trump v Wilcox they allowed Trump to defy the constitutional separation-of-powers framework (and longstanding limits on at-will removal for certain independent-agency officials), to get rid of officials he didn’t like in independent agencies that Congress had previously separated from the president’s overview, in clear defiance of the US Constitution.

Every one of these decisions is shocking on its face, and more like them are expected. Up next is most likely a decision that may further gut voting rights in America, the only advanced democracy in the world where voting is still a privilege that can be withdrawn without notice instead of a right.

Why is this happening?

While the two elected branches get their legitimacy from “the will of the People,” the Supreme Court derives its legitimacy from openly and transparently deliberating after hearing arguments, and explaining its rationale, so anybody can understand its logic and the decisions can become a guide for future court cases.

When the Court simply says, “This is the way it is because I say so,” like a parent talking to a child, rather than explaining, it erodes faith and confidence in our justice system.

It becomes a type of justice system, in fact, that America has never seen before outside of the old Confederacy. That’s the kind of damage these Shadow Docket decisions cause.

So, why would they do this? Why would these six people defy the Founders and Framers, spit on the Constitution, and trample the rule of law, all in the service of a single wannabe dictator?

I’ve heard the arguments that they’re on the take, and they’re compelling, particularly when it comes to their Citizens United decision that allowed billionaires to buy politicians and judges and came soon after a rightwing billionaire had showered Clarence Thomas and his wife with millions in gifts and vacations.

And it’s clear that at least Thomas and Alito are so ideologically extreme that they probably wouldn’t have been uncomfortable on the German supreme court in the 1930s.

But I think the real reason is that they’re terrified.

After all, these are not (like 13 of the billionaires in Trump’s cabinet) rich people. Sidewalk protests in front of Kavanaugh’s and Roberts’ homes have let the nation see that they live in nice houses in nice neighborhoods, but don’t have the gated security and armed guards of your average decamillionaire or billionaire. They feel vulnerable.

And for good reason.

Roy Den Hollander posted pro-Trump writings online and had officially volunteered for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign prior to showing up at the door of federal Judge Esther Salas disguised as a FedEx driver. Her 20-year-old son, Daniel, answered the door and Hollander shot him dead, then wounded his father before escaping and ultimately killing himself.

The initial story that went viral was that he’d been dressed up as a pizza delivery person, so in the years since this incident, according to the US Marshall’s Service over a hundred judges who’ve handed down anti-Trump decisions have had pizzas delivered to their homes at weird hours, by way of saying, “We know where you live and can kill you whenever we want.”

The pizzas are often addressed to be delivered to “Daniel Anderl” care of the judge whose home is targeted, and sometimes even to the children of the judges receiving the pizzas; Daniel was the son of Judge Esther Salas who was killed in the attack targeting her entire family, and Salas described this ongoing rightwing terror campaign against her peers as “psychological warfare.”

Trump has used terms like “monsters,” “lunatics,” “crooked,” and “radical left” to describe judges who rule against him. His rhetoric regularly portrays judges who rule against him as political enemies, further fueling attacks and harassment from his supporters.

Judge John McConnell, for example, said he received more than 400 threatening voicemails, including messages like “Tell that son of a bitch we’re going to come for him” and “I wish someone would assassinate your ass” after ruling against Trump.

On top of that, of the 31 politically motivated attacks and assassinations since 2018, only one was done by a “leftist”; all 30 others were committed by confirmed rightwingers, the majority openly Trump supporters.

Given this history, it’s easy to see why these Supreme Court judges may be afraid of earning Trump’s ire by ruling against him.

They know that with just a half a dozen sentences on his low-rent social media site, Donald Trump could say things about any one of them that would incite a lone wolf to come to their homes to kill them.

Just last week, responding to the Kirk killing, Amy Coney Barrett said, “Political discourse has soured beyond control…”

After all, if university presidents, wealthy heads of major law firms, the heads of CBS and ABC, and billionaires from Zuckerberg to Bezos are so terrified of Trump they’ll humiliate themselves (think Tim Cook or Mark Zuckerberg) before him, why wouldn’t Supreme Court justices be, too?

It also explains why they’re using the shadow docket instead of the normal merits docket; shadow docket decisions are temporary and easily overturned after Trump leaves office, theoretically limiting the damage these rulings are causing to our republic.

They might have even convinced themselves they’re doing the best thing, by postponing a moment of conflict to reduce Trump‘s damage to America. After all, both JD Vance and Elon Musk have said that they’re willing to ignore decisions of the Supreme Court; once an administration has gotten away with that, pretty much any power the Supreme Court has completely vanishes.

This is a horrible truth all nine members are well aware of, one alluded to by both Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall. The court has no mechanism to enforce it rulings other than its credibility.

The Trump administration last week asked Congress for an additional $58 million to provide security to federal judges, presumably including the Supreme Court. Ironically, if they begin to feel safe as a result, Trump may rue the day he provided them with that additional security.

The inspiration for Trump's latest assault should chill you to the bone

We’ve seen this movie before. Or at least our grandparents did. Dictators can’t take a joke.

On Feb. 4, 1939 — seven months before their invasion of Poland kicked off World War II — the man with oversight responsibility for German media officially forbade five comedians from ever again performing in public. As the headline in the New York Times explained:

“Goebbels Ends Careers of Five 'Aryan' Actors Who Made Witticisms About the Nazi Regime”

Their crime, according to Josef Goebbels, was publicly telling “brazen, impertinent, arrogant and tactless” jokes about the Führer.

Their humor, Goebbels told the press, only appealed to the “society rabble that followed them with thundering applause — parasitic scum, inhabiting our luxury streets, that seems to have only the task of proving with how little brains people can get along and even acquire money and prominence.”

The Times wrote that Goebbels and Adolf Hitler were particularly incensed that the actors caricatured and ridiculed Hitler’s followers and the loyal toadies in his administration:

“What amused the public most, however, and presumably roiled the National Socialist authorities most — although Dr. Goebbels does not mention it — is that they deftly, but unmistakably, caricatured some gestures, poses and physical characteristics of National Socialist leaders — sometimes with bon mots that made the rounds of the country.”

The Nazi leaders were furious, arguing that they themselves had, the Times noted, “a keen sense of humor that could kill opponents with ridicule.”

Instead of ordering the offending comedians executed, the Times added, they were simply rendered incapable of earning a living in their chosen profession.

“But as National Socialism proposes to remain in power 2,000 years it has neither the time nor the patience to apply that method to the ‘miserable literati.’”

FCC (“Federal Censorship Commission”?) Chairman Brendan Carr seems to be following in Goebbels' footsteps, having implicitly threatened Disney/ABC and two groups of TV station affiliates with regulatory intervention to block multi-billion-dollar mergers if they didn’t take Jimmy Kimmel off the air.

CBS’s rolling over when Trump was offended by Stephen Colbert appears to have emboldened the administration to go after other comedians.

Donald Trump himself, meanwhile, was blunt about how “illegal” it is for people on television to criticize him. And he wasn’t just talking about comedians, specifically calling out “newscasts” that will presumably be Carr’s next target:

“I’m a very strong person for free speech. But 97, 94, 95, 96 percent of the people are against me in the sense of the newscasts are against me. The stories are — they said 97 percent bad. So, they gave me 97, they’ll take a great story, and they’ll make it bad. See, I think that’s really illegal, personally.”

Meanwhile, Trump has sent soldiers into the streets of three American cities, purged federal museums of information about slavery and discrimination against minorities and women, and posted what may have been meant to be a private DM demanding that Attorney General Pam Bondi begin prosecuting his political enemies.

Along those same authoritarian lines, three major federal buildings in Washington, D.C. now sport massive new banners with Trump’s face glowering down on people walking or driving by. Paid for with your tax dollars, the banners violate federal law according to a report released by Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA).

Georgia Democratic Congressman Hank Johnson was blunt in his critique:

“When I saw the banners hanging from federal office buildings last week, it reminded me of [the] Communist Party in China and banners hanging from federal offices — just totally inappropriate and a step towards authoritarianism. It’s another indication of the march that we’re on towards authoritarianism in this country.”

Will anybody on network television be willing this week to tell “brazen, impertinent, arrogant and tactless" jokes about the Saddam Hussein-like banners?

Stay tuned.

Trump has finally made the move that will tip us all over the cliff

This is a threshold moment, this stifling of Jimmy Kimmel. It’s the last laugh before the silence.

The attack on him is something everyone can understand.

People didn’t know what it meant that Donald Trump was getting billions for his bitcoin company or a jet airplane in exchange for essentially giving favors to other countries. They didn’t understand how inappropriate, illegal, and unconstitutional that is unless they understand the word “emoluments,” and few do; they didn’t get it.

His hustling Teslas from the White House in violation of the Hatch Act (that would put a normal person in jail for two years) didn’t seem a big deal to most Americans because they’d never seen it before.

They had no idea how bad it was. Only former presidents and people who’d read the Constitution and the law knew.

And that’s a very small percentage of people. Meaningless.

So along comes Jimmy Kimmel, who everybody knows. He’s even more popular than Stephen Colbert, or at least at that level. Everybody knows who he is. And Trump takes aim at him for things he said — his First Amendment-protected free speech — and is explicit and public about it.

Then comes his toady FCC Chairman Brendan Carr — the guy who wrote the part of Project 2025 about how the FCC should be run — threatening to go after the licenses of stations that are trying to merge with Nexstar for what may well be a billion-dollar payout for everybody involved.

They’re referencing a comment Kimmel made about Charlie Kirk‘s killer as an excuse for censoring him, but that doesn’t make any sense. It’s apparently really because Trump is offended by comedians making fun of him. You can’t make fun of the Dear Leader in Russia, Hungary, Turkey, China, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, or any other country where the men Trump admires rule.

And Kimmel was relentless in making fun of Trump.

Here’s what Carr — a government regulator — said, doing his best imitation of a mafia bone-breaker:

“This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. … These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

The station owners freaked out, because some may get even richer through the merger with TV giant billionaire-owned Nexstar (ABC), and threatened to take Kimmel off their stations. The merger would’ve been profitable for the people at Nexstar (ABC), as well.

And that merger requires Carr’s approval because it requires breaking or changing the anti-monopoly rules that forbid any company to own stations that reach more than 39% of Americans.

So, here’s how it looks to the average person: Trump and Carr threatened the Nexstar (ABC) deal if they didn’t shut up Kimmel, and the company (ABC) said, “OK,” and took him off the air “indefinitely.”

And everybody gets it. It’s not anywhere near as complicated as shady cryptocurrency deals or golf courses or Trump Towers in foreign lands.

This is a classic example of how mob-like corruption works; we’ve all seen it in movies like The Godfather or shows like The Sopranos. We don’t need law or business degrees. We have TVs.

The average person totally gets where Trump’s leverage is and why he’s using it to shut up people who irritate him; this is relatable to the life of anybody who’s ever been bullied or shaken down.

“Nice little TV network you’ve got there, we’d hate to see something happen to it.”

They get how bad the crime is. And it’s all happening to a guy — Jimmy Kimmel — who everybody knows and most people like!

Remember when Mark Twain said, “Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel”? This is the same thing: “Never pick a fight with a popular figure who can created a press conference with a quip.” It’s why Vladimir Putin outlawed comedians (and puppets) who ridiculed him.

The reason we’re only now realizing that we’re at a pivotal moment in America is because most people didn’t know how to answer this question:

“How do you know when you’re really and truly no longer living in a democracy?”

How do you know when you’re definitely no longer living in a free nation?

Most people think it’s when the tanks are rolling down the streets, and, while people in Washington DC are seeing that right now, it’s not most people‘s lived experience. They haven’t confronted a tank, been asked for their papers, or been locked up in an ICE detention center.

But everybody knows Jimmy Kimmel. So the new understanding is:

“You know you don’t live in a free country any more when comedians can no longer criticize the president.”

That’s a criteria for the end of freedom that everybody understands.

Up until the last few days, most Americans didn’t think we’d lost our freedoms or are about to. Didn’t think that we’d become a tyranny or are on the verge, where the King will come against you no matter who you are, no matter what political party you vote for (just ask registered Republicans like James Comey, Mark Milley, or Tim Miller), or how obscure you may be (just ask the Columbia students).

Don’t get me wrong: many Americans, perhaps a majority, thought things were bad. They hated inflation and the joblessness going up and all that stuff from the tariffs and Trump’s erratic foreign policy and his constant sucking up to or deferring to Putin.

They didn’t like all their hard-earned tax dollars going into the pockets of the morbidly rich like Trump and his friends and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet. People in America generally realize that pretty much everything Trump has done is either for himself, the billionaire class, or to punish people of color and queer people. They’re generally unhappy about it and pretty much every metric of every study shows it.

But they didn’t realize that we had lost what makes this country great: our personal freedom of speech. Our ability to speak our minds. Our freedom to have multiple viewpoints, and multiple voices and news sources to listen to or watch.

But when this happened to Jimmy Kimmel, everybody suddenly understood. That’s why this is an earthquake moment for the United States.

If the Democrats fail to seize on this opportunity, they are completely incompetent. This has to be the number one issue going forward. Every American understands what it means to be told to, “Shut up!“

And no Americans like it. We didn’t like it as kids; we don’t like it as adults.

In fact, Trump‘s suppression of free speech is already starting, in a small way, to “hit the regular people.” Folks are getting fired, doxed, and even having their lives and homes threatened with violence for things they said online about Charlie Kirk and his shooter. We’re starting to bleed into that “civil war” bottom of the pyramid that I wrote about yesterday.

So, the moment is urgent.

Let your elected representatives know your thoughts on this. That Brendan Carr must go. That the president must stop talking like this. That Pam Bondi must stop talking like this. That they should take the masks off the monsters in the streets so they’re once again human.

To stop making America unfree.


It’s time to stand up and speak out. Because if we don’t now, like Jimmy Kimmel, we may not be able to speak out at all in the near future.

Trump's terrified of 'far left radicals' — here's why he should be

If you’re even remotely associated with the Democratic Party, whether running for office, helping out, or just breathing while Democratic, the GOP and their rightwing media attack dogs will label you a “far left radical.”

So, in the interest of clarity, let me make it official: I’m a far left radical.

Here’s why. I believe:

— Every worker should have the right to democracy in their workplace (a union), and that nobody who works full-time should have to live in poverty because the minimum wage hasn’t gone up in a stupid amount of time. I’m a far left radical.

— Retired people shouldn’t have to pay income taxes on their Social Security (the way it was before Reagan), that morbidly rich people should pay into the system like the rest of us, that Social Security should pay enough to live modestly on, and that Medicare should cover all our expenses with minimum hassle. I’m a far left radical.

— Every American citizen should be able to vote without a hassle, and taking away your vote should require a judge’s action to prove why, just like if a state wants to take away your gun. I’m a far left radical.

— Speaking of guns, it’s obscene that the leading cause of death for our children is bullets, and we shouldn’t have to regularly terrorize our children with active shooter drills. We need rational gun control laws, like almost every other country in the world has. I’m a far left radical.

— It’s crazy that three men own more wealth than the bottom half of America and pay less of their income in taxes than your average teenager. If we want the general prosperity of the 1950s, we should have the same tax rate that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower so loved: 90 percent on the morbidly rich after they’ve made their first few million dollars a year. I’m a far left radical.

— Our children and grandchildren deserve a world where they needn’t fear being killed by climate-change-driven wild weather, drought, or wildfires, and the air and water are clean. And it’s nuts that we’re subsidizing the fossil fuel industry that’s preventing this. I’m a far left radical.

— Every other country in the world helps their young people go to college; in most it’s as cheap as it was here in the 1960s when you could put yourself through school with a weekend job. Some countries even pay people to go to college, like the $100/month stipend my dad had with the GI Bill after WWII that built our scientific and business prowess. And it’s wrong to cripple entire generations with trillions in student debt. I’m a far left radical.

— Across the 34 richest (OECD) countries in the world, over a half-million families are wiped out every year because somebody got sick. All of those families are here in America. Health care should be a right — like in every other developed country in the world — instead of a privilege that depends on how much money you have. I’m a far left radical.

— Starting a small family business, once the backbone of every American town and city, should once again be possible; we need to break up the massive monopolies that have come to dominate every single industry. See: Republican Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Like them, I’m a far left radical.

— Every person in America should be free to practice their own religion — or no religion — and raise their kids that way without government interference, government promotion, or their tax dollars subsidizing local megachurches’ religious schools. Like the Constitution says. I’m a far left radical.

— People should be judged, hired, and promoted based on the quality of their minds, their work, and their integrity, not the color of their skin, their ethnicity, or their religion. I’m a far left radical.

— Women should have the same rights and privileges as men, from the workplace to the boardroom to the voting booth. I’m a far left radical.

— Our queer brothers and sisters should have the same rights and privileges as everybody else, and be free to live their lives without discrimination or harassment. I’m a far left radical.

— America is a nation of immigrants, and we have been strengthened in every generation by the diversity of talent and humanity that have come here to participate in the American dream. We need comprehensive immigration reform to clean up our system. I’m a far left radical.

These are all positions Republicans hate, and any one of them will get you labeled as a far left radical instantly.

So, the next time some rightwing idiot attacks you for voting for Kamala Harris or having a D on your voter registration or an anti-Trump bumper sticker, simply repeat after me:

“I’m a far left radical — and proud of it!”

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