Thom Hartmann, AlterNet

Imagine that the NFL made a rule change that allowed every team to have an extra three men on the field during the game — but half of the NFL teams, protesting the new rule as “wrong” and “too much of a deviation from fairness and norms” refused to add the three players to their own lineups.

Who’d be winning almost every game? Who’d be going to the Superbowl?

This is an almost perfect analogy to what Democrats are doing today with electoral politics.

In 2013, five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court changed the rules for our elections, gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act. They ruled, over liberal justice’s objections, that it was just fine to allow states to gerrymander based on presumed political affiliation and on race (with a tiny fig leaf required) and to throw millions of people off the voter rolls, again based on race or their living in an area that votes heavily for one party or the other.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in her Shelby County v Holder dissent:

“Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

This was followed by two other corrupt all-Republican decisions, Rucho v Common Cause and Alexander v NAACP, that expanded the ability of states to gerrymander their political districts to favor one political party over another to consolidate control over state legislatures and the US House of Representatives.

Additionally, the all-Republican 2018 Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute decision made it easy for states to target voters with postcards that look like junk mail and throw them off the voting rolls if they failed to return them.

As a result of this rapid-fire series of corrupt voting-related decisions Republican-controlled states have:

— Passed hundreds of laws making it harder to register to vote, particularly for poor, Black, female, disabled, and elderly voters,
— Thrown, just last year, 4.2 million mostly Democratic voters off the rolls or refused to count their votes, leading, as journalist Greg Palast documented last month, to the 2024 election of Donald Trump and Republicans seizing control of the House and Senate, and,
— Gerrymandered their states even more heavily and surgically to give Republicans a solid hold on the House of Representatives and multiple state legislatures.

Democratically controlled states, meanwhile, have done nothing.

Actually, Democratic controlled states have done worse than nothing; many, citing “fairness” and “the way it should be done” have stopped gerrymandering altogether. None have engaged in any sort of voter suppression; to the contrary, most have expanded mail-in voting and other options to make voting easier for both Democrats and Republicans.

The result is plain and reflects the obvious goal of the rightwingers on the Supreme Court: Republicans today control the House, Senate, White House, and a handful of state houses that otherwise would have gone to Democrats.

North Carolina is a great example; it’s politically a roughly 50/50 state, which is why a statewide office like Governor has repeatedly gone to a Democrat. Nonetheless, Republicans hold 10 out of the state’s 13 seats in the US House of Representatives because of gerrymanders. If North Carolina hadn’t been gerrymandered, the US House would today be in Democratic hands.

Ditto for Alabama, Florida, Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, Ohio, and Utah, providing Republicans with seven additional House seats that would have gone to Democrats without gerrymandering.

Meanwhile, in 2008 California did away with gerrymanders because they were “unfair,” handing as many as 4 mostly permanent House seats to Republicans. Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, and Virginia are moving in the same direction.

But that’s just the beginning.

Another strategy that the GOP has rolled out in a big way to suppress the vote in Blue areas of Red states is “strict signature matching.” They primarily use this against voters who’ve succeeded in obtaining vote-by-mail ballots, which are authenticated by comparing the signature on the envelope with the voter’s registration card.

Because signatures change over time and often vary a lot when people are in a hurry, this is low-hanging fruit for the GOP. Last year they rolled out a program to field an “army” of 50,000 “poll watchers,” including interviewing candidates from among white supremacist militia groups, for the 2024 election.

Democrats, on the other hand, generally go out of their way to allow for small variations, noting that “people’s signatures often change as they age or if they’re in a hurry.”

And then there are the voter roll purges that used to be illegal.

In multiple Republican states, particularly Georgia, Ohio, Florida, and Texas, mailing out postcards into urban areas to purge people from the voting rolls has become a routine practice. (It was Ohio that took the issue to the Supreme Court in the Husted case.)

This is because purging voters — by the tens of millions every election cycle — is where Republicans find their best result. As a Demos report notes:

“Between the close of registration for the 2020 general election and the close of registration for the 2022 general election, states reported removing 19,260,000 records from their voter registration rolls. This was equal to 8.5% of the total number of voters who were registered in the United States as of the close of registration for the 2022 general election.”

Additionally, 17 million voters were purged in the two years leading up to the 2018 election, fully ten percent of America’s voting population, according to the Brennan Center.

Given that the most radical purges took place among Black and youth voters in Blue cities in Republican-controlled Red states, those 8.5 percent and 10 percent “national averages” could well be two or three times that percentage in the states where these purges were concentrated.

Remember George W. Bush’s 537-vote “victory” over Al Gore in 2000? Just a few months before that election, as the BBC documented and reported, Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris purged over 90,000 Black voters from the rolls because, Harris alleged, their names were “similar” to the names of felons in Texas.

More recently, the Brennan Center found that just between 2014 and 2016, in the two years leading up to the Hillary/Trump presidential election, over 14 million people were purged from voter rolls, largely in Republican-controlled states. Then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp purged over a million voters in Georgia alone in 2018, leading up to his 50,000-vote win that year against Stacey Abrams.

Calling the findings “disturbing,” the Brennan Center noted:

“Almost 4 million more names were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016 [just after the Supreme Court legalized large-scale no-oversight voter purges in 2013] than between 2006 and 2008. This growth in the number of removed voters represented an increase of 33 percent—far outstripping growth in both total registered voters (18 percent) and total population (6 percent).”

It’s time for Democrats to start fighting back: They need to put their three extra men on the field.

— Democratic states, instead of rejecting gerrymanders, should start to aggressively gerrymander like Republican states have done; it could produce a near-permanent Democratic majority in the House of Representatives.
— Democratic states should start mailing postcards into rural Red areas, purging Republican voters who fail to return them from the rolls.
— Democratic election judges should, as Republicans often do, aggressive challenge mail-in voter’s signatures in GOP-heavy areas, leading to the rejection of their ballots.

None of these things are “fair” but all are “legal.” It’s called fighting fire with fire.

And if Democrats were to do these simple things, in addition to winning more seats in the House and state legislatures, it would evoke howls of “unfair” from Republicans. Those protests, in turn, may even lead to Republicans working with Democrats to reform our voting system to make it easy for everybody in America to vote. (Not holding my breath, but just saying…)

Instead, Republicans are on the verge of passing the SAVE act that will prevent millions, perhaps tens of millions, of married women who haven’t gone to court to change their names after marriage from voting in 2026 and 2028. And Democratic leadership isn’t even making a concerted effort to let Americans know about it!

As distasteful as it may be, Democrats need to suck it up and fight Republicans on the field by using the new rules the Republican-controlled Supreme Court has defined over the past decade.

Otherwise, prepare for even more losses in the next two election cycles.

NOW READ: That Trump 'backlash' may not be real — here's why

Get ready.

The resistance to billionaires running our government is growing. Bernie Sanders is touring the Red State Midwest and drawing massive crowds. Federal workers are pissed. Republican politicians are in hiding, refusing to do town halls even when their constituents demand them or try to set them up.

Comrade Krasnov’s…er, Trump’s polling numbers are collapsing as fast as his embrace of Comrade Putin is growing. Fascism expert and On Tyranny author Professor Timothy Snyder notes over at BlueSky:

“Nervous Musk, Trump, Vance have all been outclassed in public arguments these last few days. Government failure, stock market crash, and dictatorial alliances are not popular. People are starting to realize that there is no truth here beyond the desire for personal wealth and power.”

James Carville told Dan Abrams:

“This whole thing is collapsing. … I believe that this administration, in less than 30 days, is in the midst of a massive collapse and particularly a collapse in public opinion.”

At the same time, four Republicans have now thrown Nazi salutes, three over this past weekend at CPAC. They think they can overcome their fear of the people by intimidating us.

This is a moment of maximum peril for our nation and our freedoms because if, as Rachel Bitecofer documents, Trump and his followers really are following Hitler’s script to seize total power and turn America into an authoritarian dictatorship, the next step may well be to exploit an attack on America.

Germans remember well that fateful day ninety-two years ago this week: February 27, 1933. It started when the government, in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack.

A Dutch communist named Marius van der Lubbe had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The German intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed. (Historians still argue whether rogue elements in Hitler’s intelligence service helped him; the most recent research implies they did not, but simply watched him proceed.)

And then van der Lubbe took down the prize of Germany, the Parliament building (the Reichstagsgebäude), setting it ablaze on that February day.

Hitler knew the strike was coming (although he apparently didn’t know where or when), and he had already considered his response. When an aide brought him word that the nation’s most prestigious building was ablaze, he verified it was van der Lubbe who had struck and then rushed to the scene and called a press conference.

“You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history,” he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded by national media. “This fire,” he said, his voice trembling with emotion, “is the beginning.” He used the occasion — “a sign from God,” he called it — to declare an all-out “war on terrorism” and the groups he said were its ideological sponsors, the socialists and Jews.

Two weeks later, the first detention center for “terrorists” was built in Oranianberg to hold the first suspected “allies” of the infamous terrorist. Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, Hitler had pushed through legislation — in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the “liberal” philosophy he said spawned it — that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus.

His Decree on the Protection of People and State allowed police to intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; and police could sneak into people's homes without warrants if the cases involved terrorism.

It was the beginning of the end of a democratic Germany.

Similarly, in 2002, the new Russian President Putin was engaged in a war with Chechnya, trying to subdue and subsume a nation that has been both under Russian rule and independent over the past several centuries, very much like Ukraine.

A theater in Moscow was seized that year by “Chechen rebels” who began executing theater-goers: Putin ordered poisonous gas apparently made of something like fentanyl poured into the theater, and it let his police take back the theater (although many of the hostages, along with their tormentors, died from the gas).

Putin used the attack as an excuse to escalate his years-long conflict with the parts of Chechnya that still were fighting for their independence from Russia; he launched a major WWII-style land invasion and bombing campaign. Tens of thousands died, entire cities were destroyed, and Chechnya was largely subdued within the year.

In the aftermath of that 2002 theater attack and subsequent war there was speculation from multiple sources and countries that Putin knew the attack was coming and welcomed it, believing he could use it as an excuse to escalate his low-level conflict with Chechnya to elevate his own profile while finally seizing full control of the region.

It was an echo of the Moscow apartment bombings in 1999 that then-Prime Minister Putin used to leverage himself into the presidency the following year. He’d used those terror attacks to consolidate his power, and repeated the trick in 2003 beginning with the 2003 arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of Yukos Oil. By the following year most serious voices of dissent or opposition in Russia were either dead, in prison, or fleeing for their lives.

There’s a long history of leaders using national emergencies to raise their popularity, expand their own power, overwhelm opposition politicians, scapegoat minorities, suspend constitutions and elections, and provide a legal façade for ending or weakening democracy.

Both George W. Bush and Benjamin Netanyahu — at a time when their popularity was in the toilet and charges of impropriety were swirling (in Netanyahu’s case, actual criminal charges) — ignored multiple warnings of attacks coming.

The 9/11 and October 7 attacks — predicted by agencies and nations warning American and Israeli intelligence services respectively — were then successfully used by both to consolidate their own popularity and power.

Which is why this is such a dangerous moment that requires vigilance and preparation.

Trump’s popularity is now collapsing as his largest campaign donor takes a chainsaw to the American government, threatening virtually every aspect of federal and state functions from Social Security to Medicaid to medical research and foreign aid. An attack on America that would enable him to play the role Bush did after 9/11 would be very politically useful.

In an extreme case, which he has publicly mused about, an attack could justify his declaring a national state of emergency, suspending elections, and putting the Constitution on ice. He could then shut down media he doesn’t like, imprison people who speak out, and suspend the 2026 and 2028 elections.

All legally.

At the same time he’s contemplating this, the FBI — America’s premiere counterterrorism organization — is being scattered with as many as 1500 agents leaving Washington, DC. An open apologist for Putin has been put in charge of our intelligence services. And the senior leadership of our military was just purged, replaced with toadies who’ll praise Trump as if this were North Korea at every opportunity.

And the JAG officers of each branch of the military along with their senior commanders — the people who would determine the legality of presidential orders to, say, shoot at protestors or open detention camps for journalists and dissidents — have been fired and replaced by loyalists who’ll do whatever Trump demands.

Brett Holmgren was the director of the National Counterterrorism Center until a few weeks ago; he recently warned that the threat levels right now are at unprecedented highs.

Muslims around the world are incensed by Israel’s slaughter in Gaza; Ukrainian expats and refugees are furious about Trump’s embrace of Putin; and the Afghanistan-based Islamic State-Khorasan has already carried out attacks killing 13 Americans along with a recent slaughter in Moscow.

And, pointing to the deadly New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans last month, Holmgren added:

“I think it illustrates that while we have been quite effective as a government and across administrations at disrupting plotting overseas and going after terrorist leaders, we have a lot more work to do when it comes to countering violent extremism at home…”

Anybody remember the bombs left at the RNC and DNC on January 6th? The bomber is still at large, not to mention groups across the political spectrum — and recently fired federal workers — who may have grievances against our government. And people from nations around the world where USAID was keeping friends and relatives alive but isn’t any longer.

I sincerely hope I’m wrong in my concern that we’re facing the very real possibility of an imminent attack that will be exploited by Trump to put a final nail in the coffin of American democracy, but we all — and Democrats, in particular — need to be ready. The Reichstag Fire scenario could be closer than any of us expect.

As the saying goes: “Stand back and stand by.”

NOW READ: Elon Musk is in deep you-know-what

Former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger asks a question no current Republican politician appears willing to say out loud for fear that Musk, Trump, or other rightwing billionaires will use the corrupt Citizens United decision to blow them out of the water politically with a multimillion-dollar primary challenge:

“[A]s I watch the behavior of our political leaders, the comments of an ever-increasingly unhinged Trump, and the growing indifference of many Americans toward our role in the world, I have to ask a painful question: Are we now the bad guys?”

It’s a helluva question.

Our nation’s Founders overthrew a king in 1776, and paid a huge price for it. Altogether, seventeen of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence were wiped out by the war they declared.

The signers wrote in the Declaration, “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor,” and it was a simple statement of fact. The day they signed that document, each legally became a traitor and was sentenced to death for treason by the ruler who controlled their lands and their homes.

One the wealthiest of the signers was Thomas Nelson of Virginia, but a year after the signing the British had seized his home and lands. When he and George Washington attacked the British in Nelson’s hometown, Nelson encouraged Washington to attack the Nelson homestead, which British General Cornwallis had taken as his headquarters, with cannons. The house was destroyed, and after the war Nelson, unable to repay loans he’d taken out against it to help finance the Revolution, lost his property; he died in poverty at the age of 50.

The wealthy Philadelphia merchant, Robert Morris, lost 150 ships at sea in the war, wiping out his small fortune; he died destitute. Signer William Ellery of Rhode Island similarly lost everything, as did Virginia’s Carter Braxton and Benjamin Harrison, Pennsylvania’s George Clymer, New York’s Philip Livingston, Georgia’s Lyman Hall, and New Jersey’s Francis Hopkinson.

The British destroyed New York’s Francis Lewis’ property and threw his wife into such a hellhole of a jail that she died two years later. Three of South Carolina’s four signers — Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., and Arthur Middleton — were captured by the British and held in a filthy, unheated prison and brutally tortured for a year before George Washington freed them in a prisoner exchange.

New Jersey farmer John Hart’s wife died shortly after he signed the Declaration, and his thirteen children were scattered among sympathetic families to hide them from the British and conservative loyalists. He never saw them again, dying alone and wracked with grief three years later.

New Jersey State Supreme Court Justice Richard Stockton took his wife and children into hiding after he signed the Declaration, but conservatives loyal to the crown turned them in. He was so badly beaten and starved in the British prison that he died before the war was over. His home was looted, and his wife and children lived the rest of their lives as paupers.

Altogether, nine of the men in that room died and four lost their children as a direct result of putting their names to the Declaration of Independence. Every single one had to flee his home, and, after the war, twelve returned to find only rubble.

They were all willing to fight and die for the idea of democracy in America. Every one of them.

And now, after 236 years of existence — as Donald Trump bows to Putin and tweets a picture of himself cosplaying king in a gold crown — America is on the verge of becoming an entirely different type of nation.

We’ve always (or nearly always) been on the side of democracies. We fought against fascists in World War II and defeated them. We helped create democratic alliances in Europe and Asia; we led the fight to create the United Nations.

And now we’re joining Russia. This century’s dictatorial, imperial power.

Monday will be the third anniversary of Putin’s brutal invasion and rape of Ukraine. When he was a US Senator, Marco Rubio said:

“Vladimir Putin is an authoritarian thug who is accountable to no one. … I don’t think what Vladimir Putin exhibits is leadership: I think what he exhibits is thuggery … and we should be clear-eyed about that. … At the end of the day, Hillary Clinton was part of the single biggest blunder ever when it came to Vladimir Putin, and that’s the reset with Russia.”

Today, Lil’ Marco is talking about “incredible [investment] opportunities” for American billionaires and US corporations who want to do business with Russia.

Just five months ago, Republican Senator Lindsay Graham stood with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy in Washington, DC and said, “You’re the best kind of ally. You fight the Russians so we don’t have to.”

Today, Graham — like every other Republican senator and House member except Thom Tillis — has been cowed into a terrified impotence, unwilling to do anything to stop or block America’s new dictator-friendly democracy-hostile foreign policy.

Our military is being purged along hard-right ideological lines, as was the Department of Justice; the FBI is next on the firing line, although reports suggest that purge began weeks ago.

Virtually every major government agency is under attack by the DOGE hackers, as the America government is being crippled; Putin is no doubt delighted.

Even our defense budget is scheduled to be cut with a chainsaw, just as the threat from Russia and China is at the highest point in our lifetimes.

They shut down children’s cancer research, Alzheimer’s research, and food and drugs for the world’s poorest people. They are laying off FAA employees at the same time planes are falling out of the sky. They’re gutting the staff that processes your Social Security, tax, and Medicare payments.

Trump and his MAGA crowd are tearing our government apart, apparently with the goal of replacing it with something quite different than America has ever experienced before.

An entirely new America. A royal America. An America of, by, and for the morbidly rich.

One that resembles the vision petrobillionaire David Koch laid out in 1980 when he ran for Vice President on a platform calling for the destruction of nearly every federal agency except the Pentagon and the end of all income taxes on billionaires.

A country that will bear little resemblance to that grand idea our Founders fought and died for.

And they’re doing it as fast as they can — dismantling our country, our democracy, and realigning our foreign policy — because they know once Americans catch on we will rise up and try to stop them.

America’s media and our free speech rights are under ideological attack, with every major television network having been sued for millions; one has already capitulated. A Substack newsletter writer was sued for millions by the new FBI Director. Trump even sued a small Iowa newspaper and their pollster because they offended him.

Both Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer and Congressman Robert Garcia have been threatened with investigation and imprisonment by a US attorney for their comments about abortion and politics, despite the Constitution protecting members of Congress from such intimidation. Schumer apologized on the floor of the Senate for saying of SCOTUS justices’ anti-abortion Dobbs decision, “You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price”; Garcia is defiant.

Republicans could stop this, if they will just find their spine. Every soldier in the American military is willing to die for their country on a moment’s notice, every single one, but elected Republicans — who are supposed to have the courage to make decisions about war and peace — won’t even raise their hands or lift their voices.

History will not treat this GOP well.

And to add insult to injury, this week Trump took down the agency that protects our elections from foreign interference. The same sort of influence that may well have put Trump into the White House in the first place.

As The New York Times noted in an article titled “Trump Dismantles Government Fight Against Foreign Influence Operations”:

“Experts are alarmed that the cuts could leave the United States defenseless against covert foreign influence operations and embolden foreign adversaries seeking to disrupt democratic governments.”

Putin’s been playing Trump for a sucker since, apparently, 2017. That was when Trump’s then-National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster said the president had a secret, private meeting with Putin. McMaster tried to warn Trump about Putin but, he wrote in his memoir:

“Putin, a ruthless former KGB operator, played to Trump’s ego and insecurities with flattery. …
“I told Trump how Putin had duped Bush and Obama. ‘Mr President, he is the best liar in the world.’ I suggested that Putin was confident he could ‘play’ Trump and get what he wanted, sanctions relief and the US out of Syria and Afghanistan on the cheap, by manipulating Trump with ambiguous promises of a ‘better relationship’. He would offer cooperation on counterterrorism, cybersecurity and arms control.
“I could tell that Trump was getting impatient with my ‘negative vibe’. I said what I needed to say. If he was going to be contrary, I hoped he would be contrary to the Russian dictator, not to me.”

Yet here we are today, with Trump realigning America toward Putin and away from the democratic republic of Ukraine and the rest of democratic Europe.

As a result, Russia’s next step is to wait until Ukraine runs out of American air defense systems and then just start bombing the crap out of Ukrainian cities. Millions could die and it could lead to World War III, but that seems just fine with Trump.

And, apparently, that’s just fine with every Republican Senator and Congress member except Tillis. America is on the verge of becoming the world’s newest thug nation ruled by fabulously wealthy oligarchs and a man who would be king.

Thus, sadly, the answer to Congressman Kinzinger’s question is clear: Yes, we are now the bad guys, at least for the moment. We are now on the side of the royal ideology of absolute power held by that one man, the King, whose soldiers imprisoned, tortured, and murdered so many of our nation’s Founders.

When Rhode Island’s Stephen Hopkins signed the Declaration of Independence, he remarked to his friend William Ellery that, “My hand trembles, but my heart does not.” But Virginia’s Benjamin Harrison, who weighed nearly 300 pounds, commented to Massachusetts’ Elbridge Gerry, a short, thin man, “With me it [the hanging] will all be over in a minute, but you will be dancing on air an hour after I am gone.”

Will any Republican in today’s House or Senate — the bodies those men created — find even a fraction of the courage of those who founded this nation?

The people of America — and the world — are holding their breath, waiting for the answer.

NOW READ: Trump's evil has no expiration date

— The most horrifying news story of the day: Ukraine can’t fight the war against Russia without the Starlink Internet system to guide their weaponry and for communication. Yesterday, it was reported that Trump is considering having Musk cut off Starlink to that country to bring them to their knees on behalf of Vladimir Putin.

— Republicans are really in love with Nazi Hitler salutes! First it was Musk, at an event after Trump’s inauguration, throwing a Nazi salute twice. Then, Thursday, Steve Bannon did it at CPAC. They think that they’re “owning the libs” with these and other Nazi references and icons, but there’s nothing funny or cute about normalizing a racist ideology that led to 85 million deaths, massive suffering, and laid waste to most of Europe. Is it time for America to consider the German approach to hate speech, explicitly banning it and providing both civil and criminal penalties for promulgating Nazism?

— Trump is about to seize control of the Post Office. Is this all about voting by mail? Republicans have spent the better part of forty-plus years trying to make it harder to vote, following Paul Weyrich’s famous dictum: “Now many of our Christians … want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people; they never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” States with mail-in voting have among the highest levels of voter participation in the country, which is why pretty much every other democracy in the world uses it extensively; this is exactly why Republicans don’t want mail-in voting. When Trump impounded money for the postal service in the 2020 election but Louis DeJoy still got 97% of all ballots delivered within 3 days, it sealed DeJoy’s fate; he was just pushed out as Postmaster General. And now Trump is reportedly planning to bring the Post Office — an American institution since Ben Franklin became our first Postmaster General in 1775 — under his personal control by handing it to billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik to run. Lutnik has been a longtime advocate for privatizing the PO, which would also presumably mean killing off the postal workers’ union and raising rates to cover the for-profit overhead, dividends for rich investors, and millions in salaries for the new CEO and senior executives. The PO could then refuse to transport ballots or otherwise put the fix in to destroy mail-in voting. Keep an eye on this; the unions have already said they’ll sue, and several members of the Postal Board of Governors have echoed those sentiments. But with Trump openly defying court orders right now around USAID and NIH, it’s unlikely he’ll be deterred by legal niceties.

— Remember Trump’s and Vance’s lies about Haitians in Springfield eating cats and dogs? They’re now planning to deport them, many to a certain death. Over a half-million Haitians have been granted temporary refugee status within the US because that country has turned into a gang-run hellhole and both the Obama, Biden and two Trump administrations have essentially refused to do anything to help. (Odds are if Haiti was filled with white people, the situation would be vastly different.) Now, Trump has decreed that their temporary protected status will run out this August, meaning the deportations can begin for those Haitians who haven’t figured out a way to get themselves to another country or back to Haiti. Another group the Trump administration is crapping on are Iranian Christians — arguably the most persecuted minority in that country (converting from Islam is punished by death) — and the hundreds of thousands of them in the US are now also facing deportation (and a batch were just this week deported to Panama) and certain death. Whoever tries to tell you that Trump and his followers are Christians needs to look up Jesus’ words in Matthew 25:31-46 and realize it’s a lie worthy of an antichrist.

— 'We’re going back': Proud Boys and Oath Keepers plan presser at Capitol they stormed; is there anything wrong with cop killers returning to the scene of their crime? Two women, one with a bullhorn and the other with a whistle disrupted the reunion and celebration of their killing three cops and near overthrow of our government. God bless them!

— Missouri Republican wants to “register” pregnant women he says are “at risk of seeking abortion.” Jessica Valenti reports that “creepy” Missouri Republican Representative Phil Amato wants the state to set up an “EHarmony for babies” that would require every pregnant woman in the state “at risk for abortion” (presumably every pregnant woman and girl in the state) to register with the state and then be “matched” with an infertile couple looking for an adopted child. The couple would then have the contact information for the pregnant woman so they could “encourage” her not to get an abortion. Creepy doesn’t begin to describe this; it’s a clear infringement on women’s Fourth Amendment rights of privacy, or at least what’s left of them after the Dobbs decision.

— Can we all be like Chris Klewe? Jim Stewartson over at mind-war.com argues that we should all take a lesson from former NFL punter Chris Klewe, who showed up at his Huntington Beach, California City Council meeting to argue against a plaque the MAGA followers on the Council wanted to put in front of the town’s library. It would claim the library was “Magical, Alluring, Galvanizing, and Adventurous (MAGA).” Klewe not only spoke up, but at the end sat down and forced the police to haul him out of the room in the finest tradition of peaceful protest. Here’s what he said:

Hi, my name is Chris Kluwe, 15 year H.B. resident. I'm here to speak out against both the plaque and the current city council. As a community made clear at the library commission meeting last Tuesday, everyone is in favor of a plaque to celebrate the library, but the vast majority are against including a MAGA acrostic.
Unfortunately, it's clear that this council does not listen, so instead I'm going to take my time to say what MAGA has stood for these past three weeks.
MAGA stands for trying to erase trans people from existence.
MAGA stands for resegregation and racism.
MAGA stands for censorship and book bans. MAGA stands for firing air traffic controllers while planes are crashing.
MAGA stands for firing the people overseeing our nuclear arsenal.
MAGA stands for firing military veterans and those serving them at the VA, including canceling research on veteran suicide.
MAGA stands for cutting funds to education, including for disabled children.
MAGA is profoundly corrupt, unmistakably anti-democracy, and most importantly, MAGA is explicitly a Nazi movement.
You may have replaced a swastika with a red hat but that is what it is. I will now engage in the time-honored American tradition of peaceful civil disobedience.

As Jim writes, “Be like Chris Klewe!”

— You need to have a bird flu plan for your cats or they will most likely die. Bird flu, while not having yet mutated into a human-transmissible form, is deadly to cats (mortality rate over 80%) and they’re getting it from eating birds outdoors and from humans tracking bird feces or feathers into the house. It’s never a good idea to let cats outside because of the environmental damage they do with their predation, but now it’s a lethal choice. And if you live in an area (like we do) where there are a lot of birds (and a lot of bird poop), be careful about where you step and what you track into the house.

NOW READ: 'Educated America knows we are in a coup': A letter to Volodymyr Zelensky

One of the enduring mysteries in today’s American political life is why so many Republican politicians and their friends are adopting or promoting openly Nazi symbols, iconography, and slogans.

Is it a shout-out to the hardcore racists and haters that make up the GOP’s base, or just a performance to get enough votes to win elections? Or a proclamation that the end-goal of Republican governance is the destruction of American democracy, perhaps in deference to Vladimir Putin? How about it’s being a bizarre attempt at trolling people old or well-educated enough to remember or know what Nazism inevitably leads to?

And why are America’s mainstream media so unwilling to even report on, much less discuss, all the Nazi and neo-Nazi references surrounding Trump and today’s captive Republicans?

Elon Musk, Trump’s #1 campaign donor and co-president, threw two Nazi “Sieg Heil” salutes following Trump’s inauguration, causing the media to fall all over itself trying to make excuses for his behavior. Actual, declared Nazis and white supremacists were thrown into an ecstatic tizzy, however, with the Ohio Proud Boys posting the clip with the words, “Heil Trump!”

The neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe posted the Musk clip with the Waffen SS lightning-bolt emoji; their leader, Christopher Pohlhaus, wrote: “I don’t care if this was a mistake. I’m going to enjoy the tears over it.” Other neo-Nazi, Nazi, and white supremacist groups across the web jumped in to celebrate the salute, as Rolling Stone extensively documented.

ALSO READ: Trump's days of defiant bribery are numbered — here's why

It all seems to have really picked up steam after young neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville in 2017, chanting Nazi slogans, murdering a young woman protestor, and giving Hitler salutes.

Our media completely failed to identify them as Nazis, even though they were proclaiming that themselves.

Since Trump’s endorsement of their behavior with his “good people on both sides” comment, which he continues to defend, such behavior has been emulated across the nation.

Poke anything associated with Trump and odds are Nazi memes will pop out.

The “America First” slogan was the name of an openly pro-Nazi movement in America in the 1930s, a fact that seems to have been lost down the memory hole. And Trump told his former Chief of Staff, Marine General John Kelly, that “Hitler did some good things…” along with referring to American soldiers as “suckers” and “losers.”

And then there are Trump’s attacks on the media, echoing Joe Stalin and Adolf Hitler with their “enemy of the people” rhetoric. He’s suing media outlets left and right, just like Putin and Orbán did in their early years to intimidate reporters and bankrupt opposition publications and websites.

Elon Musk just called for reporters for CBS’s 60 Minutes program — “the biggest liars in the world” — to receive “a long prison sentence.”

In an echo of Hitler’s “denunciations,” his “border czar” is even calling for the police at the Department of Justice to investigate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for telling immigrants about their constitutional rights.

After pointing out at a rally that Hitler said that Jews were “poisoning the blood” of Germany (yes, he pointed it out himself), Trump then said of nonwhites in America:

“It’s true. They’re destroying the blood of the country, they’re destroying the fabric of our country, and we’re going to have to get them out.”

The 2021 CPAC meeting featured a stage resembling the Odal Rune, a potent Nazi symbol, that drew a rebuke from the hotel hosting the conference.

In 2022, Trump dined with Nick Fuentes, a prominent and out Holocaust denier. Trump later posted a 30-second video that twice references a “unified Reich.” Trump’s buddy Steve Bannon has repeatedly endorsed the notoriously antisemitic and racist novel The Camp of the Saints” which characterizes Black Americans, “dirty Arabs,” and “feces-eating Hindu rapists” as engaging in a conspiracy to destroy white people and civilization.

His son, Don Jr., retweeted a message by a white supremacist who attacks interracial dating and queer people, “liked” tweets by another account that posts pictures of Jews with exaggerated noses, made a “joke” about gas chambers and our media, and participated in an interview with a talk show host who said slavery was the best thing to have ever happened to Black people.

When Vice President Vance visited Germany this past week, instead of meeting with that nation’s chancellor or his peer, he hung out with the leader of the Nazi-adjacent AfD party, while giving a speech in which he extensively quoted Putin’s sentiments. Proud to be known by the company he keeps…

And then there’s DOGE, the official title of the iron-fisted, massively rich oligarchs who ruled Venice for ten centuries that’s been reclaimed by billionaire Musk for himself and his work. The logo is arguably explicit, as Jim Stewartson points out at his excellent mind-war.com newsletter/website:

“On the DOGE logo there are 8 stars above the cartoon, and 8 stars on the flag inside the gear. This is another National Socialist signal. It means Heil Hitler. Musk has used this signal numerous times, in addition to quite literally doing two Hitler salutes at the inauguration.”

There are also 14 teeth on the gear that makes up the O in DOGE in the logo, a direct rip-off from Hitler’s Nazi labor movement of the 1930s, reflecting the famous “14 words” memorized by every white supremacist: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Check out this 30-second video, courtesy of Jim Stewartson at mind-war.com:

Following that theme, Trump, Vance, and multiple Republican politicians and media figures have, for years, promoted the Naziesque “Great Replacement Theory” that posits American Jews are paying their agents in business, government, and society to hire Black, brown, and queer people and women to replace white men.

Additionally, when Trump tweeted out his Anders Breivik quote about saving the country and thus violating no laws, Musk retweeted it with 14 American flag emojis. These guys aren’t subtle because they don’t have to be; they know any American media that calls them out will either be attacked as paranoid or they’ll simply say it was a joke or misunderstanding.

But their followers know exactly what they’re saying, and why. Just like they understood that Trump’s birther crap was really his way of saying, “Hey, white people, have you noticed that guy in the White House is Black? We can’t tolerate that!”

And they also clearly heard the dog whistle when he came down the escalator and attacked brown-skinned immigrants. Or when he claimed the Potomac crash was because the helicopter pilot was a woman hired “because of DEI.”

Or when Trump offered refugee status to white South Africans, but not to Black or Indian South Africans.

There’s so much evidence of Trump’s and Musk’s apartheid leanings, it’s pretty much impossible to deny any longer. Which raises the question: Is our media in with the Nazis, or just committed to Not-Seeing them?

NOW READ: Reckless firing of federal workers creating a crisis for this deep red state

The 32-year-old Norwegian considered himself a deep thinker and a big fan of the right-wing and Russian propaganda which argued western civilization was rotting from within because of multiculturalism, empowered women, racial/religious minorities, and liberalism. Putting pen to paper, he wrote:

“When I first started blogging I was concerned with how we could ‘fix the system.’ I’ve gradually come to the conclusion that the system cannot be fixed, and perhaps shouldn’t be fixed. Not only does it have too many enemies, it also has too many internal contradictions.
“If we define the ‘system’ as mass immigration from alien cultures, globalism, multiculturalism and suppression of free speech in the name of ‘tolerance,’ then this is going to collapse. It’s inevitable.
“The goal of Western survivalists — and that’s what we are — should not be to ‘fix the system,’ but to be mentally and physically prepared for its collapse, and to develop coherent answers to what went wrong and prepare to implement the necessary remedies when the time comes.
“We need to seize the window of opportunity, and in order to do so, we need to define clearly what we want to achieve.”

After writing over 1500 pages describing how it’s the essential duty of every white man in the world to marginalize or even kill as many non-white non-Christians as possible, Anders Breivik set off a bomb in Oslo’s Government Quarter, killing eight people.

He then drove to Utøya, an island in Tyrifjorden where the Norwegian Social Democratic party’s youth organization, the Workers’ Youth League (AUF), held their summer camp. There he used a semiautomatic rifle to kill another sixty-nine people, most in their teens or early twenties. He shot and wounded another 41 mostly young people, leaving many with life-changing injuries.

The epigraph to the paragraphs cited above was the polestar of Breivik’s philosophy, one he’d learned from studying the writings and lives of his heroes: Adolf Hitler and Napoleon Bonaparte. He opened the chapter with it at the top of the page, apart from all the other text:

“He who saves his country, violates no law.”

The phrase was most recently quoted three weeks ago — on January 24, 2024 — by El Salvador’s notoriously violent and lawbreaking President Nayib Bukele, who also tweeted: “He who saves his country violates no law.”

Napoleon overthrew the Directory in 1799, naming himself as First Consul, and then declared himself Emperor in 1804 with those same words: “Celui qui sauve sa patrie ne viole aucune loi.”

Emperors like Napoleon and dictators like Bukele don’t bother with trivial details like obeying the law. They rule by decree. Write it down, put your signature on it, and boom, it’s now the law of the land.

That was also Breivik’s hope for the Scandinavian countries: throw off the yoke of the “globalist” EU and embrace a racist strongman to lead the continent into an era of whites-only paradise. Replace “the system” of democracy with a white supremacist Christo-fascist oligarchy.

Which is why it’s so troubling that Trump tweeted the same Napoleonic phrase that Breivik made famous. The phrase every white supremacist has memorized, along with the fourteen words and the number 88 as code for “Heil Hitler.”

It would be a mistake at this point to think that when Trump quotes people like Breivik he’s just trolling us: People are now dying all over the world because a half-billion dollars’ worth of USAID food is rotting in storage; millions have lost access to AIDS drugs that were keeping them alive; children in cancer drug trials have been cut off from lifesaving medication; and federal workers who thought Civil Service would protect them are now on the verge of homelessness.

He means it. And for three weeks he’s been acting on his words, largely with impunity.

So long as he’s “saving the country,” he argues, he’s “violating no law.” It’s why he’s defying court orders right now to eject Musk’s teenage hackers from the Treasury Department or restart NIH and USAID funding.

And, truth be told, six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court have already ratified the White House’s new American dictator doctrine with the Trump v US decision last July, saying that if the president breaks the law while executing “official acts,” he’s immune from criminal prosecution for the crime.

He just gets away with it. As long as he’s saving the country, he violates no law. Don’t even bother going after him, the Republicans on the Supreme Court said; it simply won’t succeed.

It’s probably why Trump is now talking about running for a third term — perhaps even pulling a Putin and running for VP with a figurehead for president — because, like most dictators throughout history, he knows that the minute he’s no longer in power he’ll be facing prison.

This declaration by Trump was no passing joke or meme. He posted it both on Truth Social and on Xitter.

He wants us all to see it.

To hear it.

To know that he means it.

He’s shoving it in our faces. Pounding it out on the keyboard. Declaring it to the world. Quoting Anders Breivik.

And perhaps not just on his own behalf. Kyle Clark, a reporter for 9News Denver, believes it’s a shout-out to the armed insurrectionists Trump recently pardoned:

“As a journalist who covers extremism at the local level, I think it’s a mistake to view Trump’s Napoleonic statement as solely about presidential power.
“Consider if it’s interpreted as a wink and a nod for any extremist to act outside the law to ‘save’ the country as they see fit.”

Time to start killing liberals? Harassing queer people? Burning down the homes of undocumented immigrants?

After all, the rightwing gangs in Russia and Hungary enthusiastically do all these things with the tacit approval of Putin and Orbán.

And now Trump is doubling down; yesterday he retweeted a rightwinger’s message that he could defy the courts if he chose to because he is “saving the country.”

And his fellow billionaire, Elon Musk, is burning through our federal government like a California wildfire.

TS Eliot was wrong: sometimes the world does end with a bang rather than a whimper…

NOW READ: Played for suckers: Kansas farmer blasts Trump voters in scathing editorial

So, JD Vance is now saying that he and Trump don’t have to obey federal judges, tweeting, “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” This is how autocrats run things; it’s an extraordinarily dangerous moment.

It was Tuesday, July 17, 1787 and the men writing the Constitution had convened in Philadelphia to debate the separation of powers between the Congress, the presidency, and the courts. They drew their inspiration for that day from French philosopher Charles de Montesquieu, whose 1748 book The Spirit of the Laws had taken the New World and the Framers of the Constitution by storm.

In it, Montesquieu pointed out the absolute necessity of having three relatively co-equal branches of government, each with separate authorities, to prevent any one branch from seizing too much power and ending a nation’s democracy. In The Spirit of Laws, he laid it out unambiguously:

“When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty. … Again, there is no liberty, if the judiciary power be not separated from the legislative and executive.”

As the topic of the separation of powers was being debated at the Constitutional Convention that day twenty-nine years after Montesquieu’s book had been published, “Father of the Constitution” James Madison rose to address the delegates:

“If it be essential to the preservation of liberty that the legislative, executive, and judiciary powers be separate, it is essential to a maintenance of the separation, that they should be independent of each other. …
“In like manner, a dependence of the executive [president] on the legislature would render it the executor as well as the maker of laws; and then, according to the observation of Montesquieu, tyrannical laws may be made that they may be executed in a tyrannical manner.
“He [Montesquieu] conceived it to be absolutely necessary to a well-constituted-republic, that the two first should be kept distinct and independent of each other … for guarding against a dangerous union of the legislative and executive departments.”

If the president were ever to dictate all terms to the Congress, which then became a compliant rubber-stamp regardless of how excessive or even illegal the president’s actions became, that, Madison said, “may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

We’re there now.

In simplified form, the system Madison and his compatriots came up with that summer gave the power to create and fund government agencies (including the federal court system) to Congress (Article I), the first among equals.

The responsibility of the president was to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” (Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution); in other words, to manage the institutions of government envisioned, authorized, and funded by Congress.

And the role of the Article III Courts was to make sure neither overstepped their authority, and independently arbitrate disputes between them. Their decisions must be final for the system to work.

However, as a result of a 44-year-long effort by morbidly rich American oligarchs to corrupt our government to their own gain (the so-called Reagan Revolution, Bush, Trump, 1500 radio stations, three television networks, multiple newspapers and other publications, over 200 television stations, hundreds of billions spent to purchase and then elect politicians), all of this American democracy and government— after 240 years — is finally on the verge of collapsing and being replaced by something very much like Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.

The GOP-controlled Congress has, in both houses, become a pathetic rubber-stamp for whatever billionaires, Trump, Musk, and industries like fossil fuels, crypto/tech, and banks want.

The president is nakedly breaking laws and daring both Congress and the courts to do anything about it.

And now JD Vance claims Trump can do whatever he wants and ignore the courts. (Only federal marshals can enforce federal court orders, but they work for Pam Bondi and Donald Trump.)

That is the very definition of a constitutional crisis.

And Republicans on the Supreme Court facilitated the entire corrupt deal by legalizing political bribery in 2010 with their billionaire-funded Citizens United decision.

As a result, every Republican and most Democrats are terrified of Elon Musk or some other billionaire destroying them in the next primary election. The result has been legislative gridlock, a paralysis of the legislative branch.

Going a step farther, Trump has authorized a drug-abusing, Putin-conversing, government-contracting billionaire — his single largest donor who probably was responsible for him becoming president — to access the private information of every American citizen and corporation, dismantle entire agencies created and funded by Congress, and stop multiple investigations into his own business practices.

This is more correctly defined as a war against America and our system of government than mere politics.

A war that must be absolutely delighting America’s enemies, particularly Russia’s Putin and China’s Xi. Especially now that Musk is calling for the shutdown of the Voice of America that both Putin and Xi hate as much as they both hated USAID.

But it even goes beyond that. Trump and Musk are rapidly moving America — with their attacks on the press, voting, and truth itself — toward the kind of authoritarian police state that several of the men Trump appears to love have established.

Further defying the Constitution, Trump has empowered the richest man in the world to attack and possibly destroy multiple federal agencies that were, just coincidentally of course, investigating his businesses:

— The FAA’s Administrator had launched an investigation into SpaceX after a spectacular rocket explosion; he’s now been fired.
— The Department of Justice was looking into possible violations of securities and other laws by Musk and Tesla; it’s probably safe to assume that investigation won’t go any farther.
— The USAID Inspector General was investigating how Musk's SpaceX Starlink satellite terminals, purchased with USAID funds, were used in Ukraine’s war to defend itself from Russia.
— The Department of Defense’s Inspector General opened a review in 2024 into alleged repeated failures by Musk and SpaceX to properly disclose their contact with foreign leaders; he’s now fired.
— The USDA Inspector General's office was investigating alleged animal abuse at Neuralink, Musk’s brain implant company; he’s been fired.
— The National Transportation Safety Board, overseen by the DOT, had several open probes into Tesla regarding its remote and self-driving vehicles; odds are they’ll be dropped if they haven’t been already.
— The EPA had settled multiple lawsuits with Tesla in recent years over Clean Air Act and hazardous waste law violations; now that the EPA is being gutted there probably won’t be any more.
— The National Labor Relations Board, overseen by the Department of Labor, had 17 open investigations against Tesla and SpaceX for alleged unfair labor practices, safety violations, and discriminatory work practices that are probably now moot.
— The FCC was carrying out investigations and had issued court orders related to Musk’s businesses.
— The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was overseeing some of Musk’s companies and had a consent decree in place.
— Additionally, the Air Force and the Pentagon’s Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security launched reviews in November 2024 regarding Musk and SpaceX’s compliance with federal reporting requirements.

Musk’s $277 million investment to get Trump elected — legalized by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court — has, so far, paid off well.

Welcome to Madison’s “very definition of tyranny.”

Now that Republicans control Congress and have surrendered their authority to Trump, the last bulwark against the president converting himself into the sort of monarch we fought the Revolutionary War against is the Supreme Court, which will probably begin weighing in over the next few weeks.

And, in the face of this, the vice president is arguing that he and the president should feel free to ignore court orders.

This attack on our republic represents the most dangerous moment America has experienced since the Civil War.

Neither the Supreme Court nor Congress are entirely capable of ignoring public opinion: It’s vital we all reach out to our elected officials (particularly Republicans) to demand they reclaim their rightful role in our republic and speak out against this illegal, unconstitutional power grab.

It’s also crucial to make our opinions known in every way and every venue possible.

If America is to retain any fidelity whatsoever to our Constitution that was written and survived more than two centuries’ investment of blood and treasure, it’s time to raise absolute holy hell.

NOW READ: Oklahomans school Republican on what he should have known

Trump wants FBI agents who investigated his coup attempt, his facilitating espionage, or his other financial and criminal activities fired.

Let’s be very clear: this is how dictatorships start.

A guy who wants to be a dictator always begins by changing how the government works. Even though the majority of the nation had agreed previously that the government should do certain things in certain ways, he reassures everybody he’s got a better way and it’ll all work out.

In the process, he breaks a bunch of laws, but people mostly shrug because they don’t directly affect them. Pastor Niemöller wrote about this in 1930s Germany; to paraphrase: First they came for the government workers…

Then people start resisting, which is when he begins to use the police power of the state. The people who show up in the streets, the people who speak out in the media, the people who try to fight him in the legislatures and the courts: he figures out ways to get them fired, harassed, and ultimately imprisoned.

When she was being confirmed, Attorney General Pam Bondi refused to say that she would not execute an illegal order on Donald Trump’s behalf. Like if he directed her to investigate somebody who irritated him. Or prosecute somebody who had investigated him. Or imprison — perhaps only temporarily, at first — somebody who has spoken out against him.

We’re there now. Bondi just announced that the political prosecutions are about to begin. At first they will be going after the police agencies themselves, as a way of bringing them to heel: Terrify the terrifiers.

Next will be the Press. First they will use financial terror to force compliance; we’re already seeing that with Trump’s lawsuits against all three major networks and multiple newspapers. That will expand. Eventually it will turn into shutdowns and arrests.

He will remake our schools so they become indoctrination factories for his white, male supremacist worldview and the new authoritarianism.

He will realign our democratic country away from democratic allies and toward countries run by dictators like he aspires to become.

He will purge the military of leadership that might resist him and of troops who might refuse his orders.

He will remake our criminal justice system so it becomes more violent and brutal, opening prisons for “the worst of the worst“ in places beyond the reach of law, like Auschwitz in Poland or Guantánamo in Cuba.

He will remake our media so it becomes a Greek chorus, singing his praises and carrying his every word.

By proclaiming, as every dictator does, that divine providence and the blessings of God put him where he is, he will bring the country‘s largest religious institutions to heel.

He will proclaim grand plans and spectacular efforts, like the Autobahn or remaking Gaza, Greenland, and Panama. They will distract the public from the relentless, grinding destruction of the guardrails of government itself.

He and his allies will empower civilian militias who will then become his terror shock troops against the people who oppose him. Hitler had his Brownshirts; Republicans in Nassau County are right now trying to field America’s first armed private militia.

He will remake commerce and business, so the most successful companies are those that throw money and resources at him. Fritz Tyson wrote a book about this, about his shame at facilitating it, titled I Paid Hitler. Someday, perhaps, Jeff Bezos or Tim Cook will write a similar book.

America today is early in this process, although it doesn’t typically take very long. It took Hitler 53 days. It took Putin about a year. It took Victor Orban about two years. It took Pinochet less than a week, although he had the help of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

Trump and his project 2025 friends, however, have been preparing for this for four years: They hit the ground running.

This moment proves that the preservation of democracy requires constant attention and a collective commitment to uphold the integrity of its institutions.

Right now, though, the only thing standing between democracy and dictatorship in America are public opinion, the media, and the Democratic Party; Republicans have completely caved and the courts move too slowly to stop him.

Elon Musk and Donald Trump seem to think they can pull this off in a matter of weeks, and so far — because of the cowardice of Republican legislators and the disorganization and lack of leadership among Democrats — they may be right.

Unless we all stand up and speak out now.

NOW READ: 'Cult making kids kill': Mysterious online figure linked to at least 2 school shootings

Is Trump’s, Musk’s, and Putin’s coup against democracy complete?

Under the guise of a 44-year campaign to reverse the middle-class advances of the New Deal and Great Society, rightwing billionaires and the Republicans they own have pushed a fundamentally fascist agenda that is now openly at war with America. They are engaging in a coup, finishing the work Trump started on January 6, 2021.

Trump is nakedly breaking the law right in front of the entire country, just as progressive Democrats have been predicting. Not a single elected Republican has had the courage to try to stop him or even speak out against his lawlessness, and only a handful of Democrats have found that fearlessness. That has to change.

— Trump is illegally firing career Civil Service prosecutors in the DOJ and agents in the FBI. The principal message he is conveying is, “Donald Trump, his family, and his friends are above the law. Investigate them and you will lose your job.”

— He’s illegally fired Inspectors General who search out and prosecute corruption within their own agencies.

— He’s illegally impounded money appropriated by Congress.

— He’s illegally imposing tariffs against Mexico and Canada, turning our friends against us, just like Putin has dreamed for years.

— USAID, created by President Kennedy, is our single most effective tool for keeping poor countries on America’s side instead of joining Russia or China. Musk has declared war on this Agency, and the only beneficiaries will be those two dictatorships.

— And now this South African billionaire has apparently downloaded all of your and my private information from the federal agencies responsible for making six trillion dollars’ worth of payments every year, with the explicit permission of Treasury Secretary and billionaire Scott Bessent — who was put into his job with the votes of 15 compliant Democratic senators.

As Senator Patty Murray (who voted against Bessent) noted on Bluesky yesterday:

“All of your most sensitive data and our country’s checkbook are in the hands of an unelected billionaire. This is the most corrupt administration in history and it’s putting our economy & government in serious jeopardy.
“It’s time to speak out and fight back. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/01/u...”

Hell, it’s way past time to speak out and fight back.

Ever since Reagan’s Revolution on behalf of the billionaire class, many of us have been shouting from the rooftops about the inevitability of this day. I’ve published multiple books and hundreds of articles (see * below), as have many of my colleagues, warning of this exact scenario.

This is the tail-end of the battle, not the beginning:

— When Republicans claimed that corporations were “persons” with rights guaranteed under the Bill of Rights (including the right to fund political campaigns), Democrats could have spoken out, but — other than the progressives — didn’t. Instead, Bill Clinton encouraged corporate contributions to his “New Democrats.”

— When Republicans said billionaires and corporations bribing politicians was legal (and could even be considered “tips”), Democrats could have spoken out, but — other than the progressives — didn’t. Instead the “Problem Solvers” and many others simply put their hands out.

— When Republicans gutted union protections, borrowed $34 trillion to fund tax breaks for billionaires, and ended support for college tuition, Democrats could have spoken out, but — other than the progressives — didn’t. Instead, many “moved to the center.”

— When Republicans fought voting rights and purged over 50 million voters from the rolls over the past decade (giving Trump the White House last year), Democrats could have raised hell, but — other than the progressives — didn’t. Instead, they abandoned Red states, often not even bothering to run candidates.

— When Republicans denied climate change and went to the mat to protect the hundreds of billions in subsidies the fossil fuel industry gets every year, Democrats could have stopped them, but — other than the progressives — didn’t. Instead, they complained about “disruptive” groups protesting pipelines.

— When Republicans raised an entire Astroturf Tea Party movement to fight progressive efforts to put into place a national healthcare system that would include a buy-in option for Medicare at all ages, Democrats could have fought for their constituents, but — other than the progressives — didn’t. Instead, they offered a privatized Obamacare and weak “negotiation” with drug companies to lower prices on 10 drugs while ignoring the creeping privatization of Medicare with the Medicare Advantage scam.

In each case, progressive Democrats were ahead of the curve and corporate Democrats either ignored or even obstructed needed reforms.

Republicans, meanwhile, have been steamrolling ahead with their plan — first laid out by Lewis Powell in 1971 — to turn our country into an oligarchy that’s no longer accountable to its people.

And now they’re just months away from finishing off our democratic republic, silencing all voices of dissent, and guaranteeing — like Trump promised — that we may never be able to even vote again in a meaningful election with candidates who aren’t pre-vetted by billionaires.

The greatest danger America is facing today — because Democratic messaging and outrage have been so weak for so long — is that average people won’t realize what’s happening until it’s too late.

Meanwhile, the leadership of the Democratic Party — Hakeem Jefferies in the House and Chuck Schumer in the Senate — are both saying that they’re not going to challenge Trump on every crime he commits, and Democratic senators voted unanimously for Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, who’s now in Panama threatening that sovereign government.

Trump is working as hard as possible to make his fascist vision of America a reality by attacking, threatening, and suing reporters and media outlets while his billionaire buddies and AIPAC threaten to fund primary challenges against any politician — Democrat or Republican — who dares to challenge them.

And the threats are working:

— The media is walking on pins and needles, trying to avoid pissing off Trump or Musk.

— The FCC just launched an investigation that could lead to the end of NPR and PBS.

— Major networks are paying off Trump to settle frivolous lawsuits.

— Democrats are treating Vichy Republicans as if they were good faith colleagues during normal times, many even voting for Trump’s cabinet nominees.

But these are not normal times: Our democracy is hanging by a thread. The simple reality is that the MAGA takeover of the GOP has turned it into, essentially, an agent of Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China. And an immigrant billionaire is deconstructing our government like a toddler busting up a Lego set.

Democrats — who campaigned on the allegation that Trump was a fascist — must now behave like their claim was true and fight back, before Trump and Musk finalize Orbán’s and Putin’s neofascist governance model, making such a response impossible.

— Shut down the House and the Senate.

— Challenge Johnson’s speakership.

— Fight every unanimous consent vote.

— Use quorum calls to bring floor business to a standstill.

— Put holds on every Trump nominee, even for things like naming Post Offices or noncontroversial positions.

— Hold a major press conference every day and coordinate with Democrats across the nation to amplify that day’s message across local and national media.

— Organize political guerilla theater and mass protest events.

Average people can reach out to their elected officials — the phone number for Congress is 202-224-3121 — and raise absolute holy hell. Blow up social media with protest and outrage posts. Share your concerns with friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors.

As Bernie Sanders — who’s been fighting this fight his entire life and was on my radio/TV show every Friday for 11 years — shared yesterday with people subscribed to his newsletter:

“We must fight back — effectively. This is not a time for wallowing in despair and hiding under the covers. The stakes are too high. We’re not just fighting for ourselves. We’re fighting for our kids and for future generations. We’re fighting for the future of this planet.
“Further, we must not become overwhelmed and think that Trump has some kind of extraordinary mandate and an inevitable glide path into the future. That’s what the right-wing mouthpieces want you to believe, but it’s not true. Trump won the election because Kamala Harris and a very weak and out-of-touch Democratic Party received 5 million votes LESS than Biden did in 2020, not because Donald Trump or his agenda were popular. His agenda can be defeated. …
“We cannot just play defense. We have got to be on offense. Please, never forget, the agenda that we are fighting for is widely supported by working families all across this country. And we must continue to fight for that agenda.”

It only took Hitler 53 days to use legal means to turn Germany from a functioning democracy into a dictatorship. We’ve officially gone way too far down that same road, and if Trump and Project 2025 aren’t stopped now it may well be too late by as soon as this Spring.

*Many of us have been raising the alarm for years:

Three decades ago (1995), I wrote a bestselling book about climate change, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, which is now in its third complete rewrite/edition and available in 17 languages. It’s been made into or inspired several feature-length movies, including a short, shocking video that Leonardo DiCaprio and I put together a decade ago. Today’s Republicans, owned outright by fossil fuel billionaires since the 1980s, continue to deny the clear link between their products and the deaths and property damage extreme weather are causing.

Just a few years later (1999), I broke the story in my book Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights that corporate personhood had not, in fact, been ratified by the Supreme Court in 1886, but was a scam promulgated by the wealthy Republican Clerk of the Court, John Chandler Bancroft Davis, on behalf of the railroad oligarchs.

When George W. Bush doubled down on Reaganomics with his massive trillion-dollar 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for billionaires and a Labor Department hostile to workers’ rights, I wrote Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class, detailing how Republican policies are devastating working class people, students, and people living on Social Security. Things have only gotten worse in the years since it was first published.

When Bush and Cheney lied us into two illegal wars to seize oil and save Halliburton, I wrote We The People: A Call to Take Back America. The back cover copy says:

“America faces its greatest threat since the Civil War. The worst fears of the Founders are being realized, as powerful corporate interests have taken over our culture and representative government. We the People now face a fundamental choice: take back our country ... or do nothing, and become victims of tyranny and empire.”

Those were followed by a book on the rightwing’s war on American culture (Threshold: The Progressive Plan to Pull America Back from the Brink), political messaging (Cracking the Code: How to Win Hearts, Change Minds, and Restore America's Original Vision), and two histories of America’s founding and what it means for today (What Would Jefferson Do? and The American Revolution of 1800 with Dan Sisson).

Since then I’ve published the Hidden History series of 10 short books alerting Americans to our gun crisis, the GOP’s war on voting, the Supreme Court’s betrayal of America, the rise of American monopolies (foreword by Ralph Nader), the dangers of rising oligarchy, our corrupt healthcare system, how tech billionaires are this generation’s Big Brother, how neoliberalism took over both political parties and then America, the history of our democracy and its Native American inspiration, and what’s happened to the American Dream and how to recover it.

Many of us have been fighting this predicted rise of fascism — kicked off in 1981 by Ronald Reagan — for years, even decades. Please join us and share the message as far and wide as you can!

There is one thread that ties together Trump’s destruction of American government agencies, his offer to take the Gaza crisis off Israel’s hands and dump it on our military, and senators’ and representatives’ failure to challenge him: This is how kingdoms operate. Rule by decree.

It proves that we’re asking the wrong question.

Plug “Can American democracy survive Trump?” into a search engine and you’ll find thousands of websites, blogs, articles, and podcasts devoted to that one, single question.

But American democracy was kneecapped by five Republicans on the Supreme Court years ago when they ruled that money was the same thing as “free speech”; that corporations are “persons” with rights under the Bill of [Human] Rights; and that political operatives can engage in virtually unlimited purges of voting rolls, accompanied by racial- and gender-targeted laws to make it harder to vote.

The correct question is: “Can the American system — now that it’s become flooded with dark money and the ‘right to vote’ has become a mere privilege in Red states — ever again represent the interests of average citizens? Can we ever return to democracy?”

In an open call on X yesterday with Republican Senators Joni Ernst and Mike Lee, apartheid billionaire Elon Musk — whose father says he was chauffeured to school in white-run South Africa in a Rolls Royce — lit into the regulations that created and protect the American middle class and our democracy:

“Regulations, basically, should be default gone. Not default there, default gone. And if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in.”

In a child-like echo of Ayn Rand, Musk added:

“These regulations are added willy-nilly all the time. So, we’ve just got to do a wholesale, spring cleaning of regulation and get the government off the backs of everyday Americans so people can get things done. … If the government has millions of regulations holding everyone back, well, it’s not freedom. We’ve got to restore freedom.”

Both capitalism and democracy could be likened to a game — say, football — ideally played to benefit the largest number of people by creating and guaranteeing “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

But imagine if the NFL were to suspend their regulations just before this Sunday’s Super Bowl. And the Chiefs, like most elected Democrats, chose to continue playing by the old regulations, but the Eagles started gut-punching, facemask-pulling, and even threw five extra players onto the field.

The only team that would ever win would be the one most willing to play dirty or buy off the refs. And, increasingly, that’s where we are today, both with our democracy and our economy.

We know this is crazy: Every state in the union has put into place an agency to regulate insurance companies because that very industry has a long, horrible history of ripping people off and refusing to pay claims unless the power of the state is invoked against them.

We regulate banks and brokerages for the same reason; when we deregulated them in the 1920s and the late 1990s the result was huge rip-offs that produced the Republican Great Depression and the Bush Crash of 2008.

We regulate automobile manufacturers because they have a history of putting profits over the lives of their customers (Ford Pinto 900 dead, GM trucks 2000 dead, etc.); refineries because their emissions cause cancer and asthma; drugs because unscrupulous manufacturers killed people in previous eras; workplace safety after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire killed 146 young women; voting because corrupt politicians rigged elections.

We regulate traffic with signs and stoplights to keep order and reduce accidents; we regulate police to prevent them from abusing innocent people; we regulate building codes so peoples’ homes don’t collapse or catch on fire from faulty cheap wiring.

And there was a time in America when we regulated money in politics and guaranteed the right to vote.

Those two types of regulations were passed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries after multiple scandals, like in 1899 when William Clark — then the nation’s second-richest man — openly bribed Montana legislators by standing outside the legislative chamber passing out brand new $1000 bills to the men who voted his way. Or when state after state — most all former Confederate states — repeatedly refused to allow Black people to vote.

We passed regulations guaranteeing a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, and the right to unionize to create the world’s first large-scale middle class. And we regulated the morbidly rich with a 90% income tax rate to prevent them from amassing so much wealth that their financial power could become a threat to our democratic republic.

And, of course, it’s those regulations — money in politics, the right to vote, and preventing the accumulation of dangerous levels of wealth — to which today’s broligarchs most strenuously object.

In each case, it was five Republicans on the US Supreme Court who gutted our protective regulations and put America on a direct collision course with today’s oligarchic neofascist takeover.

— They ruled that billionaires can buy politicians because giving money in exchange for votes isn’t bribery, but merely an expression of First Amendment-protected “free speech.”
— They claimed that corporations aren’t soulless creations of the law but are “persons” with the same right to share their “free speech” with politicians who do their bidding.
— And they ruled that voting is not a right in America — in open defiance of US law — but a mere privilege, giving the green light to Republicans to purge or refuse to count over 4 million votes in the 2024 election.

The result of all this Republican corruption is that the will of the majority of American voters hasn’t been fulfilled in two generations. The last time our political system was truly responsive to the voters was in the 1960s, when Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps were created, and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were passed. And in the early 1970s, when we outlawed big money in politics.

Then, in 1978, five Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled in the Bellotti decision (written by Lewis Powell himself) that corporations are persons and money is merely free speech. Two years later, Reagan floated into the White House on a river of oil money and systematically began gutting the protective regulations that had built the largest and most successful middle class the world had ever seen.

Since then, big money has frozen us like a mosquito in amber. Even Obama’s big effort to establish a national healthcare system with an option for Medicare had to kneel before the throne of rightwing billionaires and the insurance industry.

Every developed country in the world has some variation on a free or low-cost national healthcare system, and free or even subsidized higher education. In most developed countries homelessness is not a crisis, nobody goes bankrupt because somebody in their family got sick, and jobs pay well enough (and have union pensions) so people can retire after 30 or 40 years in the workforce and live comfortably for the rest of their lives.

But not in America. Since the Reagan Revolution, rightwing billionaires have blocked any of those things from happening because they’d be paid for with taxes, and there’s nothing rightwing billionaires hate more than paying taxes.

— Dark money has destroyed the notion of one-person-one-vote.
— Monopoly — allowed because corporations can now buy politicians — has destroyed the small businesses that once filled America’s malls and downtowns.
— And voter suppression and voter list purges handed the 2024 election to Trump, as reporter Greg Palast documented in a recent, shocking report.

So, yeah, let’s do away with all the regulations like wannabe Kings Elon and Donald say. And make the United States look and operate more like Syria and its failed-state relatives than anything Americans would recognize.

After all, freedumb!

NOW READ: What you shouldn't call President Trump

In your mind, turn the tables for a moment.

If Barack Obama had sent a murderous mob against the Capitol and they had beaten and pepper-sprayed Officer Brian Sicknick so badly he suffered two strokes and died the next day, how would Republicans refer to the so-called “J6 rioters”? Is there any doubt in your mind that they’d be calling them “Cop killers”? Every day, day after day, in every venue possible? And if Obama pardoned them, they’d be demanding impeachment right now?

If Bill Clinton had denied security to military or intelligence officers like Mark Milley or John Bolton who were under death threats from Iran, what would Republicans say? You know they’d be charging Clinton with attempted murder, saying he was no better than a mob boss who’d sanctioned a hit.

If Joe Biden had started shipping white supremacists convicted of criminal acts to Guantanamo, what would the GOP be claiming non-stop? We’d never hear the end about his sanctioning torture, murder, and how the entire offshore enterprise was unconstitutional and illegal. They’d call him Ayatollah Biden.

And that’s just scratching the tiniest surface of opportunities Democrats have blown in the past week to attack Trump and Republicans for very real violations of law, norms, and the Constitution.

Next week the DNC will have a new chair, who will hopefully provide solid and aggressive leadership. Because the key to Democratic success over the next two (and four) years is pretty simple: Messaging.

First, Democrats must frame the fight in simple, moral terms. From the Civil Rights era to the War in Vietnam, there was a time when my party knew how to do this; lately, it seems they’ve all fallen asleep (with a few rare exceptions).

Instead of saying, “We need to expand social safety net programs,” they should say, as Lyndon Johnson often did, “No child in America should go to bed hungry.” Their next sentence should add, “But childhood hunger is just fine with Republicans trying to protect tax cuts for their Mar-a-Lago billionaires.”

Second, Democrats should stop playing defense and instead seize the populist high ground. FDR knew how to do this and delighted in it. In one speech, referring to the morbidly rich of his day, he said, “They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

In today’s social media politics if you’re not fighting as if it’s war, you’re losing. Instead of arguing for “fair” taxation, say, “Trump wants to kill your healthcare and torch your kid’s school to pay for his billionaire tax cuts!”

Or, as Reagan once asked a group of schoolchildren in a moment of accidental candor, “Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver or less?” The kids all shouted, “More!”

Keep it simple.

Third, ruthlessly define the Republican opposition and the morbidly rich broligarchs who own them. Lyndon Johnson famously labeled Barry Goldwater as a dangerous war-monger with his “Daisy” ad; it was simple, emotional, and effective.

Instead of generalizations or abstractions, Democrats must characterize Republicans in stark, explicit terms. Instead of saying, “Trump’s policies are dangerous,” they should claim, “Trump is trying to be a dictator, and wants to destroy our democracy.”

Don’t be afraid to use fear, particularly when it’s justified. But always also include hope for a brighter future: Any marketing executive can tell you the best sales pitch involves both fear and hope. “Trump is tearing down our government so he can give its pieces to his rich Mar-a-Lago crowd, but we’re fighting to stop him so America can have a revival of the middle class.”

Fourth, tell stories instead of facts. Ronald Reagan wanted to fund his tax cuts for billionaires by cutting welfare payments, so he invented a Black “welfare queen” to convince Americans fraud was rampant. Democrats have the advantage that they don’t need to lie to tell stories that illustrate their arguments.

Instead of saying, “Healthcare should be a human right,” tell a personal story: “Sarah, a single mom in Ohio, works two jobs, but she can’t afford her son’s insulin. That’s wrong.”

Every woman victimized by Republican abortion laws should have her story spread far and wide, like GOP strategists did with Laken Riley, the woman killed by an undocumented criminal. Instead of noting that Harvard Medical School found that over 45,000 Americans die every year because insurance companies refuse to pay for procedures or treatments, pick two or three peoples’ horror stories and make them as famous as Republicans did with Ashli Babbit, Daniel Penny, and Kyle Rittenhouse.

Humans, after all, are story machines; it’s how we transmit culture and the rules of society (The little boy who cried “wolf,” The emperor’s new clothes, The ant and the grasshopper, etc.). Every bill, every campaign, every attack on Republicans should have a relatable human story attached to it.

Fifth, use repetition and slogans. Remember the old advertising bromide that people don’t recognize a message until they’ve seen or heard it at least seven times.

Donald Trump knows this one well; remember his “Build the wall” and “Fake news” slogans? He repeated them until every American who’s even half-conscious was repeating them in their sleep. Same with “Make America Great Again.”

Democrats must develop catchy, oft-repeated slogans and market the hell out of them through repetition by every member of the Party at every opportunity: “Democracy vs. Dictatorship,” “People over Profits,” “Freedom means healthcare, voting rights, and fair wages,” “MAGA is the new Klan.”

Sixth, appeal to patriotism and invoke American history and values. Lincoln framed the Civil War as a battle for the survival of democracy itself. FDR invoked the age-old battle of struggling working people against the selfish, tyrannical rich. Lyndon Johnson, talking about the strategy rich white conservatives had used to keep poor white people on their side for a century, famously said:

“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”

Democrats must reclaim the language of patriotism. “The real America is one where every vote counts, every worker gets a fair wage, and every kid has a future.” “MAGA racism and sexism should have no place in our country.” “Our founders fought and died for freedom, not for tax breaks for Trump’s rich Mar-a- Lago friends.”

Seven, take a lesson from late-night television and weaponize humor: Use mockery against self-aggrandizing Republicans like Trump. On most issues, Republicans must lie to gain support (tax cuts trickle down, immigrants increase crime, Black voters cheat, etc.), so simply telling the truth with a cutting edge can be incredibly effective.

But don’t forget ridicule: When Marco Rubio pointed out the size of Trump’s tiny hands in 2016, he obsessed over it for more than a year. He hates having it pointed out to him that he’s bald and the plugs across the front of his hairline didn’t go right (as my wife, Louise, said to his face). Combover Don. The little-fingered dictator. Stormy’s little mushroom.

Instead of claiming, “Trump is unfit for office,” say, “America deserves a president who can spell.” Turn his absurdity into a joke.

Eight, inspire with a bold vision. Republicans have never been afraid to shoot for the moon, and there was a time when that was true of Democrats as well. Literally: in his inaugural address, President Kennedy set out the moon shot as a goal of his administration.

Brand that vision with a slogan (see 5) like JFK did with his “New Frontier” and Obama did with his “Yes, we can” catchphrase. Simplify relentlessly. As Trump said when he spoke at Davos, “Three days ago, I took the oath of office and we began the golden age of America.”

Instead of wonky crap like, “We need a more progressive tax system,” say, “Imagine an America where no one struggles just to survive. That future is possible.”

The bottom line is that Democrats and progressives win when they speak emotionally, define their enemies, tell human stories, and offer a vision worth fighting for. They lose when they sound like bureaucrats or assume that facts alone will persuade people.

As I lay out in my book on political messaging, Cracking the Code: How to Win Hearts, Change Minds, and Restore America’s Original Vision, Republicans understand the power of messaging and there have been several times in our history when Democrats did, too.

Hopefully, with the reboot of the Party this weekend, they can re-learn those simple lessons and begin to kick some Republican ass.

NOW READ: There will be a reckoning: Trump nightmare not all bad if it wakes America up

— Let’s just call these mass firings at Justice and the FBI what they are. Donald Trump is a lawless man who is ripping apart the FBI to turn it into a banana republic-style group of enforcing thugs who will only do his will. They will spare his friends and persecute his enemies. We’ve seen this over and over during the past century in countries all over the world; it’s nothing new. It’s just that we never expected to see it here in America. Putin dreamed for most of his life of destroying America; he now has a friend who is doing it for him. This attack on the Justice Department and particularly on the FBI is the beginning of America’s first true era of dictatorship. The only question now is how long and how far Democratic and Republican politicians and career government employees will tolerate this, and, when their resistance comes, whether it will be too late. The phone number for Congress is 202-224-3121.

— This plane crash shows Trump can’t handle a crisis; we’re going to have to hold our breath for the next 4 years... We already knew this from Covid, when at least 400,000 Americans died unnecessarily because of Trump’s utter incompetence and his attempts to use the pandemic for political gain. Now, with the plane and helicopter crash into the Potomac he let his racist and misogynist freak flag fly high, coming out before any investigations to say that the crash was caused by Black people, women, and/or handicapped people having been hired by the FAA. This is sick, twisted, unAmerican, inhumane, and highlights his complete and utter lack of character or humanity. It now appears that the fault for the crash lies with the helicopter pilot, who was both too high and off-course — and was apparently a woman. One of his people must’ve told Trump, who immediately saw it as an opportunity to go off on women, arguing, like Pete Hegseth, that women shouldn’t be in any kind of significant role in the military. The FAA itself did a quick investigation and found that there was only one controller in the tower handing both plane and helicopter traffic (normally there are 2) in part because the DCA airport only has 19 certified controllers altogether, even though the FAA says they should have 30. This is the result of years of Republican cuts to the FAA’s budget to finance tax breaks for billionaires. The GOP’s 2025 proposed budget includes another 26% cut in FAA funding to pay for tax cuts for Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, just like their unsuccessful 2023 budget effort. When will Americans wake up to the fact that Republicans only care about billionaires and big corporations that kick back campaign contributions to them in exchange for subsidies, deregulation, and tax loopholes? You’d think, after all these years of the Reaganomics trickle-down scam (among others) that they’d have figured it out…

— We have another “hair on fire” moment with Musk sticking his nose (and people) into our Government. After the head of the FAA opened an investigation into Musk’s SpaceX program, it appears that Musk himself intervened to get the guy to quit or be fired; now another federal officer, the highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department, has also resigned rather than do battle with Musk. Nobody elected this billionaire — arguably the richest man in the world — but this past week he apparently walked into (or sent emissaries) the part of the Treasury Department that writes trillions of dollars in checks to demand information about who’s getting paid, how much, and why. This could include highly confidential information that may well include government payments to Musk’s Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink competitors, among others. Will Trump reign him in? It appears that our president is as afraid of Musk as many of his employees say they are. Oligarchy is a form of government where morbidly rich people or their agents take over the reins of government and turn its resources and efforts away from helping average people and toward protecting and subsidizing the oligarchs themselves. We’re officially there.

— People are trying to simplify the message. One of the latest viral internet memes is a graphic with the following words on it:
*January 20: Trump FIRES the FAA director
*January 21: Trump FREEZES all Air Traffic Controller hiring
*January 22: Trump DISBANDS the Aviation Safety Advisory Committee
*January 28: Trump sends a buyout/retirement ransom letter to existing FAA employees
*January 29: First American mid-air collision in 16 years, 67 fatalities. WE ARE ONCE AGAIN RULED BY AN INCOMPETENT FOOL WHO IS GONNA GET US ALL KILLED!

— “They’re both dangerous”: Senators are worried after both Patel and Gabbard refused a constitutional pledge. Delaware’s Democratic Senator Chris Coons is warning Americans that when he asked both Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard if they’d refuse an illegal or unconstitutional order from Trump, both refused to say they’d stand up to the Mango Mussolini. “It gives me real pause,” Coons told Raw Story, adding, “Bill Barr answered easily [that he’d refuse an illegal order]. Pam Bondi answered easily. Merrick Garland answered easily. I do that with every nominee.” The sad and simple reality is that Trump has so badly intimidated his nominees that most are afraid to even say out loud that they’d challenge him, much less actually do it when the chips are down. This should alarm every American, particularly given Trump’s long history of criminal behavior and his past requests to the military to shoot protestors “in the legs” and other bizarre, illegal, and fundamentally unAmerican steps. We’re in for a hell of a ride over the next four years…

— “Mass Murderer in Waiting”: Reporter accuses LA Times’ billionaire owner of editing his anti-RFK op-ed to support Kennedy. Eric Reinhart wrote an article for the LA Times about Bob Kennedy’s appearance before the Senate, but is now saying that the paper’s editors — presumably at the behest of the paper’s rightwing billionaire owner — rewrote his article and changed the headline to make it seem like he was endorsing Kennedy when in fact it was the opposite. “I am the author of this OpEd,” Reinhart wrote on X, “which was given a misleading title and from which key lines were cut—lines that made very clear that RFK Jr is dangerously ignorant, has absolutely no business near HHS, and is effectively a mass murderer in waiting.” What’s the old joke about the Golden Rule? “He who has the gold makes the rules,” as I recall. Certainly seems to be the case here, truth be damned…

— ICE horror story hits the news… A grandmother, mother, and toddler were all hauled off to an ICE immigration detention center (euphemism for “jail”) by Trump’s officers when they were caught speaking Spanish to each other. Turns out they were visiting from Puerto Rico — where everybody’s a US citizen — but that didn’t deter the enthusiastic cops. Thank the gods they didn’t end up in Gitmo. ICE had been prioritizing undocumented immigrants who’d committed crimes while in the US, but since Trump gave each ICE office a daily quota for arrests they’re starting to do more general sweeps, looking for people who’ve been good residents, quietly doing their work and paying their taxes. The latest report is that Trump wants to open the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison for black- and brown-skinned people here without documentation; as the old saying goes, the cruelty is the point.

NOW READ: Inside the GOP's 60-year conspiracy to kill our democracy

This week, the Medicaid payment portal was shut down in all 50 states; they came back up when a federal judge put Trump’s illegal impoundment of federal funds on hold until February 3rd.

And it wasn’t just Medicaid. The Trump administration shut down Pell grants, federally supported student loans, veterans homeless shelters, veterans suicide prevention programs, school meals, home heating assistance, housing assistance, food stamps, food for women and infants, childcare, Headstart, child abuse investigations, rape crisis centers, and hundreds of other programs.

Why?

Because Trump is trying to gut the federal government the same way Mitt Romney gutted Clear Channel when I did my show from one of their studios a decade ago.

Romney’s company did it to shut down Air America and then extract the millions in wealth Clear Channel had, before throwing the husk of the company into bankruptcy; Trump is tearing our systems of governance apart because he and his billionaire buddies are offended by the idea of paying taxes to help the American middle class and the poor.

In the process, Trump is also breaking multiple laws and daring Congress and the courts to do anything about it. This is the beginning of the path to both economic chaos and dictatorship.

But first, let’s take a look at what Trump and his billionaire funders are up to and why.

Back in 1980, David Koch ran for vice president on a platform of shutting down virtually every federal function except the military and the court system. Some billionaires, you see, hate paying taxes and many of them think that all those “gummint” programs are both unnecessary and wasteful.

His platform included a whole series of positions that were specifically designed to roll back and gut FDR’s “big government” programs (along with those added on by both Nixon and LBJ’s Great Society) that had created and then sustained America’s 20th century middle class:

— “We urge the repeal of federal campaign finance laws, and the immediate abolition of the despotic Federal Election Commission.
— “We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs.
— “We oppose any compulsory insurance or tax-supported plan to provide health services, including those which finance abortion services.
— “We also favor the deregulation of the medical insurance industry.
— “We favor the repeal of the fraudulent, virtually bankrupt, and increasingly oppressive Social Security system. Pending that repeal, participation in Social Security should be made voluntary.
— “We propose the abolition of the governmental Postal Service.
— “We oppose all personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes.
— “We support the eventual repeal of all taxation.
— “As an interim measure, all criminal and civil sanctions against tax evasion should be terminated immediately.
— “We support repeal of all law which impede the ability of any person to find employment, such as minimum wage laws.
— “We advocate the complete separation of education and State. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended.
— “We condemn compulsory education laws … and we call for the immediate repeal of such laws.
— “We support the repeal of all taxes on the income or property of private schools, whether profit or non-profit.
— “We support the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency.”
— “We support abolition of the Department of Energy.
— “We call for the dissolution of all government agencies concerned with transportation, including the Department of Transportation.
— “We demand the return of America’s railroad system to private ownership. We call for the privatization of the public roads and national highway system.
— “We specifically oppose laws requiring an individual to buy or use so-called ‘self-protection’ equipment such as safety belts, air bags, or crash helmets.
— “We advocate the abolition of the Federal Aviation Administration.
— “We advocate the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration.
— “We support an end to all subsidies for child-bearing built into our present laws, including all welfare plans and the provision of tax-supported services for children.
— “We oppose all government welfare, relief projects, and ‘aid to the poor’ programs. All these government programs are privacy-invading, paternalistic, demeaning, and inefficient. The proper source of help for such persons is the voluntary efforts of private groups and individuals.
— “We call for the privatization of the inland waterways, and of the distribution system that brings water to industry, agriculture and households.
— “We call for the repeal of the Occupational Safety and Health Act.
— “We call for the abolition of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
— “We support the repeal of all state usury laws.”

In other words, gut the federal government the same way Mitt Romney’s company gutted Clear Channel. But in politics and governance, it’s called libertarianism, which is the hot new philosophy for Silicon Valley tech bro billionaires.

The “Project 2025” plan put together by the Heritage Foundation (funded in part for years by the Koch brothers’ network) was a 21st century cleaned-up version of Koch’s 1980 Libertarian Party platform. And now we’re seeing it put into place, one step at a time.

Like Romney stripping the liberal talk radio network out of Clear Channel, they are now stripping the 20th century out of our laws and policies.

It’s why Republicans are working so hard to disempower women in the workplace, starting with eliminating their control over their own reproductive capacity.

It’s also why they’re doing everything they can to shut down corporate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs nationwide; the majority of the hiring and increased pay benefits coming from corporate, government, and academic DEI programs go to women, a situation Republican men find intolerable.

Republicans want to either “return” to a pre-Civil War understanding of the Constitution (as advocated by Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito) or embrace Russell Vought’s “post-constitutional” order, in which the last century’s “innovations” (including the income tax, women’s suffrage, “welfare” programs, entitlements, and even free public school and college) are dialed back.

We also see this in the ways the Republicans on the Supreme Court have gutted both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, how they’ve stripped most of the teeth out of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, and how they’re working to castrate most regulatory agencies including the EPA, FTC, and even the IRS.

Republicans are trying to do to our government, in other words, what corporate raiders do to companies.

Some of it is simple greed: as the middle class shrinks and poverty grows, the cash stash at the very top of the American economic pyramid grows exponentially.

Other American oligarchs follow the teachings of Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, and Ronald Reagan who all argued that a larger-than-50% middle class is a threat to the stability of the nation.

The simple reality is that nations without a large and active federal government providing protections and services to its people never develop large middle classes.

Unregulated capitalism always produces the kind of nation Charles Dickens wrote about in Christmas Carol and his many other novels: A tiny 1% who own most wealth; a small 3-5% middle class of doctors, lawyers, and small business owners (Ebeneezer Scrooge); and a massive 90%+ class of the working poor (Bob Cratchit).

Ever since the 1950s when Russell Kirk wrote his manifesto The Conservative Mind, a small cabal of Republicans and billionaires have argued that FDR’s “big government” programs — that moved America from being 10% middle class in the 1930s to over 60% when Reagan came into office in 1981 (it’s under 50% now) — were dangerous.

As I detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, their argument was largely based on the turmoil of the 1960s, when women, Blacks, and young people were demanding rights; they worried that these protests could lead to the destruction of our republic and a “communist takeover.”

Nowadays most rightwing billionaires have largely abandoned that argument, simply asserting their disgust at having to pay taxes to support programs that primarily benefit “the little people.”

And then, of course, there are those in the GOP who simply hate America because of its pluralism and diversity.

Most recently, Trump proved his commitment to fulfill their and Putin’s desire to see America’s government destroyed by sending an email to 2 million federal employees offering them 8 months pay if they’ll resign.

Just like when I was at Clear Channel and Romney’s company fired or laid off more than half of the employees here in Portland.

In the process of disemboweling our federal government, however, Trump is taking it a step farther and breaking multiple laws:

— The Impoundment Control Act, which was passed in the 1970s after Nixon withheld funding for programs he didn’t like, including the Clean Water Act, Public Housing projects, the elementary and Secondary Education Act that funded public schools in poor districts, school desegregation efforts, mass transit programs for cities, and health research and healthcare programs for low-income people.

The law says that presidents cannot refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress without the explicit permission of both the House and Senate, and requires him to give them 45 days to consider the impoundment or rescission of funds.

Our lawless, convicted-criminal president is nakedly breaking this law and daring Congress and the courts to do something about it.

— The Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883 and the Civil Service Reform Act guarantee that federal government employees can’t be fired for “retaliation” or political reasons; there must be actual evidence that they are not doing their jobs, doing them poorly, or behaving in ways that justify the firing.

When Trump fired all the career prosecutors and lawyers in the Justice Department who’d participated in his prosecution, it was a clear case of political retaliation and a clear violation of the law.

— The Inspector General Act of 1978 (also responding to Nixon’s corruption) mandates that the president must notify Congress at least 30 days before removing an IG and provide detailed, case-specific reasons for the dismissal. Inspectors General are the watchdogs for federal agencies, keeping an eye out for people within those agencies committing fraud, stealing funds, or engaging in illegal favoritism or bribery, among other crimes.

Firing them is like a police department firing its Internal Affairs department that looks into corrupt cops. It sets up every federal agency affected by the firings to be corrupted by the Trump cronies put in charge of them. Even Republican Senator Chuck Grassley is furious about this.

Our lawless, convicted-criminal president is nakedly breaking this law, too, as he raids our government, and is daring Congress and the courts to do something about it.

As Alexandrian Ocasio-Cortez noted on social media yesterday:

“Trump is holding all the nation’s hospitals and vital services hostage to seize power from Congress and hand it over to billionaires. We must state the truth: this is a constitutional crisis. It’s a massive, illegal power grab that the House and Senate have a sworn duty to stop.”

Trump’s defiance of these three major laws (along with a few others) in the first two weeks of his presidency — and the GOP’s acquiescence to his criminality — are terrible signs for the future of American democracy.

They are frankly even more dangerous than his corporate raider-like efforts to bring the American government to its knees.

While most Americans who voted for Trump probably knew he was a convicted criminal, it’s unlikely they also thought he’d commit crimes in office that would gut the protections and programs that so many of them need. They f----- around and now they’re finding out.

Sadly, they’re taking the rest of us with them…

NOW READ: CNN host has a message for working-class voters ditching the Dems

Democrats are warning that Trump’s threats to increase our national debt by as much as $7 trillion (with new tax cuts for billionaires), shift billions of Treasury dollars into crypto, and impose tariffs on imported goods risk creating a financial crises and maybe even a second Republican Great Depression.

After all, tariffs will jack up inflation, crypto is incredibly volatile, and increasing the national debt will pull hundreds of billions out of the treasury in interest payments that could have otherwise been used to help the American people, rebuild our infrastructure, and upgrade our schools. Any of the three could trip off a national economic emergency: all three could be a perfect storm.

Trump, though, seems unconcerned, even though Republican economists are also signaling their alarm. Which raises the question: Why is he so willing to risk an economic crash on his watch with these risky policies?

To the average person, the idea of a recession or even a crash like we saw under Bush in 2008, Reagan in 1981/82, or Hoover in 1929 seems grim. Millions are laid off work, businesses are in crisis as bankruptcies erupt across the nation, and poverty explodes during a time when more than half of American families live paycheck-to-paycheck.

To understand why a billionaire like Trump — and the billionaires who put and keep him in office — might be not just willing but enthusiastic about creating an economic crisis, you first must view it from a rightwing billionaires’ point of view.

— First, a time of economic disaster is a great excuse to gut government programs or reduce taxes with the excuse that federal tax revenues have cratered along with the economy. Both Reagan and George W. Bush used recessions as an excuse to “stimulate the economy” by cutting trillions from the taxes of billionaires and big corporations.

Reagan’s Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 used that year’s severe recession as an excuse to reduce funding for social programs including food stamps, Medicaid, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). George W. Bush used his recession as the justification to try to cut Social Security, although that plan died in the face of widespread public opposition.

— Second, times of economic crisis increase the tolerance for strongman governments. FDR, for example, pushed through a number of then-radical programs using the Republican Great Depression as his excuse. Rightwing politicians were beside themselves, calling him a tyrant, communist, and usurper of constitutional authority, but the majority of Americans at the time were largely with him.

In Europe, Hitler used the Depression to his advantage when he came to power in 1933, demanding — and receiving — massive emergency powers including the ability to rule by decree and outlaw his political opponents.

Trump could similarly use a severe economic crisis to consolidate his power and ram through the authoritarian Project 2025 wish-list as a starting point to take America down the road to an America First form of neofascism.

His billionaire social media backers are already seeding the ground. The US and the UK both embraced neoliberalism (destroy unions, cut taxes on the rich, embrace free trade) around the same time (Thatcher/Reagan) with similar consequences for the middle class of each country.

A new study by Channel 4 in England, reported in The Times, found:

“Most young people are in favour of turning the UK into a dictatorship, according to a ‘deeply worrying’ study, which has revealed an acceptance of authoritarianism and radicalism among Generation Z.
“Fifty-two per cent of Gen Z — people aged between 13 and 27 — said they thought ‘the UK would be a better place if a strong leader was in charge who does not have to bother with parliament and elections.’
“Thirty-three per cent suggested the UK would be better off ‘if the army was in charge.’”

Where did they get these ideas? From social media, it turns out, including the feeds of accused racists, misogynists, and neofascists like “Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson,” who were “trusted” by 42 percent of British young men.

Fifty-eight percent said they trusted social media posts more than traditional news sources. And 45 percent believe women have gained too many rights, echoing Tate’s argument that, as young British men told Channel 4, “We have gone so far in promoting women’s equality that we are discriminating against men.”

Here in America, the percentage of young men who believe women have acquired too much power has increased from 32% to 45% in just five years, while fully 52% say they trust what they read or see on social media.

— And third, billionaires often make the most money when there’s a crash. They absolutely love market collapses because they are, uniquely, in a position to profit from the same economic downturns that wipe out average working people or those who’ve invested their 401Ks in the market.

This is a story as old as capitalism. During the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s, for example, some of America’s greatest fortunes were made or massively expanded.

My (late) friend Gloria Swanson once told me over dinner in her apartment how her former manager and lover Joe Kennedy, who’d made a pile of money manipulating the stock market in the 1920s, bailed out as the market began its slide in 1929 and even shorted the market, increasing his wealth. But once it had crashed, when everybody was broke, she said, he bought stock with a vengeance.

“Cash is king” was the phrase of the day, and Kennedy was well stocked in cash (he even bought a movie studio). By the end of the Depression, he was one of the richest men in the nation.

J. Paul Getty’s favorite phrase was, “Buy when everyone else is selling, and hold on until everyone else is buying.” It’s something you can only do at scale if you’re fabulously rich to begin with.

The afternoon of the Great Crash — October’s Black Tuesday under Republican President Hoover in 1929 — Getty skipped his parents’ golden wedding anniversary to head to Wall Street where he began buying stocks, particularly in small oil companies that were in trouble.

“It is the opportunity of a lifetime to get oil companies for practically nothing,” Getty later wrote. Out of that, he became one of the richest men in the world.

Flash forward to the modern era.

When Wall Street banks — exploiting Republican-demanded deregulation of banking and investment rules — crashed the American economy in 2007, home prices (and, thus, homeowner equity) collapsed by 21%. Over 10 million Americans lost their homes to banking predators like “Foreclosure King” Steve Mnuchin, and tens of millions of others were underwater.

The stock market plummeted by over 50% in the last year of Bush’s presidency. On October 9, 2007 the Dow was at its all-time peak of 14,164 but by March 5, 2009 it had collapsed to 6,594.

While over 8 million Americans lost their jobs and were wiped out as the Bush Crash started today’s homelessness crises, the top 1 percent (and the Bush and Cheney families) saw it as a buying opportunity.

Working-class people were desperately unloading stocks in their 401Ks at a loss just to pay the bills, as wages plummeted in the face of a collapsing labor market.

But the morbidly rich were doing great.

Between 2009 — the bottom of the Bush Crash — and 2012 when the recovery really began, the top 1 percent of Americans saw their income grow by over 31 percent. Fully 95 percent of all the income increases in the country were seized by the top 1 percent of Americans during that period.

As the economy recovered, rich people who’d used their increased income to buy stocks at the market bottom rode the S&P 500 up by 462 percent to 2020. A billion dollars invested in 2009 became $4.62 billion in just 11 years, a period during which the combined wealth of American billionaires went up by over 80 percent.

Then they did it again 10 years later!

The Trump/Covid Crash of 2020, for example, presented America’s morbidly rich with another brand new and huge opportunity to get richer on top of a crisis brutalizing the rest of America.

Once again the market collapsed, this time under Republican Trump, and working people, now out of work, were selling their stocks at a loss just to pay the mortgage and buy food.

But for the wealthy, it was a gift from God.

March 16, 2020 — just after Trump declared a pandemic and lockdown — the Dow sustained the largest single-day crash in its entire history. For the investor class, Trump, and his billionaire buddies, this was an even better opportunity than the Bush crash of 2007!

Fewer than three months later, on June 4th, we learned that the seven richest people in America had seen their fortunes increase by fully 50 percent.

And with Trump’s massive tax cut for his fellow billionaires, they could keep most all of it: by that time the average American billionaire was paying less than 4 percent in income taxes (a situation that persists to this day).

Just during that one single terrible “crash” year of 2020, the Institute for Policy Studies documents, the world’s 2,365 billionaires saw their wealth increase by a full 54%, as U.S. billionaires saw their net worth surge 62 percent by $1.8 trillion. Average billionaire wealth worldwide increased 27% in that one year alone.

And now it begins anew: Republicans are meeting at Trump’s Doral golf resort in Miami today to plan strategy.

Don’t expect them to argue that it would be a bad thing if his plans provoked an economic crisis: To the contrary, that may well be exactly what they — and their billionaire owners — are hoping for.

NOW READ: Butching up: Females are running amok and frightening the alpha males

Saturday afternoon, Donald Trump held a rally in Las Vegas. It was streamed and mentioned on social media millions of times within an hour of his repeating his “No tax on tips” mantra. By the time Facebook, Meta, X, TikTok, and Instagram were done with the weekend, using their now-heavily-tilted-to-Republicans algorithms, it’s safe to bet Trump’s rally got hundreds of millions of impressions.

Senator Chuck Schumer, meanwhile, read the most boring speech ever on the floor of the Senate condemning Trump, evoking the Democratic version of the old “tree falls in the forest” question. I listened to it online (couldn’t find it on social media), but, frankly, it was so deadly tedious that I can’t remember a word he said.

Being media savvy — and exploiting the hottest new media — isn’t a new thing. You’d think Democrats would have figured this out by now; they sure did in past generations.

Richard Nixon was a crook, but few Americans (other than Jimmy Hoffa) knew it in 1960. But he lost the White House to John F. Kennedy because he didn’t know how to use the hot new communications medium that had burst on the scene in just the previous two decades: Television. His refusal to wear makeup and play to the camera for the debate, according to many presidential scholars, cost him the election.

While Calvin Coolidge was the first president to use radio in 1923, Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first really radio-savvy president. He rallied Americans to his cause with “fireside chat” radio addresses — starting in 1933 just weeks after he was inaugurated — that were often listened to by as many as a third of Americans.

Because FDR kept in regular contact with the people, explaining every step he took while making fun of Republican obstruction and hammering “economic royalists” for the Republican Great Depression, American voters elected him to the presidency four times.

If Joe Biden had done the same during his four years, reaching out to the American people every week and heavily using the new (social) media, explaining and bragging on his many successes and blaming Republicans for their obstruction, either he or Kamala Harris would be in the White House today.

Instead, like with professional media personality Ronald Reagan in 1980, we ended up with the president who NBC spent millions teaching how to do media and to promote his brand.

It’s way past time for Democrats to figure this out.

We no longer live in the radio era or even the age of television. Paul Harvey and Ed Sullivan are dead. Radio advertising revenue is in the crapper, the victim of podcasts; TV networks are laying off staff as they watch their ratings crater; even major old-line newspapers like The Washington Post are desperately trying to reinvent themselves for the social media century.

In the 1930s, if it didn’t happen on radio it didn’t happen. In the 1960s it was television. Today it’s YouTube, X, Facebook, TikTok, and Bluesky.

Thomas Carlyle is credited with articulating the “Great Man Theory of History,” which suggests that many of history’s major hinge points were the result of individuals with uncommon charisma and talent for leadership.

Democrats, in the era of JFK, understood — and delighted in — the power of charisma. Republicans got the memo after Nixon went down in flames; they found a TV star of their own with Reagan. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were similar vessels of charm and animal magnetism.

More than half of America’s newspapers are dead, radio and TV are struggling, and about half of all Americans get all or most of their news from social media.

And yet, when you look across the media landscape right now pretty much all you see is Donald Trump.

In the face of a growing fascist threat from Trump and his captive GOP, America desperately needs Democratic politicians who can lead, inspire, and energize. Who will fight back, and stand up for American values. Who can win elections.

If Democrats don’t start using political theater and fielding candidates talented enough to capture a social media audience, our country is doomed.