Thom Hartmann

I recently came home from the studio and turned on the TV to see an MSNOW host and her guest agree on how important it is that Democrats “unite around the issue of term limits” for members of Congress. Last week, the Democratic governor of a swing state said on my program that he was pushing for term limits.

In just the past 48 hours, I’ve heard three different commentators on MSNOW and CNN speak of them as if term limits are the “solution” to “elderly” legislators or to the naked corruption that’s so rampant in DC.

This is the wrong issue for Democrats to be promoting now: term limits actually do more damage than good, which is why Republicans and the Heritage Foundation have been pushing them for decades.

For example, they’d get rid of good, effective, high-quality legislators like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, Maxine Waters, Barbara Lee, and Pramila Jayapal, among others.

But the problem with term limits goes far deeper than that.

Unfortunately, term limits are popular because they seem like an easy fix to the corruption crisis in American politics (over 70 percent of Americans favor them), but in reality, they simply hand more power over to giant corporations and the morbidly rich. Here’s how:

First, term limits shift the balance of power in a legislature from the legislators themselves to lobbyists, which is why corporate-friendly Republicans so often speak fondly of them.

Historically, when a new lawmaker comes into office, he or she will hook up with an old-timer who can show them the ropes, how to get around the building, where the metaphorical bodies are buried, and teach them how to make legislation.

With term limits, this institutional knowledge is largely stripped out of a legislative body, forcing new legislators to look elsewhere for help.

Because no Republican has ever, anywhere, suggested that lobbyists’ ability to work be term-limited, we have an actual experiment we can look to. Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, and South Dakota all have term limits.

Research has shown, repeatedly and unambiguously, that in those states with term limits the lobbyists end up filling the role of permanent infrastructure to mentor and guide new lawmakers, and thus have outsized power and influence, far greater than they had before the term limits were instituted.

Of course, lobbyists — and the billionaires and corporations that pay them — love this. It dramatically increases lobbyists’ power and influence, giving them an early and easy entrée into the personal and political lives of the individual legislators who, in those states with term limits, are forced to lean on them for guidance.

This simple reality is not lost on the GOP, which has been pushing these restrictions on service at the federal and state legislature level for years: term limits are law in 16 states, all as the result of heavy Republican PR efforts and lobbying during the George HW Bush presidency.

Pappy Bush rolled the idea out in 1990 as a central part of his failed run for re-election in 1992. An unpopular president who was being blamed by voters for the destruction of unions and factories rapidly moving offshore, his advisors thought it would be a great way to blame Congress for the problems that neoliberal Reaganomics had inflicted on the nation.

As The New York Times noted on December 12, 1990:

“President Bush has decided to push for a constitutional amendment to limit the number of terms for members of Congress, his chief of staff, John H. Sununu, said today. Doing so as he prepares for his re-election campaign will put Mr. Bush squarely and publicly on the side of an idea that is as widely popular among voters as it is wildly unpopular among members of Congress…
“But even though passage of such an amendment is unlikely, there is little risk for Mr. Bush in associating himself with this movement. Politically, the move fits nicely with the growing effort by the White House to depict Congress as the source of most of the nation’s problems.”

While the US Congress never seriously took up the idea, Bush’s advocacy of it echoed through the states and was heavily promoted by Rush Limbaugh, whose national hate-radio show had rolled out just two years earlier in 1988.

Newt Gingrich made term limits the cornerstone of his 1994 Contract On America, but the issue died at the federal level in 1995 when the Supreme Court, in U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, ruled term limits imposed on federal officials are unconstitutional.

This doesn’t mean Congress can’t impose term limits on itself; it would just require them to be done as a constitutional amendment or via some other mechanism that gets around the Supreme Court, like court-stripping (which, itself, is dicey). Term limits were imposed on the presidency by Congress in 1951, a GOP backlash against FDR’s having won election to four consecutive terms in office, but that took ratification of the 22nd Amendment.

Following Bush’s promotion of them, Oklahoma picked up term limits for its legislature in 1990, with Maine, California, Colorado, Arkansas, Michigan, Florida, Ohio, South Dakota, Montana, Arizona, and Missouri debating them during the 1991 and 1992 legislative sessions and all putting them into law in 1992. Louisiana and Nevada put them into law in 1995 and 1996, respectively, Nebraska in 2000, and North Dakota finally got around to them in 2022.

In every single case, term limits have worked to the benefit of billionaires and special interests and against the interests of average citizens. It’s why the Koch brothers and rightwing think-tanks have been pushing them for decades, like you’ll find in the article “Term Limits: The Only Way to Clean Up Congress” on the Heritage Foundation’s website.

In addition to strengthening the hand of lobbyists, term limits also prevent good people who aren’t independently wealthy from entering politics in the first place.

What rational person, particularly if they have kids, would take the risk of a job they know will end in six years when instead they could build a career in a field that guarantees them security and a decent retirement?

Also because of this dynamic, term limits encourage legislators to focus on their post-politics career while serving.

Many busily legislate favors for particular industries in the hope of being rewarded with a job when they leave office. This is just one of several ways term limits increase the level of and incentives for corruption.

Because term limits encourage independently wealthy people to enter politics and push out middle-class would-be career politicians like Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, they always shift the Overton window of legislatures — regardless of the party in power — to the right.

Probably the strongest argument against term limits, though, is that they’re fundamentally anti-democratic. In fact, we already have term limits: they’re called elections.

The decision about who represents the interests of a particular state or legislative district shouldn’t be held by some abstract law: it should be in the hands of the voters, and term limits deny voters this.

And, because term limits weaken the power of the legislative branch by producing a constant churn, they strengthen the power of the executive branch, a violation of the vital concept of checks-and-balances.

Even where governors or presidents are term-limited by law or constitution, the concentration of power in a single executive is inherently problematic, requiring a robust legislative branch to balance it. Term limits thus neuter a legislature’s ability to mount a muscular challenge to a governor or president grasping for excess power.

States that have instituted term limits generally suffer from “buyer’s remorse.” As the Citizens Research Council of Michigan noted in a 2018 report titled Twenty-five Years Later, Term Limits Have Failed to Deliver On Their Promise:

“Legislative term limits in Michigan have failed to achieve their proponents’ stated goals: Ridding government of career politicians, increasing diversity among elected officials, and making elections more competitive.
“Term limits have made state legislators, especially House members, view their time as a stepping stone to another office. Term limits have failed to strengthen ties between legislators and their districts or sever cozy relationships with lobbyists. They have weakened the legislature in its relationship with the executive branch.”

A scholarly study of term limits in Florida similarly concluded:

“The absence of long-serving legislators under term limits equates to a significant loss of experience and institutional memory. … Those who had built a career in the Legislature were not applauded for the expertise they had developed but were castigated…
“After the first full decade with term limitations in place, the Florida Legislature is a dramatically different institution. Term limits increased legislator turnover and drastically affected legislative tenure, all but destroying institutional memory.”

The Brookings Institution, in a paper titled Five Reasons to Oppose Congressional Term Limits, notes that the primary results of term limits are to:
— “Take away power from voters,”
— “Severely decrease congressional capacity,”
— “Limit incentives for gaining policy expertise,”
— “Automatically kick out effective lawmakers,” and
— “Do little to minimize corruptive behavior or slow the revolving door.”

As a result, Idaho, Massachusetts, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming have all repealed their legislative term limits.

For people who’ve never worked in politics or held elective office — which is most of us — term limits sound like a quick and easy answer for the complex problems of corruption and congressional dysfunction. But the only truly reasonable place for term limits to be applied are to the presidency (which we’ve already done) and the unelected members of the Supreme Court (18 years is generally suggested as an appropriate limit to their terms).

So, the next time you hear some politician or TV pundit proclaiming that term limits are the “best solution” to the “problem” of corruption or congressional dysfunction, consider their real agenda.

Unless they’re simply naïve or cynical, it’ll almost always be that they are or once were (before Trump) a Republican and just can’t help themselves.

Dear Marjorie Taylor Greene,

Thank you for standing up against unnecessary war, advocating for Epstein’s victims, and for defending the spiritual side of Christianity against Trump’s recent blasphemy.

Our mutual friend Congressman Ro Khanna (who you worked with on the Epstein legislation) reached out to you a few months ago about dropping by on my radio/TV program to have a friendly conversation; I haven’t heard back, but figured I’d reach out this way to suggest some things we could discuss.

You’re one of the few high-profile Republicans who’s not only disagreed with Trump on policy but has also clearly seen through his con-man façade of competence and, frankly, sanity. Well done! But let’s go a bit farther and talk policy, including a few areas where we may even agree…

Healthcare

America spends about twice as much as any other developed country in the world on healthcare, yet we have a lower lifespan and poorer outcomes than any other similar nation. We spend about $14,885 per person per year, while the average among other developed countries is about $5,967 (according to the OECD). Even Mexico, President Sheinbaum announced this week, will have comprehensive free national healthcare (including drugs) within 2 years.

Some of your Republican colleagues will say our poor outcomes are because we have “too many Black people” (referencing Prudential’s Frederick Hoffman’s old “genetically inferior Blacks” story that dominated healthcare and insurance policy in the 1910-1965 era covered in detail in my book on the Hidden History of American Healthcare). I’ve had several conservatives reference that old canard when they’ve come on my show. But that’s just a racist myth, and the proof is that these numbers hold for poor whites, too; just look at the numbers in overwhelmingly white West Virginia, for example.

As a conservative, I’d guess you’d be outraged by the billions of our healthcare dollars that are being shoveled into the money bins of the insurance and hospital giants. Your colleague Senator Rick Scott, for example, ran a hospital chain convicted of the largest Medicare fraud in American history at the time and walked away from it with hundreds of millions in his money bin; it financed his run for governor and senator from Florida. “Dollar Bill” McGuire, the first CEO of United Healthcare, left with over $1.5 billion from his gig (although he had to return a few hundred million to avoid going to jail for fraud).

The Medicare Advantage scam is costing Americans billions a year and that profit all goes directly to the stockholders and executives of massive insurance companies. And now Trump is inserting for-profit insurance companies into real Medicare in 6 states as an “experiment” and Dr. Oz is talking about replacing real Medicare with Advantage plans as the default when people turn 65. Millions of dollars are going into the pockets of politicians of both parties (but mostly Republicans) who support this fleecing of the American people.

If America just did what every other developed country in the world has done, we’d preserve a fortune and save an estimated 68,000 lives and a half-trillion-dollars a year. And, as any EU citizen can tell you, the service will be better! That seems like something a conservative could get behind?

Education

America is the only country in the developed world where a person goes deeply into debt to get an education; an advanced degree can create a debt that takes decades to pay off, and is preventing young people from getting married, buying a home, starting a family, and discouraging would-be entrepreneurs like yourself from starting a small business.

When we gave returning GIs from WWII free college, almost 8 million young men and women not only got free tuition from the 1944 GI Bill but also received a stipend to pay for room, board, and books, as about half of Europe’s countries do today. And the result — the return on our government’s investment in those 8 million educations — was substantial.

The best book on that time and subject is Edward Humes’ Over Here: How the GI Bill Transformed the American Dream, summarized by Mary Paulsell for the Columbia Daily Tribune:

“[That] groundbreaking legislation gave our nation 14 Nobel Prize winners, three Supreme Court justices, three presidents, 12 senators, 24 Pulitzer Prize winners, 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists, 67,000 doctors, 450,000 engineers, 240,000 accountants, 17,000 journalists, 22,000 dentists and millions of lawyers, nurses, artists, actors, writers, pilots and entrepreneurs.”

When people have an education, they not only raise the competence and vitality of a nation; they also earn more money, which stimulates the economy. Because they earn more, they pay more in taxes, which helps pay back the government for the cost of that education.

In 1952 dollars, the GI Bill’s educational benefit cost the nation $7 billion. The increased economic output over the next 40 years that could be traced directly to that educational cost was $35.6 billion, and the extra taxes received from those higher-wage-earners was $12.8 billion.

In other words, the US government invested $7 billion and got a $48.4 billion return on that investment, about a $7 return for every $1 invested.

In addition, that educated workforce made it possible for America to lead the world in innovation, R&D, and new business development for three generations. We invented the transistor, the integrated circuit, the internet, new generations of miracle drugs, sent men to the moon and reshaped science.

Wouldn’t any rational conservative agree with former Republican President Eisenhower and his Vice President Richard Nixon that that’s a good deal for America? I realize the big banks who make billions in profits from all that student debt regularly pour millions into the coffers of your Republican colleagues, but shouldn’t America’s interest and and that of hard-working Americans come first?

Taxes

When Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981, two-thirds of Americans were in the middle class and could get and stay there with a single paycheck. Today it’s only 43 percent of us who qualify for that, and, to add insult to injury, it takes two paychecks to get there. In large part that’s because of Republican “trickle down” economics.

When Reagan came into office, the top tax rate on the morbidly rich was 74% and corporations 50%. That encouraged wealthy people to make tax-deductible donations to charity and stop taking money out of their companies after the first three million or so a year (in today’s dollars) when the top rates began to kick in. Billionaires weren’t even a thing, mostly, at the time; now we have a guy who’s about to become a trillionaire.

CEOs and senior managers often lived in the same neighborhoods as their workers, although their homes were a bit spiffier. Just look at old sitcoms from the ‘50s and ‘60s and you’ll see what I mean. It also encouraged companies to invest their surplus money into R&D, new products and expansion, and better wages and benefits for their workers (all tax-deductions that helped them avoid paying corporate income taxes). Today, instead, since Reagan legalized stock buybacks (it used to be a felony called “stock price manipulation”), CEO’s recycle their companies’ money into buybacks to artificially inflate the value of the stock and thus their bonuses.

When Reagan came into office in 1981, the total national debt was about $800 billion — less than one trillion dollars — and had been going down every year since the end of WWII. If you add up the total value of Reagan tax cuts, the GW Bush tax cuts, and both sets of Trump tax cuts — all heavily weighted toward the obscenely rich — you’ll discover that the number is well north of the current $38 trillion of our national debt.

In other words, under those three Republican presidents America borrowed — in your name, my name, and our kids’ and grandkids’ names — $38 trillion and handed it all to the Musks and Zuckerbergs and Bezos of our country so these “Masters of the Universe” could compete to see who could build the largest mega-yacht, shoot themselves highest into outer space on penis-shaped rockets, or build the most elaborately outfitted doomsday bunker.

If we went back to the tax rates we had when Reagan came into office, working class people would see a major tax break, the morbidly rich would have to again pay their fair share, and corporations would once again be incentivized to innovate their products and pay their employees enough to revive the middle class.

Wouldn’t a reasonable conservative think that’s a good deal for America? Eisenhower and Nixon certainly did; even Republican President Jerry Ford agreed and kept the top tax rate at 90%.

There are multiple other issues we could discuss and probably agree on. They include the benefits of:

— Building out public transportation like China, Japan, South Korea, and most of Europe have done;
— Cleaning up our air and water to save lives and slow down these increasingly deadly weather disasters (you do believe in science, right?);
— Protecting our public lands from greedy fossil fuel billionaires;
— Passing Republican James Langford’s immigration legislation to get undocumented people out of the country without brutality while cleaning up our immigration mess going forward;
— Getting off our addiction to fossil fuels and the Middle East;
— And even the “small government” idea of letting queer people and non-Christians simply live their lives in peace and quiet.

We can discuss these things or any issue you’d like; you can also talk directly to my listeners and viewers all across the country. Every week members of Congress come on my show for a full hour to take calls from listeners; you’re welcome to do the same, too, if you’d like. Bernie Sanders did that every week for 11 years. Ro Khanna is one of my regulars and has been for years; he can tell you all about it.

Hoping to hear from you.

Saturday’s back-to-back headlines in The Washington Post were: “‘They Have Chosen Not To Accept Our Terms,’ Vance Says” and “U.S. Intelligence Shows China Taking A More Active Role In Iran War.” They echo headlines from a century ago that reported on the early days of what quickly became World War I.

In 2021, China and Iran became military allies, signing a “broad strategic partnership encompassing economic, diplomatic, and security dimensions.” Russia signed a similar comprehensive military/security agreement with Iran in January of last year. The three countries are now military allies and formally assisting each other. Hold that thought.

Then, on Sunday, America’s resident madman Donald Trump announced on his Nazi-infested social media site that the United States Navy will illegally blockade the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow chokepoint through which 20 percent of the world’s oil used to flow every day — threatening to intercept “every vessel in International Waters” that’s paid a toll to Iran.

The US blockade of the Strait began Monday.

That means all the shipping of oil for China and drones for Russia will be intercepted by the US. We’re now blocking the war and energy supplies of nations that have nuclear weapons and whose military assets are already in the region. And it came just hours after the peace talks in Islamabad — led by three American grifters with absolutely no diplomatic experience — had predictably collapsed.

What happens next will depend entirely on whether anyone in this administration has ever seriously studied what happened the last time a similar cascade of great-power commitments, cornered leaders, and military miscalculations all converged at once.

A hundred and twelve years ago this summer, a young Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip fired two shots in Sarajevo, killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary.

What followed was a deadly catastrophe, because every major European power had spent the previous 40 years putting together mutual defense treaties with other major European powers.

(In the 1908 Bosnian Crisis, Austria-Hungary had annexed Bosnia, land that Serbia claimed; the Serbs were humiliated and furious. The Balkan Wars of 1912-13 left Serbia stronger and more willing to reach out to the Slavic people still living under Austria-Hungarian rule, particularly those in Bosnia, further enraging the Austria-Hungarians.)

Everybody was armed to the teeth and, frankly, paranoid about everybody else. So, when Franz Ferdinand’s assassination gave Austria-Hungary an excuse to punish its longtime enemy Serbia, those treaties clicked into place like the tumblers of a massive combination lock and the doors of hell swung open onto the most catastrophic war the world had, at that time, ever seen.

Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Russia, bound by pan-Slavic solidarity and treaty, mobilized. Germany, allied with Austria-Hungary and, seeing the Russian mobilization, declared war on Russia. The Franco-Russian alliance dragged France in.

Once the fighting started, Germany’s Schlieffen Plan required invading France through neutral Belgium, which triggered Britain’s 1839 treaty obligation to protect Belgian neutrality.

Within six weeks of two pistol shots in Sarajevo, virtually every major power in Europe was engaged in a brutal war that escalated with the inevitability and power of a landslide. The leaders who set the whole machine in motion genuinely believed they could control the escalation, but they were terribly and tragically wrong. The interlocking agreements and past hostilities simply took over, and seventeen million people died.

I’ve been thinking about Sarajevo a lot this week, because what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz right now follows the same terrifying script, except that this time, the European, Middle Eastern, and Asian powers that are being pulled toward what could easily become World War III all have nuclear weapons.

Here’s how we got here:

Benjamin Netanyahu made six trips to the White House in the year before the war began, each time pressing Trump and his old family friend Jared Kushner with the argument that Iran was ripe for regime change, that the mullahs were one good strike away from falling, and that history was calling.

What the New York Times’ reporting now makes clear — and what Trump’s own CIA director and secretary of state reportedly called “farcical” and “b------t” in private — is that Netanyahu had an overwhelming personal reason to want this war: he’s been fighting a fraud, bribery, and breach-of-trust criminal trial that could put him in prison if he’s convicted.

Wars are good for embattled leaders: they can generate emergency status and even pause court proceedings. And when this war started on February 28th, Netanyahu’s trial did indeed grind to a halt under Israel’s wartime court emergency rules, which had to be repeatedly extended. The trial is only now, this week, resuming. (Trump, to help his fellow authoritarian, has been publicly pressuring Israel’s president to pardon Netanyahu, telling him to do it “today” and calling him a “disgrace” for hesitating.)

So Trump (himself facing a crisis from the Epstein documents and accusations of raping a 13-year-old girl) and “Whiskey Pete” Kegseth (who simply loves war) launched a bloody confrontation in which one of the key decision-makers’ primary motivation — at least on the Israeli side — was to keep himself out of prison.

And 44 days later, the man who should be in the defendant’s chair is instead flying into southern Lebanon to pose with troops (his popularity is now sky-high in Israel because of the war), while the United States Navy blockades one of the most consequential waterways on the planet.

On Sunday, Trump posted to his failing social media site a declaration that may end up being seen, in retrospect, much like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. He proclaimed that the Navy will begin “BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz” and will “seek and interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran.”

That last sentence is the one that could rock the planet, because, as the independent National Security Desk analysis makes clear, Trump’s phrase “every vessel in International Waters” is a global directive. It means the U.S. Navy now officially claims the legal right to board, search, and seize foreign ships anywhere on the world’s oceans as well as the ships of any nation trying to pass through the Strait.

Under international maritime law, that’s called “piracy.” And here’s the other parallel to the tensions between Austria-Hungary and Serbia back in the day: roughly 80 percent of China’s oil imports that transit the Strait — that Trump just said he will “blockade” — are Chinese-owned or Chinese-connected vessels.

— China already has a Type 055 cruiser, a Type 052D destroyer, and a massive surveillance ship sitting right there in the region, in the Gulf of Oman.
— Chinese satellites have been providing real-time targeting intelligence to Iran throughout this war.
— Russia has been running electronic warfare systems that, according to pre-war assessments, degrade American radar and communications by as much as 80 percent.
— Iran’s military has been successful in killing over a dozen American troops and wounding hundreds — and downing multiple US military aircraft — because of targeting information Putin’s reportedly been giving them.

These are active military contributions to the Iranian war effort right now.

So what happens when a U.S. destroyer orders a Chinese-flagged tanker to heave to in the Strait of Hormuz and a Chinese warship sails between them? Trump has to choose between backing down — and watching the blockade collapse — or firing on the naval vessel of a country with roughly 400 nuclear warheads.

And this isn’t a purely hypothetical scenario. China and its leader Xi Jinping have made it abundantly clear that maintaining an uninterrupted energy supply through the Strait is one of its core national interests; it won’t simply steam away.

On the Russian side, Vladimir Putin is also not a man who responds with moderation to being cornered. And he’s already in deep trouble in his own country, as well as on his back foot in Ukraine.

The Atlantic Council and RAND have both documented that Putin’s domestic position is more stressed than at any point since his brutal and criminal Ukraine invasion began. Russia today faces runaway military spending consuming eight percent of GDP, skyrocketing inflation, fuel shortages, and a society that polls show has grown deeply tired of the war in Ukraine.

Analysts at the Royal United Services Institute have concluded that Putin literally cannot afford to be seen accepting strategic defeat, because the entire justification of his authoritarian model rests on his promise to “restore Russian greatness” (Make Russia Great Again). If he fails, he may not survive. Not just politically, but physically; Russia has a long, ancient history of dealing harshly with failed leaders.

Thus, a cornered, domestically vulnerable Putin with 6,000 nuclear weapons who is already actively helping Iran kill Americans isn’t a guy who backs down gracefully. He’s a leader who escalates.

And to compound things, on Sunday one of the most important parts of the worldwide autocratic network Putin’s been building for decades (including his support for Trump’s election and re-election) collapsed.

In Hungary, where Viktor Orbán has spent 16 years building the model of “illiberal democracy” that Trump, Vance, and the Heritage Foundation have openly cited as their template, voters turned out in the highest numbers since the fall of communism — a stunning 78 percent — and handed a decisive victory to opposition leader Péter Magyar and his Tisza party.

Vice President JD Vance was just there last week, rallying with Orbán, promising Trump’s “economic might” to help out Hungary (which is suffering under years of corruption and looting by Orbán’s oligarch buddies) if Fidesz held on. That ally is soon to be gone (Magyar takes over in May). The worldwide autocrat network, which is now largely led by Putin, Trump, Orbán, and Netanyahu, is beginning to fracture at its European edge.

When great powers are simultaneously cornered along with a smaller ally, when their leaders face domestic crises that demand the appearance of strength, when interlocking military commitments are already active and drawing them toward conflict, that’s when the world has historically stumbled into catastrophes that nobody wanted and nobody planned.

In 1914, it took six weeks until the dogs of all-out-war were fully unleashed. This time, we’re already 43 days in, and we have destroyers parked in a mined strait that China needs to stay alive economically and Russia would love to see humiliate the United States and Europe.

Louise and I have traveled the world extensively; I’ve stood in the World War I cemeteries of France and Belgium, with row after row of white crosses stretching to the horizon, and been stunned by the fact that every one of those young men died in a war that the people who started it genuinely believed they could control.

The lesson of WWI is that leaders who think they can manage escalation usually can’t.

The time to speak up is right now, before the tumblers click into place. Call your senators and representative (you can reach them through the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121) and tell them to support the Democrats’ War Powers Resolution that could stop Trump from going even farther down this treacherous, deadly, possibly-planet-destroying road.

Congress must reassert its constitutional war-making authority: under our Constitution, no president gets to blockade an international waterway with a social media post, and the American people didn’t vote for a nuclear confrontation with China and Russia over Benjamin Netanyahu’s corruption trial. Trump must be impeached now.

And make sure you’re registered to vote and that everyone you know is registered, because the November 2026 midterms are the most direct democratic check we still have on where this is all heading. Check your registration at Vote.gov.

• Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

Trump’s thought police may already have your name in their database, which is growing — according to Kash Patel — at the rate of around 300% right now. They’re not looking for people who’ve committed crimes but, rather, people who they think may commit crimes in the future. Thought and opinion crimes.

Yeah, like in the movie Minority Report, only with an Orwell 1984 twist. You could call it the FBI’s New Political Pre-Crime Center.

We shouldn’t be surprised, as horrific as this is. When wannabe dictators are elected to lead countries and want to end their democracies and impose absolute rule, they typically follow a simple series of steps, sometimes referred to as “The Dictator’s Playbook.” They:

— Purge government institutions of professionals and replace them with yes-men and groveling toadies.
— Strip their political party of anybody who’d even consider challenging them.
— Help friendly oligarchs buy up the nation’s primary media and turn it into a mouthpiece for the new regime, while directing billions in government contracts as recompense to those same men.
— Pack the courts so they and their buddies can crime without consequence while they drain the government of wealth.
— Build a separate, parallel police force loyal first and foremost to Dear Leader that they can use to terrify the population and “keep order.” (Schutstaffel, Brownshirts, Blackshirts, Tonton Macoute, Central Nacional de Informaciones, Brigada Político-Social, KGB/FSB, ICE, etc.)

But key to their entire identity and supporting their base of power is their ability to identify “an enemy within” and convince enough of the population that these people represent such a danger to the nation that they must be suppressed.

If you’re a democrat or lean that direction, that’s you and me. And that’s now.

Reporter Ken Klippenstein has been on this beat for a while, and his newsletter is well worth the read. He first identified the GOP’s hit list in Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, often referred to as “NSPM-7.” It identifies as potential “domestic terrorist” threats those Americans who espouse:

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

Klippenstein then, three months later, discovered that the Trump regime — specifically, Bondi’s DOJ and Patel’s FBI — was already busily compiling lists of such potential terrorists, sharing the responsibility with some 200 FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) working collaboratively with local police departments across America.

And Bondi had instructed them to go back as far as five years in their scrubbing of social media and searching out our thoughts and opinions to find Americans who presumably may oppose Christianity, billionaires, or Tradwives.

But that was just the beginning.

Now, this week, Klippenstein has found that Patel has set up within the FBI a group — including 10 different federal investigative and police agencies — to “proactively” identify those of us who may disagree with their opinions about religion, gender, or capitalism.

The old “Terrorism Screening Center” set up in the wake of 9/11 to look for guys from Saudi Arabia who may want to learn to fly planes without landing them has been shut down and replaced with the “Threat Screening Center.”

And Bin Laden’s guys aren’t the “threat” they’re looking for: it’s those “potential domestic terrorists” who aren’t sufficiently Christian; who oppose the abuses and excesses of the “free market’s” unregulated no-holds-barred monopoly capitalism; and are or have friends who are queer or otherwise support the queer community.

One of the most troubling parts of the entire story is that America’s mainstream media appears to have no interest in this whatsoever, even though it appears right there in Trump’s new budget and is already up and operating within the DOJ and FBI.

And, ironically, reporters — particularly those for what Republicans call “liberal” publications and media outlets — would probably be among Patel’s prime targets. As Klippenstein notes:

“Again, all of these developments have yielded virtually zero media attention.”

Which tosses the responsibility for letting Americans know about the new Schutstaffel that, come election time, may well be rounding up or at least “visiting” people on its list, to you and me.

America was founded on the idea that your thoughts and opinions are your own and the government has no business regulating them or punishing you for them.

Under today’s GOP, Putin is writing our European/NATO foreign policy, Netanyahu is writing our Middle Eastern foreign policy, and now, it appears, the late George Orwell is writing our domestic policy.

The question, then, isn’t whether this is happening — it already is and they’re bragging about it — but whether we’ll tolerate it. If we continue to let the Trump regime and the GOP decide which thoughts and opinions are acceptable and which make you a criminal suspect, we’ve already given up the very freedoms our Constitution was written to protect.

Our answer has to be loud, visible, and relentless: sunlight, outrage, and actions like protesting, contacting our elected officials, and voting before the Trump/Republican machinery of hate and suspicion becomes a permanent new normal in America.

• Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

On Easter Sunday, Donald Trump posted to his failing, Nazi-infested social media site a rant that has shocked the world, threatening multiple war crimes with a level of obscenity that no Republican would have tolerated from President Barack Obama or any other Democrat:

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F---in’ Strait, you crazy b------s, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH. Praise be to Allah.”

The Iranian response was to call his language “vile”:

“Iran’s steadfastness and resistance have driven Trump to the brink of madness.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene shared an opinion most of the world now agrees with, tweeting:

"He has gone insane, and all of you (the administration) are complicit.”

She added:

“Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshiping the President and intervene in Trump’s madness. Our President is not a Christian and his words and actions should not be supported by Christians.”

All of which raises the question: What the hell is going on here?

When Donald Trump’s mentor Vladimir Putin wanted to cement absolute power in Russia, he and former President Boris Yeltsin authorized a terror attack against an apartment complex in Moscow that would be blamed on Chechen “terrorists.” It was Russia’s 9/11 event, and signaled the end of that nation’s brief experiment in democracy.

Timothy Snyder, the world-renowned scholar of fascism, argued this past week that Trump and Hegseth may be planning something similar for America, using the war with Iran that they lurched us into as its foundation, and a false-flag “terror event” within the U.S. to trigger a legal state of emergency to corrupt our coming elections.

If this is their plan, it could also explain the seemingly-inexplicable decapitation of the JAG corps (which advises officers on the legality of orders), and the recent removal of about 20 of our most senior military leaders who were uniquely in a position to stop Trump and Hegseth from staging a military coup that they could use to stop or severely interfere with the November election.

After all, it wouldn’t be the first time Trump has attempted a coup against our American form of democracy; that’s exactly what he was trying to pull off on January 6th. With that attempt he was able to get the military to stand down for hours; this time he could mobilize it against the people he has now already officially designated as enemies of America in his National Security Presidential Memorandum 7.

It authorizes the FBI, DOJ, and over 200 federal Joint Terrorism Task Forces (coordinating FBI with local police across the country) to seek out and investigate any person or group who meet it’s “indica” (indicators) of potential domestic terrorism. They include, as Ken Klippenstein first reported:

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

— Have you ever spoken ill of our country or its policies, particularly under Trump?
— Trash-talked capitalism or praised socialism on social media?
— Publicly questioned Protestant Christianity or professed loyalty to Judaism, Islam, Catholicism, Hinduism, Paganism, or any other non-Evangelical-Christian belief system or religion?
— Embraced the trans or more general queer community?
— Spoken out in defense of single-parenting, gay marriage, or same-sex couples adopting children?
— Said things or carried a sign that might hurt the feelings of masked ICE agents, Trump, Miller, or Hegseth?

Just imagining that any of these could trigger FBI agents — or the Army — kicking in our doors was so grotesque a notion that when the story first appeared eight months ago, it was reported and then largely dismissed by mainstream media within the same day.

I mentioned it in a Saturday Report and an earlier article, but, like pretty much everybody else in the media, dismissed it as virtue-signaling to the Trump base rather than an actual plan to set up a Putin-style police state here in America.

I was wrong.

In a second bombshell report, Klippenstein obtained and published a copy of former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s December 4th memo ordering the FBI to actually begin Russian-KGB/FSB-style investigations of people and groups who fit into the categories listed above.

And now, he reports this week, the FBI is actively in the process of setting up the architecture necessary to essentially become America’s KGB, what he calls “the FBI’s new Political Pre-Crime Center” looking for and rooting out dissidents and critics of the Trump regime.

Not only that, Bondi also ordered the FBI to go back as far as 5 years in their investigations of our social media posts, protest attendance, and other activities to find evidence of average Americans’ possible adherence to these now-forbidden views.

At the same time, ICE is using a chunk of the massive budget the Big Ugly Bill gave them — larger than the budget of the FBI or any other police agency in America (or any other police agency in the world outside of China and Russia) — to buy tools they can use to spy on “anti-fascist” people who protest Trump’s cabal or oppose their actions.

In a report titled “ICE Wants to Go After Dissenters as well as Immigrants,” the Brennan Center for Justice details how the agency has acquired “a smorgasbord of spy technology: social media monitoring systems, cellphone location tracking, facial recognition, remote hacking tools, and more.”

They’ve reportedly acquired devices that spoof cellphone towers, so if you’re near them your phone will connect, thinking it’s talking to your cell carrier. Once the connection is established, ICE and/or DHS/FBI can monitor every communication to or from your phone and possibly even download all the content on your phone including emails, pictures, apps, and your browsing history.

They’re tying into nationwide networks of license-plate readers, airport facial recognition systems, and federal surveillance drones to monitor people they consider enemies of the Trump regime. And they’re carefully combing your social media content for posts, likes, and reposts they consider objectionable. As the Brennan Center noted:

“Homeland Security Investigations recently signed a multimillion dollar contract for a social media monitoring platform called Zignal Labs that claims to ingest and analyze more than 8 billion posts a day. The agency is also paying millions to Penlink for monitoring tools that gather information from multiple sources, including social media platforms, the dark web, and databases of location data.”

ICE is also acquiring Russian-style spy software that can remotely target your phone without your realizing it, infect it with the equivalent of an “ICE virus,” and then have your phone send them everything you do, say, hear, or see on an ongoing basis for months.

The only clue you’ll have will be that your phone gets warm and battery life seems to have dropped as it’s pumping out to ICE your data and everything the camera and microphone in it pick up, all without your knowledge or permission.

This Putin-style “search” without a legal warrant is the sort of thing that King George III’s officers did against the colonists (although back then it was reading their mail, spying on them in person, and kicking in their doors) in the 1770s that provoked our nation’s Founders to write in the Fourth Amendment to our Constitution:

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

It’s also a clear violation of the First Amendment’s protection of our rights to “free speech” and “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

When Putin ended democracy in Russia, he called the people who protested his policies “domestic terrorists” and had his secret police go after them in ways that are shockingly similar to the lawlessness ICE has been engaged in and Bondi ordered the FBI to begin.

With every passing day, Trump and his lickspittles grow more desperate that they’ll be held to account for their criminal activities and war profiteering if the November elections go the way they’re looking today.

Forty of Nixon’s senior officials, including his Attorney General John Mitchell, went to prison. Trump and his toadies realize they’re looking at the same thing if they lose their grip on power.

And now that the war is also going badly for Trump, and he’s decompensating right in front of our eyes with his obscene “Open the F---in’ Strait, You Crazy B------s!” Easter rant, comes the very real possibility that after getting nearly $90 billion for ICE and proposing an astonishing half-trillion-dollar increase in the Pentagon’s budget, he’s doing it all to buy in advance the military’s willingness to go along with a second coup attempt against America.

An ICE officer can now make $200,000 a year, enough to ensure complete loyalty to his or her paymaster in DC, Donald Trump. If Trump’s purges of the military and request for additional funds are designed to do the same thing in the armed forces so that, like in Chile during Pinochet’s day, they’ll happily turn their guns on those who hold “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views,” we need to get ready.

That means spreading the alarm far and wide, as Snyder recommends in his excellent Substack newsletter.

Share the news of this threat with everybody you know, post to social media, reach out to your politicians to tell them in advance not to knee-jerk-react to a 9/11- or Moscow Apartments-type of terrorist event between now and the November elections.

And tell elected officials to cut funding to Trump’s ICE, stop his illegal war, and to begin immediate impeachment hearings in the House of Representatives.

Well, I guess it’s reassuring to learn that gasoline prices have nothing to do with Trump’s war. And that we’re winning against Iran. In fact it’s won! Better than anybody could ever have imagined!!! Although we’ll be there another few weeks... And maybe we’ll bomb them back to the Stone Age… And he needs another $200 billion… And let’s activate the draft (except for Barron, who has congenital bone-spurs.…)

One day, we’ll look back on last Wednesday’s speech as the moment it became impossible to ignore. Not just the policy or the war, but the man and his growing mental and emotional disabilities.

Because what’s now vividly clear — and increasingly dangerous — is that Donald Trump isn’t just prosecuting a war against a major, wealthy, modern, 2,500-year-old Middle Eastern empire that is politically and militarily aligned with Russia and China: he’s doing it while he’s visibly unraveling.

Go back just a few weeks.

On February 28th, as the first strikes loomed, Trump told Axios he could “go long and take over the whole thing, or end it in two or three days.” He was calling for total conquest or a quick hit in the same sentence, the same breath.

By March 1st, he’d shifted. The war had “always been a four-week process… it’ll take four weeks — or less,” he said, according to the Washington Post. That same day, it became “four to five weeks.”

On March 2nd, he claimed we were already “ahead of schedule,” still referencing that timeline. But on social media, tracked by New York Magazine’s Intelligencer, he added something else entirely: wars, he said, could be fought “forever.”

Really? Forever. Four weeks. Two days. I guess we’re just supposed to pick one?

By March 7th, he was calling the war “a short excursion” (the proper word is “incursion”) while also saying it would continue “for a little while.” On his Nazi-infested, failing social media site he bragged that “we’ve already won.”

On March 9th, he said the war was “pretty well complete.” In an interview summarized by TIME, he insisted there was “nothing left in a military sense,” even as the fighting continued, and he predicted it would end “very soon.”

Two days later, March 11th, he declared, “We’ve won… in the first hour, it was over.” Then, on March 13th, it would last “as long as it’s necessary” — but also “not long.” By March 17th, he was rewriting history, claiming it had been “essentially largely over in two or three days.” And yet by March 31st, he was telling Reuters it would take “two weeks, maybe three” more.

And now he’s using genuinely obscene and entirely un-American language like “bomb them back to the Stone Age” that seems to invoke nuclear war.

This isn’t strategy, spin, or political 3-D chess: something is deeply wrong with this man, and American troops and Iranian schoolchildren are dying because of it. And it’s not just Trump’s critics or “liberals” noticing his rapidly increasing mental deterioration.

Laura Ingraham — hardly a member of the resistance, but a longtime Trump ally and one of the most reliable voices in the billionaire Murdoch media ecosystem — raised the question of Trump’s ability to “understand the complexity of this” out loud on her show.

“Was the president fully briefed about the risks of all of this from the beginning?” she asked. “And was he then able to take it all in and understand the complexity of this, how complex it could actually get?”

Meanwhile, major conservative figures like Joe Rogan, Alex Jones, and other online and podcast-based influencers who once embraced Trump are starting to peel away, disturbed by the chaos and the drift toward a wider war that never would have happened if we’d had a rational president in control of his faculties and willing to listen to the experts around him.

None of this surprises longtime Trump watchers like his brilliant niece, psychologist Mary Trump, who wrote about his “decompensating” mental state:

“This isn’t a joke; this isn’t one more thing we can sweep under the rug. This issue, which is infinitely more important and serious than the... emails, needs to be on the front page of every newspaper…”

Trump is running the United States the same way he ran his businesses, but worse. Impulsively, recklessly, and with a long, well-documented history of failure. This is a man, after all, who bankrupted casinos; businesses so structurally profitable that, in normal hands, they’re almost impossible to kill. A man whose corporate history is littered with collapsed ventures, unpaid contractors, lawsuits, and burned partners.

Back then, it was just his own inherited wealth that he was destroying. Now he’s ruining America’s economy, our international standing, and has set up a military disaster in the most volatile region of the world. All while it appears he’s melting down.

Nuclear-armed powers are watching and American troops’ lives — and potentially millions of others — are now on the line. Trump’s lifelong pathological lying, his sociopathic disregard for anybody but himself, and his impulsivity are now all colliding with literally life-and-death stakes that make wrecking an airline, a steak business, or a casino seem insignificant.

First of all, he appears increasingly drunk on power, both in person and online. The bizarre, overblown language of his social media posts — “we’ve already won,” “militarily WON,” his declarations clearly detached from observable reality — increasingly read like something from a spoiled, over-emotional, always-got-his-way adolescent. Tearing down the East Wing. Running multiple grifts. Attacking foreign countries. Picking unnecessary fights with allies. Hanging Putin’s picture in the White House.

Second, unlike his first term, this time Trump’s surrounded himself entirely with toadies who are absolutely terrified to tell him no or even gently contradict him. The guardrails to impulsive or destructive behavior, the professionals and experts who surrounded him nine years ago and restrained him, however imperfectly, are long gone, and what’s left is an horror-movie-funhouse echo chamber of groveling flattery and silent, breath-holding fear. His cabinet meetings are downright shocking. He’s forcing Marco Rubio to wear shoes that don’t even fit.

And third — the part nobody in the GOP or the billionaire-owned rightwing media wants to say out loud — is the reality that he’s pushing 80, and it’s showing.

The contradictions are sharper, his claims more disconnected from reality, and his rhetorical tics like “more powerful than anybody ever imagined” feel like they’re coming from somebody who’s genuinely disoriented. His public comments and posts are becoming more erratic, more grandiose, and more uncoupled from the real events that the rest of us can easily see. It’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” except nobody near him has yet been willing to point out his nakedness.

This isn’t a partisan critique: I’m just observing a pattern that others have noticed as well. And it’s accelerating at a uniquely dangerous moment in world history.

James Madison warned us that war is “the true nurse of executive aggrandizement.” War, he noted, concentrates political power, erodes accountability, and creates the possibility that a president can essentially turn himself into a dictator.

So, that’s where we are now: a war launched and incoherently narrated by a man whose own words seem to randomly fall all over themselves. Who’s visibly losing it in real time.

A commander-in-chief who treats our troops like they’re objects, toy soldiers with tin tanks and planes, rather than human people with families and hopes for the future.

A government that’s drifting toward disaster, with congressional Republicans and his cabinet members too terrified to even squeak out the tiniest objection or concern.

This has gone way beyond politics; we’re now talking national — and, perhaps, planetary — survival. It’s way bigger than one sick old man who slathers his face in orange makeup and compulsively plasters everything around him with gold paint.

Republicans in Congress and the cabinet must decide whether their loyalty is to an aging, mentally ill, demonstrably incompetent man or to the nation and world he’s put at risk.

Because the cost of continued inaction here isn’t some abstraction; it’s already being paid in American blood and treasure, and could easily lead to an escalation that no one can deal with if it really starts to spin out of control. The echoes of World War I are too loud to ignore any longer.

There are two immediate constitutional remedies: Impeachment and removal from office, or the 25th Amendment.

If even a handful of Trump’s cabinet members can summon the courage to deal with the reality that we all saw last Wednesday, they could force him into retirement. Alternatively, if enough Republicans in Congress choose country over career, they could impeach him and thus end this crisis before it spirals further.

But the clock is ticking, the prime ministers of Great Britain and Australia are already warning their people, and strongman autocrats like Putin, MBS, and Netanyahu are rubbing their hands gleefully as America crashes and burns.

If we’re serious about avoiding a wider war — or worse, a global one — we may not have the luxury of waiting for November’s election; we need to push a few brave Republicans (if we can find them) to join all the Democrats and take action now.

Because last night’s speech not only failed to tell us where this war is going but starkly shoved in all our faces the reality of how far gone the man leading it already is.

Call your Republican representative and/or Senators at 202-224-3121.

The Hartmann Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I still remember the day, back in 2009 when we were on speaking terms, when Alex Jones showed up naked for a live simulcast of our two shows. It’s one of those pictures that my staff and I have worked for years to get out of our heads.

It was for a stunt, of course; if nothing else, Alex has always known how to be a showman. It was April 15, Tax Day, and he wanted to emphasize how the IRS had “taken the shirt off my back.” Point made. And a largely harmless one (other than that $38 trillion national debt that’s 100% derived from tax cuts for billionaires and corporations we were lied into by Reagan, Bush, and Trump).

But when he filmed a phony, staged “ISIS beheading” that he claimed happened on the southern US border, it was far from harmless, according to a new book by one of his former employees, Josh Owens, titled The Madness of Believing: A Memoir from Inside Alex Jones’ Conspiracy Machine.

The video of one of Jones’ reporters dressed up as an ISIS soldier carrying a phony severed-head prop went viral, gaining millions of views, and helped fuel anti-Muslim hatred that the right-wing was then working hard to exploit in post-9/11 America. Owens told an NPR reporter that the turning point for him was sitting on a plane next to a Muslim woman with her young daughter:

“I remember sitting there watching her, and it sounds so cheesy, but it was just this moment of like ... these people didn’t do anything. There’s no reason for suspicion; it’s just racism. It’s not like after that I changed everything and all of a sudden became a good person or started to do the right thing. But it did start to make me look at things a little bit differently.”

The real crisis this kind of media causes isn’t just the misinformation; it’s the collapse of a shared reality among Americans, without which democracy can’t function. And we’re seeing that play out in real time in the daily dysfunction both in Congress and in state capitols across the nation.

When political power is built not on debate, compromise, and persuasion but on intentional lies, governance simply becomes a shallow performance and an opportunity for corruption rather than a way to serve the needs of the people of a country. It becomes, in essence, a grift.

This is why partisan lies used to seize and hold power are so corrosive: they destroy a nation’s sense of shared reality.

While it’s nearly impossible to identify any meaningful lies Democrats depend on to win elections, increase media profits, or pass special-interest legislation, there’s a long list of rightwing lies that serve those exact purposes:

— Tax cuts for billionaires help average people,
— Unions are bad for workers,
— Climate change is a hoax,
— Welfare fraud is widespread and mostly committed by Black “welfare queens,”
— Social Security is going broke and lifting the cap on what billionaires pay won’t solve the problem,
— The 2020 election was stolen from Trump,
— Immigrants bring more crime than native-born citizens,
— Deregulation doesn’t produce harms but by increasing profits helps society,
— National single-payer health insurance can’t work in America (even though it mysteriously works just fine, better than what we have, in dozens of other democracies),
— America was founded as a Christian nation,
— Men are superior to women,
— White people are superior to people of color,
— Vaccines are dangerous and COVID isn’t,
— Voter fraud and voting by non-citizens is widespread,
— Guns will keep your home and children safe,
— Rich Jews are funding a program to “replace” white workers with dark-skinned people,
— Increasing the minimum wage destroys economies and causes severe inflation.

Each one of these lies is repeated regularly by Republicans on TV and hosts of right-wing talk shows as if they’re true to the point where MAGA voters can recite them in their sleep (and when they’re carrying tiki torches).

As America learned when Fox “News” was forced to admit in court that their top talent was lying directly to the camera for months about the 2020 election, these lies are typically planned, organized, intentional, and can produce millions in revenue for the media and its stars.

Not to mention supporting billions in profits for aligned industries like fossil fuels and tobacco that depend on people believing lies to keep consuming their products.

Republican lies can also swing elections, like when a PAC aligned with George HW Bush’s 1988 campaign promoted their Willie Horton ad arguing that a prison furlough program that led to a white woman being raped and murdered by a Black man was Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis’ fault when, in fact, it’d been started by a previous Republican governor.

Rightwing lies have taken America into or prolonged wars, as we learned when Nixon lied about his “secret plan” to end the Vietnam war, Reagan “rescued” medical students by invading Grenada, George HW Bush had a member of the Kuwaiti royal family lie on national TV about Iraqi soldiers throwing babies out of incubators, Bush and Cheney lied us into combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Trump lied us into attacking Iran and killing hundreds of innocent children.

Republican lies can even create self-fulfilling prophecies, like how when both Obama and Biden each came into office Republicans and rightwing media immediately started loudly claiming the US southern border was “now wide open” and that lie, repeated over and over again by conservative politicians and media, made its way down to South and Central America and caused people there to believe it and then to migrate north.

It’s particularly problematic when Republican lies become loyalty tests for public office. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Sheldon Whitehouse have been asking every Republican-promoted federal judge nominee to come before the Judiciary Committee the simple question, “Who won the 2020 election?” Not even one single candidate has yet answered with the simple truth that Joe Biden won, fair and square, a result that was even litigated 60 times and proven before the Republicans on the Supreme Court.

The problem Republicans, right-wing billionaires, and conservative media have is that if they simply told the truth about any of the things in the list above — that they really do support more pollution and raw bigotry while exclusively working to enrich the already morbidly rich — they’d quickly lose their audiences and their voters.

The fix, therefore, isn’t particularly complicated, even if it does require discipline.

Every anchor, every host, every journalist, and particularly every guest on radio or TV who lets one of these lies slide past without correction needs to be called out for it.

Not “some people disagree,” or “Democrats say otherwise.” Lies like these require a flat-out, factual, on-air correction: “That’s not true, and here’s the proof.” There really are differences between the two major parties, and only the GOP consistently uses demonstrable lies to get their way.

When hosts or Republican guests refuse to respond to that in good faith, when they treat a documented lie as just another “perspective” worthy of equal consideration, they have to be outed.

The Founders understood — as much as they loved free speech — that democracy can’t survive without a press willing to tell the truth. What we have today in far too much of our media landscape is the opposite: a press that’s either owned by billionaires invested in the lies or so terrified of being called “liberal” that it’s stopped holding liars accountable.

So, when you see this happen, pick up your phone and tell the network, station, host, or politician exactly what you just witnessed. And amplify it on social media.

The deep truth here is that decades of Republican lies have only worked because so many in the media — and so many of us who consume media — have let them pass unchallenged.

The facts are on our side. Americans, when presented with the actual substance of these issues without partisan labels attached, consistently support the positions Democrats hold and Republicans lie about.

And remember, every one of the lies on the list above exists for one reason only: because without them, the people telling them couldn’t win an election, hold an audience, get tax cuts and deregulation, or make more money.

So, correct the lies at the dinner table. Share articles like this one that document them with receipts. Support the journalists and outlets brave enough to call partisan and corporate liars out by name. Show up for protests. And, most important, vote this fall like your democracy depends on it, because (as the old cliché goes) it does.

Turn on your local billionaire-funded right-wing media (it’s ubiquitous, after all) pretty much any day of the week and you’ll hear a similar rant, uttered with the same grinning certainty:

“ICE is going to surround the polls this November, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

They’re not floating it as an idea or something up for debate. They’re not raising it as a question of legality or even practicality. They’re promising it, celebrating it, and daring those of us who believe in democracy to try to stop them.

Steve Bannon says it nearly every broadcast. Hate-monger Jesse Watters applauds it on Fox “News” in prime time. Professional victim Ben Shapiro calls it reasonable. Newsmax, owned by two billionaires and Sheikh Sultan bin Jassim Al-Thani, hosts commentators who treat it like a done deal.

They’ve decided, in the open and on camera, with a swaggering confidence that no Republican will dare stand against them, that armed, masked thugs will stand at the entrance to your neighborhood polling place this fall, just like the Klan did in our great-grandparents’ generation in the South. Especially if you live in a neighborhood with a lot of Black and Hispanic voters.

And if you or some of your neighbors are frightened enough to turn around and avoid the building or even simply stay home, well, that’s precisely the point of this awful echo of some of the worst of America’s history.

The 150+ billionaires who bankrolled Donald Trump’s return to the White House now own the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House, and enough of our nation’s media to make their threat feel like it’s simply inevitable. As I’ve pointed out before, they’ve spent decades and billions of dollars building a media and think-tank infrastructure to keep working people confused, divided, and willing to believe whatever bullshit they’re fed.

But what these wannabe fascists don’t own yet, at least not completely, is your right to vote. And, looking at the prospect of a Blue Tsunami, that’s exactly what hard-right Republicans are working to fix before November.

“You’re damn right we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November,” Bannon announced on his podcast back in February, and he’s been repeating it in variations ever since.

Fox “News’” Jesse Watters thinks it’s a splendid idea. Ben Shapiro is fully on board. Newsmax hosts have been cheerleading it for weeks. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche — formerly Trump’s criminal attorney — stood at CPAC and asked, with feigned innocence, why anyone would object to armed, masked goons menacing people by standing outside polling places. You know, just like in the 1920s and the 1880s in the Deep South.

They’ve wrapped the whole scheme in the claim of “election integrity,” which is the same language every authoritarian in history has used when he decided the wrong people were voting too easily. It was the underlying logic and rationalization for Jim Crow in previous generations.

The real target of this obscene scheme isn’t some mythical army of illegal voters: as the Heritage Foundation discovered, they literally don’t exist in any meaningful way. Their real target is you, particularly if you’re not a straight white man, and the one of the several tools they’re planning to use is raw, naked fear.

And it’s not like they don’t know exactly what they’re doing. The Heritage Foundation’s own voter fraud database, assembled by people who have every political incentive to find a crisis, has documented exactly 68 cases of noncitizen voting going back to the 1980s. Sixty-eight cases across four decades in a country of 330 million people having cast billions of votes.

And when Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security conducted an internal review specifically to build the legal and political case for this “emergency,” they came back with the same answer: there is no evidence of widespread fraud. None.

The “crisis” Republicans have been using to justify making it hard to vote since the 1960s is entirely fictional. The emergency was cynically manufactured by rightwing operatives including William Rehnquist and proclaimed in 1980 by Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich. But the armed thugs they want to plant at your polling place will be very, very real, and their effect on who decides to show up and vote will be very, very real, too.

What they’re proposing is also, not incidentally, a federal felony.

Title 18 of the United States Code, Section 592 — a law written in the aftermath of the Civil War by horrified legislators who’d personally watched armed and officially deputized members of the Klan threaten Black voters with nooses and at gunpoint — makes it a crime punishable by up to five years in prison and the loss of any elected or appointed position to deploy armed federal personnel to any polling location, anywhere in America:

“Whoever, being an officer of the Army or Navy, or other person in the civil, military, or naval service of the United States, orders, brings, keeps, or has under his authority or control any troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held, unless such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both; and be disqualified from holding any office of honor, profit, or trust under the United States.” (emphasis added)

That law has been on the books for more than a century because the people who wrote it understood that the moment we let the government sanction terror at voting locations, we no longer have a real democracy. Which, of course, is exactly the point of these rightwing fascists.

The cruelty of the scheme becomes even clearer when we consider how closely what ICE has been doing resembles previous generations’ experience of the Klan. A 2025 Supreme Court “shadow docket” ruling written by Pillsbury Doughboy imitator Brett Kavanaugh in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo says ICE can profile Americans based on how dark their skin is, where they work, or how they talk — the so-called “Kavanaugh Stops” — and what’s followed has been a wave of well-documented harassment of brown-skinned U.S. citizens.

A 20-year-old American citizen named Mubashir Khalif Hussen, for example, was stopped by masked ICE agents while walking from work to lunch in Minneapolis, shackled, and violently dragged off to a federal building — as he repeatedly protested that he was a US citizen and carried in his pocket the proof of it — before being threatened, humiliated, and ultimately released. He repeated “I’m a citizen, I’m a citizen” the entire time, but the agents, hungry for their bonuses and high on functional Vice President Stephen Miller’s racism, didn’t care.

A ProPublica investigation found more than 170 cases of U.S. citizens beaten, shackled, or dragged off at raids and protests, and that’s probably just the tip of a very large, very deep iceberg.

According to the Cato Institute, 73 percent of people booked into ICE detention since October 2025 had no criminal convictions whatsoever. You don’t need a scientific study to know what happens to Latino voter turnout when an ICE thug is the first thing you see when you walk up to cast your ballot.

The Brookings Institution found around 75 percent of Latinos across the country can speak Spanish well enough to be flagged under ICE’s “Kavanaugh Stop” profiling criteria, making enormous numbers of Latino citizens vulnerable to harassment and detention based on nothing more than how they sound. Not to mention that Brett Kavanagh’s diktat allows for harassment and arrest based on the color of their skin.

And Republicans know it. That suppression of the vote isn’t an incidental side effect of this GOP plan. It is the plan.

And what gets suppressed along with those votes is everything that working people in this country depend on to survive.

This — in addition to trying to keep Trump, his grifter family, and his toadies out of jail — is also the most recent way Republicans are going after FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society programs that built the modern middle class.

Research from the Economic Policy Institute documents how the states with the most aggressive voter suppression are also the same states with the lowest wages, the weakest labor protections, and the highest rates of poverty.

Red states with aggressive voter suppression have, in fact, the highest rates in the nation of:

— Spousal abuse
— Obesity
— Smoking
— Teen pregnancy
— Sexually transmitted diseases
— Abortion (at least before Dobbs; now it would be “forced births”)
— Bankruptcies and poverty
— Homicide and suicide
— Infant mortality
— Maternal mortality
— Forcible rape
— Robbery and aggravated assault
— Dropouts from high school
— Divorce
— Contaminated air and water
— Opiate addiction and deaths
— Unskilled workers
— Parasitic infections
— Income and wealth inequality
— Covid deaths and unvaccinated people
— Federal subsidies to states (“Red State Welfare”)
— People on welfare
— Child poverty
— Homelessness
— Spousal murder
— Unemployment
— Deaths from auto accidents
— People living on disability
— Gun deaths

That’s not a coincidence, and, for social scientists, it’s not a mystery. When working people can’t vote union rights evaporate, so corporate bosses don’t have to negotiate with their workers. When working people can’t vote, the minimum wage stays frozen, healthcare gets stripped, unions get busted, and social services are cut to pay for tax cuts so the morbidly rich keep all the money they’ve made from the labor of the people at the bottom.

Research from Equitable Growth has gone even further, showing a direct causal link between higher voting rates and higher minimum wages, more generous state support programs, and lower income inequality overall, which is why Blue states consistently have the highest standards of living in the country.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, by breaking down barriers that kept Black workers from the polls, actually reduced the Black-white wage gap. When five corrupt, racist Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted key provisions of that Act in 2013, the racial wage gap got worse again.

The ballot box isn’t just a civic ritual. For working people, it’s the democratic lever that moves everything else. It’s how you get a raise, keep your healthcare, and make the people who write the rules answer to the people who must live under them.

That’s why what Bannon, Trump, and his billionaire backers are doing is so nakedly corrupt. They know that if Black, Latino, and young voters, along with hourly workers and people in the communities ICE is currently terrorizing, all show up in November, the GOP will experience an electoral bloodbath.

When their congressional allies lose their majority, the billionaires’ and Trump crime family’s looting gets interrupted. Two years of ruinous tariffs, Medicaid cuts, tax giveaways to the morbidly rich, and the demolition of every federal agency designed to protect workers rather than owners all face a reckoning. Trump’s lickspittles — including his Attorney General — face prison, just like over 40 of Nixon’s aides and his Attorney General did.

That’s what they’re in an absolute panic about. That’s what armed, masked thugs at the polling place are designed to prevent.

I’ve spent enough time studying the history of authoritarianism, both in literature and in countries I’ve visited or worked in, to recognize what this moment represents. Every Putin-, Orban-, and Trump-style strongman who’s converted a democracy into an authoritarian state started by making “certain people” afraid to participate.

Today’s Republicans aren’t even original in their obscene threats of implied violence at the polling places. For almost a century after the Civil War, this was completely normal in the previously Confederate South.

And as the Klan taught previous generations of Americans, intimidation also doesn’t need to be legal to work. The chilling effect lands the same way whether or not the statute books say it’s permissible, which is exactly why they’re planning this in open defiance of federal law, and exactly why we have to name it for what it is: an attack on our constitutional right to determine our own leaders and thus our own nation’s future.

Call your member of Congress (202-224-3121) and demand they go on record opposing any deployment of ICE or other armed Trump goons to polling places. Let them know it’s a federal crime that should be enforced, and any federal official — including the president — who pushes it must “be disqualified from holding any office” and lose their job.

Check your voter registration right now at vote.org and make sure nothing has changed since the last time you looked, particularly if you live in a Red state.

Then bring every person you know to the polls this November, because the people trying to scare us away from the ballot aren’t just doing it for fun; like previous generations in the South, they well understand the vote’s power better than most of the people who take it for granted. It’s well past time the rest of us caught up.

• Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

Standing in the Oval Office last week, Donald Trump declared that the war with Iran — a war he started without a declaration of Congress, apparently at the urging of MBS and his son-in-law who takes $25 million a year from Saudi Arabia — is “won,” and then added that “the only one that likes to keep it going is the fake news.”

Iran, for its part, flatly denied that any negotiations are even taking place. And the network news covered it just like that: Trump says the war is won, Iran says it isn't, here's the weather.

Nobody on camera yesterday morning even bothered to ask why Jared Kushner, who was simultaneously soliciting a fresh $5 billion from the Saudis who lobbied hardest for this war, was one of the people at the table in Geneva when the last chance for a deal collapsed.

That omission isn't an accident. It’s the result of a thirty-year Republican strategy to bully the press into docility, and it’s long past time for Democrats to fight back using the exact same playbook.

An old friend dropped me a note this week with a complaint that, once you hear it, you can’t stop noticing everywhere you look in our nation’s media. He’d been watching one of the three major network TV evening newscasts and noticed that Trump and other Republicans are on every single night, almost always without serious pushback or fact-checking, while Democrats are rarely featured at all.

When a Democrat does show up, it’s usually to react to something Trump just did or said, a process that reinforces the Republican frame of the news even when it pushes back against it (see: George Lakoff).

I’ve been in the media much of my life; was a radio news reporter for a top station in the 1970s and have been writing books and articles about democracy and politics regularly for the past three decades. What my friend is describing is neither an accident nor a coincidence.

It’s the fully ripened fruit of a successful strategy Republicans have been running to get the media to spin stories for them since the early 1980s. And it’s long past time for Democrats to stand up and fight back hard with exactly the same playbook.

Back during the 1992 Clinton/Bush Sr. presidential race, Rich Bond, then chairman of the GOP, explained his party’s media strategy with unusual candor:

“There is some strategy to it,” he said of their habit of bashing the so-called liberal media. “If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is ‘work the refs.’ Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one.”

Lee Atwater had been running a version of this strategy for years before Bond said the quiet part out loud. The genius of it was that they never needed to prove that the media was actually infected with “liberal bias.”

Which was good for them, because the mainstream media’s never really had any sort of political bias other than status quo; it’s just that the GOP has relied on so many lies over the years like “trickle down,” “murderous immigrant invasion,” “evil union bosses,” “non-citizens voting,” “queer predators,” etc., etc., that when they get confronted with reality it seems to them like bias.

All they needed was for the accusation to be repeated often enough that journalists and producers would end up sufficiently intimidated to lean over backward to prove they weren’t pushing a liberal line. And it worked.

Media scholar Eric Alterman documented the phenomenon in detail at the Center for American Progress: conservative columnists like George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and Bob Novak had prominent perches all over the allegedly “liberal” media showing up on major TV programs weekly, while genuinely progressive voices like Paul Krugman and E.J. Dionne almost never got television slots.

A study comparing Sunday morning talk shows during Obama’s first two years versus Trump’s first two years (first time around) found that by the Trump era, every single major Sunday show, including NBC’s Meet the Press and CBS’s Face the Nation, was featuring more Republicans than Democrats. And a FAIR analysis found Republicans outnumbering Democrats 56% to 40% in Sunday show appearances during Trump’s first post-election transition period.

Here’s how effectively this strategy worked: When Bush was president, the networks said they “needed more Republicans” on television because “Republicans are in power.” When Obama was president, they said they “needed more Republicans” on TV “because Democrats were in charge,” and “it’s important to hear from the opposition.”

Heads Republicans win, tails Democrats lose, every single time, under almost every conceivable circumstance and on pretty much every topic. That’s not journalism. That’s genuine media bias. In favor of the GOP.

And while that particular scheme was playing out, the billionaires on the hard right were simultaneously building media empires of their own that now include roughly 1,500 rightwing radio stations, Fox “News,” Newsmax, One America News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, more than half of America’s local newspapers, and now, CBS itself.

Meanwhile, CNN may soon land in the hands of the same billionaire nepo-baby buyer, reportedly eager to move it in a similar direction. Just ask Pete Hegseth, who recently said, “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”

Even the White House and Pentagon press pools, once home to credentialed reporters from established outlets, are now packed with “reporters” from fringe rightwing websites and sketchy podcasts, while serious journalists and representatives of progressive outlets often find themselves locked out.

The hypocrisy here, particularly since the media now either ignores or treats Trump family and cabinet corruption as something normal, is breathtaking.

For example, Jared Kushner has been simultaneously acting as Trump’s Middle East “peace envoy” while raising a new $5 billion round of investment from the same foreign governments he’s supposedly negotiating with.

Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which is controlled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), already pumped $2 billion into Kushner’s private equity firm right after he left the first Trump White House, and pays him $25 million a year in management fees.

According to reporting in The Washington Post, MBS was making private phone calls to Trump for weeks before the bombing of Iran started, urging him to strike, since Iran is Saudi Arabia’s chief regional rival.

Kushner himself met with Iran’s foreign minister in Geneva just before the bombs fell. Iran’s foreign minister later said a deal “was within reach,” suggesting Kusnher may have been playing them for suckers on behalf of MBS and/or Netanyahu (an old Kushner family friend).

Senators Ron Wyden and Jamie Raskin have called for investigations into whether Kushner violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act and the Constitution’s emoluments clause. Not to mention policies against nepotism. And that’s Trump’s peace envoy. That’s the person steering American foreign policy toward a war that explicitly benefits and may even be being fought — at the cost of American lives and treasure — on behalf of his biggest client.

At the same time, Qatar handed Trump a $400 million luxury Boeing 747 jumbo jet to ultimately keep for himself and you and I are now paying a billion dollars to outfit it. Multiple constitutional law scholars have called it a textbook violation of the Foreign Emoluments Clause, which prohibits presidents from accepting gifts from foreign governments without congressional approval.

The New York Times has reported that Trump has already personally pocketed at least $1.4 billion from the presidency through his family’s various business deals; other investigations suggest the number could be well over $4 billion.

The administration has also been killing people on boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean — at least 151 people killed in 45 strikes since last September — including at least one Colombian fisherman, all without a declaration of war or congressional authorization. And then they bombed and invaded Venezuela, killing more than 80 people including civilians, seizing its president without any legal authority whatsoever under international law.

Now, consider what would have happened if Barack Obama or Bill Clinton had done any of this? What if Clinton’s son-in-law had taken $2 billion from a foreign government and then whispered in Clinton’s ear to start a war that benefited that same foreign government? What if Obama had accepted a $400 million jet from Qatar? What if a Democratic administration had been killing people on boats in international waters without congressional authorization?

Republicans would have been incandescent, holding news conferences and hearing after hearing after hearing. Fox “News” would have run wall-to-wall of outraged coverage for months. The Sunday shows would have featured nothing but Republicans demanding impeachment or worse.

And the mainstream media would have covered those hearings seriously and continuously, because they’d have been terrified of being called “liberal” if they didn’t.

That’s the mechanism. That’s how it works. Republicans institutionalized the accusation of “liberal media bias” so thoroughly that the media now polices itself on their behalf, even when the corruption on the other side is jaw-dropping.

The solution to this media crisis that’s so damaging to our democracy is straightforward, and Democrats need to do it now.

Every senator, every congressperson, every governor, every mayor, every Democratic surrogate who goes on television needs to be trained to say the words “rightwing media bias” early and often, not occasionally, but constantly, institutionally, the same way Republicans “worked the refs” for thirty years.

It means pressuring the networks directly. It means holding hearings — even if they have to be unofficial “shadow” hearings — right now about media consolidation and the capture of the press corps by rightwing interests. It means pointing out, loudly and specifically, every single time a network gives a Republican five minutes of uncontested airtime and then gives a Democrat thirty seconds to “respond.”

Republicans didn’t spend forty years bleating about the “liberal media” because the liberal media actually existed. They knew it didn’t but were relentless about the accusation nonetheless, and they had the infrastructure to amplify it everywhere, all the time.

Democrats can do the same thing today, and unlike the GOP, they have the truth on their side.

This starts with you. Call your Democratic senators and representatives today and demand they raise this issue publicly and loudly, in press conferences, in hearings, in every television interview. Share this article. Talk with your neighbors about it.

The refs change their calls when the voices get loud enough. It’s time to start speaking out loudly.

Steve Bannon, an enthusiastic advocate of authoritarianism, dropped the mask this week. On his War Room podcast, while interviewing far-right lawyer Mike Davis, Bannon said plainly what the Trump administration has been dancing and weaving around for months:

“We can use this as a test run, as a test case, to really perfect ICE’s involvement in the 2026 midterm elections.”

There it is. Not a conspiracy theory. And definitely not liberal hand-wringing. The man himself, in his own words, explaining exactly what’s going on at airports across the country right now.

I’ve been writing and talking about authoritarian playbooks for decades, including in my book The Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class, and they almost always follow the same predictable script.

First, you exploit (Reichstag Fire, 9/11) or manufacture (“Border invasion,” Iran attack) a crisis. Use that to change the laws to give yourself more power as you flood public spaces with your militarized enforcers under the cover of “helping.”

Then you normalize it. Have you noticed how stories about ICE brutalizing and killing people have gone from the front pages to occasional mentions on social media?

Then you expand it. ICE has gone national, massive databases of protesters are being organized, and Trump this weekend came right out and said that his next target will be Democrats, who he called America’s “greatest enemy,” using the “Democrat Party” slur that Joe McCarthy suggested Republicans should always use:

“Now with the death of Iran, the greatest enemy America has is the Radical Left, Highly Incompetent, Democrat Party!”

Hitler didn’t march his stormtroopers into polling places on day one. He put them on street corners first, just like Trump is doing. By the time Germans understood what was happening, the intimidation and threats of violence or imprisonment were already baked into daily life, and questioning what was happening felt like questioning the natural order of things.

As you can see, what’s happening in American airports today is simply a chapter of that same playbook.

The crisis, of course, was manufactured. TSA agents are working their second or third round of missed paychecks because Trump and Republicans in Congress refuse to fund the Department of Homeland Security.

More than 400 TSA officers have quit since the shutdown began, according to their union. Callout rates at some airports have hit 55% in recent days. Lines at JFK, Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson, and George Bush Intercontinental have stretched three hours or more, right in the middle of spring break travel season.

And why hasn’t this been fixed? Because, as Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana admitted on Fox News just yesterday morning, Trump killed the deal. Kennedy and Ted Cruz had actually worked out a two-step plan with Senate Democrats to reopen DHS and get our TSA agents paid. It would have worked just fine.

“Senator Thune submitted that to President Trump,” Kennedy said. “As is his right, he said no. No deals with the Democrats. So we’re back to square one.”

Senate Republicans have now blocked legislation to pay TSA agents at least seven separate times.

So the chaos in our airports isn’t an accident. It’s the setup for the end of free and fair elections and the final installation of a fascist state here in America. Create the crisis, then ride in to “save the day” with your loyal and violent enforcers as the solution.

And notice who those enforcers are: ICE agents, funded not through the normal appropriations process that’s stalled but through the $75 billion Trump locked into his “One Big Beautiful Bill” last year, fully paid while TSA workers go broke.

The agents can’t run X-ray machines, as border chief Tom Homan himself admitted. They’re not trained for airport security or to help people efficiently get to their airplanes.

What they are trained for, as Bannon crowed about on his podcast, is looking for brown-skinned people and checking their IDs. And that, Bannon said explicitly, is “perfect training for the fall of 2026.”

Bannon’s rightwing guest Davis was enthusiastic, saying ICE should be at polling places because “if you’re an illegal alien, you can’t vote.”

That claim sounds reasonable until you realize that noncitizen voting is, as Democracy Docket, the Cato Institute, and numerous academic studies have documented, virtually nonexistent. It’s a naked lie Republicans have been pushing since the 1960s to justify suppressing the vote of minorities and women.

The Heritage Foundation’s own election fraud database, after years of searching, found only a tiny handful of cases — fewer than 30 over several decades — in a country that cast billions of votes over that time period.

This has nothing to do with illegal voting, and Steve Bannon and Donald Trump both know it. As does every elected Republican and the very well paid professional propagandists at Fox “News.” It has everything to do with stopping legal voting by Americans who might vote the “wrong way.”

And it doesn’t stop at airports. The Fulton County FBI raid in late January exposed another piece of this apparent puzzle. Armed federal agents showed up at the Fulton County Elections Hub in Georgia and carted away over 700 boxes of 2020 ballots, as well as voter rolls and voting machine tabulator tapes.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was personally present, saying she was there at Trump’s personal direction. The affidavit used to justify the warrant cited claims about the 2020 election that have already been investigated, audited, litigated, and debunked repeatedly. Fulton County Commission Chair Robb Pitts put it plainly:

“Every audit, every recount, every court ruling has confirmed what we the people of Fulton County already knew: Our elections were fair and accurate and every legal vote was counted.”

Georgia’s ballots were hand-counted three times after the election six years ago. There’s nothing to find, because nothing untoward happened.

But that’s not really what the raid was about either, was it? It was about setting up a rationale for future election interference.

About sending a message that the federal government can roll into any county in America, flash a warrant, and in a clear violation of the Constitution walk out with your election infrastructure. It was about demonstrating raw power, and about laying the groundwork for stealing this fall’s contest.

What comes next, Bannon has now told us directly: ICE surrounding polling places in November to scare away Black and brown voters and intimidate anybody else afraid of being the next Renee Good or Alex Pretti.

Trump himself has told reporters he thinks Republicans should “take over the voting in at least 15 places.” When pressed by reporters, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt admitted that she “can’t guarantee” that ICE agents won’t be at polling places this fall.

Newly confirmed DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, during his confirmation hearing, also refused to rule it out, saying he’d only deploy ICE if there was a “specific threat,” without explaining that that could mean pretty much anything.

So imagine walking up to your polling place in November, having driven past ICE vans parked outside, seeing heavily armed immigration agents in black gear and wearing masks standing near the entrance.

You’re a citizen. You know you have the right to vote. But your neighbor is undocumented. Or your cousin is. Or you’ve been at an immigration rights protest. You don’t know if your name is on one of the many lists you’ve read about. You don’t know what “specific threat” means. And you think: maybe I’ll just come back later. Maybe it’s not worth it.

That’s voter suppression in its most raw and brutal form. That’s the way Vladimir Putin would do it. And that’s what this invasion of our airports is for.

Federal law under 18 U.S.C. § 594 prohibits “intimidating, threatening, or coercing any person with regard to voting or attempting to vote.” The law under 52 U.S.C. § 20511 prohibits certain federal and state officials from acts of fraud in connection with federal elections.

Deploying federal law enforcement at polling places for the purpose of intimidating voters as Bannon is bragging they’re setting up now is not some obscure, gray area of American law. It’s blatantly illegal. But the Trump regime has made clear, over and over again, that it considers itself above the law. And there’s no way Ka$h Patel’s FBI is going to investigate ICE or even itself.

I’ve been doing this long enough to remember when suggestions like the ones Bannon is making would have ended a political career before lunch. Now they’re bragged about on a podcast with millions of listeners, and the White House doesn’t deny them. That’s how normalization works.

That’s exactly how it worked in the 1930s, when European democracies looked at what was coming and kept telling themselves “it can’t really happen here.”

But it can happen here: It is happening here.

What you can do right now is simple but urgent. First, check your voter registration at vote.org and make sure you’re still on the rolls, especially if you live in a red state where Republican-led purges are removing voters by the hundreds of thousands.

Second, contact your senators, both of them, and demand they go on record about whether they support ICE agents at polling places. Make them say it out loud. Ditto for your member of the House of Representatives. (202-224-3121)

Third, support the organizations fighting this in court. Democracy Docket is doing extraordinary work on exactly these cases, and Fulton County’s lawsuit seeking the return of their ballots is one battle in a much larger war.

And fourth, talk to everyone you know. Not just the people who already agree with you, but your neighbors, your coworkers, your family. Because the goal of all of this, the airports, the raid, the threats, is to make you feel like resistance is futile.

It isn’t. But only if we act like it isn’t.