Thom Hartmann

Donald Trump is already telling us he’s going to try to steal the 2026 election, and the fact that he’s saying it now, months in advance, is the whole tell.

Back in February, he stood up and declared that “Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” floated taking over the vote in 15 states his party doesn’t control, and returned to the lie he’s been pushing for a decade, that mail-in ballots are crawling with fraud.

They aren’t. Americans have voted by mail for more than a century and a half, and the Brennan Center has shown over and over that you’re more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit mail-ballot fraud.

The fraud claim was never an argument: it’s an excuse for voter suppression, its own form of election fraud. When you convince tens of millions of people that the only way your side can possibly lose is if the other side cheats, you’ve prepared them to swallow whatever you “have to do to protect the vote,” and to reject the result as illegitimate if you lose anyway. That’s the groundwork, and they’re laying it right now in the open.

The measures themselves are extraordinary. This spring, Trump signed an executive order trying to seize federal control over how states run their elections, and when the courts blocked most of it, his administration found a back door through, of all places, the Post Office.

The Postal Service has proposed a rule that would let it refuse to deliver mail-in ballots in any state that won’t first hand over its complete list of mail voters to the federal government, a rule the NAACP says is built to disenfranchise voters and that 23 Democratic-led states are now suing to stop.

Steve Bannon went on his podcast and promised that “we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November,” and when reporters asked the White House to rule it out, the press secretary wouldn’t. More than forty-eight million Americans voted by mail in 2024.

These men want the power to decide whose ballot gets carried to the mailbox and who feels safe enough to show up in person.

If you’re wondering why they’re working this hard to keep you from voting, the answer slipped out of Todd Blanche’s mouth this spring.

Standing on a stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) outside Dallas, the man who’d been Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer and who now runs the Justice Department as acting Attorney General told the crowd, “[E]verybody’s afraid that the next administration, if we don’t win, we’re going to all be investigated and indicted.”

He meant it as a rallying cry. What he actually delivered was a confession: you don’t spend your evenings bracing for an indictment unless some quiet part of you already knows what you’ve done.

A reckoning is coming for the people breaking the law for this president, and they can feel it.

And now the White House is even discussing completely blowing up the Constitution and the right of habeas corpus, which dates back to the year 1215 when the British elite forced King John to sign the Magna Carta on the plain at Runnymede. As the New York Times reported:

“Suspending habeas corpus was one of two radical ideas [Trump's Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen] Miller had been pushing that alarmed [White House Staff Secretary Will] Scharf. The other was invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military to enforce the law on American streets as protests grew against deportation sweeps.”

Todd Blanche, in particular, has every reason to be worried: he knows who Trump really is, and what he’s capable of.

He’s the lawyer who defended Trump in the New York hush-money trial that ended in 34 felony convictions, and in the federal cases over January 6th and the classified documents stashed at Mar-a-Lago.

He’s also the guy who’s now hiding three million Epstein documents and cut the cushy, puppy-filled deal with Ghislaine Maxwell for keeping her mouth shut.

Now he presides over a Justice Department that he and Trump have remade into a personal instrument of vengeance, complete with a Hitler-like 60-foot banner of Trump’s leering face on its façade, and the president has just nominated him to hold the office permanently.

So when Blanche says out loud that he’s afraid, he isn’t being paranoid. He’s being a good lawyer, reading the room, and the room he’s reading is called “history.”

It reminds me of two lawyers I learned about when we lived in Germany, because the men doing Trump’s legal dirty work today are walking a road that better-dressed men walked 90 years ago, and, as a result, we know exactly where it leads.

The first is Hans Frank, who started out as Adolf Hitler’s personal attorney, defending Hitler and his Nazi thugs in court all through the 1920s the way Blanche once stood behind Trump at the defense table.

When Hitler took power, Frank was rewarded. He became the Reich’s chief jurist, president of the Academy for German Law, and eventually Governor-General of occupied Poland, where he presided over ghettos, mass plunder, and slaughter on a scale that’s still hard to grasp.

Frank was the respectable face of the regime, the man who insisted there was a legal theory for everything. At the Nuremberg trials he was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and on October 16, 1946, the respectable lawyer was hanged.

The second man is Roland Freisler, and if Frank shows you what happens to the enabler, Freisler shows you what happens to the judge who decides — like Blanche has argued and John Roberts went along with — that the law is simply whatever Dear Leader wants it to be.

Freisler ran the Volksgerichtshof, the People’s Court, a tribunal stood up outside Germany’s constitutional structure for the express purpose of producing the verdicts the regime demanded. He handed down thousands of death sentences in three years.

He screamed at defendants from the bench, ordered their microphones cut, condemned the young students of the White Rose resistance to the guillotine for the crime of printing leaflets, and sent the officers of the July 20th plot to be hanged within hours of their show trials.

Freisler never faced a Nuremberg of his own, but only because an American bomb fell on his courthouse in February 1945 while he was reportedly clutching a defendant’s case file. The defendant lived; the judge did not. There’s a grim justice in the fact that the one man who most weaponized the law against his fellow citizens was killed holding the very file he was using to destroy one of them.

I stood in the small plaza at the University of Munich back in 1988, the Geschwister-Scholl-Platz, named for Hans and Sophie Scholl, where the two of them were caught scattering their leaflets from the gallery before Freisler sent them to die. They were the Renee Good and Alex Pretti of their time.

The university has since pressed bronze replicas of those scattered leaflets right into the pavement, so that today you walk over them and have to stop.

You think, standing there, about how ordinary the machinery of all this was. It wasn’t run by monsters in uniform alone. It was run by men like Todd Blanche and John Roberts, men with law degrees, men who told themselves they were just interpreting the statutes, just following the orders, just serving the head of state.

And every honest accounting that came afterward, from Nuremberg onward, rejected that excuse and established the principle that a directive from above does not protect the man who carries it out.

That principle is precisely what must be keeping Todd Blanche awake, because we’re already watching the American version, as Mark Twain once said, rhyme.

When Trump wanted his enemies prosecuted, the career professionals balked, so the administration installed Lindsey Halligan, another former Trump personal lawyer with no prosecutorial experience whatsoever, as a U.S. attorney, and she promptly indicted James Comey and Letitia James.

In contrast with Germany in 1933, a federal judge threw both cases out, ruled her appointment unlawful, and other judges in the district were so disgusted that one of them now puts an asterisk beside her name on every court filing.

Thankfully, at least so far, these are not the actions of a legal system that’s fully surrendered (although Aileen Cannon may soon have a word). They’re the actions of one that’s still fighting back, and that fight is the whole ballgame.

But it gets worse, because that same executive order about mail-in voting also directs the Department of Homeland Security to build its own state-by-state lists of who’s eligible to vote, exactly the kind of national database you’d assemble if your real plan was to pressure states into purging their rolls.

If that sounds like paranoia, it’s only because we’ve already forgotten that we lived through it. In 2000, Jeb Bush’s secretary of state, Katherine Harris, who also happened to be co-chair of his brother George’s Florida campaign, hired a private firm to scrub the voter rolls using a list of supposed felons that included eight thousand names shipped in from Texas.

The matching was deliberately loose, flagging anyone whose last name was an 80 percent match to a felon’s, and the Brennan Center later found that at least 12,000 eligible voters were wrongly purged, 22 times George W. Bush’s 537-vote margin. Black Floridians were 11 percent of the electorate and 41 percent of the people thrown off the rolls.

Bush took the presidency by that sliver, and the Florida Supreme Court-ordered recount that would have caught the theft was shut down by a Supreme Court whose deciding majority included a justice his own father had put on the bench, Clarence Thomas, whose wife was at that very moment collecting résumés for a Bush administration, and Antonin Scalia, whose sons worked for firms representing Bush, neither of whom saw any reason to step aside.

That’s the voter merge-and-purge playbook, and they’re dusting it off on a national scale for this November with new, borrowed-from-Putin tweaks. Or at least they’re trying their hardest to.

When the Reichstag finally voted itself out of existence in March 1933, uniformed storm troopers lined the walls of the chamber so the legislators would understand the price of voting no.

That’s the tradition these men are drawing from, and we’d be fools not to be clear-eyed and ready for just about anything between now and November. After all, we all watched what Trump and his lickspittles did on January 6th, 2021, killing four police officers as they tried to “hang Mike Pence.”

But here’s the difference between Germany in 1933 and America in 2026 and, as Wendy Lawrence argues in a brilliant recent essay, it comes down to timing.

The Germans got their decisive vote after the seizure of power, when a newly seated Reichstag rubber-stamped the Enabling Act and handed Hitler everything. We get ours before. Which is why they’re so frantically trying to suppress the vote.

The November midterms will arrive while the courts are still ruling against this administration, while subpoenas can still be issued, while the power of the purse still belongs to whoever controls the House.

A Democratic majority doesn’t need to convict anyone to change everything. It can deny the appropriations that fund the deployments and the detention machine, it can compel sworn testimony and drag the concealed directives into daylight, and it can restore a Justice Department willing to enforce laws like Section 242, the Reconstruction-era statute that makes it a felony for any official to strip any citizen of their constitutional rights.

The Supreme Court’s immunity ruling shields the president’s official acts, but it shields no one beneath him. The agents, the contractors, the lawyers who signed the unlawful papers, all of them remain fully exposed, and a future attorney general can act on that.

Trump understands this perfectly, which is why he told House Republicans that they have to win the midterms because otherwise “they’ll find a reason to impeach me.” It’s why his people muse about ICE at the polls and write rules to choke off the mail. It’s why Stephen Miller is reportedly pushing to suspend habeas corpus. It’s why Trump promised to “pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval [Office].”

These lawyers and judges aren’t afraid of impeachment as an abstraction: they’re afraid of the reckoning that oversight makes possible, the same reckoning Hans Frank met at the end of a rope and Roland Freisler escaped only by dying.

The coming reckoning — unless they can stop it this fall — isn’t vengeance. It’s the rule of law standing back up after being knocked down, and in this country that recovery still runs through a ballot box which the members of the Reichstag of 1933 no longer had.

So, make sure you’re registered, and make sure everyone you know is too, at vote.org, and if you vote by mail, request your ballot early this fall and send it back early so no postal rule can run out the clock on you.

Save the nonpartisan Election Protection hotline in your phone, 866-OUR-VOTE, and call it the moment anyone tries to intimidate you at a polling place, because no badge and no uniform has the right to stand between you and your vote.

Call your representatives through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and remind them that funding lawless deployments, gutting oversight, suspending habeas corpus, and letting the Post Office police our ballots are against the Constitution.

Keep an eye on your own statehouse at openstates.org, where this fight is being waged district by district.

And if this piece helped you see the stakes clearly, please share it and support independent journalism here at the Hartmann Report, because the people counting on you to look away are counting just as hard on you to stay home, and the single most dangerous thing you can do to them is to show up.

A Cable TV host did an extended rant a few days ago about how many cases Trump has lost in court, arguing that “these guys are really bad at what they do” or words to that effect. I beg to differ: they know exactly what they’re doing, and getting convictions to imprison protesters isn’t (yet — they haven’t yet finished building out their network of concentration camps) their real goal.

Stop thinking of it as law enforcement and start thinking about it as punishment and intimidation. That’s their real goal, at least for the moment.

The indictment, the predawn FBI raid, the mugshot, the bail hearing, the ankle monitor, the year of massive, retirement-fund-draining legal bills and sleepless nights, and the GoFundMe that a protestor, politician, schoolteacher, or a local trustee has to set up just to defend herself against the most powerful government on Earth: those are the punishments that Trump and his lickspittles are so gleeful about inflicting on those of us they decide to target.

Former Trump DHS Chief of Staff Miles Taylor, noting last week that he’s heard more indictments of Trump “enemies” are coming soon, summarized it this way:

“The Soviet-ization of American life is farther along than most people realize.”

The eventual dismissal in court or quiet non-indictment by a grand jury is just paperwork stapled to the end of a campaign of brutal intimidation that already did exactly what it was built to do.

A prosecutor who only brings cases he expects to win is enforcing the law. But, in Trump’s case, corrupt prosecutors who keep bringing cases that grand juries reject, that judges ridicule, that they themselves abandon the moment real scrutiny shows up, aren’t trying to win at all. They’re trying to make examples of people, to destroy them financially, and to intimidate anybody else who may think of speaking out.

Because making examples of people who criticize those in power is Rule One in the Dictator’s Playbook.

This isn’t even a new or modern idea here in America.

Back in 1798, President John Adams and his rightwing Federalists pushed through the Sedition Act, which made it a crime to publish anything false, scandalous, or malicious about the president. The most dramatic target was a sitting liberal congressman from Vermont named Matthew Lyon, who went to jail for writing that Adams had “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp.”

Adams had his federal prosecutors go after more than two dozen people, most of them opposition newspaper editors, for the “crime” of criticizing him. It was such a naked abuse of power that horrified Americans swept Adams out of office in the election of 1800 and handed the presidency to Thomas Jefferson, who pardoned every last one of them and expired most of the law.

The Framers had just finished writing into the First Amendment the right of the people “peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances,” and Adams turned right around and tried to make exactly that a felony.

Everything Trump’s DOJ is doing right now is a sequel to that story, with an even more fascist edge to it.

For example, you can see the whole brutal scam running in a case just outside Chicago. Six immigration-rights allies, including a former congressional candidate, an Oak Park village trustee, and a Democratic ward committeeperson, got hit with a felony conspiracy charge for allegedly surrounding an ICE agent’s SUV at a protest outside the Broadview detention facility.

They were painted as a “violent mob” in the media, each faced up to seven years in prison, and they spent the better part of a year raising money and living with all of that hanging over their heads. It was a living hell, the sort of thing that disrupts lives, loses jobs, and even can stress marriages to the point of breaking, which is exactly what Trump’s malicious legal goons intended.

Then — in a move I suspect they hadn’t anticipated — a curious federal judge pried loose the original grand jury transcripts, and the whole thing came apart in dramatic fashion.

The transcripts show the grand jury had actually refused to indict, returning a rare “no bill,” and that when one juror said out loud that the case was a “crock of s–t,” the lead prosecutor simply dismissed him and sent him home.

It took the ethics-free lawyers still willing to work for Trump and Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche three separate tries before prosecutors finally squeezed out the indictment they wanted, and the judge later said she’d never before seen the kind of misconduct she saw in those pages.

To avoid a public humiliation, days before the trial was set to begin, the U.S. Attorney dropped everything with prejudice, meaning it can never be refiled; one of the defendants broke down in tears and cried out loud in the courtroom when she finally heard it was over.

If Broadview was a fluke, you could chalk it up to one rogue prosecutor having a bad year. But it wasn’t a fluke. It’s the template.

Out in Los Angeles, a former Marine and longtime community activist named Alejandro Orellana got indicted on felony conspiracy and civil-disorder charges, facing up to 10 years, for the crime of handing out protective face shields to people demonstrating against ICE.

The FBI raided his home and ripped it apart; the U.S. Attorney went on social media to brand him part of a “shadowy network funding riots.” Six weeks later, prosecutors quietly moved to dismiss the case. By then, the Los Angeles Times had documented dozens of protest-related arrests that had collapsed or been quietly downgraded, none of them walked back with anything like the fanfare of the original perp walks.

In each case, people were hit with tens of thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of dollars in legal bills, had their lives and homes turned upside down, and were doxxed in ways that, for many, brought death threats and harassment from Trump’s most violent and fervent cultists.

This Russia-like racket runs all the way up to Capitol Hill.

When six Democratic members of Congress, including Senator Elissa Slotkin from my home state of Michigan and combat hero Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, recorded a ninety-second video reminding service members that they have a legal duty to refuse unlawful orders, Trump called it seditious behavior “punishable by DEATH” and demanded they be arrested and put on trial.

His DOJ actually carried it to a grand jury, which flatly refused to indict anyone. The same thing kept happening to other marquee targets: the cases against James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James were thrown out, and a second grand jury refused to charge James even on a do-over, something her lawyer called unprecedented, because it nearly is.

Nonetheless, all of their lives were disrupted, all of them had to raise a small fortune to cover their legal costs, and their reputations were sullied. That was Trump’s real goal.

And it’s not just individuals.

When DOJ leadership went after the Southern Poverty Law Center, whistleblowers inside the department told Congress that senior officials ordered prosecutors to fast-track a “legally deficient” indictment even though they couldn’t point to a single victim or any actual deception, and that the standing instruction was to “go big” and “go loud” against protesters and critics like the SPLC.

That’s why career lawyers — literally thousands — have been resigning from federal positions in waves rather than sign their names to this kind of fascistic, bullying, punitive crap.

The cruelty of the thing is the point: the people running these legal grifts know they’ll lose most of these cases, but they don’t care, because winning in court was never the goal. The goal is to hurt the protestors and intimidate into silence anyone else who may be watching.

It’s the next teacher who thinks about marching in a protest, the next county trustee who thinks about signing an open letter, the next reporter who thinks about publishing a leaked memo and decides it just isn’t worth a year of her life and a hundred thousand dollars in legal fees to find out whether she’d eventually be vindicated.

Joe McCarthy understood this in the 1950s, when he and Roy Cohn (also Trump’s attorney and pre-Putin mentor) barely convicted anybody of anything yet gleefully destroyed thousands of lives. The subpoenas, the televised hearings, and the blacklist did all the work, and careers and lives were turned upside-down on accusations alone.

Watchdog groups like Protect Democracy are now keeping running tallies of these retaliatory cases precisely because the pattern has become too consistent to pass off as a string of honest mistakes, like they keep trying to pretend they are.

So let’s name it plainly: when prosecutors keep bringing cases that grand juries don’t want, that judges openly mock, and that they themselves abandon the instant a real court starts asking real questions, they aren’t fumbling.

They’re trying to bleed and then delete the right to peaceably assemble and petition for a redress of grievances, the right to free speech, the right to hold an anti-Trump or anti-fascist opinion right out of the Constitution, one frightened citizen at a time.

The sentence gets served long before any jury votes, and the verdict they’re actually chasing is our silence.

Don’t hand it to them. Call your senators and your representative through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and demand real and serious oversight of a Justice Department that’s being run as a McCarthy-like revenge and intimidation operation, and insist that the people dragged through these sham prosecutions be protected and made whole.

Back the organizations defending them, from Protect Democracy to the ACLU, and stand behind the local prosecutors and judges who’re refusing to go along.

Make sure everyone you know is registered at vote.org and find out who’s actually on your ballot at openstates.org, because the surest way to end a weaponized Justice Department is to elect the people who will dismantle it.

The Framers gave us the right to petition our own government precisely so that we’d never have to be afraid of it, and the only way to keep that right alive is to use it loudly enough that they’re forced to remember why it exists.

And if this piece helped you see the pattern more clearly, please share it, forward it, and pass it along, because their whole corrupt, evil strategy depends on people feeling alone and outgunned: the simple act of making sure your neighbors understand what’s happening is its own quiet form of resistance.

You can support this work and find more of it at hartmannreport.com, and every time you share it you make the next person a little less afraid to stand up. And that’s how we rescue our democracy.

I started in radio news as a teenage reporter at WITL-AM/FM in Lansing, Michigan, then the number one station in the capital city. I began reporting from the Capitol and City Hall, and was writing and reading the morning newscasts within a year.

The station owner was a hardcore Goldwater Republican, our news director was a liberal but Libertarian-curious Democrat, and I was a long-haired anti-war hippie member of MSU's Students for a Democratic Society.

I did the news there for years, and nobody ever told me how to spin it or what to insert or delete. I knew that I couldn’t bias it to reflect my own opinions: the news — accurate, factual, honest information — was sacred.

It was also the cost of our broadcast license, and we all knew it. The widely misunderstood Fairness Doctrine’s main demand was that radio and TV stations “program in the public interest,” and that was widely understood to mean straightforward, reliable, faithful-to-reality news at the top and bottom of every hour on radio and an hour-long news block in prime time on TV.

We did this — and embraced the Fairness Doctrine — because we knew it was part of the price of freedom, of democracy in our republic. When Thomas Jefferson said he’d rather live in a country with newspapers and no government than in one with a government but no newspapers, he wasn’t knocking government; he’d help create ours and was its president for 8 years. He was talking about the vital importance of an honest and free press.

Part of that honesty came from the competition; there were multiple stations in Lansing and most had an in-house news operation like ours, and the ones that didn’t ran the CBS or AP radio newscast twice an hour. Honesty and clarity were essential to getting and maintaining an audience, as well as hanging onto our license.

Reagan ended the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and now Trump and his oligarch enablers are trying to bury the entire concept of honest, straightforward news.

Over the past year and a half, we’ve watched Brendan Carr, Trump’s hitman at the FCC, go to CPAC conferences and brag about how he’s going to assault stations that say things he and Trump dislike. He’s trying to intimidate ABC affiliates into muzzling Jimmy Kimmel — again. And he succeeded in taking down Stephen Colbert.

And a Trump-adjacent billionaire nepo-baby has acquired CBS and is systematically stripping it of its journalistic integrity, starting with the evening news and now gutting the nation’s number-one news magazine show, 60 Minutes.

Storied journalist and 60 Minutes reporter Scott Pelley isn’t taking it lying down, even though it’s a virtual certainty that he has the standard non-disparagement clause that most media operations now require for talent, which forbids them to ever speak ill of their former employer should they leave for any reason. He’ll probably get sued for it, but he’s a man committed to the truth.

Trump, Ellison, Weiss, the billionaire owners of Sinclair, the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News,” the 1,000+ billionaire-owned radio stations across the country, the billionaire-subsidized podcasters, and billionaire-owned social media sites like Facebook and X that have apparently been algorithmically slanted toward Trump’s neofascist movement are all following an ancient script.

Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, and Franco all seized control of the news in their countries in their first year in power. It took both Putin and Orbán two or so years, because they wrote a new script for the takeover: sue the news outlets and reporters into bankruptcy for “defamation” or “slander,” then have friendly oligarchs take over the outlets.

Orbán even came to CPAC in Dallas to tell Republicans that they should do the same thing as he had done by turning America’s media over to right-wing billionaires. He also told the American CPAC conference in Budapest four years ago, during the Biden administration, that they should do the same in America when Republicans next seized control of the US government:

“Have your own media,” he said. “It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left. The problem is that the western media is adjusted to the leftist viewpoint. Those who taught reporters in universities already had progressive leftist principles.”

He added:

“Of course, the GOP has its media allies, but they can’t compete with the mainstream liberal media. My friend Tucker Carlson is the only one who puts himself out there. His show is the most popular. What does it mean? It means programs like his should be broadcast day and night. Or, as you say, 24/7.”

Thus, this is now the Putin/Orbán/Trump formula:

— Manufacture a crisis.
— Declare an “emergency.”
— Seize powers the Constitution doesn’t grant.
— Bypass Congress.
— Bully or ignore the courts.
— Use masked, secret police and the military against your own residents.
— Send people to foreign concentration camps.
— Build concentration camps within the United States.
— Prosecute lawyers and judges.
— Assert control over universities.
— Merge corporate and state interests.
— Cow the media into silence about your corruption and crimes.
— Then call it all “law and order.”

Trump is 18 months into his project and he’s already taken down the Voice of America, defunded PBS and NPR, seen the Washington Post and LA Times acquired by sycophantic billionaires, and turned CBS over to a nepo-baby billionaire who’s going after CNN next. As Jefferson pointed out, this is how democracies are fatally corrupted, which is apparently Trump’s and his billionaire enablers’ goal.

Combine that with a capture of the police and prosecutorial agencies of the government so, like in Putin’s Russia, they can harass and prosecute anybody who dares speak up against their destruction of our way of life, and you have the classic formula for turning a democratic republic into an oligarchic dictatorship.

The classic symbol of authoritarian governance dating back to ancient Rome and Caligula — violence as entertainment — will come to the White House as musclebound men will beat each other bloody and senseless for spectacle and the amusement of our 80-year-old “president” on our nation’s birthday.

Masked thugs snatching people off the street without warrants and putting them into concentration camps in violation of the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments also plays well for the fascist Klan-remnant Republican base, so long as the people they beat, pepper spray, or murder are either dark-skinned or “liberal agitators.”

We’re now way down the road to the complete destruction of America, all in less than two years, as I wrote and warned of in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy in 2020.

The courts are packed with Trump toadies, thousands of lawyers have been purged from government, the FBI is now weaponized against Americans, Blacks and women are being pushed out of senior military commands by an openly white supremacist Defense Secretary, our history is being whitewashed in national parks, museums, and every federal property, and Trump’s face hangs, 60 feet tall, on multiple federal buildings.

And now they’re coming for the news. If it falls, recovering our republic will be possible — the examples are Hungary with Peter Magyar and Volodymyr Zelenskyy being elected in Ukraine — but very, very difficult. It will take years and cost a fortune both in work, cash, and probably blood, as it did in those two countries.

But we can gain courage from our heroes of this moment. Scott Pelley is unintimidated, telling us bluntly that the new owner and management of CBS tried to force him to lie to us on the air and spin stories so they could please wannabe-Emperor Trump. When they tried to lie their way out of the PR mess Pelley created for them, he immediately called out their falsehoods.

This crisis isn’t limited to CBS: the same nepo-baby billionaire who’s taken over that network also, according to Bernie Sanders, now owns, controls, or soon will control:

“TikTok, Warner Bros., Paramount, DC Studios, The Discovery Channel, CNN, CBS, HBO, BET, Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, Nickelodeon, MTV, Cartoon Network, Food Network, Travel Channel, Investigation Discovery, Animal Planet, Comedy Central, Showtime, TBS, TLC, HGTV, and more.”

Oligarchy and monopoly are two sides of the same anti-democratic fascist coin. They’re always tied together.

As anti-democracy billionaires continue their march across the American media landscape and pour billions into elections, it falls to us to resist.

To register our discontent with those outlets. To boycott them. To demand that our politicians start breaking up the monopolies that Reagan legalized when in 1983 he ordered the SEC, FCC, and FTC to stop enforcing the antitrust laws that went all the way back to the 1890s (leading to three decades of “merger mania”).

Monopolies are destructive, but media monopolies are pure Putin-style poison.

We all must become truth-tellers, regardless of whether our platforms are, like mine, on radio, TV, and Substack, or if the place we can make our mark and speak our voice is on social media, the local newspaper’s letters to the editor, financial or volunteer support for a fighting progressive politician, or the town square with a protest sign.

We are all Scott Pelley.

America seems to be failing, both at home and around the world. But why?

David French published a thoughtful op-ed in Monday’s New York Times titled The Fire of Stupidity Can’t Be Contained, identifying many of the symptoms of our national decline and wondering out loud why this is happening now.

His best guess is that we’re not remembering the horrors of both fascism and communism from the last century, which is why people — particularly young people — are embracing both. He notes:

“A disturbing number of young people on the right are fascinated with fascism. An extraordinary 34 percent of young people overall express a favorable view of communism, and young Americans are far more likely than their parents or grandparents to say that political violence is ‘sometimes OK.’”

Katy Tur opened an hour of her MSNOW show with French’s article; she similarly was wondering what happened that has so torn our country apart. Could it be that we’re just not as well educated about our history as we once were? Is it the economy? Demagogues like Trump in politics?

Millions of words have been rightly devoted to this sort of inquiry, but most miss the most obvious answer: it’s the billionaires, stupid. Follow along and I think you’ll get it.

When FDR took over America in March of 1933, we’d been a largely laissez-faire nation since our founding. There wasn’t much government help for anybody other than the rich and powerful.

Three preceding Republican presidents (Harding, Coolidge, Hoover) had dismantled what little regulation was left from the progressive Republicans (Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft) and dropped Wilson’s 91% top income tax rate down to 25%, kicking off the Republican Great Depression.

In 1933 a third of America was unemployed, hunger and homelessness were rampant, and only about 20 percent of us were in the middle class; the country had never gone above a third of us in that class. So, FDR, his wife Eleanor, and Labor Secretary Francis Perkins set out to reinvent America. They legalized unions, restored the 90% income tax rate on the morbidly rich, made government the employer of last resort, and instituted the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, Social Security, built schools and infrastructure nationwide, etc.

The result was dramatic. By 1981, when Ronald Reagan took office, fully a third of us had good union jobs and they set the wage floor for another third of us; as a result, two-thirds of us were in the middle class, and could do it with a single paycheck. A single-family home, a car, an annual vacation, send the kids to college, and retire on a good pension.

But from 1933 forward, FDR’s New Deal had been under continuous attack from a handful of extremely wealthy oligarchs who resented capping their paychecks to avoid that top 91% tax rate and hated the regulations that made both consumer products and the workplace safer but cut into their profits.

That backlash movement found its voice with Lewis Powell’s infamous Memo in 1971, and Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court the following year.

The Memo called for the creation of rightwing think tanks that could influence public opinion, taking over schools and colleges, buying and running media operations, seizing control of the courts (particularly the Supreme Court), aggressive pushback against the Civil Rights movement, and the promotion of “free market” ideology. It was essential, Powell wrote, to “save” America from an incipient communist takeover.

The Memo electrified what we today call the Epstein/Billionaire Class of morbidly rich men. They endowed and built all of that infrastructure, spending literally billions in today’s dollars, putting a right-wing radio station in every city and town, right-wing TV networks, well-paid pundits, “alternative” colleges like Hillsdale, a billion-dollar effort to pack the courts, challenges to textbooks, and an embrace of hard-right Christianity.

Their main message was that the government had grown “too big,” a result of the New Deal that must be reversed, and the GOP they own has run with it ever since.

Although the federal government of the US was smaller as a percentage of either population or GDP compared to virtually every other developed country in the world, it was a meme that resonated with average people who were horrified that we’d been lied into the bloody Vietnam War, resented paying taxes, and felt they were being left behind as a result of the severe oil-shock inflation of the Nixon/Ford '70s.

Their plan worked. Trust in the American government went from nearly 80 percent in the early 1960s to a mere 17% last year. And, just like a marriage doesn’t work when the partners don’t trust each other, neither does a society or a government.

Reagan cemented this by declaring in his first inaugural speech that “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” It was the perfect encapsulation of the billionaire hatred of taxation and regulation, but was sold so well that a majority of Americans bought it hook, line, and sinker.

Reagan and the billionaire-owned Republicans in Congress broke the back of the union movement, slashed taxes on the morbidly rich and corporations, stopped enforcing our anti-monopoly laws, sold off federal lands, increased subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, slashed federal spending on education and college, enabled stock manipulation through stock buy-backs, etc., etc.

Five corrupt Republicans who the Powell movement billionaires had helped install on the Supreme Court helped amplify the damage with their 5-4 Bellotti (written by Powell) and 5-4 Citizens United decisions, freeing both billionaires and corporations to buy elections by claiming that “corporations are persons” and “money is free speech.”

As a result, our elections now typically go to the highest bidder and billionaires are the biggest players in our political system. Just 100 billionaires put $2.6 billion into the 2024 election, about a fifth of all spending, and will probably beat that number this fall; in recent elections, roughly nine times out of 10 the better‑funded candidate wins, especially in House races.

Meanwhile, 45 years of Powell Memo-style Reaganomics have gutted the middle class. Only around 43 percent of us can now claim that status, and it takes two full-time paychecks today to live like one could in 1981.

Nobody has halted this slide from a highly functioning government and a vibrant, healthy middle class into the mess we have today, all as the result of nearly a half-century of Reaganomics.

The income tax rates are still stupidly low, incentivizing yachts for billionaires and massive bonuses for corporate executives. Bill Clinton declared “the era of big government is over” as was “welfare as we know it.” Obama turned our healthcare funding system over to a handful of massive insurance companies who are now turning the screws to extract as much wealth from us as they can.

So, people are — quite reasonably — pissed off. Our legislators are bought-and-sold, sometimes even by foreign-loyal entities like AIPAC, our judges are hand-picked by billionaires, and Trump has gutted our “big” government even further.

By the end of 2025, the federal civilian workforce had shrunk by roughly 300,000+ employees compared with its size at Trump’s inauguration, a drop of around 10% in a single year.

Education Department staff fell by 43% in 2025 alone, the U.S. Agency for International Development was effectively dissolved, the agency housing the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities lost more than half its staff; AmeriCorps shrank by 44%; the Small Business Administration by 33%; the agency overseeing Voice of America and other international broadcasters by roughly 33%; and the National Science Foundation by about 30%.

During the 2025 shutdown, the Trump administration used that crisis it created to carry out at least 4,200 immediate layoffs across seven agencies in a single day, rather than furloughing workers. Cuts hit Treasury (1,446 workers), Health and Human Services (around 1,100–1,200), Education (466 on that day, after earlier large cuts), Housing and Urban Development (442), Commerce (315), Energy (187) and Homeland Security (176), with additional reductions at EPA and the Patent Office.

Laying off over 7,000 people at Social Security has left seniors with frustrating day-long hold times and a lack of in-person appointments, while the feds under Dr. Oz are experimenting with partially privatizing and starting pre-clearances done by big insurance companies and inflicted on traditional Medicare recipients in six states, Arizona, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas and Washington.

As our government is gutted, our social services are crushed, our unions are enfeebled, wages are flattened, and our politicians and judges are wholly-owned properties of a handful of billionaire families and industries, Americans are justified in looking for alternatives.

Ironically — and perhaps alarmingly — billionaires are now looking for alternatives, too.

Peter Thiel, the guy who funded JD Vance’s political career who, through Palantir, has access to mind-boggling amounts of data on us and our future, just moved his entire family to Argentina. Mark Zuckerberg has a 5,000 square-foot doomsday bunker in Hawaii, and Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison are reported to have similar “bolt-holes” in case the public gets too restive or Trump starts a nuclear war.

The bunkers-for-billionaires business is among the fastest-growing in America, with Survival Condo, Oppidum Bunkers and Vivos advertising architect-designed what Oppidium calls “ultra-luxury fortified underground residences.”

Meanwhile, because of Reagan’s cuts to education and civics, two generations have grown up without a good understanding of how government works in a democracy; only 1 in 20 Americans can name the five freedoms protected by the First Amendment, and a third of Americans can’t name the three branches of government. No wonder they’re curious about fascism and communism.

So, the next time somebody asks you why America is in such a mess, why people no longer care or even despair about the future, let them know the simple and real answer: “It’s the billionaires, stupid.”

Corporations can now vote in Delaware. And they’re doing it.

Seriously. Not dystopian science fiction or a new novel by an AI version of George Orwell. Actual corporations — what America’s first Supreme Court Justice, John Marshall, in 1819 called “an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law” — are today voting in elections for everything from the mayor and town council to referendums on corporate taxes and limits on corporate behavior.

What could possibly go wrong?

There are, after all, more corporations than people in Delaware. They can now decide who’s going to run the government, what the laws are, and — through their votes to elect humans who’ll take corporate money to do what corporations want (something else that corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized) — even what regulations companies must follow and what limits there are on their behavior.

In a few weeks, my next book will be coming out, “Who Killed the American Dream: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told,” and the timing couldn’t be more synchronous.

The book, written like a murder mystery but 100% true, tells the story of how a corrupt Supreme Court clerk conspired with a corrupt Supreme Court justice to hand “corporate personhood” to the railroad corporations that were then among the richest and most powerful in the world.

The decision was handed down in 1886; in it, the Court itself didn’t say a single word about corporate personhood. Back then corporations had the rights of “artificial persons” so they could pay taxes, own land, and execute contracts and lawsuits, but nobody seriously claimed they could assert human rights like free speech, privacy, or the right to vote.

But the clerk of the Court, a wealthy plutocrat named John Chandler Bancroft Davis, slipped into the headnote of the case — a commentary for law students and others wanting a summary of a decision, which carries absolutely no legal weight whatsoever — that the Chief Justice, Morrison Remick Waite, had claimed corporations were “persons,” implying they had rights under the 14th Amendment.

The railroads then hired a few retired members of Congress who were on the committees that wrote the Amendment as frontmen and for the next five years they traveled the country claiming that the “actual intent” of the authors of the 14th Amendment was to grant human rights to corporations, not former slaves.

Their efforts worked; just 10 years later, in the Covington & Lexington Turnpike v. Sandford case, the Court cited the Santa Clara decision and ruled:

“[C]orporations are persons within the meaning of the constitutional provisions forbidding the deprivation of property without due process of law as well as a denial of the equal protection of the laws.”

That badly abused Amendment, ratified on July 9, 1868, was written to liberate formerly enslaved people, and its language is pretty clear about that:

“No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” (emphasis added)

The railroad corporations claimed that because they were taxed at different rates on property they owned in Santa Clara and Santa Ana counties in California, they were “persons” being denied the “equal protection of the law.” The Court determined that the California constitution already dealt with tax issues like that, giving the railroad the relief they wanted, but there was no federal action at all.

However, the lie about corporate personhood buried in the headnote took root and lives on to this day. For example, yesterday afternoon I asked DuckDuckGo’s AI the question:

“Who won the 1886 Santa Clara Supreme Court decision?”

And the answer I got back was:

“The Southern Pacific Railroad Company won the 1886 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad decision. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the railroad, affirming that corporations are considered ‘persons’ under the Fourteenth Amendment.”

None of that is true, but it was nonetheless the basis of the 1978 First National Bank v Bellotti decision written by Lewis Powell himself (of “Powell Memo” fame), claiming that because corporations are “persons” with rights under the Bill of Rights — including the First Amendment right to free speech — they could spend big bucks to swing elections. In that decision, the Court majority footnoted:

“It has been settled for almost a century that corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific R. Co., 118 U. S. 394 (1886); see Covington & Lexington Turnpike R. Co. v. Sandford, 164 U. S. 578 (1896).”

Because corporations don’t have mouths to speak with, Powell reasoned, their money served the same purpose. So they could “speak” freely with millions thrown into elections, corrupting our democracy to their benefit and our detriment.

Two years earlier, in Buckley v Valejo, the Court had struck down the 1970s campaign contribution limits Congress put into law after the Nixon bribery scandals. They ruled that wealthy Senator James Buckley (brother of William F. Buckley) could use his own money to finance his election campaign because his money was functionally the same thing as his First Amendment-protected free speech.

Which led straight to Clarence Thomas — the most corrupt Supreme Court justice in history, then on the take from a Nazi-memorabilia-collecting rightwing billionaire — to cast the deciding vote in Citizens United.

That bizarre decision blew up hundreds of campaign finance and other good-government laws, claiming that there should be virtually no limits on the money morbidly rich individuals, corporations, and even foreign entities could pour into US elections.

Clarence Thomas even cited the Bellotti case and, thus, its reference to Santa Clara to justify handing our democratic processes over to the richest people and biggest companies in the nation.

And now we’ve arrived at terminal insanity. As Reuters reported on Tuesday:

“A judge in Delaware, where many big U.S. companies are incorporated, ruled on Tuesday that a small town that allows corporations to vote in municipal elections was not violating the state’s constitution.
“Delaware Superior Court Judge Craig Karsnitz said the beach town of Fenwick Island was not diluting human votes by allowing companies and other legal entities that own property to cast votes in municipal elections.”

More corporations are incorporated in Delaware than any other state in the nation because of that state’s lax corporate laws and low corporate taxes: there are more corporations in the state than people.

And now they can vote.

I wrote Who Stole the American Dream? to wake people up to the corruption of our democracy by the rich and powerful, particularly the corporate “artificial beings” that keep buying off judges and politicians because of corrupt Supreme Court cases citing that corrupt headnote, starting with Santa Clara and then going to Covington and then straight-lined to Bellotti and Citizens United.

The entire thing is a fraud, a 140-year-long scam, as knowledgeable legislators like Sheldon Whitehouse, Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna, Mark Pocan, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Pramila Jayapal, and Elizabeth Warren will tell you in a New York minute.

And it needs to be overturned.

There are a few ways to do that, the most effective being a constitutional amendment, but reorganizing the Supreme Court and even strong legislation can take a bite out of it. I detail them all in the book, and good government groups like Move to Amend and Public Citizen have been on this case for years.

The situation, after all, has become so bad that I suggested in my book Rebooting the American Dream (which Bernie read from on the floor of the Senate in his famous filibuster) that members of Congress should be required to wear NASCAR-style patches to let folks know which corporations are “sponsoring” them.

If we don’t get active and take back our democracy for humans, corporations may one day vote one of themselves into office and the Republican majority on the Supreme Court will probably simply nod along.

America has 51 billionaires who made their money from our profit-driven healthcare system, the only one in the developed world. It’s not only obscene that they’re taking so much money from so many of us who have so little; it’s also killing all of us.

We’re among the worst — and most expensive — healthcare systems in the developed world, with Thailand and Ecuador even beating us out.

And the reason it stays that way, according to a shocking new study, is because about half of all white people would rather inflict pain on all of us (including themselves) than allow for a system which may also benefit Black people.

If that sounds irrational, it is. But it’s also completely consistent with a history that includes white communities closing their own schools and swimming pools back in the 1960s when LBJ forced them to allow Black children in.

Sixty-six years ago, on a campaign swing through Tennessee, Lyndon Johnson turned to his press secretary Bill Moyers in a hotel room and explained, with the bluntness of a man who’d grown up watching it work in Texas, why America couldn’t have nice things.

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

Moyers wrote about it years later in The Washington Post, and the line has been quoted ever since because it explained, in one sentence, the entire arc of “conservative” behavior from Reconstruction to Nixon to Reagan to Trump.

Last week, a pair of political scientists at the University of Delaware put empirical meat on the bones of what Johnson learned the hard way. Sumeyye Mine Iltekin Gocer and Joanne M. Miller, writing in the peer-reviewed journal Research and Politics, surveyed more than 700 white Americans and split them into two groups.

One group was asked whether white Americans were winning or losing politically. The other was asked whether white Americans were winning or losing compared to racial minorities. Both were then asked how they felt about economic redistribution programs like food stamps and Medicaid, the things that put food on tables and keep people from dying of treatable diseases.

The first group’s answers tracked roughly with their income and ideology. The second group, the ones prompted to think about race before answering, turned against redistribution across the board, even programs that would obviously benefit them, even when they themselves were poor.

The mere act of comparing themselves to Black and brown Americans made them willing to sacrifice their own healthcare, their own paycheck, their own kid’s future, as long as people of color were sacrificed too.

That’s the trap. That’s how a country with the largest economy in human history ends up as the only developed nation on Earth without universal healthcare, the only rich country where 600,000 people a year still go bankrupt because somebody in the family got sick, and where, alone among our peer nations, we’ve built an entire group of healthcare billionaires on the simple business model of denying claims and pocketing the difference.

There are now fifty-one of them. Fifty-one Americans whose ten-figure fortunes exist because we refused, decade after decade, to do what every other developed country figured out by the 1970s.

Becker’s Hospital Review crunched the latest Forbes list and counted them up: hospital chain heirs like Thomas Frist Jr. at $41.1 billion, medical-device dynasties like the Cooks and the Strykers, pharma fortunes, insurance fortunes, and a long tail of executives who got fabulously wealthy off the misery of people trying to pay for chemo.

Some who became morbidly rich off healthcare even went into politics like Senator Rick Scott, whose company committed the largest Medicare fraud in American history when he was CEO. Others simply pour millions into buying Republican politicians and judges to maintain the profitable status quo.

These billionaires exist nowhere else in the developed world for a simple reason: no other developed country has set up its healthcare system so that human sickness is a profit center.

From Nixon‘s Southern Strategy to Bush’s Willie Horton ads to Trump’s racist birtherism, scaring White people about Black people has been the go-to position of the GOP since the 1960s. And stopping “socialism” that may benefit Black or Hispanic people is at it’s core.

Canada doesn’t have hospital billionaires. France doesn’t have insurance billionaires. We do, and we have fifty-one of them, and the reason we do is the reason LBJ named in that hotel room.

The people who’d benefit most from a national healthcare system are the people who keep voting against it. Look at the map. Of the 10 states that still refuse to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, seven are former Confederate states with large Black populations.

Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas have together left billions of federal dollars sitting on the table, billions that would have built rural clinics, kept hospitals open, paid for prenatal care, and saved roughly 1.5 million of their own citizens from going uninsured.

Their Republican legislators won’t take the money, their Republican governors campaign against the money, and their Republican voters keep electing the people who refuse the money, all because that money would also benefit the Black and Hispanic people who live in those states.

And the bodies pile up. Tennessee has the highest maternal mortality rate in the United States, 42.1 deaths per 100,000 live births averaged across 2019 to 2023, with Louisiana and Mississippi right behind.

The Commonwealth Fund found this past summer that Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee all have maternal death rates more than double those of California, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Minnesota.

Mississippi just declared a public health emergency over infant mortality because the state’s babies are dying at the rate of 9.7 per 1,000 live births, nearly double the national average, and for Black babies in Mississippi the rate is 15.2, which would be a national emergency in any country that wasn’t busy looking the other way.

Life expectancy tells the same story in the same racist handwriting. Mississippi sits dead last in the country at around 71 years, followed by West Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Kentucky.

The Princeton economist Angus Deaton, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on poverty, has observed for years that life expectancy in much of Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta is now lower than in Bangladesh or Nepal. White working-class men in the Mississippi Delta and the West Virginia coal country can now expect to live fewer years than men in countries we call “impoverished.”

And the political response from the Republicans? They keep electing racist white politicians to refuse Medicaid expansion, slash food stamps, hand tax cuts to their morbidly rich white men, and triple down on the very cultural grievances that the Delaware study just demonstrated, in laboratory conditions, are the precise mechanism by which they’re being conned.

I grew up in Lansing, Michigan, where in 1956 my father finally got a job at a tool-and-die shop with a union contract and health insurance that covered the whole family without a copay. None of us got rich, but none of us went bankrupt when somebody got sick, either.

The country my dad worked in had marginal income tax rates above 90 percent on the very wealthy, no billionaires to speak of, and a healthcare system that, for everyone covered by a union job or a public employer, looked something like what Canada or Germany has today.

In Michigan, like in most states of that era, hospitals and health insurance companies were required to be non-profits, run for the public good and heavily regulated.

Then Reagan came in, busted the unions, slashed the top rates, deregulated the insurance industry, and let the banksters loose on what had been a largely nonprofit hospital and insurance sector. The fifty-one healthcare billionaires we have today are the direct, foreseeable result of those choices.

I wrote a book about all of it, The Hidden History of American Healthcare, and the math hasn’t changed: every dollar in the bank account of a Frist or a Stryker or a UnitedHealth executive is a dollar that didn’t go to a nurse, a clinic, or a sick kid in Tupelo.

The Delaware study explains why we can’t seem to vote our way out of it. The morbidly rich Republicans who actually benefit from the system know exactly what they’re doing when they fund Fox “News,” Heritage, Turning Point USA, and the entire infrastructure of right-wing media that pumps racial grievance into white American living rooms twenty-four hours a day.

They’re running LBJ’s con at industrial scale. Convince a guy in Tupelo that Medicaid expansion is a handout to Black people in Jackson, and he’ll vote to keep his own daughter uninsured.

Convince a retiree in The Villages that single-payer means giving healthcare to dark-skinned immigrants, and she’ll defend, with every breath she has left, the very system that’s overcharging her for the drugs keeping her alive.

It works because “conservatives” have found it’s a very useful con to make themselves rich and maintain political power, and the fifty-one billionaires it produced are the ones writing the checks to make sure it keeps working.

Every other developed country has figured out that healthcare works better, costs less, and produces longer lives when it’s run as a public good rather than a profit center.

Bernie Sanders, Pramila Jayapal, and Debbie Dingell have a Medicare for All bill sitting in Congress right now, with hundreds of co-sponsors and the active support of National Nurses United and most of the rest of organized labor.

Californians are about to vote on a billionaire wealth tax that would partly fund healthcare and education by clawing back a five-percent slice of accumulated wealth from people who’ll never feel its absence.

The arguments are made, the policies are drafted, the funding mechanisms are costed out. The only thing missing is enough Americans willing to recognize the con LBJ named sixty-six years ago and refuse, just once, to fall for it.

If this article helped you see the con for what it is, please share it as widely as you can, forward it to the in-law who tells you Medicare for All is communism, and consider subscribing to the Hartmann Report so we can keep doing this work.

LBJ laid out the con in a Tennessee hotel room in 1960. The Delaware researchers just confirmed it in 2026.

The only question left is whether we’ll act on what we now know, or whether somebody like me in the next generation will be writing the same article about the seventy-fifth healthcare billionaire and asking the same exhausted question about why we still can’t have what every other developed country built two generations ago.

The United States and the Republic of China (the official name for Taiwan) — one of the world’s most vibrant and functional democracies — have had a formal defense relationship since 1955. Last week, Donald Trump — who’s been withholding since last year two shipments totaling $25 billion worth of US military hardware Taiwan has purchased — said that relationship is now a “bargaining chip” to get what he, his oligarch friends, and his family want from China.

America was founded on the idea that democracy — a form of government that our Founders discovered functioning well among Native American societies, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living — was our north star, the core concept around which all our actions revolved.

We fought Great Britain to establish democracy, fought against the fascist Confederacy to preserve democracy here in America, and helped fight German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese fascists to preserve and restore democracy in Europe and Asia.

After winning each battle, we became a little more democratic, enfranchising women, formerly enslaved people, and even 18-year-olds. We welcomed the diverse people of the world, groaning under oppression and poverty, to share our democracy and the free enterprise system it enabled.

Most of the countries in today’s world, however, have little use for democracy. Certainly, Putin, Xi, and the Middle Eastern sheiks view it as a threat to their wealth and power. Most of the smaller countries across the world are dominated by wealthy families (oligarchy) or violent warlords (autocracy); during the decades I did international relief work, I spent time in many of them.

And yet we always fought for democracy, even though we started out imperfectly. We helped create the United Nations, a democratic institution. We fought and died for European and Asian democracy. We encouraged democracy around the world through foreign aid programs like USAID and through pro-democracy advocacy operations like the Voice of America.

Until Trump.

Today, we have a president who holds democracy and democratic nations in disdain. He openly ridicules our democratic allies while sucking up to and praising autocrats and oligarchs. He gutted USAID, killed Voice of America, and even tried to overthrow our own democracy — and will probably try again.

His racist, homophobic, and “poorly educated” followers agree with his disdain for democracy, openly embracing his despotic proclamations because he hates the same people they hate. Republican politicians who once defended American democracy cower before his threats of revenge when, like Senator Bill Cassidy, they don’t join him in embracing Putin and fail to nakedly cheer Trump’s violations of international law.

Foreign billionaires like the Fox “News” Murdochs and the Middle Eastern sheiks who’ve poured billions into Trump’s family are apparently happy to see our democracy under assault. About a hundred domestic billionaire families are enthusiastically willing to trade democracy and the free press it requires for tax cuts and deregulation.

So, what happens if they win?

What happens if America finally, fully abandons the alliances we’ve built up over 250 years and instead embraces this autocratic new world order of Putin, Xi, and the corrupt billionaires who run most of the world’s autocracies?

If we formally pull out of NATO or, simply, quietly continue the process of abandoning the alliance? If we leave Taiwan, Japan, Australia, and South Korea to the tender mercies of the Chinese Communist Party? If we continue our embrace of “America’s coolest dictator,” Bukele in El Salvador and Rodriguez in Venezuela, and let their authoritarianism continue to metastasize across our hemisphere?

If the GOP and its billionaire owners manage to muzzle all but a token remnant of our once-vibrant free press, if ICE becomes Trump’s and Vance’s personal Schutzstaffel and throws open their “detention centers” to the “liberal” Americans they’ve already designated as “domestic terrorists”? If they continue to follow Putin’s system of tightly regulating who’s eligible to vote (while corrupting Democrats like Fetterman) so Republicans never lose?

What happens if they win?

Then the wealthiest people on Earth finally get the world they’ve always wanted, from the days they opposed the American Revolution, to fighting against Lincoln, to “America First” billionaires trying to hire Smedley Butler to assassinate FDR, to now supporting Trump:

A world where democracy is weak.
Labor is powerless.
The press is controlled.
Religion is weaponized.
Elections are managed.
Fear keeps people obedient.
And billionaires rule without accountability.

That’s the oligarch’s endgame and has been for millennia. It’s why they bought off Sinema, Manchin, Golden, and Fetterman and are inserting themselves in elections across the nation. It’s why they’re buying our media. It’s why Republicans in Congress keep sending more and more of our taxpayer money to ICE while ignoring Trump’s multiple impeachable offenses from war crimes to emoluments violations to the open betrayal of our democratic allies.

Not “making America great.”
Not patriotism.
Not Christianity.
Not freedom.

Power.

Raw power for a small handful of morbidly rich men, enforced by propaganda, corruption, and violence, both committed by agents of the state (against Comey, James, Schiff et al, and soon to be directed against you and me) as well as J6 freelancers Trump is trying to pre-pay with $1.7 billion just in time for this fall’s election.

Roughly every 80 years, it seems, the battle to preserve democracy comes back around and confronts the generation then living. And here it is again.

The generations that defeated fascism in the 1770s, 1860s, and 1940s understood something simple but profound: democracy survives only if ordinary people are willing to defend it.

Now it’s our turn.

Back in 2019, Donald Trump pointed at Hunter Biden’s brief “cup of coffee” with a Chinese banker during a 2013 ride on Air Force Two and turned it into the single biggest line of attack he ran against Joe Biden for the next five years.

The grift! The corruption! The selling-out of America! Oh, the humanity!!!

Trump told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo that Hunter “walked out of China with $1.5 billion” because his father was vice president, even though no evidence ever surfaced that the elder Biden touched his son’s business dealings, nor that Hunter ever pocketed anything close to that sum.

This week, Donald Trump landed in Beijing for a three-day summit with Xi Jinping with his son Eric and daughter-in-law Lara on Air Force One, alongside more than a dozen of the wealthiest CEOs in America: Elon Musk of Tesla, Tim Cook of Apple, Larry Fink of BlackRock, Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone, David Solomon of Goldman Sachs, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, and many others.

The Trump Organization, which Eric runs, has flirted with Chinese business deals for years, and Eric’s American Bitcoin company works directly with Chinese crypto-mining giant Bitmain.

Hunter Biden’s cup of coffee looks like a teetotaler’s glass of water next to this rolling roadshow of self-dealing, where every executive on board is openly there to negotiate his own deal while Beijing’s officials size up the willingness of the family of the most powerful man in the world to sell out America for a few billion dollars.

That’s the thing about Trump. He brags about corruption, lives on corruption, and treats every lever of the federal government as a personal slot machine, yet because he yelled “drain the swamp” loud enough in 2016, half the country still believes he’s the guy fighting the corrupt part of the establishment.

He isn’t fighting it; he is it, only stupider, more openly larcenous, and more contemptuous of the public good than anyone who’s ever held the office.

Consider what he’s done just in recent months.

In January, Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and the Treasury Department, agencies he himself runs, over the leak of his tax returns during his first term while his own appointees were running the IRS. He’s suing himself, in other words, for damages he then expects his own Justice Department to pay him out of taxpayer money.

According to reporting in The New York Times and New Republic, Trump’s DOJ is now negotiating a settlement that may include dropping all IRS audits of Trump, his family, and his businesses, which would amount to a get-out-of-tax-fraud-free card signed by the very man whose taxes the IRS is required by law to audit every year.

ABC News is now reporting that he also wants $1 billion to give to the January 6 rioters. Perhaps as prepayment for his “army” that will attack people during this November’s elections?

This is naked corruption on a scale we've never seen. The federal government's now a personal piggy bank for one criminal man and his violent cult.

Senators Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren rightly called it “a shameless and transparent act of corruption that should make any American’s head spin.”

Trump’s corruption extends to his civil debts too. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals denied his motion to undo the $83 million defamation judgment won by E. Jean Carroll, whom a jury found Trump had sexually abused and then defamed.

Now Trump’s lawyers are floating a brand new theory: maybe the Department of Justice should substitute itself as the defendant under the Westfall Act, on the theory that defaming a woman he abused “is part of the official duties of the President of the United States.”

Because the federal government can’t be sued for defamation, this would vaporize Carroll’s judgment entirely and let Trump walk away free. Trump’s corrupted DOJ, naturally, is willing to argue it. That’s what happens when you corrupt the Justice Department into your personal law firm.

The same corrupt Justice Department is also doubling as Trump’s cortupt personal revenge machine. There’s been a fresh corrupt indictment of former FBI Director James Comey over a beach photograph of seashells that prosecutors claim, against all credulity, was a coded threat to kill Trump.

The DOJ corruptly raided John Bolton’s home and indicted him on classified documents charges.

They corruptly went after what they called the “Seditious Six,” the Democratic lawmakers who recorded a video reminding service members they have a duty to refuse illegal orders, until a grand jury embarrassingly refused to indict.

Senator Adam Schiff is being corruptly investigated by the DOJ for alleged mortgage fraud that his attorneys call “transparently false, stale, and long debunked,”

Special Prosecutor Jack Smith is under a corrupt investigation, New York Attorney General Letitia James is under a corrupt investigation, and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell was under a corrupt investigation until even Trump’s corrupt Republican allies told him the optics were getting bad before the midterms.

That’s the corrupt behavior of authoritarian regimes, not constitutional republics. But corrupt Republicans appear just fine with all of it.

Meanwhile, the Trump family’s corrupt World Liberty Financial crypto empire has cleared something north of $5 billion in valuation after a flood of corrupt foreign and corporate money, including a $2 billion stablecoin deal from a state-owned Emirati fund that, as 60 Minutes reported, corruptly routed itself through a coin issued by the president’s sons.

Shortly afterward, Trump corruptly pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who had pleaded guilty to money-laundering crimes that included moving funds for Hamas, Iranian-linked terrorists, and child sexual abusers. He has apparently helped the Trump family business; former DOJ pardon attorney Liz Oyer called the Zhao pardon, simply, “corruption.”

And the corrupt $400 million White House ballroom? It’s funded by Lockheed Martin (with $33 billion in federal contracts in 2025 alone), BlackRock, Google’s parent Alphabet (after settling a $24.5 million lawsuit/shakedown with Trump), Palantir, Coinbase, and a parade of crypto firms, tobacco giants, and defense contractors whose names the White House corruptly tried to keep secret until a court ordered disclosure.

Every one of those companies has business in front of the federal government Trump personally oversees, and every check is a bribe by any honest definition of the word.

This corruption is the political opportunity of a generation, and I keep waiting for Democrats to wake up to it.

Péter Magyar just defeated Viktor Orbán in Hungary by running a Navalny-style anti-corruption campaign on the single through-line of criticizing the “state capture system” Orbán built with his billionaire cronies.

When I was working in Russia, I watched Alexei Navalny build his political career almost entirely around exposing the corruption of Putin and his oligarchs through his Anti-Corruption Foundation, the same foundation that got Navalny murdered for becoming too effective.

Back in the 1980s, working for a German relief organization in the Philippines, I watched Cory Aquino bring down the entire Marcos kleptocracy by running on corruption alone. They literally bumped me off the plane — several days in a row — in their rush to leave the country.

From Bolsonaro’s first Brazilian victory on the back of his “Operation Car Wash” call for clean government to Volodymyr Zelenskyy riding Ukraine’s anticorruption EuroMaidan “Revolution of Dignity” into the presidency, to Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Nast smashing the Tammany Hall machine, the anti-corruption frame has been the most reliably winning political message of the last 125 years all over the world.

It will work here, too. In fact, it’s already working: Trump’s “drain the swamp” lie was the cynical perversion of a real anti-corruption message, and that lie put him in the White House twice. Democrats now have the much easier job, because the corruption being exposed is real, vast, well-documented, and entirely on the other side.

But, and this is where Democrats keep tripping over their own feet, they have to be willing to clean their own house first.

When John Fetterman takes hundreds of thousands of dollars from AIPAC and its allied PACs and then joins Republicans to demand the US keep arming Netanyahu through a war that killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and ultimately dragged us into a hot war with Iran, that’s the kind of corruption that lets Republicans laugh in our faces every time we accuse them of being on the take.

And it’s particularly disheartening to younger voters who’re awakening for the first time to the impact of politics on their daily lives.

When Senate Democratic hopefuls Haley Stevens and Angie Craig accept tens of thousands of dollars from donors employed by the very corporations (Lockheed, Comcast, Microsoft, Coinbase) that are paying for Trump’s ballroom, the message we’re trying to send on corruption gets muddled.

When AIPAC openly brags that it’s the top donor to the Democratic Party and to the Black, Hispanic, and progressive caucuses on the Hill, that’s not a moral failure on AIPAC’s part: lobbies will lobby, and five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized it. But that doesn’t make it right.

If we want to win on corruption, we have to be willing to refuse it ourselves, or at least make overturning citizens United the declared number one priority of the entire party.

This doesn’t require unilateral disarmament, but it does require bold, public, and loud promises and the initial actions necessary to follow through on them.

Bernie Sanders has shown for decades that in some districts/states you can fund a serious national campaign out of small dollars alone, and a growing group of Democrats have followed his lead in refusing corporate PAC money. That ought to become the rule, not the exception, and it ought to start now, at least with primaries.

Every Democrat in America should be hammering the GOP’s corruption every single day from now through November 2026 and on into 2028.

Consider the opportunities:
— Eric Trump’s seat on Air Force One,
— the $10 billion settlement that’s about to flow from the Treasury into Trump’s personal pocket,
— the DOJ’s attempt to bail Trump out of his E. Jean Carroll debt,
— the revenge prosecutions of Comey and Bolton and James and Schiff,
— the Zhao pardon,
— the ballroom bribes,
— the multibillion-dollar crypto self-dealing,
— and the Kushner-family Saudi sovereign-wealth payouts are all sitting on the public ground in plain sight, and every Republican on a 2026 ballot owns every bit of them.

While we’re naming their corruption every day, we’d better be ready to name the corruption inside our own party too, because the Democrats who run on cleaning up Washington while taking AIPAC checks and ballroom-donor money will never beat Trumpism.

Only an honest, anti-corruption, small-dollar, working-class Democratic Party can do that, and it’s the kind of party Magyar, Aquino, Zelenskyy, and Navalny would all have recognized.

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

If you want to do something about it, start by checking your voter registration at vote.org, since dozens of corrupt Red states have quietly purged voter rolls under cover of Trump’s various election-integrity executive orders and with permission from the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court.

Call your senators and representatives through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them three things: work to end all corporate PAC and AIPAC money, support real anti-corruption legislation including a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United, and make GOP corruption the central message of every campaign from now to 2028.

Find your state legislators at openstates.org and demand they pass state-level disclosure, lobbying, and stock-trading reform. Join, fund, and amplify the activist movements organizing the public outrage, like Public Citizen and CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington), the same kind of grassroots energy that toppled the Marcos and Orbán machines abroad.

This work doesn’t get done without independent voices, since the mainstream media is too compromised by its own billionaire ownership to consistently name what’s happening. If this article was useful to you, please share it as widely as you can, forward it to five friends today, and consider subscribing to the Hartmann Report so we can keep doing this work.

Americans have toppled corrupt regimes before, and we can do it again, but only if we refuse to be quiet about the grift that was legalized by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court and the resulting corruption that’s become the normal way of doing business for the GOP and a handful of corporate “problem solver” Democrats.

Mother’s Day has just passed, so it’s an excellent time to examine what the most powerful conservative think tank in America is planning right now for the women in your life.

The same outfit that wrote Project 2025 and watched the Trump administration follow its playbook virtually to the letter has been busy assembling a 90-page tract called “Saving America by Saving the Family.”

It maps out a future in which American women are stripped of their right to vote without their husbands’ paperwork, denied access to contraception and abortion, pushed back into the home, and reduced to what Heritage’s new American Citizenship chair Scott Yenor calls the “heroic feminine” of motherhood and wifeliness. It’s quite a Mother’s Day card from the people who claim to revere motherhood the most.

Scott Yenor wants:
— To make gay sex illegal in America again,
— Divorce to be “difficult to get or proscribed,”
— Adultery and sex between unmarried consenting adults (he calls it “fornication”) criminalized, and
— The Civil Rights Act to be “scaled back” so that businesses, schools, and “every other institution in the country” can once again discriminate against women, queer people, and minorities the way they used to.

And just a few months ago, the Heritage Foundation, the same outfit that wrote Project 2025 and watched the Trump administration follow their playbook virtually to the letter, hired Yenor to chair its American Citizenship Initiative.

When pressed about Yenor’s record, reported in detail by The Guardian and LGBTQ Nation, Heritage didn’t quietly walk anything back. They instead invoked their “One Voice” doctrine, which means that what one Heritage staffer says is what the institution stands for, and they loudly stood by him.

Even some of the foundation’s allies winced publicly to The Atlantic, but Heritage reportedly didn’t budge. This is what billionaire-funded Christian nationalism looks like in 2026, and it’s been the project, almost without interruption, ever since the Reagan Revolution

Most Americans don’t know how the Heritage Foundation came to exist; I’ve been telling this story on the radio for more than two decades because it matters. In 1971, a tobacco lawyer named Lewis Powell wrote a confidential memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce arguing that the American “free enterprise system” was under attack from “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.”

His prescription was that corporate America needed to fund its own intellectual infrastructure, think tanks and university programs, legal centers, and media outlets that would shift the country’s political center hard to the right and protect billionaire wealth from democratic accountability.

Two months after writing that memo, Nixon nominated Powell to the Supreme Court.

In 1973, beer baron Joseph Coors read the Powell Memo, decided American business was “ignoring a crisis,” and wrote a $250,000 check to launch the Heritage Foundation alongside Paul Weyrich, the man who later coined the phrase “Moral Majority” and famously told a room of 1980 evangelical leaders that conservatives don’t actually want everyone to vote because “our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Heritage was, from day one, a vehicle for translating Powell’s memo into operational policy, and that founding circle of donors, Coors plus Bradley plus Olin plus Scaife plus Koch, never really left.

According to a DeSmog analysis of Project 2025’s funders, six billionaire family foundations bankrolled Heritage’s blueprint for the second Trump administration: Bradley, Coors, Koch, Mellon, Seid, and Uihlein.

Same families, same project, more than half a century of the same handful of fortunes funding the same grinding assault on democracy, women’s rights, civil rights, and any policy that would tax great wealth or restrain corporate power.

What’s new is how openly they’re saying the quiet parts now.

Heritage’s 90-page tract “Saving America by Saving the Family,” the subject of a thorough investigation by Billie Jean Sweeney for Important Context, lays out a vision that overturns marriage equality, denies the existence of trans people, eliminates no-fault divorce, and uses federal Medicaid dollars as a weapon against any state that disagrees.

The document opens with the sentence “The Founding Fathers were, quite literally, fathers,” which gives you a pretty clear sense of where they’re going. They’ve invented a problem they call a “birth dearth” and identified the culprits: women being educated, women working outside the home, women using contraception, women existing as autonomous people.

As Mehmet Oz, Trump’s administrator for Medicare and Medicaid, said recently, “One in three Americans is under-babied.” White Americans, of course.

Anybody who’s read 1930s European history will recognize what’s going on here.

The Nazi regime’s Mutterkreuz, the “Cross of Honor of the German Mother,” handed out medals to Aryan women who produced four or more children while sterilizing those it considered unfit, and the Lebensborn program ran maternity homes designed to manufacture “racially valuable” babies for the Reich.

Heritage isn’t there yet, but the ideological architecture is the same: women as reproductive vessels for a state-defined ideal, with the full weight of federal policy bent toward forcing them into that role.

Civil rights attorney Michelle Uzeta, who runs the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, told reporters the through-line is “government-sponsored devaluation of entire communities, informed by eugenic thinking,” and that’s not hyperbole, that’s what the documents say when you read them carefully.

The operational arm at HHS is staffed accordingly. Russell Vought, Trump’s OMB director and a self-described Christian nationalist who co-authored Project 2025, has spoken with revulsion of “the transgender sewage that’s being pumped into our schools and institutions.”

Calley Means, a former Heritage research analyst, is now senior White House advisor at HHS. His sister Casey Means, whose surgeon general nomination Trump just withdrew on April 30 after Senator Bill Cassidy refused to support her, told Tucker Carlson that birth control “shuts down” a woman’s “life-giving nature,” and Trump immediately replaced her with another vaccine-skeptical Fox News contributor, radiologist Nicole Saphier.

Natalie Dodson, a named Project 2025 contributor, runs the Office of Population Affairs that decides Title X family planning rules, and the first Trump-era domestic gag rule, in effect from 2019 to 2021, forced 981 clinics out of the program and cut the network’s patient capacity in half, leaving six states with no Title X provider at all. The current administration has signaled it will repropose the gag rule, and Trump’s 2026 budget proposes eliminating Title X entirely.

The most useful place to watch how the playbook actually operates on the ground is Missouri.

Voters there passed a constitutional amendment in November 2024 protecting abortion rights with 52 percent of the vote, and the Republican-controlled legislature simply ignored them and referred a counter-amendment to this November’s ballot that would repeal the protections voters just enshrined.

To boost their odds, they bundled in a permanent ban on gender-affirming care for trans minors, even though Missouri law already bans that care. It’s pure ballot candy, bolted onto an abortion ban specifically because polling shows the trans-care provision boosts support for the abortion ban among voters who otherwise wouldn’t go along.

Divide and conquer, in other words, weaponized at the ballot box to overturn the explicit will of the voters.

This is what I wrote about in The Last American President: the slow, methodical, billionaire-funded conversion of American constitutional democracy into something that more closely resembles a “Christian” white supremacist oligarchy with a theocratic veneer.

The people running this project are not hiding it anymore. Yenor isn’t hiding it, Vought isn’t hiding it, and Heritage’s “Saving the Family” tract isn’t hiding it either.

They’re telling us, in their own words, that they want to recriminalize gay sex, eliminate no-fault divorce, force women back into the home, gut the Civil Rights Act, and use federal funding as a chokehold on any state that resists.

And while Heritage and its think-tank allies map out the cultural policy, their allies in Congress are working to rig the franchise itself so that the populations most opposed to all of this can’t actually vote any of it down.

The SAVE Act, which Republicans in the House passed in expanded form on February 11 as the SAVE America Act, would require every American to produce documentary proof of citizenship in person at an election office in order to register or re-register to vote.

The Brennan Center estimates that more than 21 million eligible American citizens lack ready access to those documents, and the League of Women Voters puts the number of American women whose paperwork doesn’t match their current married name at 69 million, all of whom would suddenly need to dig up a birth certificate, a marriage license, proof of a legal name change, and matching photo ID just to vote.

Trans Americans, naturalized citizens, older Black Americans born in the pre-civil-rights South who were never issued birth certificates in the first place, college students, military families stationed overseas, rural voters who’d have to drive hours to a county office, and the millions of working-class citizens who simply can’t afford a passport would face the same wall.

Senator Mike Lee of Utah, one of the bill’s chief Senate champions, has publicly tied its passage to Republican prospects in the 2026 midterms, which is about as close as a politician gets to admitting on the record that the entire point of the bill is to keep women, trans people, young voters, and Americans of color away from the polls so the Heritage agenda doesn’t get voted down by the majorities that consistently oppose it.

So here’s where you come in. Call your senators through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them you oppose Nicole Saphier’s surgeon general nomination, you oppose any reimposition of the Title X domestic gag rule, your oppose the SAVE Act, and you expect them to say so publicly.

If you’re in Missouri, or you know someone who is, get involved with Abortion Action Missouri and the ACLU of Missouri right now, because Amendment 3 is on the November ballot and the divide-and-conquer strategy works only if voters don’t see it coming.

Check your registration at vote.org, track state-level legislation through openstates.org, and support the Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood, and the Center for Reproductive Rights with whatever you can give.

And share this article and HartmannReport.com with everyone you know. The billionaires funding this project are betting that ordinary Americans won’t connect the dots from Powell to Coors to Yenor to Project 2025 to the ballot in Missouri this fall, and the only way to prove them wrong is to make sure those dots get connected loudly, publicly, and everywhere we can manage it.

Bill Maher and Sen. John Fetterman sat around joking about Donald Trump’s new White House ballroom like a couple of wealthy guys at a country club joking over cocktails as the republic burns outside the window.

Maher dismissed the outrage by calling the cost “couch money.” Fetterman rolled his eyes and reduced the backlash to “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” They practically patted each other on the back for being the last two supposedly reasonable men in American politics.

Calm down, peasants, they were essentially saying. It’s only a $330 million gilded palace add-on for a man who already treats the presidency like his private casino.

This is what elite detachment looks like in America now. Smug. Self-satisfied. Historically illiterate.

No, Bill. People are not angry because Trump likes chandeliers. They’re angry because symbols matter in politics. They always have.

Americans are watching a president who already wrapped himself in gold-plated excess try to build a massive gilded ballroom while millions of working people can’t afford rent, healthcare, childcare, or groceries. And then they’re being told by multimillionaire celebrities that noticing the symbolism somehow makes them irrational.

That’s not “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” it’s something called “civic awareness.”

The founders of this country fought a revolution against aristocracy. Against kings and inherited power wrapped in luxury and spectacle. Thomas Jefferson warned repeatedly about the rise of an “artificial aristocracy” built on wealth instead of merit. Teddy Roosevelt spent years warning Americans about concentrated wealth turning democracy into oligarchy and got us the estate tax (which today’s Republicans have crippled).

But now we have political celebrities and media entertainers sneering at ordinary Americans for recognizing the obvious.

A golden ballroom attached to the White House isn’t just a ballroom: it’s a statement about power.

Authoritarians throughout history have always understood and exploited the power of spectacle. Palaces. Towers. Gold. Giant halls. Arches. Statues of themselves. Grand architecture designed not to serve democracy but to glorify the ruler who built it.

The point is psychological, to elevate the leader above ordinary citizens. To make power feel untouchable, royal, and permanent. And Donald Trump has spent his entire public life desperately trying to achieve exactly that aesthetic.

Gold elevators. Gold furniture. Gold ceilings. Gold logos with his name stamped onto everything he touches, like a monarch branding his kingdom.

So when critics recoil at the idea of a gilded Trump ballroom attached to the People’s House, they’re not reacting to drapes and drywall. They’re reacting to what it represents: the transformation of democratic government into personal branding for a strongman billionaire.

Maher dismisses $330 million as “couch money.” That’s easy thing to say when you’re rich enough to spend more on wine tonight than many Americans spend on groceries each month. But the real issue is even bigger than the raw dollar amount: it’s about moral obscenity.

America has veterans sleeping under bridges. Public schools are begging parents for supplies. Seniors are rationing their insulin and blood pressure meds. Young people are crushed under student debt. Entire towns are being poisoned by corporate greed while on-the-take and in-the-pocket politicians like Fetterman shrug.

And in the middle of all that, the political and media elite want the public to admire a gold-plated ballroom because apparently excess itself has become a form of patriotism.

This is what the post-Reagan Revolution neoliberal rot has done to our society. Morbidly rich people and their lickspittles like Fetterman now tell us that opulence is wisdom, that billionaire aesthetics are inherently admirable, and that criticism of grotesque displays of wealth is “envy by the peasants” instead of concern about the survival of our democracy.

The progressive critique of this sort of ostentation has never been about “hating success.” It’s always been about opposing concentrated power that masquerades as virtue.

A teacher contributes more to civilization than a real estate grifter hustling his name like a luxury perfume brand. A nurse contributes more than a billionaire tax cheat hiding profits offshore. A union worker building roads contributes more than another hedge fund parasite gaming markets from his Manhattan penthouse.

Tragically, America’s media culture increasingly treats wealth itself as proof of greatness. Trump didn’t invent that sickness; he simply weaponized it.

And what makes Maher and Fetterman’s comments especially galling is the contempt buried inside them. The assumption that ordinary people are stupid. Emotional. Hysterical.

If you object to a billionaire president building a gaudy palace extension while inequality explodes, you must have “TDS.”

What an insult to history. Was it “George III Derangement Syndrome” when Americans rejected monarchy? Was it “Robber Baron Derangement Syndrome” when progressives fought the Gilded Age oligarchs? Was it irrational to notice that extreme concentrations of wealth led to the Republican Great Depression and inevitably distorted democracy?

Because that’s the real issue here, not one ballroom or building project.

Trump’s Epstein Golden Ballroom is a symptom of a much deeper crisis in American life. Politics has become theater, governing has become branding, and citizens are being trained by billionaires to think of leaders not as public servants but as celebrity rulers whose excess should inspire awe.

That’s poison to a republic. And people who call themselves conservatives should be disturbed by it, too.

In my dad’s generation, conservatism claimed to value humility, restraint, civic virtue, and suspicion of concentrated power. Now self-described conservatives cheer for billionaire spectacle like courtiers applauding the king’s newest palace wing… or his invisible clothes.

Meanwhile working-class Americans are told to fight culture wars against their neighbors while the ultra-rich consolidate wealth at levels not seen since the 1920s. That isn’t populism: it’s aristocracy with a flag pin.

The White House was never supposed to be Versailles. The presidency was never supposed to be a throne wrapped in gold leaf and ego. A republic survives only when leaders remain citizens among citizens. The moment political power becomes inseparable from personal grandeur, democracy starts slipping into something darker.

People aren’t angry because Trump likes ballrooms, but because too many powerful people like Bill Maher and John Fetterman no longer remember what America is supposed to be. Americans aren’t “deranged” when they recognize the stench of oligarchy wrapped in gold paint and sold as patriotism.

If you’re so insulated by wealth, celebrity, and proximity to power that you can look at a billionaire turning the White House into a monument to himself and shrug like it’s no big deal, then maybe you’re the ones who’ve lost touch with reality, not the millions of Americans who’re still fighting to keep this country from sliding, like Russia has already done, into a gilded version of rightwing authoritarianism.

We have shocking news this week from CNN: Trump is preparing to illegally purge tens of millions of Democratic voters from voter rolls nationally, just in time for the election. Just like Modi did to win overwhelmingly in India, following the GOP’s playbook.

This follows John Roberts and Sam Alito blatantly using phony, cooked numbers to justify eviscerating the Voting Rights Act, lying to our faces and then laughing at us like they did with the Dobbs decision and Citizens United.

Russian dictator Joseph Stalin is often quoted (perhaps apocryphally) as saying:

“It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.”

Today’s GOP version of that could be:

“It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s how many people we can remove from the voting rolls that will decide the election.”

In this year’s iteration, the Trump Department of Justice has demanded that all states turn over their voting rolls, complete with names, addresses, driver’s license and social security numbers, voting history, and date of birth.

They’re also requiring states to sign a “Memorandum of Understanding” that says the states will then purge from their voting rolls anybody who Republican partisans within the Trump administration — once they’ve dug into the state’s voter data — find to be a “concern”:

“You agree therefore that within forty-five (45) days of receiving that notice from the Justice Department of any issues, insufficiencies, inadequacies, deficiencies, anomalies, or concerns, your state will clean its VRL/Data by removing ineligible voters…”

We’ve seen this movie before, but always in the past on the state level.

In the 2000 election, for example, Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s Secretary of State Katherine Harris requested a list of Texas felons from Texas Governor George W. Bush’s Department of Corrections. She then ran that list of Texas felons — more than 50% Hispanic and Black — against the Florida voter roll list.

The result, as BBC reporter Greg Palast told the world and our media largely ignored, was that in the months just before the 2000 election, around 80,000 mostly-Black and Hispanic fully-legally-eligible but also mostly Democratic-voting Floridians were purged from that state’s voting rolls. Thousands of Black and brown voters whose first and last names just happened to be the same as Texas felons; lots of Jose Garcias and James Browns.

When those Florida voters showed up on election day, they were turned away and George W. Bush “won” the election by 537 votes after his father’s corrupt SCOTUS appointee, Clarence Thomas, became the deciding vote in Bush v Gore that violated the 10th Amendment by stopping the state-supreme-court-ordered recount that would have revealed the scam and given the 2000 election to Al Gore.

Some GOP-run states are happily going along with Trump’s purge effort. So far, the Trump toadies have hoovered up the intimate details on tens of millions of voters living in Alaska, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming, and the feds have obtained simple voter identity and voting history information from Colorado, Florida, Pennsylvania, Utah, and West Virginia.

Sometime between now and the election, the DOJ will present to these states the lists of voters they must purge, per the Memorandum of Understanding. And the 30 or so mostly Democratic-run states which are refusing are all in the crosshairs of a massive federal lawsuit trying to force them to comply.

As Greg Palast and I have documented in the past, if around 4 million legal American citizen voters hadn’t been purged from the rolls in the months leading up to the 2024 election, Kamala Harris would be president today and Democrats would control the House and perhaps even the Senate. Using the phony rubric of voter fraud, purging voter rolls has been, since the 1960s, a go-to strategy the GOP borrowed from the old Confederacy.

What’s truly astonishing is how little attention is being paid to how Republicans are pre-rigging this fall’s election, both by the DNC and our mainstream media. As Dissent in Bloom documents, twelve states have already passed statewide versions of the SAVE America Act:

“New Voter ID laws in AL, AZ, FL, GA, KS, LA, MS, NH, OH, SD, UT and WY restrict voter access without a secondary form of ID or a passport. About 146 million Americans don’t have a passport. Millions more do not readily have access to their birth certificates.”

This is a large part of how Putin cemented single-party-rule in Russia, by carefully controlling who’s on and who’s purged from that country’s voting rolls. And Trump and Putin are talking on the phone frequently.

Trump and Republicans are doing this because they know that their policies are unpopular: most Americans aren’t fans of tax cuts for billionaires, more pollution, deregulation, high-priced drugs, war with Iran, privatizing Medicare, giving Social Security to Wall Street, criminalizing abortion and birth control, student debt, hating on Black and queer people, ICE killings and concentration camps, and the GOP’s war on unions and working people.

So, the GOP does everything they can to make voting difficult or even impossible, particularly for people in heavily Democratic areas (which are usually college towns, big cities, and Black neighborhoods).

When Republicans run elections in such areas (typically big Blue cities in Red states), they’ll close or change polling places at the last minute to sow confusion and cause people to give up when they show up at their normal polling place and find it closed.

For example, in Ohio the state changed polling places for voters in heavily Black Cuyahoga and Summit counties just five days before the 2023 special election, as Newsweek noted in an article titled “Ohio GOP Changing Polling Locations Days Before Election Raises Questions.”

Ohio voters were outraged, and that outrage spread across X (formerly Twitter) with comments like this:

“The Ohio GOP is playing ‘Your polling place has moved’ with 47,000 voters in the largest African American voting county in Ohio—just five days before the election. Making it harder to vote—in the crucial August 8th special election (deciding if a majority of voters still can amend Ohio’s state constitution)—is wrong.”

Another X user noted:

“Ohio Republicans are so damn shady! … This stinks to high heaven. At the last minute, before Ohio’s special election, polling locations were changed in Cuyahoga and Summit counties. More than 47,000 voters are affected by changes to 50 voting precincts.”

The fact that this little effort in Ohio got virtually no national press coverage guarantees Red states will be doing more of this kind of dirty trick in the upcoming elections.

But that’s just the beginning.

Knowing that working-class people are less likely to vote Republican than white upper-class suburbanites, Republicans also engineer polling situations so people paid by the hour will have to wait for hours in line to vote, losing out on income.

Every year, we’re treated to pictures and videos of hours-long lines to vote in Blue cities in Red states, while lines in white suburbs in those same states typically run fewer than 10 to 15 minutes.

Similarly, many Red states have imposed draconian penalties on people conducting voter registration drives for making even the smallest mistakes, or for failing to “properly register” themselves with the state. This has shut down many voter registration programs, including some from long-term organizations like the League of Women’s Voters.

As The Kansas Reflector newspaper noted, the penalty for even a minor, inadvertent error is now 17 months in the state prison and a $100,000 fine:

“The League of Women Voters of Kansas and other nonprofits are suspending voter registration drives for fear of criminal prosecution under a new state law.”

The League has sued Florida, Tennessee, and Texas for their criminalization of voter registration drives as well; so far they all stand.

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

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

Additionally, as I lay out in The Hidden History of the War on Voting, 17 million voters were purged in the two years leading up to the 2018 election, fully ten percent of America’s voting population, according to the Brennan Center.

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

Demos added, most of the purge activity was taking place in former Confederate Red states that — before five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in their 2013 Shelby County decision — had to have purges pre-cleared by the federal government:

“The median purge rate over the 2016–2018 period in jurisdictions previously subject to preclearance [Red states] was 40 percent higher than the purge rate in jurisdictions that were not covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act [Blue states].”

More than a quarter of those purged during this period from 2016-2022 were removed from the rolls either because they failed to vote in the previous election or because they failed to return a postcard mailed out by a Republican secretary of state (that is usually designed to look like junk mail).

This card-mailing strategy is called “caging” and used to be illegal, but Sam Alito broke the tie and wrote the 5-4 decision in the 2018 Husted v A Phillip Randolph Institute decision when the five Republicans then on the Court ruled that Ohio Republican Secretary of State (and now Senator) Husted could continue his practice of mailing the postcards into Ohio cities with the largest Black populations.

In his dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out that only around 4 percent of Americans move out of their county every year. Yet, he wrote:

“The record shows that in 2012 Ohio identified about 1.5 million registered voters—nearly 20% of its 8 million registered voters—as ineligible to remain on the federal voter roll because [Republican Secretary of State Husted said that] they changed their residences.”

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

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

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

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

Because signatures change over time and often vary a lot when people are in a hurry, this is low-hanging fruit for the GOP. Last year they started a program to field an “army” of 50,000 “poll watchers,” including interviewing candidates from among white supremacist militia groups, for the 2024 election. Those “watchers” probably invalidated millions of mail-in votes (nobody has kept track of the numbers).

This year, Trump promises an “army” of “election integrity” inspectors to double-check mail-in signatures in Blue states, while the Post Office will no longer automatically postmark ballots on the they’re dropped off.

While some of these poll watchers will also be on hand to try to intimidate or challenge Black and young voters (a practice that’s legal in most Red states), many will be overseeing the counting of mail-in ballots, which are generally more Democratic than Republican.

All they have to do is claim that, in their opinion, a signature doesn’t match and the ballot goes into the “provisional” pile and won’t be counted until or unless the voter shows up in person at the county elections office. Most people never even know their ballot was challenged and not counted.

Whether any of this is part of the “autopsy” the DNC did on the 2024 election that Chairman Ken Martin is refusing to release is unknown, but it certainly should be. And Democrats and all of us in the media need to start calling it all out loudly.

Share this story with everyone you know and tell your elected Democrats that it’s way past time to start shouting from the rooftops about Republicans pre-rigging the upcoming election these ways.

For decades, many Democrats have suspected what’s now being confirmed in plain English by a Trump insider. Ashley St. Clair — the 27-year-old former Turning Point USA brand ambassador and mother of one of Elon’s 14 kids who built a million-follower platform on X and became one of MAGA’s most visible young women — has spent the past few weeks blowing the lid off the entire racket.

In a series of TikTok monologues and a recent feature in The Washington Post, she’s describing in detail how the Republican right-wing influencer economy actually works, and her bottom line is brutal: she estimates that “roughly 99 percent” of the largest right-wing influencers are compensated in some form, most of it locked behind nondisclosure agreements so airtight that anyone who tries to talk about it will get buried under litigation they can’t afford.

According to St. Clair, GOP consulting firms (some run by former White House officials) run platforms where wealthy donors and Republican political operatives can list influence campaigns, and influencers will sign up to push specific scripts, petitions, or even GOP legislative messaging on a per-click rate or for a flat fee.

There’s no disclosure requirement because the content is “political” rather than “commercial” and the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that political lies (“speech”) are protected in ways that wouldn’t be the case for lies told to simply make money.

She’s shared screenshots of DMs offering thousands per post, and she’s detailed coordinated group chats on X where administration officials and Trump’s team can push talking points to the biggest accounts in real time.

Smaller influencers and the mainstream media see the resulting wave of identical posts across social media, assume it’s an organic movement, and jump on the bandwagon, creating an even larger echo chamber for right--wing talking points that benefit billionaires or monopolistic corporations.

It isn’t. As she put it: “There is no free thinking here. They are waiting to get marching orders and a direct deposit.”

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because we already saw a version of it in 2024, when the Biden Justice Department unsealed an indictment revealing that Putin’s people had funneled almost $10 million through a Tennessee shell company, Tenet Media, to bankroll a group of right-wing influencers including Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Dave Rubin who podcast to millions daily.

One right-wing influencer was reportedly paid $400,000 a month plus a $100,000 signing bonus to produce videos that just happened to riff on topics serving Trump’s and the Kremlin’s interests. (The influencers all swore they were victims who didn’t know the money was Russian, if you can believe that, but they sure were happy to take and keep it.)

And the broader point stands: the entire ecosystem of right-wing media is so saturated with covert money that a foreign adversary could plug straight into it without anyone even noticing, and did!

I’ve been around long enough to remember when this stuff was happening to radio hosts, before podcasting took off. Back in the early 2000s, I had a friend who was a nationally syndicated right-wing talk show host, and he told me how every time he gave a speech to a high school audience, a right-wing foundation would cut him a $20,000 check as a “speaker’s fee” to supplement his income. He did a dozen or more a year. That was the level of subsidy on offer just for keeping kids’ minds tilted in the right direction, and it was, he said, available to hundreds of right-wing radio hosts across the country.

None of this came out of nowhere.

It started with the Powell Memo of August 1971, when corporate lawyer and tobacco company board member Lewis Powell (about to be appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon) sent a confidential blueprint to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce telling American business it had to build a permanent infrastructure of think tanks, media operations, scholars-on-call, colleges, and legal foundations to destroy New Deal programs like Social Security and union rights.

Joseph Coors took that memo and used it to seed the Heritage Foundation in 1973 with $250,000. Richard Mellon Scaife followed with tens of millions. The Bradley, Koch, Uihlein, and Seid family fortunes joined the party.

Today that same network of six billionaire family fortunes has been joined by other right-wing billionaires to put more than $120 million into the groups behind Project 2025 alone, and dark-money conduits like DonorsTrust and Leonard Leo’s network have funneled additional hundreds of millions more into Heritage, the Federalist Society, Hillsdale College, Turning Point USA, the Cato Institute, ALEC, and the rest of the Powell ecosystem.

Then there’s Rupert Murdoch, who brought his Australian poison to America with a little help from Ronald Reagan, built Fox “News” into the propaganda flagship for the GOP, and then had to write a $787.5 million check to Dominion Voting Systems for knowingly broadcasting lies about the 2020 election.

And let’s not forget Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022 and, according to peer-reviewed research published in Nature and the Queensland University of Technology study, tilted the X algorithm in mid-July 2024 to dramatically boost his own posts and Republican-leaning accounts. After that change, views on Musk’s posts surged 138 percent, and right-wing accounts saw engagement leaps that progressive accounts simply never get any more on billionaire-run social media.

So, step back and look at what all that money buys. It buys a constant drumbeat telling:

— Working-class white people that they should be afraid of Black and Hispanic neighbors,
— Women in the workplace are stealing their jobs,
— Gay and trans people are coming for their kids,
— Low or no taxes on billionaires will “trickle down” somehow despite forty-five years of evidence to the contrary,
— Deregulation will lower prices instead of raising them,
— Fossil fuels are essential and climate science is a hoax, and that
— Russia and Israel are our friends while Canada, Germany, and France are our enemies.

It’s a deliberately constructed fog of lies and grievance, and it has one purpose: to keep us screaming at each other about bathrooms and brown-skinned invaders while the people writing the checks rob us blind.

And the scale of that robbery is genuinely staggering. The most recent RAND Corporation working paper by Carter Price, updated in 2025, calculates that since 1975 a cumulative $79 trillion has been “redistributed upward” from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the top 1 percent.

In 2023 alone, the transfer to the morbidly rich was $3.9 trillion, enough to give every working American a $32,000/year raise. Meanwhile, we’re still the only developed country on earth without a national health care system, our kids go into a lifetime of debt to attend college, our infrastructure is crumbling, and we’re falling further behind Europe and China every year on the clean-energy transition that climate science says we have maybe a decade to get right.

Republicans don’t have any real answers for any of the crises we’re creating, because their actual policy agenda (more tax cuts for billionaires, more deregulation for monopolists, more handouts to fossil fuels) both caused most of these problems and is also wildly unpopular when stated plainly.

So they manufacture the rage, pay the influencers, bias the algorithms, fund the think tanks, bankroll right-wing podcasts, radio and TV, and then coordinate and pay for the talking points in private group chats.

They have to do it this way because if American working people ever stopped to add up what’s actually been done to them over the past forty-five years of the Reagan Revolution, the political landscape would shift overnight.

This should be a national scandal. It should be the lead story on every progressive show, in every Democratic stump speech, in every union newsletter, and on every front page.

Ashley St. Clair has handed us a confession that Democrats need to use. Call your senators and representatives at the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and demand legislation requiring full disclosure of paid political messaging by online influencers, the same way every other form of paid political advertising is regulated.

Make sure your registration is current at vote.org. Find out who’s running for your state legislature and county offices at openstates.org, because that’s where the next round of voter-suppression and gerrymandering fights will be won or lost.

And the next time somebody in your life forwards you a piece of viral right-wing outrage, ask them one simple question: who paid for that post?

The answer, more often than not, will be a right-wing billionaire or the fossil fuel, pharma, insurance, tech, or banking industry that made them rich. And once people know that, the spell starts to break.

Pass it along.

Here's what happened this week.

— While the FAA was collapsing, the Transportation Secretary was filming a reality show. Former B-lister reality TV and Fox star Sean Duffy revealed Friday on Fox & Friends — the same way he announces most things — that he and his wife, Fox host Rachel Campos-Duffy, spent seven months shooting a road-trip reality program called The Great American Road Trip while he was, in theory, running the Department of Transportation. The corporate sponsors are a Cabinet ethics nightmare laid out in a press kit: Boeing, Toyota, Shell, Google, Comcast, and United Airlines, meaning the airlines and defense contractors he’s supposed to regulate were paying him to bring their cameras on family vacations. This is the same Sean Duffy who presided over historic air traffic controller shortages and a government shutdown that forced 13,000 controllers to work without pay, with 10-percent flight reductions at the country’s 40 busiest airports. People nearly died this winter because his agency couldn’t keep towers staffed while he spent more than half his Cabinet tenure shooting infomercials for the industries he’s supposed to be regulating. In any functioning government, this would be a forced resignation by Monday morning. In Trump’s America, it’s a Friday Fox segment with the kids.

— Donald Trump just openly threatened to nuke Iran on national television. Asked Thursday whether the ceasefire with Tehran still held, our stable genius president told reporters that, without one, you’d just see “one big glow coming out of Iran.” That isn’t a slip: that’s a sitting U.S. president casually musing about committing a massive war crime involving nuclear weapons. The National Iranian-American Council asked the obvious follow-up: whether this man is mentally fit to make decisions affecting millions of lives. Meanwhile, a confidential CIA assessment delivered to the White House this week concludes that Iran can outlast Trump’s Hormuz blockade for 90 to 120 days at a minimum, has retained roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile inventory, and has reopened almost all of its underground weapons storage. Iranian retaliatory strikes have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures at U.S. military sites across the Middle East, far more than Trump or Pete Hegseth have publicly admitted. And as ex-Undersecretary Richard Stengel pointed out on MS NOW, the bombshell wasn’t the report itself but the fact that it blindsided Trump’s own White House. Forty-five years of Reaganomics and grievance politics have produced a Republican Party that confuses chest-thumping with strategy. Now its Dear Leader is hurtling toward an oil-crisis cliff at the end of the month with one hand on a nuclear threat button he doesn’t even begin to understand and the other on a phone tweeting about butterflies falling beautifully into the sea. Vladimir Putin, watching Trump rattle nuclear threats while his own CIA reports the war is already lost, must be sleeping like a baby.

— GOP-dominated courts have decided that “voting” is now optional. This is the start of the fascist/Republican takeover of America. On Friday, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled 4-3 to throw out a voter-approved congressional redistricting referendum on procedural grounds after voters had already passed the thing. Trump celebrated. Democracy Docket called it a terrifying moment: a court canceling an election after the fact. Republican-led states like Texas, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, and Tennessee now are perfectly free — just like during Jim Crow — to gerrymander aggressively at Trump’s personal request, but when Virginia’s voters tried to fight back, four state justices invented a paperwork problem to stop them. Two of those four are up for reappointment by the legislature within two years. Religious-violence scholar Thomas Lecaque didn’t mince words: he warned this trajectory could lead us to a second civil war. And in Tennessee, GOP Gov. Bill Lee just signed a map dismantling the state’s only majority-Black congressional district, prompting the NAACP to file an emergency petition calling it a direct attack on democracy. The new rule of American politics, based on the cruel, racist politics of six corrupt members of the Supreme Court is now simple: Republicans are free to do whatever they want, and Democrats are free to do whatever Republicans permit. Having gutted the middle class, the GOP is unable to win on policy so they’ve stopped pretending to try.

— Sam Alito’s voting-rights ruling was based on data Pam Bondi’s DOJ apparently cooked. When the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais last week, Justice Alito assured America that Black voter turnout had exceeded white turnout in two of the five most recent presidential elections, both nationally and in Louisiana. This was proof, he claimed, that the discrimination the VRA was designed to fight had finally evaporated. As the Brennan Center and the Guardian have now shown, that line was lifted almost verbatim from a friend-of-the-court brief filed by Trump’s Justice Department, and it depends on phony junk methodology that calculates turnout against the entire over-18 population, including non-citizens and people with felony convictions who legally cannot vote. Use the methodology experts actually use, and Black turnout in Louisiana exceeded white turnout in only one of those five elections: 2012. The two years Alito cherry-picked were 2008 and 2012, the two times Barack Obama was on the ballot. Roberts pulled the same slick trick to claim there’s no more racism in America in Shelby County back in 2013. This right-wing Court isn’t reading evidence; it’s writing the conclusion first and then shopping the DOJ or 17th century witch-burning judges for numbers or examples that fit. And Roberts apparently has the gall to whine that it hurts his feelings when people call his Court partisan. Save the tears, Mr. Chief Justice; save them for the millions of Black voters whose ballots your project just helped the Confederate states dilute.

— A billionaire is reportedly negotiating with Trump over which CNN anchors he should fire. Two press freedom groups — the Freedom of the Press Foundation and Reporters Without Borders — filed with Delaware a demand on Thursday for Paramount Skydance’s internal records, citing reports that Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, who’s bankrolling the Paramount/Warner Brothers Discovery merger with his nepo-baby son, told White House officials he’d “implement the CBS playbook” at CNN if regulators wave his deal through. Translation: axe the anchors Trump hates — Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar were the names floated — and run the newly-rightwing CBS’s 60 Minutes on CNN’s air as a kind of pro-Trump-regime consolation prize. We’ve already watched the CBS version of this. Days after Stephen Colbert called Paramount’s settlement of a bogus Trump lawsuit a “big fat bribe,” CBS canceled The Late Show. High-profile reporters have walked, ratings have crashed, and now they want to do it again at CNN. This is what state-aligned media looks like in real time: billionaires offering up newsrooms as personal favors to a corrupt neofascist president who, like Stalin and Hitler, calls journalism “the enemy of the people.” The First Amendment was not supposed to come with an unless Trump complains clause.

— ICE apparently just murdered a man in custody and we only know because a witness refused to be silenced. In January, Cuban immigrant Geraldo Lunas Campos died in a Texas ICE facility. The Trump administration immediately ruled it an attempted suicide. But a fellow detainee, identified by Zeteo only as “Texas” for his protection, tells a very different story. He and roughly nine other detainees in the adjacent room could hear Campos repeatedly begging for his medication, then officers entering the room and grabbing him. The last words “Texas” says he heard from Campos were that he was being choked. Days later, an ICE officer reportedly threatened him for talking, then made good on the threat by relocating him to another facility. He has yet to be interviewed by a single law enforcement official. This is exactly what authoritarian regimes like Russia (Trump‘s role model) do: they detain people without due process, kill some of them in custody, and silence the witnesses. The only thing standing between us and the full version of that picture right now is the courage of one man who decided he wasn’t going to keep quiet and the journalists at Zeteo willing to publish him. Remember their names when this is over.

— Forget corporate Democrat Rahm Emanuel: Maine’s Graham Platner is what the future of the Democratic Party actually looks like. Robert Reich makes the case at Common Dreams that the corporate-funded Democratic establishment desperately wants you to believe nominating recycled triangulators like Emanuel is the route back to power. Maine voters say otherwise. Platner — a Marine with four combat tours, an oyster farmer who’d never held an office higher than town harbormaster — is running for the Senate seat Susan Collins has occupied since 1997, and his viral August launch raised $1 million in its first nine days. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ruben Gallego, Martin Heinrich, Ro Khanna, and Reich himself have endorsed him (you can include me on that list, too). Schumer’s hand-picked alternative, Gov. Janet Mills, was forced out of the primary entirely. Platner’s pitch is the one establishment Democrats have refused to make for 45 years: that the real enemy isn’t the other party: it’s the oligarchy itself, the billionaires who fund both sides, and the politicians (Collins very much included) who sell out their voters to keep getting paid. That’s the lesson the DNC has been refusing to learn since 1992. You don’t beat fake populism by running corporate cardboard. You beat it with the real thing.

— Ted Cruz just admitted out loud what Republicans have been whispering about Social Security for 50 years. At the Milken Institute’s billionaire-studded global conference in California this week, the Texas senator dropped what he himself called the “dirty little secret” of the GOP’s so-called Trump Accounts: they’re a Trojan horse for Social Security privatization. Cruz waxed nostalgic about 50 years of conservatives trying — and failing — to get their hands on payroll tax revenue, lamented the collapse of George W. Bush’s 2005 privatization push, and predicted that within five years, parents will demand to divert their Social Security contributions into Wall Street-managed Trump Accounts “just like” the ones their kids got under the 2025 budget law. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent already said the quiet part out loud last summer, calling the accounts “a backdoor for privatizing Social Security.” And as an SSA insider told The New Yorker this week, the playbook is two-handed: gut the Social Security Administration with one hand while pointing at the smoking ruin with the other and saying, “See? It doesn’t work — let Goldman Sachs run it.” Just 15 percent of Americans support privatizing Social Security; even the MAGA base wants their checks to keep coming. So Republicans, true to form, are doing it anyway; they’re just lying about it until the trap snaps shut. Ted Cruz, drunk on Milken Institute champagne, finally admitted what FDR warned us about back in 1936: the same Wall Street crowd that crashed the economy in 1929 has been trying to get its hands on Social Security ever since the day it was signed. Eighty-nine years later, they’re closer to privatizing all of Social Security than they’ve ever been.

It sure looks like tech billionaires and foreign dictatorships gave us Trump in 2024. This is as bad as the massive Russian bot presence on Facebook and Twitter back in 2016, which Robert Mueller documented gave Trump the presidency that time.

A peer-reviewed study released Thursday in Nature, the world’s most prestigious scientific journal, has finally put hard numbers to what a lot of us suspected the moment the 2024 election was called for Trump (and Republicans in Congress) by the big networks: the algorithms that control our largest social media platforms intentionally and explicitly tilted the playing field, and they tilted it for Donald Trump and the GOP.

Researchers at New York University Abu Dhabi created hundreds of “sock puppet” TikTok accounts in New York, Texas, and Georgia (via VPN), uploaded to them either pro-Democratic or pro-Republican videos to show their political leanings, and then watched what TikTok’s algorithm fed back to them every day over the 27 weeks leading up to Election Day.

Across more than 280,000 recommendations, Republican-seeded accounts received about 11.5 percent more “party-aligned content” than their Democratic counterparts, while the pro-Democratic accounts were force-fed 7.5 percent more attacks from the other side. As Professor Talal Rahwan put it:

“The algorithm wasn’t just giving people what they want; it was giving one side more of what the other side says about them.”

The pro-rightwing bias was even more dramatic when researchers looked at how the candidates’ own accounts did. Candidate Trump’s official TikTok videos were pushed to Democratic-leaning users 27 percent of the time, while Kamala Harris’s videos only reached Republican-leaning users just 15.3 percent of the time.

Translation: Leading up to the 2024 election, TikTok was working overtime to expose Democrats and lefties to MAGA’s most persuasive messaging, all while shielding rightwingers, independents, and Republican voters from Harris’s voice.

Making it even more astonishingly consequential, studies show that TikTok matters enormously to young people; roughly half of TikTok users under 30 say they use the app to keep up with politics and news, and that TikTok-engaged demographic shifted a mind-boggling full 10 percentage points toward Trump between 2020 and 2024 following this exposure.

Young men, for example, flipped from voting 56 percent Biden in 2020 to 56 percent choosing Trump in 2024, the kind of swing that decides battleground states.

Even more troubling, other research shows that TikTok isn’t an outlier. It’s one piece of a much larger algorithm-run social media ecosystem, and that system is now the main way a plurality of Americans engage with politics. Pew Research, for example, found that 42 percent of US social media users consider these platforms “important” for getting involved in political and social issues, and almost none of them have any idea how the top-secret social media algorithms decide what they see.

Sometimes it’s so obvious that it’s surprising it’s not a bigger news story.

Researchers at the Queensland University of Technology found a “structural break for Musk’s metrics around July 13th, 2024,” the exact day Elon Musk endorsed Trump. Overnight, algorithm-driven view counts on Musk’s own X posts jumped 138 percent and retweets exploded 237 percent, far above what any other major account experienced.

And it wasn’t just Musk’s own posts that got the boost; other pro-MAGA, pro-white supremacy, pro-GOP right-wing accounts across X were also systematically amplified. A separate peer-reviewed field experiment published this year in Nature randomly assigned active US users to either an algorithmic or chronological X feed for seven weeks. The result — what could only be called successful brainwashing of those being fed posts by the X algorithm — was astonishing.

The scientists noted that those on the algorithmic feed shifted “towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump, and views on the war in Ukraine.”

And once people are initially convinced of a worldview, changing their mind is a huge and usually unsuccessful undertaking, which is why rightwing billionaires were so eager to fund Charlie Kirk and other programs to indoctrinate schoolkids. Switching back to a chronological feed didn’t undo the damage.

This was on top of the roughly $277 million Musk personally spent electing Trump and Republicans, $239 million of it through his America PAC, making him by a wide margin the largest individual donor of the 2024 cycle.

Then there’s Mark Zuckerberg. After spending a decade telling Congress that Meta was politically neutral, Zuckerberg watched Trump win, metaphorically dropped to his knees, and immediately killed the fact-checking systems on Facebook and Instagram that kept identifying and calling out Trump’s and Republicans’ lies and misrepresentations.

Like a loyal puppy (or a terrified rabbit), Zuck called Trump’s reelection “a cultural tipping point,” wrote a $1 million check to Trump’s inaugural slush fund, replaced his head of global policy with longtime Bush-era Republican Joel Kaplan, and then announced he was moving Meta’s trust-and-safety operation from California to Texas. Meta’s institutional pivot toward Trump and MAGA wasn’t even subtle.

YouTube — also largely owned and run by right-wing billionaires — isn’t innocent either. A UC Davis audit using 100,000 sock-puppet accounts found that right-leaning users get systematically funneled into channels pushing rightwing extremism, conspiracy theories, and hard-right “otherwise problematic content,” while left-leaning users see nothing comparable.

A separate Brookings analysis found that YouTube’s algorithm tugs every user, regardless of where they start, “in a moderately conservative direction.”

I’ve been around digital media since the very beginning. My business partner Nigel Peacock and I were running forums on CompuServe back in the early 1980s, when “going online” meant a 300-baud modem screeching into your phone line and a connection bill that could put a small business under in a month.

The platforms were primitive, slow, and gloriously pluralistic; gatekeepers were a handful of sysops who worked with Nigel and me (CompuServe paid us) trying to keep the message boards clean and useful. Things were civil, the feed was chronological, and there was no anonymity; even political arguments were reasonable.

None of us back then imagined that one day a few billionaires would be able to flip a switch in Beijing, San Francisco, or Austin and successfully shift the political mood of an entire continent overnight. But that’s exactly where we are today, and it appears to have been the tipping point that brought us Trump and all the horrors that accompanied him.

The closest historical parallel is the era of William Randolph Hearst and the Yellow Press at the turn of the 20th century. Hearst’s chain of newspapers reached more readers than any information outlet in human history up to that point, and when he decided it would be in his interest for America to have a war with Spain in 1898, he largely manufactured one with wild, sensationalist coverage of an explosion in the boiler room of the USS Maine in Havana harbor, casting it as an attack against America.

He’s said to have cabled his illustrator in Cuba, “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.” And, sure enough, within just a few months, America was at war.

The difference between Hearst and the men running today’s platforms isn’t moral; it’s mechanical. Hearst had to print on physical paper and ship it on physical trains. Musk, Zuckerberg, and the executives at TikTok and Google/YouTube can rewrite the political information environment in which hundreds of millions of people are marinating in real time, with no editor, no copy desk, and — unless things change — exactly zero public accountability.

So what do we do about these men effortlessly swinging our elections invisibly and without spending a penny of their own money? Three things are at the top of the list that Democrats in Congress and Democratic candidates need to make priorities.

First, Congress needs to require algorithmic transparency, as I suggested in The Hidden History of Big Brother in America. Senators Markey and Blumenthal have introduced excellent bills demanding that platforms disclose how their recommendation systems weight political content and forcing them to submit to fully independent audits. Given the political power these platforms and their billionaire owners command and how they’ll fight to hang onto it, none of these types of bills will pass without sustained public pressure.

Second, we need to repeal or substantially reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act so that algorithm-driven platforms are treated legally like the publishers they are, rather than like the telephone wires they used to travel over.

Third, the Justice Department’s antitrust division needs to be unleashed against the handful of companies that now control the political conversation in America. Standard Oil was broken up in 1911. AT&T was broken up in 1984. There is nothing about Meta, X, or Google that makes them more sacred that these behemoths that preceded them.

Call your senators today through the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and tell them you want algorithmic transparency legislation and Section 230 reform. Make sure your voter registration is current at vote.org, check on your state-level legislators at openstates.org, and start telling everyone you know that science has now proven that the 2024 election wasn’t a free and fair contest of ideas.

It was — based on this new research — a rigged information environment run by a handful of billionaires that put a corrupt, predatory fellow billionaire in the White House and helped install billionaire-friendly Republican lickspittles in Congress and state houses across the country.

We can fix this mess. But only if we stop scrolling and start demanding change.