These numbers show Charlie Kirk's 'American Comeback' relied on lies of the morbidly rich

When Charlie Kirk was assassinated, he was sitting under a tent that had “The American Comeback Tour” printed in huge letters across all four sides. It was the theme of his tour of college campuses, a tour run by his Turning Point organization that was, according to NBC News, early-funded by 10 morbidly rich right-wingers.

The question is “America Comeback” to what?

In 1981, when Ronald Reagan was sworn into office
  • Fully two-thirds of Americans were in the middle class,
  • College was so cheap you could pay your tuition with a weekend job,
  • Healthcare was inexpensive and widely available,
  • Women and minorities had achieved legal (albeit not yet actual) parity with white men,
  • And school and mass shootings were largely unknown because weapons of war were mostly outlawed from our streets.

Today, however, as a result of the Reagan Revolution:

  • Only around half of us are in the middle class,
  • College debt has crushed two generations to the point where they can’t start a family or buy a house,
  • A half-million families end up homeless or bankrupt every year because somebody got sick,
  • The GOP is leading an effort to make it harder for women and minorities to vote or maintain employment,
  • And, with more guns than people, mass shootings are an almost-daily occurrence.

It's easy to see why an appealing pitch to the nation’s young people would be “comeback” or “Make America Great Again.” But what caused that “greatness” that we need to “come back to” and what wrecked it?

The American middle class is a relatively recent phenomenon. In 1900, only about 17 percent of us were in it; by the time of the Republican Great Depression it was about a quarter of us.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn into office in 1933, he embarked on a radical new campaign to create the world’s first widespread, more-than-half-of-us middle class. It had three main long-term components.

First, he passed the Wagner Act in 1935 that legalized labor unions and forbade employers from bringing in scab workers or refusing to recognize a union. That gave workers democracy in the workplace, and they used that power to demand that as their productivity increased, so would their pay and benefits.

Second, he established a minimum wage to make sure that people who worked full time would never end up in poverty.

Third, he raised the top income tax rate to 90 percent for the morbidly rich and 52 percent for corporations.

That high top tax rate on the rich meant that the average CEO took only about 30 times what the average worker did (because he’d be paying 90 percent or 74 percent after taking the first few millions), leaving far more money in the company to give raises and benefits to workers.

Corporations could get around their top tax rate by investing in their business. Research and development, new product roll-outs, advertising and marketing, and increasing pay and benefits were all tax-deductible, and that high tax rate incentivized them to do these things that built a strong and resilient manufacturing economy (stock buybacks were considered illegal stock manipulation until 1983).

Reagan undid all of that, lowering the top tax rate on the morbidly rich from 74 percent to 27 percent (it’s since gone up to 34 percent), cutting the top corporate tax rate to 34 percent, and legalizing stock buybacks, so now CEOs are taking literally hundreds of billions out of their companies (Musk is set to make a trillion) and wages for workers have been mostly flat even since 1981.

In similar fashion, Reagan declared war on labor unions so effectively that that one-third of us protected by unions in 1981 has collapsed. Today private sector union membership rates are only 5.9 percent, with some states even lower (North Carolina 2.4 percent, South Dakota 2.7 percent, and South Carolina 2.8 percent.

Regarding college, 80 percent of the cost of an education in state-run colleges and universities was paid by government when Reagan came into office, leaving about 20 percent of the cost to be covered by tuition. The Reagan Revolution changed all that, so that today tuition covers the largest percentage and the state is only covering around 20 percent-40 percent (it varies from state to state).

Healthcare was inexpensive when Reagan came into office because most states required both insurance companies and hospitals to run as nonprofits. There weren’t any billionaire insurance industry executives like Dollar Bill McGuire until Republicans changed the rules of the game, letting insurance companies and hospitals run as profit-making operations at the expense of the American public.

Great strides had also been made in opportunity for minorities and women by 1981; just a decade earlier women had gained the right to have a credit card or sign a mortgage without a husband, brother, or father’s signature. Affirmative Action programs were pulling racial and religious minorities into the mainstream of the American economy, kicking off a widespread Black middle class.

So, if Charlie Kirk was all about an “American Comeback,” what were his positions on the issues that created that broad, widespread middle class that Republicans and Trump promise us they’ll restore when they “Make America Great Again”?

On taxes, Kirk wanted to replace the progressive income tax with a 10 percent flat tax, so even the poorest person is paying income taxes on their meager income while the morbidly rich get a massive tax break.

He called unions “cartels” and celebrated teachers losing the right to unionize.

On college tuition, he opposed any plan to reduce student debt or increase federal or state funding to higher education, calling free college a “bribe.”

And on health care, Kirk opposed the kind of universal health care every other developed country in the world has, calling the VA an example of failed “government-run” healthcare.

With regard to the rights of women and minorities Charlie was also outspoken, most notably saying about prominent Black women Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, whom he labeled “affirmative action picks”:

“You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”

He added:

“We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the mid-1960s.”

Finally, with regard to guns, even though 87 percent of Americans want reasonable gun control, Kirk was all-in with the firearms industry, arguing that “some gun deaths every single year” are worth the cost of the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s interpretation of the Second Amendment. How do we protect our kids? Kirk said, quite simply, more guns was the solution:

“If our money and our sporting events and our airplanes have armed guards, why don’t our children?”

So, the question: How does doubling down on low taxes for the morbidly rich, keeping our health care for-profit, withholding higher education funding, gutting unions, increasing the number of guns, and trash-talking women and minorities make America “comeback”?

Republicans and their well-paid hustlers (Kirk took in hundreds of millions) have been promoting these positions for forty-four years and the result has been the gutting of the American middle class, now leading to anger, resentment, and political violence.

It’s way past time for America to return to the policies and positions that history proves (both in America and around the world) produce and build a strong middle class, the essential foundation for economic and political stability.

Sticks and stones may break our bones — but these Trump words can really hurt us

Every president and most members of Congress have known for the past two centuries that having the ability to wield the power of government is a serious responsibility that carries with it real obligations for self-control.

The reason is simple and obvious, although our media appears to not realize it when they act like Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s rhetoric is normal: Government can legally kill you, imprison you, and take everything you own. Fox “News” and other commentators can’t.

When some bigot on Fox or another rightwing outlet goes off on how Democrats are “left wing extremists,” “terrorists,” or “traitors,” he doesn’t have the power or ability to do anything about it. They’re just words, which is why they’re protected by the First Amendment. Inflammatory words, certainly, but just words.

But when a government official slaps one of those kinds of labels on you because of things you’ve said or political views you hold, you can lose literally everything.

Just ask Mahmoud Khalil or Rümeysa Öztürk, who were imprisoned for expressing their opinions on the genocide Benjamin Netanyahu is carrying out in Israel, or Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had the bad fortune of being brown-skinned when Miller was on one of his racist jeremiads, even though Garcia had legal permission to stay in the US.

This is why even after 9/11 George W. Bush measured his words, going so far as to emphasize that Islam wasn’t our enemy. So did Abraham Lincoln, for that matter, even as the country he led was under attack by actual traitors committed to ending democracy in America.

In his first inaugural address, on the verge of the Civil War, he said:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds…”

Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, understood that as a government official with the power to kill by firing squad or imprison, it was his obligation to turn down the heat.

“We can return violence with violence; we can return hate with hate. That’s the problem with political violence. It metastasizes,” Cox told the nation when Trent Robinson was arrested on suspicion of killing Charlie Kirk. “We can always point the figure at the other side. At some point we have to find an off ramp, or else it’s going to get much worse.”

Trump, Miller, and the GOP more generally haven’t gotten the message.

Trump blamed the “radical left” — as if there actually is any meaningful number of people in America calling for communism — for the killing, and then on Thursday told reporters, “We just have to beat the hell” out of “radical left lunatics.”

When Matthew Dowd notes on MSNBC that Kirk engaged in hate speech, the worst that happens is the network fires him. Ditto for when Fox’s Brian Kilmead called for America to emulate Hitler’s Aktion T4 program, where physicians killed homeless and disabled people by lethal injection, later moving on to mobile vans that used their exhaust to kill. The worst Kilmead can expect is to be fired, although given how shamefully unprincipled Fox management is, that’s probably unlikely.

But when government officials describe people using language that could lead to any of us being investigated, arrested, or even imprisoned or deported because of our politics, it’s an entirely different thing. It’s a genuine threat to our system of government, our rule of law, and to the safety and security of all of the American people.

Because when they start hauling away Americans for their opinions, when they threaten to pull our citizenship or passports — as Trump and other Republicans have recently done — history tells us it’s not a long trek to using those same tactics against people who thought they were on the “right side.”

Indeed, it’s already started to happen: just ask James Comey, John Brennan, and James Clapper, who are all now facing criminal investigations for speaking out against Trump. All these lifelong Republicans had to lawyer up after Trump publicly called them “criminals.”

When Miller — who the White House wants you to know definitely does not play with porcelain dolls — says the Democratic Party (which he can’t bring himself to say; he instead uses Joe McCarthy’s “Democrat Party” slur) “is not a political party; it is a domestic, extremist organization,” he’s laying a legal foundation for criminal investigations and arrests per the Patriot Act.

When he vows to “dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence,” promising under Trump’s leadership to use law enforcement to “strip them of money, power, and freedom” and threatening that members of the left who “spread evil hate” will “live in exile” he’s not just a commentator: he’s a man who wields actual power over life and death, imprisonment or freedom.

This rhetoric is particularly troubling since all of the previous 31 politically-motivated violent attacks in America have been committed by rightwingers.

Or consider Elon Musk, the world‘s richest man who created and ran the DOGE program to dismantle our government. He spoke to a crowd in England this weekend and said:

“The violence is going to come to you. You will have no choice. This is a, this is, you're in a fundamental situation here where you, where, whether you choose violence or not. The violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die. You either the fight back or you die. And that's the truth.”

And he wasn’t talking about Osama bin Laden or anybody like that. He was talking about people like you and me:

“[Y]ou see how much violence there’s on the left with our friend Charlie Kirk getting murdered in cold blood this week and people on the left celebrating it openly; the left is the party of murder and celebrating murder. I mean let that sink in for a minute. That’s who we’re dealing with here. That is who we're dealing with.”

When Trump is asked how to heal the country and says, “I couldn’t care less” and adds that, “The radicals on the left are the problem,” he’s inciting stochastic lone-wolf terror against Democrats and setting up rationalizations for government actions like Hitler’s Reichstag Fire Decree that ended all free speech protections in Germany in 1933.

And now a member of Congress is introduced legislation to strip the passports of anybody who “supports terrorism.“ The bill’s author is a former soldier in the Israeli military: you know what direction this is going.

The few rational people still left in the GOP need to reach out to this administration and convince them to follow the example of every other president since Andrew Jackson to dial back the rhetoric, acknowledge the fundamental humanity of Democrats and others on the “left,” and their absolute right to advocate for their own, different vision of a better America with fewer guns, more unions, and free healthcare and free college (the actual “radical left” positions).

Because when a government points its finger at you — when it decides you are the enemy — the entire machinery of the state lines up behind that accusation. That’s not hyperbole; it’s the lesson of history, written in blood and exile and mass graves.

Every authoritarian regime began not with tanks in the streets but with leaders who used words like weapons and convinced their followers that fellow citizens were traitors. Every one. Trump and his enablers are replaying that script, right here, right now.

The only question left is whether we’ll recognize it for what it is and slam on the brakes, or whether we’ll watch, paralyzed, as the state’s power to cage, exile, or kill is once again turned inward, but this time, against us all.

This abject media cowardice only makes violent GOP rhetoric worse

As a guy who regularly gets death threats because of my media presence, I shouldn’t have to say that killing people — or even threatening them — for their politics is wrong. But here it is, for the record: nobody in America should die for their politics.

That said, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination — the guy who downplayed slavery, demonized Black and brown people, promoted the racist antisemitic Great Replacement Theory, attacked queer people, made degrading comments about women, said gun deaths were fine because that’s the price we must pay for the Second Amendment — the media is afraid to say anything about the state of our politics other than “we need to stop violence-provoking political rhetoric on both sides.”

As if there were two sides here.

Here’s the hard truth that the bullshit-embracing “both sides” punditry won’t say out loud: calling for Democrats to “tone it down” has become a permission slip for Republicans to keep stoking hate, flirting with violence, and treating fellow Americans as enemies rather than opponents.

If you actually look at the political science and the public record, the escalation didn’t start with Democrats, and it doesn’t continue because Democrats use accurate words to describe what we’re facing. The political research is clear.

As Rachel Bitecofer points out, Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein said the quiet part our loud when they wrote that the modern GOP had become “ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition” in their 2012 Washington Post essay and book-length work on asymmetric polarization.

And this isn’t new: the rhetoric that got us here wasn’t even invented on social media. Lee Atwater explained Nixon’s Southern Strategy out loud in 1981, describing how race-baiting messages were laundered into “abstract” appeals that produced the same results without resorting to the N-word.

Ronald Reagan elevated the “welfare queen” trope into a national morality play that exploited poverty and race for partisan gain. The Willie Horton ad and “Revolving Door” spot baked fear-first politics into a Republican presidential campaign’s core strategy.

Pat Buchanan then said the quiet part with a bullhorn in his 1992 convention speech, declaring a “culture war” against Democrats and anyone who didn’t fit his vision of a Christian white America. Newt Gingrich operationalized it with his GOPAC training memo, a how-to guide that told Republican candidates to brand Democrats with words like “corrupt,” “sick,” and “traitors” while reserving terms like “freedom” and “strength” for themselves.

This wasn’t an internet rumor, it was the Republican party’s official training literature.

When the National Rifle Association mailed a fundraising letter in 1995 calling federal agents “jack-booted thugs,” former President George H. W. Bush resigned from their board in protest, which tells you how far the mainstream right still had to travel to normalize incendiary attacks on law enforcement when it suited their politics.

Fast forward to the past decade and the escalation didn’t slow.

Republicans have long normalized calling Democrats “socialists” or “communists” as a baseline insult rather than an argument. This isn’t a fringe habit, it’s a standard applause line for Republican leaders and conservative media outlets.

The “Second Amendment” wink-and-nod-endorsing-violence politics isn’t new either. Sharron Angle campaigned on “Second Amendment remedies” in 2010 and Donald Trump suggested in 2016 that the “Second Amendment people” might have to step up to stop Hillary Clinton.

With Trump’s 2016 campaign, the glorification of violence moved from innuendo to stagecraft. He urged rallygoers to “knock the crap out of” protesters, then later told police “please don’t be too nice” to suspects during a Long Island speech.

Armed rightwing extremists swarmed the Michigan Capitol in April 2020, a preview of how “we the people” could be recast as a threat display when public health or election results didn’t go the way Republicans wanted.

Republican Congressman Paul Gosar posted an anime video that depicted violence against AOC and President Joe Biden, which isn’t normal in an advanced democracy. Nonetheless, all but two Republicans refused to vote for his censure.

The GOP’s information pipeline supercharged moral panics about identity and belonging; the old birther lie about Barack Obama’s citizenship migrated from fringe to Fox to Trump’s core brand.

Then the “Great Replacement” narrative went from white supremacist fever dream to a standard talking point on the country’s most-watched rightwing channel, and then into the manifestos of mass murderers in El Paso and Buffalo, and into the antisemitic rantings of the Tree of Life shooter who blamed Jews for “bringing invaders” here.

After Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, the “groomer” slur against queer people exploded by more than 400 percent because political entrepreneurs like Kirk realized how quickly a smear can mobilize fear and clicks in the current media economy.

Republican officials and aligned media also popularized the false frame that gender-affirming care equals “genital mutilation,” a homophobic slur Kirk kept using that’s been rejected on the record by federal judges examining the facts in these cases.

This is the ecosystem that produced a presidential debate moment in which Trump told the racist Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” and a January 6 rally where he urged supporters to “fight like hell.” The Republican National Committee later tried to rebrand the attack as “legitimate political discourse,” which was an explicit signal to their base that political violence is just fine with the GOP.

The Department of Justice charged more than 1,500 people in connection with the attack on the Capitol, including hundreds for assaulting police officers (three of whom died): Trump then pardoned them all, explaining again by his action (and the failure of any Republicans to condemn it) that political violence is just fine with today’s GOP.

Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two election workers falsely smeared by Trump’s lawyer, won a landmark defamation verdict because Republican threats to public servants are real, not rhetorical flourishes.

When critics talk about authoritarian drift, they aren’t making it up for cable hits. Trump created “Schedule F” by executive order in 2020 to strip job protections from large categories of civil servants. President Biden revoked it but now it’s back, leading to a dangerous politicization of the federal bureaucracy that’s now hunting and purging “lefties” the way slave patrolers once tracked down escapees.

Alongside that, Trump has publicly urged defunding or punishing the FBI and DOJ when they investigate him, and even floated “terminating” parts of the Constitution, which is rhetoric that would have ended careers a generation ago and now earns a shrug from most of his party’s elected officials.

And, as Jessica Valenti points out:

“[W]hen a pregnant woman dies of sepsis in a hospital that could have helped her but is legally prevented from doing so, that’s political violence. It’s political violence when a child is shot in their classroom because lawmakers refuse to take action on guns. An abortion provider being assassinated after years of conservatives calling them ‘baby-killers’ is political violence, as is the death of a person who had their medical claim denied by companies more interested in their bottom line than people’s lives.”

And now, in the wake of Kirk’s murder, Republicans are again amping up the violent rhetoric.

Laura Loomer posted, “More people will be murdered if the Left isn’t crushed with the power of the state.” Trump referenced “radical left political violence” as if that’s the only source of it. Sean Davis, the CEO of The Federalist, wrote: “When Democrats lose elections they couldn’t steal, they murder the people they were unable to defeat.” Fox host Jesse Waters said, “Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us.”

Mother Jones compiled a more comprehensive list of Republican calls for violence against Democrats.

Trump made jokes about Paul Pelosi’s near-murder, and laughed when a thuggish congressional candidate assaulted a reporter for asking him a question about health care policy. That thug is now governor of Montana.

And let’s not forget Charlie Kirk’s hero, Kyle Rittenhouse, who murdered two people and blew most of the arm off a third. Trump invited him to Mar-a-Largo to congratulate him.

Violence is their brand.

And in the wake of all this, Trump pulls the Secret Service security detail from Kamala Harris just as she begins her book tour.

Now put that record next to what Democrats have done.

I realize it makes them sound like wimps, but instead of vilifying their opposition Democrats in Congress have been working across the aisle for the average person, passing healthcare legislation, trying to strengthen voting rights, reduce student debt, clean up the environment, rebuild our infrastructure and kick-start chip manufacturing, and hold corporate criminals to account.

After Democratic Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered by a rightwinger with a list of almost 50 other Democrats he planned to kill, and a state senator and his wife were wounded, Trump refused to even call Governor Tim Walz, much less lower flags to half-staff. Democrats, who’d lost a genuine hero, universally called for toning down political rhetoric instead of vengeance or retributive violence.

While the GOP’s brand is “We’re victims!!!,” Democrats are more interested in getting things done for the people. And when they do call out the authoritarianism of this administration, they’re pointing to actual policies like masked secret police, military in the streets, Trump grifting billions in crypto, using the FBI to go after his political opponents, and Republicans on the Supreme Court giving Trump immunity from prosecution for actual crimes.

On top of passing legislation, Democratic leaders have consistently condemned political violence without caveat, from Biden’s 2020 speech spelling out that “rioting is not protesting” to repeated condemnations after attacks on public officials and public servants.

So when commentators ask both parties to “lower the temperature,” we should be honest about what that means in practice.

Too often, it’s a request for Democrats to stop calling out the very real way the modern right has mainstreamed eliminationist rhetoric, moral-panic politics, and procedural hardball.

It is a call to pretend that saying “you’re child-abusing communists who hate America” versus “you’re undermining democracy and endangering people with lies” are mirror images.

They are not.

One is a smear that licenses political violence. The other is a description of a documented pattern of behavior with decades of receipts.

None of that means Democrats are perfect. It means Democrats are operating inside the reality-based world where deals must be made, bills must be passed, and violence is condemned when it appears on your own side.

Former Republican George Conway warns that the GOP is on the verge of turning Kirk into Horst Wessel, the Nazi streetfighter who Hitler made into a martyr when he was killed. Conway posted:

“They may not want to hear it, and it may incense them, but the parallels between what the Nazis did then, and what Trump and MAGA are doing today, are striking, chilling — and as any expert on authoritarianism will tell you, straight out of the same toxic, but dog-eared, playbook.”

Jim Stewartson suggests Kirk’s killing could be used by Trump the way Hitler used the Reichstag Fire to change German law and give himself unlimited power.

These are indeed very, very dangerous times. And the political rhetoric coming out of 1500 rightwing hate-radio stations, Republican politicians, and billionaire-funded hard-right-biased-social-media-algorithms is at the center of the crisis.

If Republicans want the volume to come down, the path is simple.

  • Stop labeling mainstream opponents as “communists” and “groomers.”
  • Stop flirting with “Second Amendment remedies.”
  • Stop normalizing threats against election workers.
  • Stop trying to bend the machinery of government to punish critics and shield allies.

When that happens, Democrats will meet them in the middle, because Democrats already live there when they write bipartisan infrastructure bills, subsidize domestic chip manufacturing, narrow gun loopholes, and harden the legal process for counting electoral votes.

Until then, asking Democrats to “watch their tone” is not a plan for peace: it’s a plan for unilateral disarmament in a fight the other side first chose.

Our media must call the problem what it is, or we’ll never fix it. The people who lit this fire keep tossing gasoline on it. The only way to put it out is to stop pretending the arsonists and the firefighters are the same.

We the people are the ones who must stand up to Trump

If you’re not a criminal, you shouldn’t fear government. Instead, as Thomas Jefferson often pointed out, government should fear you.

This is the foundation of the American experiment, that our system of government was created, as the Declaration of Independence says, “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

And, yet, today increasing numbers of Americans are afraid of their government, or at least afraid of the people who now run it.

Our news media are terrified of being sued or otherwise harassed by Trump, so much so that two of our three big TV networks have paid him millions in what was essentially protection money.

CBS just put a rightwinger with ties to the GOP as their ombudsman, and NBC is on the verge of spinning off MSNBC, which is increasingly problematic for the network as it regularly draws Trump’s ire.

Republicans in the House of Representatives and Senate are so cowed by Trump’s primary threats and the hundreds of millions in political dollars he controls that they’re desperately engaging in a coverup of his alleged participation in Jeffrey Epstein's crimes.

Writers I know on Substack and elsewhere are watching their words carefully to avoid provoking rightwing ire and the death threats it often brings, at the same time a series of very-well-funded rightwing media empires are growing.

Armed men in civilian clothes with masks on their faces are snatching people off the street and disappearing them, now with the blessing of six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court; it’s often impossible to distinguish them from gang members trying to kidnap people for torture or ransom.

People of faith and goodwill are fleeing social media sites ever since their billionaire owners opened the sites up to Nazis and tweaked their secret algorithms to favor hate, fear, and the hard right while suppressing voices of compassion or advocates for democracy here or abroad.

Government workers live in terror that some old tweet or message board posting might be discovered that will cost them their jobs. Some, like Lisa Cook, were just doing their jobs when Trump’s toadies decided to scan everything they’d ever done and find the one checkbox they shouldn’t have clicked that can be used to discredit and then destroy them.

Former government employees and elected officials — from John Brennan and Miles Taylor to James Comey — are wiping out their retirement savings to pay for lawyers because our government has targeted them for Trump’s “retribution.”

Protestors objecting to the militarization of our nation’s cities are arrested for “conspiracy” and charged with crimes that could send them to prison for years or even decades. People who volunteer to help out with voting operations find themselves doxed and vilified on national rightwing media and have to go into hiding, the peace and normalcy of their lives shattered.

Captains of industry, CEOs of the nation’s largest companies, trek to the White House to bow and scrape in front of His Orangeness, and cabinet meetings have turned into a bad caricature of Hans Christian Anderson’s Emperor’s New Clothes fable. We watch, yelling at the TV, “Tell him he’s naked!” but to no avail; they can’t stop slobbering over him like terrified victims being held at knifepoint by a serial killer.

None of this is normal in a democracy; all of these are signs of a creeping dictatorship taking over our nation. It’s particularly not normal in America: we’re the country that invented citizens rising up against an oppressive government. When the South abandoned democracy in the 1850s, and when Europe lost its democracies in the 1930s, we went to war and shed blood and treasure to defend the right to dissent.

And what’s particularly ironic is that the very same people who’ve been loudly warning us about the day coming when the government becomes oppressive and tyrannical — from the John Birch folks to militia members — are now in the vanguard of authoritarianism advocacy. If it wasn’t so tragic — and dangerous — it’d be funny.

Our Attorney General is apparently leading the Epstein coverup, our Secretary of State cheerleads murdering civilians on the high seas, our Treasury Secretary is reportedly provoking fistfights, our Energy and EPA chiefs deny climate change and push more fossil fuel pollution, FEMA is being gutted, Social Security has been crippled, Medicare is about to start pre-clearance of payments in six states, millions will soon be thrown off Medicaid, aid to student borrowers is gone, and food support to needy Americans is being pulled along with food and medicine for millions around the world.

All being done so the morbidly rich (like our billionaire president and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet) could get another $4 trillion tax gift, paid for by the rest of us as our schools are gutted and our children fail.

And it’s not just America that Trump, MAGA, and the GOP are destroying on the altar of bowing to the very rich: Everything Vladimir Putin wants, he gets. As Trump discards America’s allies, Xi Jinping is picking them up, and country after country around the world is abandoning democracy for the siren song of big-money-driven autocracy.

Tariffs, which historically have been the careful, surgical tools of trade policy wielded by Congress since the days of George Washington, are being used as blunt cudgels to beat foreign countries into giving cash, jumbo jets, and Trump Tower opportunities to America’s parasitic ruling family.

Even our Supreme Court has fallen to big money corruption, allowing Trump to do anything he wants — no matter how criminal or anti-democratic — without any pushback or consequences. A billionaire-funded think tank is writing our domestic policy, while Putin and Netanyahu appear to be running our foreign policy.

None of this reflects the traditional American values of fairness, honesty, and rule by the consent of the governed.

With most of our institutions now captured by the morbidly rich, racism and voter suppression openly celebrated, and our police agencies shifting from protecting to oppressing our people, the only group left to stand up to defend what’s left of our shredded republic is We, the People. Us.

History shows that when fascists haven’t yet entrenched themselves as far as Hitler or Mussolini did (or Putin and Viktor Orbán today) it’s still possible for the people to rise up and throw them out. It happened in Ukraine, in South Korea, in Spain and Chile, among others.

People stood up in the face of fear of their governments and, instead, peacefully made those governments fear them. And it can happen here, too.

So, now it’s our turn. And our obligation. We’re the ones who must save us, who must stand up to these fascists, who must awaken our friends, neighbors, and relatives.

Tag, we’re it!

This appalling murder can help us confront the scourge of gun violence

Republican Charlie Kirk is dead. So is former Democratic Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark.

Two clearly political assassinations in the past four months.

And a new study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association’s journal, Pediatrics, suggests that most of the deaths from the more than 250 mass shootings in America so far this year could also be classified as resulting from politics.

How did we get here, and what do we do?

In 2008, the in-the-NRA’s-pocket Republican Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia did much the same thing that Sam Alito would later do with his Dobbs anti-abortion ruling: he reached back hundreds of years to look for a definition at the time the Second Amendment was written for how people then viewed the phrase “bear arms” and then twisted it beyond recognition.

The result was the corrupt Heller decision, as I lay out in The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment, which unleashed a new wave of guns on an unsuspecting America.

It was followed two years later by McDonald v Chicago, another NRA-purchased all-Republican decision striking down Chicago’s gun control laws and forcing cities and Blue states to accept more weapons whether their people — through their elected officials — wanted that tsunami of guns in their communities or not.

As Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his dissent:

“Although the Court’s decision in this case might be seen as a mere adjunct to its decision in Heller, the consequences could prove far more destructive — quite literally — to our Nation’s communities and to our constitutional structure.”

As we saw yesterday with the right’s new martyr, and have been seeing in the daily toll of gun deaths that America suffers from — alone among all other nations in the world — Stevens was prescient.

We are literally the only country in the world that is experiencing this magnitude of gun crisis. Half of the guns in civilian hands in the entire world are here in the United States, so it shouldn’t surprise anybody that the leading cause of childhood death in the US is bullets and political assassinations have become routine.

The study in Pediatrics looked at child gun deaths in America before and after the 2010 McDonald decision. What they found is shocking.

That decision caused two major changes in gun laws across America. The first was that nearly every red state loosened their gun laws, sometimes in the extreme, even allowing open carry of semiautomatic weapons of war without any permit or regulation. Most blue states, on the other hand, looked for and found ways around the decision to actually tighten their gun control laws.

The result was astonishing. Between 2011 and 2023, the study period, red states that had loosened their gun laws saw 7,453 more children killed by firearms than the pre-McDonald statistical trends would have predicted had the Republicans on the Court not further loosened gun laws.

In blue states that maintained or strengthened their gun laws, though, child gun deaths remained the same as before McDonald and Heller, and, to quote the study:

“Four states (California, Maryland, New York, and Rhode Island) had decreased pediatric firearm mortality after McDonald v Chicago, all of which were in the strict firearms law group.”

Melissa Hortman was a strong advocate of gun control laws. Charlie Kirk opposed them. Both are dead by gunfire, along with hundreds of children and adults this year.

When Hortman was murdered by a politically-inspired rightwing thug, some conservatives on X and other platforms celebrated.

Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee, for example, tweeted: “This is what happens When Marxists don’t get their way,” along with a picture of the shooter. An hour later, again showing the suspect’s picture, Senator Lee wrote: “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” apparently trying to humorously reference Minnesota’s Democratic Governor Tim Walz and his advocacy for gun control.

Yesterday, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, some liberals were posting the equivalent of “good riddance” to social media platforms, some making Lee’s obscene posts seem tame.

Both are reprehensible.

Instead, let’s take this moment to reflect on how the NRA’s work over the past decades — often funded and supported by Vladimir Putin’s Russia (where gun control is rigid) — killed both of them. And tens of thousands of children and adults over the years.

This week NPR reported that school shootings have spawned a $4 billion industry selling everything from bulletproof backpacks to “panic buttons, bullet-resistant whiteboards, facial recognition technology, training simulators, body armor, guns and tasers.”

They note:

“Tom McDermott, with the metal detector manufacturer CEIA USA, says schools used to be a small fraction of their U.S. business. Now they’re the majority.

“‘It’s not right. We need to solve this problem. It’s good for business, but we don't need to be selling to schools,’ McDermott says.

“Sarah McNeeley, a sales manager with SAM Medical, is selling trauma kits, which include tourniquets, clotting agents and chest seals. She says their customers are traditionally EMTs, fire departments and military medics, but increasingly, school districts.”

It’s insane that America’s answer to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court and the NRA flooding our country with deadly weapons is to create a multi-billion-dollar industry to stop bullets or ameliorate their damage in our public schools.

The vast majority of Americans want rational gun control laws instead of this Wild West insanity. Every other developed country in the world has them; not a single one forces their children through the trauma of active shooter drills or subjects them to metal detectors and requires them to occasionally come face-to-face with murderous psychopaths armed to the teeth.

It’s way past time for our politicians to wake the hell up, and hopefully the assassination of a far-right “gun rights” icon will cause at least a few Republicans to break with their party’s fealty to the weapons industry and join with Democrats to Make America Safe Again.

This senator just put the GOP's racist plan on plain display

Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) took the stage at the National Conservatism Conference and declared that America is “a nation and a people.” With those five words he threw aside the pluralism that has defined this country since before its founding and embraced an ideology rooted in blood and soil, in exclusion and hierarchy. He put it in context:

“That’s what set Donald Trump apart from the old conservatism and the old liberalism alike: He knows that America is not just an abstract ‘proposition,’ but a nation and a people, with its own distinct history and heritage and interests…

“When they tear down our statues and monuments, mock our history, and insult our traditions, they’re attacking our future as well as our past. By changing the stories we tell about ourselves, they believe they can build a new America — with the new myths of a new people. But America does not belong to them. It belongs to us.”

It’s not new to hear Republicans peddling this kind of racialized “us versus them” rhetoric, but it’s still shocking to see a sitting United States senator parrot phrases that would be more at home in the speeches of European fascists or Confederates in the years leading up to the Civil War than in the halls of Congress today.

Schmitt offered no acknowledgment of the millions of enslaved Africans whose stolen labor helped build this country, no recognition of the generations of immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and Africa who contributed to our prosperity, no admission of the bloody sacrifices of those who fought for civil rights, equality, and inclusion.

Instead he spoke only of a singular people and a singular nation, implicitly white, implicitly Christian, and implicitly obedient to his party’s authoritarian vision.

This is not some isolated gaffe: it’s part of a pattern. At the same moment Schmitt was narrowing the definition of who counts as American, he’d chosen as his spokesman Nathan Hochman, who was forced out of Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign after circulating a promotional video featuring Nazi imagery.

That a man with such a stain on his record can walk comfortably into the Republican fold today says everything about the party’s trajectory. It’s no accident, no oversight, no slip. The GOP is nakedly embracing white supremacy and the Confederate neofascist ethos.

They’re not ashamed of it, either, as previous generations would have been, speaking in Nixonesque “law and order” code. Today, they flaunt it. They want to redefine America itself, not as a democracy where all people are “created equal,” but as a fortress where some people’s bloodlines, wealth, and religions entitle them to power while others are cast aside or erased from memory.

This assault is not simply rhetorical. The Trump administration has already shown us the template they’re using to deconstruct a democratic America and replace it with a whites-only neofascist ethnostate.

Their racist attacks on the Smithsonian and other national museums weren’t about efficiency or budgets — they’re about rewriting history, about stripping slavery, segregation, and genocide from the story of America, and replacing it with sanitized myths that glorify the Confederate ethos and erase the Confederacy’s victims.

They want future generations to walk through America’s most important cultural institutions and see nothing of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Sitting Bull, César Chávez, or Bayard Rustin. They want a nation of children raised on the lie that America was always a white, Christian ethnostate, that pluralism and democracy were well-intentioned but impractical mistakes to be corrected.

This is how authoritarian regimes always consolidate power: as George Orwell wrote in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which the GOP has apparently adopted as an instruction manual, control the narrative of the past and you control reality of the future.

But history refuses to be erased. The graves of the people who fought and died to end slavery and grant civil rights to nonwhite people and women are still here.

The gravestones of Black soldiers who charged Confederate lines at Fort Wagner, who bled and died under the Union flag, are still here. The blood of abolitionists lynched by mobs is still in our soil. The memories of those who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and were beaten nearly to death by racist sheriffs are still vivid.

The soldiers of my father’s generation who fell on Omaha Beach didn’t die so that a senator from Missouri could try to turn our country into a singular “nation and a people.” They died for liberty, for equality, for a world where democracy could flourish instead of fascism. To erase their sacrifices by redefining America as a white nation is to spit on their graves.

Where are the Republicans who once called themselves the Party of Lincoln? The ones who agreed with President Ronald Reagan when he famously said:

“You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American. …

“This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America's greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation.

“While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier.

“This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

Abraham Lincoln himself declared at Gettysburg that this was a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. He didn’t say “all white men.” He didn’t say “all Christians.” He said all men, a word that at the time encompassed all people. He understood that America’s strength was not in its uniformity but in its aspiration to universality.

Have they all been purged from the GOP? Has the last Republican who believes in a multiracial democracy been driven into silence or retirement?

Watching today’s party leaders it seems so. The few who whisper their discomfort are drowned out by the roar of those who openly embrace bigotry, authoritarianism, and historical revisionism. The Party of Lincoln has become the Party of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, right down to Trump renaming military bases after traitorous Confederate generals and Klan leaders.

This is not a mere political dispute: it’s a struggle for the soul of America.

Our choice is between the pluralistic democracy that generations of Americans fought and died to protect, or an authoritarian nationalism that dehumanizes millions and threatens to dismantle our most cherished institutions.

When Schmitt stands before a crowd and offers them a vision of America as a singular people, he’s calling for the death of the American experiment itself. When Republicans bring men like Hochman into their fold, they’re saying right out loud that Nazi imagery and Confederate ideology are no longer disqualifying, but are welcome.

When Trump and his administration try to rewrite history in the Smithsonian, they’re declaring war on truth itself. And on the concepts and ideals that made America a great nation.

The outrage is justified because the stakes are existential. A party that embraces white supremacy and fascist ethos cannot coexist with democracy. A nation that allows its museums, its textbooks, its speeches, and its laws to be purged of pluralism cannot endure as a democracy.

America has faced down this poison before. We lost 700,000 people fighting a Civil War to crush it. We passed civil rights laws to dismantle its legal scaffolding. We buried tens of thousands of soldiers in Europe who died fighting against fascism abroad.

To let it rise again here at home, wrapped in the flag of one of our two great political parties, is the ultimate betrayal.

And to put a massive punctuation mark on it, on Monday Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a shadow docket opinion for his five corrupt Republican colleagues on the Supreme Court saying that it’s now perfectly legal for ICE and other federal, state, and local police authorities to engage in racial profiling.

Protesting Republicans bringing us fully into a “your papers please“ type of race-based fascism, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that because of the Republicans on the Supreme Court:

“The Government, and now the concurrence, has all but declared that all Latinos, U.S. citizens or not, who work low-wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction.”

The question now is whether we’ll rise to the moment. Will we allow a senator’s words to pass unchallenged, a party’s racism to be normalized, a nation’s history to be rewritten? Or will we push back with the force of truth, with the weight of history, with the unyielding conviction that America belongs to all its people, not just those deemed acceptable by the far right?

Silence is complicity, both on the part of our media and our politicians of both parties. Pretending this is normal politics is complicity. It’s time for every American who still believes in the Constitution, in equality, in pluralism, in democracy itself to speak out in favor of an inclusive America.

This is not about left versus right. This is about democracy versus fascism, inclusion versus exclusion, truth versus lies.

Eric Schmitt and those like him want us to forget who we are. They want us to forget the Declaration’s promise, Lincoln’s dedication, King’s dream, and the sacrifices of millions of ordinary Americans who fought for liberty and justice. They want us to forget the very idea of America as a pluralistic nation.

We must not forget. We must not be silent. We must not surrender America’s future to those who would drag us back into the darkest chapters of America’s past.

Trump is using this appalling meme to trigger a terrifying new catastrophe

Last week, Donald Trump posted a stolen valor war meme on his failing, Nazi-infested social media site, with the bonespurs-draft-dodger wearing a US Army Cavalry hat and the slogan, paraphrased from the movie Apocalypse Now:

“’I love the smell of deportations in the morning…’ Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of War. 🚁 🚁 🚁”

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker replied on BlueSky:

“The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal. Donald Trump isn't a strongman, he's a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.”

So, how could this play out? It’s important to begin the conversation — and planning — for what appears to be the Civil War 2.0 that Trump’s apparently trying to incite.

First, there’s precedent for the federal government to send federal troops into a state to enforce the law as ordered by a court.

JFK did it in the 1962 Ole Miss crisis, to enforce the Supreme Court’s Brown v Board decision, mobilizing up to 31,000 federal troops, including the 503rd Military Police Battalion, the 108th Armored Cavalry Regiment, and soldiers from the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. Kennedy also sent federal troops and readied thousands near Birmingham, Alabama, during violent resistance to those same federally mandated desegregation efforts.

To accomplish this, Kennedy invoked the Insurrection Act of 1807, which is actually a series of laws passed over a two-decade period, that constitute a virtual blank check for presidential power.

Particularly problematic is Section 253 of the law that allows the president to use troops to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” in a state that “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.”

As the Brennan Center for Justice explains:

“This provision is so bafflingly broad that it cannot possibly mean what it says, or else it authorizes the president to use the military against any two people conspiring to break federal law.”

Adding to Trump’s potential power, in 1827 the Supreme Court ruled that “the authority to decide whether [a crisis requiring the militia to be called out] has arisen belongs exclusively to the President, and . . . his decision is conclusive upon all other persons.”

Both JB Pritzker and California Governor Gavin Newsom have explicitly said that they believe much of this is Trump preparing to use troops for voter suppression in Blue areas of the country during the 2026 elections to prevent Democrats from taking Congress.

Pritzker said voters “should understand that he [Trump] has other aims, other than fighting crime” and that this is part of a plan to “stop the elections in 2026 or, frankly, take control of those elections.”

Newsom pointed out, “Interestingly, we still have federalized National Guard assigned through Election Day. Is that a coincidence? Through Election Day?!”

Additionally, the governors of 19 Blue states issued a statement saying:

“Instead of actually addressing crime, President Trump cut federal funding for law enforcement that states rely on and continues to politicize our military by trying to undermine the executive authority of governors as commanders in chief of their state’s National Guard …

“Whether it’s Illinois, Maryland and New York or another state tomorrow, the president’s threats and efforts to deploy a state’s National Guard without the request and consent of that state’s governor is an alarming abuse of power, ineffective, and undermines the mission of our service members. This chaotic federal interference in our states’ National Guard must come to an end.”

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner went a step further, saying he was willing to actually arrest federal agents who exceed or break the law:

“Let’s be clear: if the National Guard comes to Philadelphia and commits crimes, they will be prosecuted locally and Donald Trump cannot pardon them.”

So, how does this play out?

Trump is already reportedly positioning Texas National Guard troops and other federal officers at the Naval Station Great Lakes, just north of Chicago, presumably preparing for an invasion of that city as soon as this week.

The vision of former Confederate-state troops seizing control of the largest city in a former Union state is explosive and may well provide Trump with the violence he’d hoped for but didn’t get in LA and DC. Violence he could use to justify invoking the Insurrection Act like Kennedy did, and then using that to lock down the 2026 elections.

If this happens, will Pritzker follow Krasner’s model and begin arresting federal agents and Texas National Guard members if they’re found breaking Illinois or Chicago law? Or will he sue at federal court the way Newsom did? Or both?

If he does the former, it could literally kick off a second American Civil War. If he does the latter, Trump may win Civil War 2.0 without a shot fired, particularly if the six corrupt on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court overrule the lower courts and endorse Trump’s actions.

And if Pritzker and Newsom are right, all of this is being done — along with extreme gerrymandering — as part of the widespread Republican effort to rig the 2026 election so Democrats can’t take back the House and begin subpoena-based investigations of Trump’s crimes from the Epstein era to his recent murder of 11 immigrants in a boat off the coast of Venezuela.

Meanwhile, as Trump pits Americans against each other, dismantles our federal government, ensures future epidemics, and grifts billions in cybercurrencies, China and Russia are pulling the rest of the world together against America. It’s almost as if Vladimir Putin was giving Trump weekly directions, a dystopian Manchurian Candidate notion that seems more credible with every passing day.

He’s systematically weakening America while boosting Putin. By shutting down Voice of America, dismantling defenses against Russian election interference, ignoring Ukraine, and bungling diplomacy with tariffs and summits that drive allies toward Moscow, he’s handed Putin victories that come at the direct expense of U.S. power and security.

In the face of this, Trump is doing everything he can to ramp up tensions and provoke people in Blue cities to violence which he can then exploit to increase his power and further crack down on elections, particularly next year.

All, apparently, in-service of converting America from a historic liberal democracy into a one-man personality-driven dictatorship that’s increasingly aligned with — and following the model of — other tyrants around the world.

As a result, now is the critical time for all Americans to get educated about what’s going on and prepare for the eventuality of a totally locked-down police state being imposed on multiple Blue cities, particularly in states where not counting the urban vote can flip the entire state Red (which is most Blue states).

Trump is trying to take down American democracy for good. This is not a drill. Organize, educate, call your representatives, and prepare to show up in the streets.

Trump just became a murderer — let's say it like it is

When the Supreme Court says Donald Trump is above the law, who speaks for the 11 dead on that boat U.S. forces blew up in the Caribbean? Their lives ended not in a battlefield crossfire or a clash between nations, but at the whim of one man emboldened by six justices who declared him untouchable.

Trump simply ordered human beings erased, confident the Court had given him immunity from any consequence and the leaders of his military would obey an illegal order. Eleven souls were sacrificed not just to his cruelty, but to a judicial betrayal that transformed the presidency into a license to kill.

For most of our history, American presidents have at least gone through the motions of cloaking lethal force in some form of legal justification.

Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War but sought Congress’s approval. Franklin D. Roosevelt went to Congress for Lend-Lease before escalating aid to Britain, and sought a declaration of war against Japan. George W. Bush and Barack Obama leaned heavily on the post-9/11 Authorizations for Use of Military Force to justify everything from Afghanistan to drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia to killing Osama Bin Laden.

The principle has always been that the United States does not simply kill people without some kind of legal process. It may be stretched, it may be abused, but it has been invoked.

What Trump has now done with the strike on a small boat off Venezuela’s coast is to break that tradition in a way that is both lawless and unprecedented. He gave the order to kill 11 human beings with no congressional approval, no international authorization, and no visible evidence justifying it.

This was simply murder on the high seas. And the world knows it.

He did it in the full knowledge that six Republican appointees on the Supreme Court have granted him immunity for crimes committed while in office, even international crimes. That ruling opened the door to precisely this sort of extrajudicial killing and stripped away one of the last guardrails protecting both our law and our global standing.

The official claim is that the boat carried members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. But 11 people on a small vessel that couldn’t possibly travel as far as America doesn’t sound like a cartel’s drug shipment (typically there’s only one or two people manning such a boar); it sounds like desperate migrants fleeing a collapsing country.

That possibility makes the strike even more chilling when paired with a story Miles Taylor has told about Trump’s senior advisor Stephen Miller.

Taylor recounts traveling with Miller and a Coast Guard admiral after a drug war event in Key West.

On that trip, Miller asked the admiral if it would be legal to use a Predator drone to obliterate a boat full of migrants in international waters. Miller’s reasoning was that migrants weren’t covered by the Constitution, so what was to stop us from blowing them out of the water?

The admiral reportedly shot back that it would violate international law, that “you cannot kill unarmed civilians just because you want to.”

At the time it was an alarming glimpse into the sadistic mind of a man who saw immigrants as less than human.

Now it looks like Trump has taken Miller’s reported hypothetical and turned it into policy. What was once an outrageous musing has become a bloody precedent.

This has profound legal and moral implications.

By attacking a vessel flying the flag of a sovereign state, Trump risked triggering a direct military confrontation. Venezuela could have fired back at American forces in the region. A firefight at sea can escalate quickly into a regional war, and Venezuela’s leader Nicolás Maduro would have every incentive to turn to Russia and China for protection.

Leaders of both of those nations are eager to deepen their presence in our hemisphere, and this gives them an opening. It’s not inconceivable that Moscow or Beijing could send ships or aircraft to Venezuela in response.

That would put foreign military forces hostile to us within 1,300 miles of Miami. If shots were fired between American forces and Russian or Chinese deployments in the Caribbean, the slide toward a larger war would be real, very much like the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1963 (except then we had a statesman as a president, instead of a corrupt buffoon).

World War I began with a simple assassination that pitted one nation against another and then the sinking of the civilian boat the Lusitania; this is how great power conflicts can begin. Trump’s reckless strike doesn’t just risk Venezuelan lives. It risks American troops, regional stability, and, in the most ominous scenario, world peace itself.

Meanwhile, at home, the timing is impossible to ignore. Authoritarians throughout history have turned to foreign crises to distract from domestic scandals.

Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia as Watergate began to close in. Reagan invaded Grenada days after hundreds of Marines were killed in Beirut. Trump has lived for decades under the shadow of allegations of sexual predation, including reports that Jeffrey Epstein recorded him with underage girls during the years he owned and ran Miss Teen USA.

If new evidence of that were to surface, Trump would need a distraction on a scale large enough to blot out the outrage. Creating a crisis with Venezuela, complete with martial language and threats of escalation while renaming the Department of Defense to Department of War, serves that purpose. It’s the oldest play in the authoritarian book: wag the dog.

Except this time the stakes are far higher. This time we’re dealing with a president who’s been told by six corrupted members of the highest court in the land that he’s above the law.

When Miles Taylor first revealed Miller’s macabre question about bombing migrant boats, some dismissed it as idle cruelty. It now looks like a glimpse into the inner workings of Trump’s policy mind. In this worldview, immigrants are vermin, human rights are optional, Democrats are “extremists,” and lethal force is just another tool of politics.

Combine that with the Supreme Court’s gift of immunity and you have a recipe for lawless violence on a scale America has never contemplated. The entire edifice of international law is designed to prevent precisely this sort of conduct.

Extrajudicial killings, violations of sovereignty, the targeting of civilians: these are the acts that international courts prosecute when they can, and that history condemns when courts cannot stop them.

And now we’re learning that Trump did something similar in 2019 when he was last president. He authorized a SEAL Team strike against North Korea, where they killed three civilians in a boat who were simply out fishing.

If America embraces this new Putin-like assertion of America’s power to bomb anybody, anywhere, on the whim of the president, we’ll have abandoned any claim to moral leadership.

Worse, we will have normalized the authoritarian logic that anyone the president labels an enemy can be eliminated without trial, without evidence, without process. We’ll have handed Xi Jinping a rationale to attack Taiwan; all he has to do is claim that a non-governmental gang within that nation is importing drugs into China (or something similar).

The international reaction has already been severe. America’s allies are horrified, our adversaries have been emboldened, and human rights groups are openly appalled.

But the real test is here at home. Do we still believe in the principle, famously cited by our second president, John Adams, that America is a nation of laws and not of men? Do we still insist that presidents cannot kill at will? If Trump can strike a boat off Venezuela today, what is to stop him from ordering lethal force against dissidents, protesters, or political opponents tomorrow?

Keep in mind, the same Stephen Miller — who reportedly wanted to blow up boats of immigrants to kill more brown people — just in the past week claimed that the Democratic Party is a “domestic extremist organization.”

The doctrine of immunity means there is no legal backstop. The only remaining check is political will. And Trump’s fascist toadies are all in on more extrajudicial killings.

On Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete “Kegger” Hegseth said:

“We’ve got assets in the air, assets in the water, assets on ships, because this is a deadly serious mission for us, and it won’t stop with just this strike.”

Secretary of State “Little Marco” Rubio echoed the sentiment, saying during a speech in Mexico City that similar strikes “will happen again.”

This is why Democrats, independents, and every American who values the rule of law must call this out for what it is: an atrocity against eleven people, an assault on international norms, and a direct threat to American democracy.

Trump has shown us exactly how far he’s willing to go. He’s willing to risk a war in our hemisphere. He’s willing to put our troops in danger. He’s willing to risk drawing Putin and Xi into a confrontation with us that could spiral out of control. He’s willing to destroy lives to protect himself. And he’s doing it because six Republicans on the Supreme Court told him he could.

If Congress doesn’t act now to confront and contain this lawless behavior, if we don’t restore accountability to the presidency, then we’ll have surrendered not just our moral authority but our future.

The question is not whether Trump wants a distraction from his scandals; of course he does. The question is whether we’re willing to let Trump and his fascist toadies drag America and the world into catastrophe to get it.

This isn’t just about a boat off Venezuela. It’s about whether America will allow a president, blessed by the Court, to kill without evidence, without process, without even the pretense of law.

Eleven dead migrants are the proof of what immunity means in practice: impunity. If Trump can slaughter refugees today, what stops him from targeting dissidents, protesters, even political opponents tomorrow?

The answer, unless Congress and the people act, is nothing. And “nothing” is what those justices have left to protect us, our laws, and our humanity.

The Trump Achilles heel that threatens to damn world democracy

Could Trump’s weakness and the GOP’s cowardice mean the end of democracy around the world? Could his part in the Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell scandal be the proverbial horseshoe nail that brings down majority rule and representative government worldwide?

The world’s first modern major confrontation between authoritarianism (in this case, a kingdom) and democracy was the American Revolution in 1776. Outside of tribal societies, democracy had been largely dormant all over the world for the previous two thousand years, but we installed an early version of liberal democracy here in 1789.

Our first president, George Washington, not only fought the fascist forces of King George III, but he was also a fanatic proponent of democracy itself, to the point that he refused to serve a third term in office so as not to set a “king-like” precedent.

But 80 years later, America faced her second major confrontation with fascists who wanted to end our democracy and replace it with a strongman autocracy.

By the 1860s there were only a handful of democratic nations in the world when the second major war between democracy and fascism happened. The southern US states — taken over by morbidly rich plantation owners who ended democracy in the South by the mid-1850s — attacked the United States itself in an effort to end our democratic system.

But we had a fierce democracy advocate for president in Abraham Lincoln so, after almost 700,000 people died in the Civil War, we managed to preserve democracy in America and thus for much of the rest of the world.

Eighty years after that, America faced her third major war against fascist forces, this time the attack coming from Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan. While America “only” lost an estimated 413,000 men and women in WWII, the blood price the world paid was far more massive as an estimated 75 to 80 million people perished in that conflict.

And here we are, exactly 80 years after the end of that war against fascism, and America again faces the test: will we defend and preserve democracy for ourselves and the world, or will we let the new Axis that’s forming this week in China take over the planet as Trump reshapes America into a police state and realigns us with the world’s fascist nations?

For the first time — in the fourth of these 80-year cycles of assaults against democracy — America has a president who openly and explicitly disdains the idea, embracing instead the world’s most notorious autocrats and their neofascist forms of government.

And, even if he was inclined to defend democracy, Trump is terribly weak and unpopular, which only adds to the danger that this time we could see a worldwide revolution against the form of government our Founders and Framers were willing to die to establish.

On Wednesday, as 10 of the victims of Trump’s “closest friend” Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were telling their stories in front of the Capitol, Trump ordered a deafening fly-over by military jets, ostensibly to “honor” a Polish pilot. Many saw it as the president’s way of saying, “This is how much power I command; you’d better be quiet about me.”

Trump’s also threatening Congressional Republicans, with a White House source saying that anybody signing onto Ro Khanna and Tom Massey’s discharge petition (calling for the full release of the Epstein files and related info) were committing a “hostile act.”

House Speaker “Little Mike” Johnson piled on, telling the victims as he lied to their faces that he was committed to “transparency” and “justice” and then leaving the meeting to whip against the vote to release those very documents.

Putin’s clearly reading the tea leaves: he’s launched these past few days the largest, most massive, and most deadly air raids against Ukraine of the entire three-year war. Over 500 drones and two dozen ballistic missiles hit the democratic nation overnight Tuesday, most focusing on its energy grid.

Lev Parnas, once close to Trump, says this is the new Trump/Putin strategy: destroy Ukraine’s power grid and then, when winter sets in and people are freezing to death, Trump will swoop in and “negotiate peace” that screws Ukraine and gives Putin whatever he wants.

Meanwhile, China’s President Xi Jinping said on Wednesday — using code words that every diplomat in the world heard with ringing clarity — that he’s going to take Taiwan.

Xi stood with the presidents or rulers of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Cambodia, Congo, Cuba, India, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Malaysia, Maldives, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe. That’s a significant Axis to take on the Alliance of NATO and other democratic nations.

These world leaders know what appears obvious to most Americans: if Trump were innocent of participating in Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes he’d have made all the records public. The sustained ferocity of his coverup not only appears to demonstrate guilt, but also reflects the weakness he’s brought to the office with his long history of criminal and grifting behavior.

And that weakness may well be exactly what will motivate those fascist leaders to move soon to end the pesky democracies around the planet and, finally after 249 years, again make the world safe for autocrats.

So, what do we do?

In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, in his “Quarantine Speech” calling for the democratic nations of the world to essentially quarantine the fascist nations:

“Without a declaration of war and without warning or justification of any kind, civilians, including vast numbers of women and children, are being ruthlessly murdered with bombs from the air. In times of so-called peace, ships are being attacked and sunk by submarines without cause or notice. Nations are fomenting and taking sides in civil warfare in nations that have never done them any harm. Nations claiming freedom for themselves deny it to others.

“Innocent peoples, innocent nations, are being cruelly sacrificed to a greed for power and supremacy which is devoid of all sense of justice and humane considerations.”

We are there again. Roosevelt wasn’t able to stop the inexorable metastasis of fascism across the planet that erupts every four generations, and now, 80 years later, Trump is unlikely to succeed at preventing another world war where FDR failed.

Nonetheless, we all need to do everything we can to restore decency and democracy to America — including exposing Trump’s crimes, so he can no longer be threatened or blackmailed by Putin, et al — and stand against this new Axis of Tyrants. There really is no other option.

This Dem bruiser punches back at Trump but only a team effort will achieve a TKO

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker isn’t pulling any punches. On Tuesday, he gave a speech calling out Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s fascist cosplay, their lies and distortions, and predicting federal troops will soon be on the streets of Chicago.

Pritzker came right out and said Trump is doing all this for his own wealth and power:

“None of this is about fighting crime or making Chicago safer. None of it. For Trump, it's about testing his power and producing a political drama to cover up for his corruption.”

Ominously, he added:

“Any rational person who has spent even the most minimal amount of time studying human history has to ask themselves one important question: Once they get the citizens of this nation comfortable with the current atrocities committed under the color of law, what comes next?”

Pretty much every time a nation tips toward authoritarianism — as America is doing today — there’s a strongman at the center of it.

The idea goes back at least to Thomas Carlyle, whose “Great Man” theory argued that history is the story of exceptional leaders whose charisma and force of will bent the times to their shape. From Napoleon to Hitler to Trump, we see the pattern over and over.

It’s no accident that Republicans have remade themselves into a cult built around one man whose sheer audacity and appetite for power dominates the news cycle and the national conversation. After all, as Malcolm X famously said, “A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything.” The GOP hasn’t stood for anything other than the interests of the morbidly rich for at least 44 years, so its base voters were sitting ducks for a demagogue with a good sales pitch.

It’s also no accident that Democrats appear, by contrast, weak and divided, a chorus without a soloist, trying to make an argument while their opponent simply shouts. In an age of television and social media this is an existential liability. If we’re going to stop today’s Trump-driven slide into fascism, Democrats must grapple directly with this reality and build an alternative form of charismatic leadership.

That does not mean mimicking Trump’s grotesque personality cult (although California Governor Gavin Newsom’s satire is spot-on and is working). The Democratic Party should not, and cannot, center itself around one authoritarian figure. But it does mean understanding that media is not neutral, that charisma matters, that the public imagination is moved more by spectacle and story than by policy papers.

If Democrats don’t field leaders who can seize the camera, hold attention, and embody a vision, then they’ll forever be fighting from behind while Trump and his enablers drown out every other sound.

Voters, after all, are human beings, not spreadsheets. They’re moved by the emotional gravity of people they trust, admire, or even fear. Republicans learned this long ago and built their machine around it. Democrats can no longer afford to pretend that calm reason, logic, and rational policies will carry the day without their own powerful messengers.

One way to answer this problem is to reject the premise that only one Great Man can command attention. Imagine instead a bench of great women and men, a shadow cabinet of governors, senators, and policy innovators who step into the spotlight issue by issue. Rather than waiting for one savior figure, Democrats could show the country that they have a team of giants ready to govern.

To show America not just one alternative to Trump but an entire government-in-waiting.

A practical way to operationalize this idea is to create a visible Democratic shadow cabinet, as I proposed back in May. In parliamentary systems, this is how opposition parties signal to the public that they are ready to govern: they line up ministers-in-waiting who mirror the actual cabinet and speak with authority on their issue areas.

Democrats could adapt this model by assigning leading governors and senators to clear portfolios and making them the public face of the fight.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren could take the economy, standing up every time Republicans peddle trickle-down nonsense. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer could own healthcare, drawing on her state's record of expanding coverage and protecting reproductive rights. Newsom could be the climate voice, touting California’s leadership on renewables and electric vehicles. Pritzker could hold the voting rights portfolio, a relentless reminder that democracy itself is under siege.

Each of these figures is already capable of commanding national attention, but the effect would multiply if the roles were coordinated and reinforced.

The press would know who to call on any issue, and Americans would see not a muddle of competing Democratic voices but a disciplined government-in-waiting.

Rapid responses, monthly press events, and consistent messaging would project competence and readiness in contrast to the chaos of Trumpism.

This is not just about communication strategy: it’s about showing the country that Democrats have the people, the policies, and the charisma to step in tomorrow if the public gives them the chance.

This idea is not unprecedented. In parliamentary systems, opposition parties have long organized “shadow cabinets” to show voters they’re ready to take power at a moment’s notice. In the UK, Labour and the Tories alike have named shadow ministers to every portfolio, each one responsible for criticizing the government and putting forward an alternative vision.

It works because it projects competence. Voters can see the depth of the bench, not just the figure at the top. In times of crisis, this has been decisive. When Winston Churchill rose to power, it was not only his charisma but the fact that the public knew there was a team of capable ministers around him that gave Britain confidence.

Democrats would do well to borrow this model and Americanize it. Instead of being a collection of individuals jostling for position, they could present themselves as a disciplined bloc with defined roles, each amplifying the other.

At the same time, Democrats must stop letting Washington gridlock define their image.

The truth is that blue states already govern some of the largest economies in the world. California, New York, Illinois, Washington, Michigan, and Massachusetts together represent a bloc of prosperity, innovation, and rights protection larger than most nations. By acting through interstate compacts and model laws, those states can prove that Democrats deliver even when Congress stalls.

Coordinated carbon markets, clean procurement policies, abortion shield laws, voting rights protections, and labor standards can all be advanced at the state level. This is how Canada built its national healthcare system, province by province until the federal government could no longer ignore it. It’s how the early American labor movement forced reforms onto the national stage.

Call it soft secession if you want, though the better term may be the Blue States Bloc. The message is simple: if Republicans sabotage governance in Washington, Democrats will show the country how it is done in the states. It’s strength, not retreat. It’s evidence, not just rhetoric.

This is where narrative judo becomes essential. Republicans — and the corporate media — paint Democrats as weak, divided, indecisive. Democrats must flip that story on its head.

They must say clearly: we lead together because we are a coalition, not a cult. They must remind Americans that our system was designed not for one man to dominate but for leaders to share power. They must repeat, over and over, that diversity is competence, that depth is resilience, that collective leadership is how democracy works.

Instead of apologizing for the absence of a single Great Man, Democrats can show that they have something better: a team of proven leaders, each charismatic in their own right, each capable of commanding attention when the issue is in their domain. This isn’t weakness; it’s the true antidote to authoritarianism.

History is filled with moments where the survival of democracy depended on whether its defenders could command attention with the same force as its enemies. In Weimar Germany, democrats ceded the stage to demagogues and paid the price. In Spain, anti-fascists failed to unify and lost to Franco.

In contrast, during the Maidan revolution in Ukraine, leaders rose from the crowd and became the visible face of resistance, embodying the movement in a way that gave courage to millions. We shouldn’t kid ourselves: Americans are living through the same sort of crisis. The question is whether Democrats can find the discipline to project strength and charisma in time.

And when the time comes to choose a presidential ticket in 2028, that choice should be the culmination of years of visible leadership, not a scramble at the last minute. A Pritzker-Newsom ticket, or some other pairing of governors who have already shown themselves as national executives-in-training, would make the case that Democrats are ready to scale up.

Their record in the states would become the national campaign platform. Jobs growth, climate leadership, healthcare expansion, protection of rights: all would be proof points. They wouldn’t have to argue in the abstract. They could simply say: “We already govern like a nation. Now we’ll do it for the whole country.”

None of this will happen by accident.

Democrats must choose to stop ceding the stage to Trump. They must stop assuming that reason alone will defeat spectacle. They must understand that media is the battlefield now, that charisma is not optional, that in an era of constant feeds and fragmented attention the messenger is as critical as the message.

And they must realize that the perception of weakness is fatal. Authoritarians thrive when their opponents look uncertain, divided, and unready. “Strongly worded letters” are fuel for them. The only way to blunt Trump’s charisma is with charisma of our own, wielded not by one savior but by a disciplined coalition that embodies both competence and passion.

Carlyle was wrong to think that history is only made by solitary Great Men. History is also made by movements, by coalitions, by generations who decide they will not be ruled by a tyrant.

But Carlyle was right about one thing: people follow leaders they can see and believe in. If Democrats want to save this republic from sliding into fascism, they must stop hiding their leaders and start elevating them, not in dribs and drabs but as a chorus of commanding voices.

Trump’s cult of personality isn’t the only way charisma can work. It can also be the charisma of democracy itself, embodied in leaders who respect the people, who work together, and who are ready to govern.

And they must begin now. Not in 2027 when the next campaign is already underway, not in 2028 when it’ll be too late, but today. Governors, senators, mayors, party leaders must convene, assign portfolios, step into the spotlight, and begin the disciplined work of shaping the public imagination.

Because if Democrats don’t seize this moment and fill the stage with our own chorus of leaders, Trump will fill it for us, and America will be left with nothing but the hollow echo of one man’s ambition.

Trump's cult is horrific – but it contains the seeds of its own destruction

America is at risk of abandoning its founding principle of government, “by and for the people,” in favor of a system older than democracy itself: rule by one man.

Pretty much everybody understands that the United States and the old Soviet Union both had governments based on ideology or principle. The main notion of the US was expressed in the Declaration of Independence and has guided us toward what Lincoln called “a more perfect union” for 249 years:

“[T]hat all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

We call it democracy. It’s larger than any one president, any one Congress, any collection of Supreme Court justices or governors. It’s a foundational principle that’s held together by our Constitution and the laws we’ve passed over the years grounded in these core ideas.

For the Soviet Union, the idea was Marx’s, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” To accomplish this, they put together a single-party state that provided housing, medical care, food, employment, and education to every Soviet citizen; in exchange the populace was expected to work hard and never challenge the power or legitimacy of the state.

Everybody understood these basic structural differences. Both were governments being driven not by personalities but by philosophy.

Although one could argue that FDR and Stalin both had widespread support and, upon their deaths, left their nations shaken, neither was truly what you’d call a cult leader. Truman and Khruschev stepped in and each country kept humming along because both countries claimed guiding ideas larger then either of those men.

But there’s a third form of government that is rarely acknowledge in the American press or high school civics classes, except in history: rule by a popular strongman. When, on April 13, 1655, Louis XIV said, “L’état, c’est moi” (“The state is me” or “I am the state”) he summed up that perspective.

Saddam Hussein called it Ba’athism, but in reality he was the government of Iraq. Pol Pot called it communism, but in reality he was the government of Cambodia. Putin claims Russia is a democratic republic with a free-market economy, much like the US, but in reality he is the government of Russia.

From the earliest days of political science, scholars have warned of regimes where the ruler and the state become one and the same, something political scientists call a “personalist dictatorship” or “personalist rule.” (Jim Stewartson does a deeper dive into this here.)

Niccolò Machiavelli, in The Prince (1513), observed that in such systems the survival of the government was entirely bound up in the survival of the man at the top: “In a principality where the people have no share in government, if the prince is destroyed, the state is likewise ruined.” He understood that once power is concentrated in a single figure, the institutions around him become little more than ornaments.

A century later, the French jurist Jean Bodin gave this reality a new name: personalist sovereignty. In his Six Books of the Republic (1576), Bodin defined it as “the absolute and perpetual power of a republic, which is vested in a prince or in the people.” When that sovereignty was vested in a prince, the fiction of shared governance disappeared: the prince was the republic.

Modern scholars have only refined this insight. Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, in their classic Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956), argued that “the essence of the totalitarian state is that power is monopolized by a single man or a small group, and that all institutions are subordinated to this monopoly.”

Political scientist Juan Linz later described this even more bluntly:

“Personalist rule emerges when power is concentrated in the hands of one individual who dominates not only the state apparatus but also the party, the military, and the economy.”

Whether the label is Ba’athism, communism, or “sovereign democracy,” the reality is the same. When one man becomes the state, when his survival is the survival of the regime, you are no longer looking at a republic, a democracy, or even a functioning ideology. You are looking at a personalist dictatorship, a form of government as old as Machiavelli’s princes and as modern as today’s autocrats.

This is what Donald Trump is trying to turn America into, using the template Putin, Hitler, and Viktor Orbán — all personalist dictators — provided him.

This explains why he’d fire people with genuine expertise, from the State Department to the CDC to our intelligence agencies and beyond, and replace them with incompetent toadies.

Their first loyalty in a democratic republic would be to the truth, to the people, to serving a “we society” nation with their best diplomacy, science, or spycraft.

But in a personalist dictatorship, the job of every person in the government isn’t to serve the citizens who provide the “consent of the governed” but, instead, to exclusively serve Dear Leader.

This explains the mass firings, the slavish Cabinet meetings where Trump’s toadies slobber all over him, and the casual lies that are routinely told by the White House press office and senior Republican officials. It tells us why Republican members of the House and Senate only speak up for principle when they’re willing to also abandon their reelection plans.

It also explains the fragility of our current government, given Trump’s age and poor state of health.

When nations run of, by, and for Dear Leader lose that leader, the result is typically chaos and a major change in that form of government, unless the leader has first so successfully co-opted the entirety of the state systems that they’ll continue following the corrupt structures Dear Leader had put into place.

When a democracy loses a leader, in other words, the system continues. But when a personalist dictatorship loses its strongman, the system shatters.

Franco ran a personalist dictatorship in Spain right up until 1975, when he died and democracy returned to that European nation. Although defeat in war took them down, the loss of Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo all signaled political transformations in Germany, Italy, and Japan. The same was true of Hussein’s Iraq and Gaddafi’s Libya, although their removals left power vacuums that led to arguably worse forms of government as opportunists and predators stepped in to fill the void.

Understanding these dynamics should inform Democrats and the few remaining Republicans who haven’t pledged their entire loyalty to Trump and Trumpism. The only true north of his reign has been self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement, things that require cult-leader-level charisma to maintain, so if Trump suffers death or incapacity before his term is out the power vacuum will be massive.

Already, Republicans are jockeying for the position of inheritor of the MAGA crown in an effort to replicate Trump’s one-man rule. JD Vance is assuring us he’s had plenty of “on the job training.” Marco Rubio is trying to play the statesman on the international stage, although Trump keeps sabotaging his efforts, from bringing peace to Ukraine to preventing India from dumping America in favor of an alliance with China and Russia.

Other opportunists and hangers-on, from Ted Cruz to Steve Bannon to Tom Cotton, are trying to position themselves as rightwing power brokers, although given how completely the Party has sold out to America’s rightwing billionaires and Middle Eastern autocrats, the final decisions about the fate and future of the leadership of the GOP will probably be made by a handful of morbidly rich men.

Democrats, meanwhile, are learning the lesson of fighting fire with fire, in this case the need for a “big” personality to take on the massive cult following — among the Republican base and within our now-corrupted government institutions — Trump has created. This is why Gavin Newsom and JB Pritzker are getting such traction: both are punching back at the bully.

And they’re probably right about the way they’re going about it. In this era where spectacle and outrage have replace newsworthiness as driving forces propelled by social media, search site, and news site algorithms, it’s going to take a big personality to take down Trump or his successors. Somebody who can dominate the news cycle day after day while pounding a pro-democracy, anti-authoritarian message.

We’ve seen this in America before. When the GOP destroyed the economy with the Republican Great Depression, the huge personality of FDR stepped up and used the force of his own personal charisma and magnetism to put the nation back on track. Republicans squealed that FDR was “imposing socialism,” but he largely ignored them and focused on what was best for average working-class Americans, literally creating the modern middle class.

Right now, the only organizing principles held by Republicans are fealty to Trump’s whims and their own personal greed (and that of their billionaire donors). “Conservative” principles of efficiency in government, defense of democracies around the world, and fiscal responsibility at home have all been thrown overboard in favor of raw power, corruption, and a willingness to burn down the institutions of the Republic if it keeps them in charge one more election cycle.

To the extent that Democrats can forcefully point this out and strong, genuinely progressive politicians can step up into leadership, there’s a huge opportunity here to reclaim political power and put America back on the small-d democratic path. Particularly if or when Trump is no longer a factor in the GOP’s political equation, leaving his Party lost in the wilderness.

If Democrats rise to that challenge, they can lead America back toward democracy and progress. But if they hesitate — or if too many cling to the illusion that Trumpism is just another policy debate — then history will record that the oldest democracy in the modern world fell not to an ideology, but to the vanity and greed of one broken man and an opposition that failed to understand and then meet the moment.

We can’t let that happen.

This sick Trump doctrine would horrify even its creator

Former Republican strategist and operative Rick Wilson called out Robert F Kennedy Jr. as a “heroin addict, sex addict, anti-vaccination lunatic and aspiring architect of millions of deaths” who’s dedicated to replacing real scientists with “radical eugenicists.”

And why would Kennedy be doing this?

Dr. Demetre Daskalakis — one of the top scientists and physicians who quit the CDC in protest over the anticipated replacement of Dr. Susan Monarez with an anti-vax crank — was unambiguous:

“I really hear the echoes of the word, ‘superior genetics.’ He referred to very high members of this administration and their improving health status. And said, well, that person has superior genetics… That is eugenics. Wake up. This is a red flag.”

And Daskalakis wasn’t condemning Kennedy for some obscure rant or policy about cub bears, sawed-off whale heads, or research animals. He was, instead, horrified that the senior-most Trump administration health official is again paraphrasing Hitler, this time in the Fūrher’s insistence that Germany could only become strong if the state employed eugenics to prevent the weak and hereditarily ill from reproducing.

Kennedy — the guy in charge of our entire nation’s health policies and their implementation — was, the CDC doc told MSNBC — explicitly boosting the idea of “weaker” Americans dying so those left will create a genetically superior America. As Dr. Daskalakis said:

“So, fast forward to West Texas and measles, where he [Kennedy] says, you know, getting the infection is fine, really, because only the strong will survive.”

And it was all wrapped in a level of weird that left doctors around the world aghast. At a marathon press event last Wednesday in Austin, Bob Kennedy, standing beside Texas Governor Greg Abbott as MAHA‑inspired laws were signed, claimed that he could detect serious illnesses in kids just by glancing at them:

“I’m looking at kids as I walk through the airports today, as I walk down the street and I see these kids that are just overburdened with mitochondrial challenges, with inflammation, you can tell from their faces, from their body movements, and from their lack of social connection, and I know that that’s not how our children are supposed to look.”

Kennedy — an attorney with no formal medical training — is dressing up an old poison in new clothes and calling it the MAHA movement. It’s not about health, though, not really. It’s about resurrecting the old, toxic doctrine of social Darwinism and giving it a fresh coat of populist paint.

The message, stripped down, is the same one plutocrats have always used to justify their privilege: if you’re rich, powerful, and healthy, it’s because you’re “fit.” If you’re poor, struggling, sick, or broken, well, that’s just nature’s way of weeding out the weak.

It’s a twenty-first-century neo-eugenics scheme, a moral excuse for selfishness, and Kennedy and Trump have found a way to wrap it in the language of health freedom and liberty. But it’s the oldest con in the book.

My old friend, the late David Loye (and his wife, Riane Eisler), spent decades trying to undo this exact lie. Loye pointed out that Charles Darwin himself never reduced human progress to “survival of the fittest.” That phrase wasn’t even Darwin’s; it was Herbert Spencer’s. Darwin did pick it up later, but by then industrialists were running wild with it, twisting his science into an ideology to prop up inequality.

Darwin himself, in The Descent of Man, was explicit: it’s not just competition that defines humanity, it’s compassion, cooperation, and the moral sense. He worried that “survival of the fittest” was being misunderstood, that it would be used to excuse cruelty. And Loye was right: Darwin would have rejected men like Kennedy out of hand, because they’re not standing up for science or truth but for a brutal pseudo-economic philosophy that elevates greed above care for others.

This worldview is nothing more than a justification for screwing the average and the needy while cutting government spending so morbidly rich people like Trump and Kennedy can get more tax breaks. It’s Ronald Reagan’s ghost rising again, whispering Ayn Rand’s catechism of selfishness, telling us that “greed is good” and compassion is weakness.

And just like Reagan, Kennedy is trying to pass this off as the “American way.” But it’s not.

The real “American way” has always been rooted in looking out for one another. Even the first president of our republic, George Washington, was personally involved in caring for the poor: he gave funds to the Alexandria Poor Relief Committee. That sense of noblesse oblige, that duty to help those in need, was fundamental to the American experiment from the start.

That’s not socialism; it’s basic decency. It’s also Christianity. The Sermon on the Mount doesn’t say “blessed are the billionaires.” Jesus didn’t say, “render unto those with the best lawyers.” He didn’t say, “let the strong crush the weak.” He said, “whatever you did for the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” The gospel couldn’t be clearer: our moral worth is measured not by how much we hoard for ourselves, but by how we treat the poor, the sick, and the stranger.

Kennedy’s MAHA movement and the post-Reagan Revolution GOP spit in the face of that teaching. As John Kenneth Galbraith once put it:

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

That’s exactly what’s happening here. RFK Jr. and his billionaire allies are recycling the same fraudulent morality used by the robber barons of the Gilded Age, the same poisonous reasoning that told factory owners it was fine to work men and women to death because if they couldn’t hack it, they weren’t “fit.” The same warped logic that defended child labor, starvation wages, and opposition to Social Security and Medicare.

And it’s been accelerating since the Reagan Revolution. Reagan idolized Ayn Rand’s brand of ruthless individualism, elevating selfishness as a civic virtue. He gutted government programs for working people while slashing taxes for the rich, and in the process rewrote the American social contract.

Ever since, Republicans and their wealthy patrons have been trying to drag us back into a society where only the wealthy thrive while the rest are left to rot. Reagan sneered at government itself, calling it the problem. But what he really meant was that government that works for the people is a problem for the morbidly rich who don’t want to pay for it.

Kennedy and the people he’s installing at the CDC and throughout our public health system are now running the same scam, draping their project in the rhetoric of “health” while selling the same poisonous brew of deregulation, disinvestment, “individual responsibility,” and cruelty.

Just look at the results. The United States today has the worst life expectancy in the developed world. Our people die younger, sicker, and with more preventable disease than citizens of countries that see healthcare as a right rather than a privilege. In Japan, in Canada, in most of Europe, people live longer and healthier lives because their governments take seriously the responsibility to ensure access to healthcare, clean food, and safe living conditions.

Here in the U.S., the rich buy themselves concierge doctors and organic diets while millions of working families can’t even afford insulin. That’s not “fitness.” That’s systemic cruelty.

Darwin understood that our species didn’t survive and flourish because the strong crushed the weak, but because we cared for each other, because we developed the instincts of sympathy and cooperation. David Loye called it “Darwin’s Theory of Love,” and Rianne Eisler documented across her many books how societies across history embraced egalitarian principles and so often rejected the kind of brutal patriarchy that Trump and his followers celebrate.

Anthropologists tell us that when early humans tended to the sick, shared food with the injured, and supported the elderly, that was when civilization began to take root. Dr. Margaret Mead told us she saw the beginning of civilization in a healed human femur from hundreds of thousands of years ago, something that only could have happened if the entire tribe had cared for its wounded member.

That’s the evolutionary advantage that made us who we are. Strip that away, and you don’t have a healthy society: you have a jungle ruled by predators.

And that’s what Kennedy and his MAHA movement — and the entire GOP for the past 44 years — appear to want: a jungle where the predators can get tax cuts while the rest of us lose healthcare, pensions, clean air, and safe food. They want to call it “natural” when kids get asthma from polluted air or cancer from toxic pesticides. They want to say it’s “survival of the fittest” when working people die ten years earlier than their wealthy peers because they spent their lives exposed to poisons in the workplace or because they couldn’t afford a doctor’s visit.

That’s not natural law. That’s man-made cruelty funded by the morbidly rich and justified by pseudoscience.

We can’t let them get away with it. We can’t let this neo-eugenics movement masquerade as patriotism or health reform. America was built on the promise that “We, the People” look out for each other, that we form a government to promote what the Constitution calls “the general Welfare,” not to serve as a handmaiden for the rich.

Washington knew it. Lincoln knew it. FDR knew it. Every generation that has bent the arc of history toward justice has known it. The question today is whether we’ll remember it in time.

Because this is not just about RFK Jr., or Trump, or Reagan’s long shadow. It’s about what kind of country we want to be. Do we want to embrace the morality of Jesus, of Washington, of Lincoln, of Roosevelt and LBJ, who all understood that caring for the vulnerable is the essence of civilization? Or do we want to embrace the morality of the jungle, where selfishness is recast as virtue and cruelty is excused as “fitness”?

Should America continue to be the only developed country in the world where healthcare is a privilege instead of a right? Or are we truly called — both by our Founders and our religious leaders — to be our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers?

David Loye dedicated his life to rescuing Darwin from the distortions of men like Kennedy, and to reminding us that our evolutionary destiny is not competition to the death but moral progress. We ignore his warning at our peril. If we let Bob Kennedy, MAHA madness, and his billionaire patrons redefine America as a place where only the strong survive, we will lose not just our health but our souls.

One radical step will horrify most but it can end our national nightmare

Thursday was the 70th anniversary of the brutal murder of Emmett Till. This week also brought us another mass school shooting, this time in Minneapolis with two children dead and 17 people in the hospital.

There are lessons we must learn from both, as I’ll lay out in a moment.

Immediately following the Minneapolis shooting, another pathetic Republican congressman claimed that the slaughter wasn’t facilitated by guns but by “mental illness, including radical gender ideology.”

A community is grieving, school kids across America are terrified, and after 339 mass shootings since the start of this year you’d think average Americans would finally understand that the horrors of this gun violence have been intentionally inflicted on us by Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court in exchange for cash from the NRA and Russia.

This is a phenomenon as systemic and unique to the United States today as Jim Crow was in the 1950s. The gun control movement needs to learn from the Civil Rights movement.

Back in 1955, young Black people like 14-year-old Emmett Till were routinely murdered by white people all over America, usually with no consequence whatsoever.

Emmett Till was kidnapped by two Mississippi white men on Aug. 28, 1955, brutally tortured, murdered, and his mangled body thrown into the Tallahatchie River. (And the white men who did it, and the white woman who set it off with a lie, never suffered any meaningful consequence.)

His mother, Mamie Bradley, made the extraordinarily brave decision to show her child’s mutilated face with an open-coffin funeral in their hometown, Chicago.

Jet magazine ran a picture you can see here of Emmett, which went viral, invigorating the Civil Rights movement as it horrified the nation. As President Biden said two years ago, honoring the release of the movie Till:

“JET magazine, the Chicago Defender and other Black newspapers were unflinching and brave in sharing the story of Emmett Till and searing it into the nation’s consciousness.”

That picture made real the horrors of white violence against Black people in America for those who were unfamiliar, or just unwilling, to confront it.

We’ve all heard about Newtown and Stoneman Douglas and Las Vegas, but have you ever seen pictures of the bodies mutilated by the .223 caliber bullets that semi-automatic assault weapons like the AR15 fire?

The odds are pretty close to zero. Most Americans have no idea the kind of damage such weapons of war can do to people, particularly children.

But we need to learn. Because pictures really work when it comes to changing public opinion.

In the 1980s, egged on by partisans in the Reagan administration, America’s anti-abortion movement began the practice of holding up graphic, bloody pictures of aborted fetuses as part of their demonstrations and vigils.

Their literature and magazines, and even some of their advertisements, still often carry or allude to these graphic images.

Those in the movement will tell you that the decision in the 1990s to use these kinds of pictures was a turning point, when “abortion became real“ for many Americans, and even advocates of a woman’s right to choose an abortion started using phrases like “legal, safe, and rare.“

Similarly, when the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of 9-year-old “Napalm Girl” Phan Thị Kim Phúc running naked down a rural Vietnamese road after napalm caught her clothes on fire was published in 1972, it helped finally turned the tide on the Vietnam War.

Showing pictures in American media of the result of a mass shooter’s slaughter would be a controversial challenge.

There are legitimate concerns about sensationalizing violence, about morbid curiosity, about warping young minds and triggering PTSD for survivors of violence.

And yet, pictures convey reality in a way that words cannot. One of these days, the parents of children murdered in a school shooting may make the same decision Mamie Till did in 1955.

America’s era of mass shootings kicked off on Aug. 1, 1966 when Charles Whitman murdered his mother and then climbed to the top of the clock tower at the University of Texas and begin shooting.

The vast majority of our mass killings, however, began during the Reagan/Bush administrations following the 1984 San Ysidro, California McDonald’s massacre, the Edmond, Oklahoma Post Office shooting of 1986, and the Luby’s Cafeteria massacre in Killeen, Texas in 1991.

Ronald Reagan’s embrace of the gun lobby, his repeal of modest restrictions like the Brady Bill waiting period, and his rhetoric casting firearms as symbols of “freedom” helped unleash a flood of guns into American society, fueling the explosion of both gun ownership and gun violence that has scarred the nation ever since.

We’ve become familiar with the names of the places, and sometimes the dates, but the horror and pain of the torn and exploded bodies has escaped us.

It’s time for America to confront the reality of gun violence. And all my years working in the senior levels of the advertising industry tell me that a graphic portrayal of the consequences of their products is the greatest fear of America’s weapons manufacturers and the NRA.

We did it with tobacco and drunk driving back in the day, showing pictures of people missing half their jaw or mangled and bloody car wreckage, and it worked.

And now there’s a student-led movement asking states to put a check-box on driver’s licenses with the line:

“In the event that I die from gun violence please publicize the photo of my death. #MyLastShot.”

This isn’t, however, something that should just be tossed off, or thrown up on a webpage.

Leadership from multiple venues in American journalism — print, television, web-based publications — should get together and decide what photos to release with parental permission, how to release them, and under what circumstances it could be done to provide maximum impact and minimum trauma.

But Americans must understand what’s really going on.

A decade ago, President Barack Obama put then-VP Joe Biden in charge of his gun task force, and Biden saw the pictures from school shootings back then.

Here’s how The New York Times quoted Biden:

“‘Jill and I are devastated. The feeling — I just can’t imagine how the families are feeling,’ he said, at times struggling to find the right words.”

Obama himself, after seeing the photos, broke into tears on national television.

And we appear to be tiptoeing up to the edge of doing exactly this. The Washington Post featured an article about what happens when people are shot by assault weapons and included this commentary:

“A Texas Ranger speaks of bullets that ‘disintegrated’ a toddler’s skull.

“This explains the lead poisoning that plagues survivors of the shooting in Sutherland Springs, Tex.; David Colbath, 61, can scarcely stand or use his hands without pain, and 25-year-old Morgan Workman probably can’t have a baby. It explains the evisceration of small bodies such as that of Noah Pozner, 6, murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary, and Peter Wang, 15, killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High.

“The Post examined the way bullets broke inside of them — obliterating Noah’s jaw and Peter’s skull, filling their chests with blood and leaving behind gaping exit wounds.”

But we need to go the next step and show the actual pictures for this truth about the horror of gun violence to become widely known. Doing this will take leadership.

And, of course, there must be a Mamie Bradley: a parent, spouse or other relation willing to allow the photos of their loved one to be used in this way.

In 1996 there was a horrific slaughter in Tasmania, Australia, by a shooter using an AR15-style weapon, culminating a series of mass shootings that had plagued that nation for over a decade.

While the mainstream Australian media generally didn’t publish the photos, they were widely circulated.

As a result the Australian public was so repulsed that within a year semi-automatic weapons in civilian hands were outlawed altogether, strict gun control measures were put into place, and a gun-buyback program went into effect that voluntarily took over 700,000 weapons out of circulation.

And that was with John Howard as Prime Minister — a conservative who was as hard-right as Reagan!

In the first years after the laws took place, firearms-related deaths in Australia fell by well over 40 percent, with suicides dropping by 77 percent. There have only been two mass killings in the 29 years since then.

The year 1996 was Australia’s Emmett Till moment.

America needs ours.

Every Republican policy serves this one sick purpose

On Wednesday, there was another highly publicized school shooting. Republicans, as usual, are offering thoughts and prayers.

But why?

Why have Republicans — who, before Ronald Reagan, were the party in favor of gun control — decided that it’s just fine for America to be the only country in the world where the leading cause of childhood deaths and injury is bullets?

Why have Republicans — who during the Eisenhower administration pushed for massive public works programs like the interstate freeways and new schools coast-to-coast — decided instead to kill off as many of those sorts of programs as possible to pay for tax gifts to billionaires?

Why are they defending insider trading in Congress, supporting monopolies that rip off consumers and small businesses, and refusing to do anything about uninsured people or student debt?

The question is answered most easily with another set of questions, these ones rhetorical:

  • Would you trust your doctor if she told you the only reason she went into medicine was to get rich and doesn’t much care for people? Would you take your kids to such a physician?
  • Would you trust your child’s teacher if he said he hated kids but needed the paycheck and though teaching might be a great way to meet attractive single mothers of young kids?
  • Or a pilot who hates flying but loves the paychecks and the flight attendants?

Yet this is exactly what Republicans have done with government. They stand up at campaign rallies and proudly proclaim that government doesn’t work and never will, and then voters hand them the keys.

Once in office, they make sure their wealthy friends and donors get the perks while they steer the rest of us straight into turbulence. It’s sabotage disguised as leadership, and the only way they get away with it is because they’ve convinced enough people that wrecking the plane is the same thing as piloting it.

Republicans — in the years since Reagan told us that, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem” — have been like that doctor, teacher, and pilot. They run for public office because it can make them rich, introduce them to people who’ll help them get richer, and might even improve their sex life.

Look, for example, how Tiffany Trump’s new husband suddenly got rich once Donald was back in the White House.

But making life better for average Americans? Hah, they’ll tell you: that’s for Democrats and suckers.

JD Vance has taken seven very expensive taxpayer-funded vacations in the eight months since he became VP; Trump plays golf about every third day and has made an estimated $3.5 billion off his having occupied the White House so far; every Republican in the House and Senate knows that if they treat the right industry the right way they’ll have a very-well-paid job waiting for them when they retire.

They don’t care about governing; they’re just in it for themselves.

This is a far cry from the idealistic notions of public service that animated the Founders and generations of Americans who’ve fought and died for this country in the years since. It’s a twisted embrace of Ayn Rand Libertarianism, a philosophy that says greed is good and whoever’s the most efficient predator deserves whatever they can steal or con people out of.

Once you understand that simple reality, everything else the GOP is up to makes sense.

It explains why they’d saturate our country with guns while taking billions from the gun industry, why they’d deregulate polluters while Americans are dying from pollution and climate change, why they’d sanction a healthcare system that has caused millions of unnecessary deaths but has meanwhile made insurance, hospital, and healthcare executives into billionaires.

This past Spring was the 22nd anniversary of my radio program. During that entire time, I’ve run a contest for anybody who can name even one single piece of legislation from the past 40+ years (since Reagan) that was:
  • authored by Republicans,
  • principally co-sponsored by Republicans,
  • passed Congress with a Republican majority,
  • signed by a Republican president,
  • and benefited average working people or the poor more than it did the GOP’s donor class.

Outside of a feeble-attempt bill to regulate spam callers during the first Bush administration and legislation reversing the Osage Allotment Act of 1906, nobody has ever won the autographed book prize.

Every developed country in the world has some variation on a free or low-cost national healthcare system, and free or subsidized higher education.

In most developed countries homelessness is not a crisis; nobody goes bankrupt because somebody in their family got sick; and jobs pay well enough and have union pensions so people can retire after 30 or 40 years in the workforce and live comfortably for the rest of their lives.

But not in America. Republican politicians have fought tooth-and-nail for generations to prevent any of those things from happening here.

Which again raises the question: “Why?”

Why do Republican politicians promote hateful messages and cruel policies? Why are Republican-run Red states the real “shithole” parts of the US with the highest rates of poverty, violence, early death, disease, and illiteracy?

What motivates these Republican politicians to say they’re for the “little guy” when the only policies they pursue are to cut taxes on the morbidly rich, gut unions, destroy public schools, and ship jobs overseas?

It’s not about ideology.

Republicans don’t hate Social Security and Medicare, for example, because they’re afraid that those programs are going to somehow turn America into a “socialist” country. They hate those programs because they’re paid for with tax dollars, and greedy Republicans hate to pay their fair share of taxes.

It’s not just about racism, although it often appears that way.

The reason Republicans work so hard to keep Black and brown people down is because they subscribe to a weird economic theory that “requires” an underclass who do most of the hard work for very little money. Thus, morbidly rich Republican “donors” — being part of the overclass — can reap the benefits of increased corporate profits while keeping their taxes low so they can stuff the extra cash into their money bins.

If their use of racist language and Confederate iconography brings in a few more low-IQ white voters, that’s just icing on the cake. They can use the racist yahoos to get themselves reelected so giant corporations will continue to stuff their SuperPACs with lobbyist cash they can use for their own retirement.

It’s not about charity.

Republicans say that the housing, healthcare, and other needs of poor people should be taken care of through “private philanthropy” instead of government. What they’re really saying is that they don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes to maintain a healthy society.

It’s not about Christianity, although they’re constantly invoking Jesus for everything from pushing the death penalty on women who got an abortion to giving bigots the legal right to discriminate against gay, lesbian, and trans people.

Jesus never once mentioned abortion and decried bigotry, but they regularly ignore and even flout His teachings in the Sermon on the Mount and His warnings in Matthew 25. They protect multimillionaire evangelists’ tax-free status, and the preachers repay them by preaching politics from the pulpit.

It’s not about saving Americans from the pandemic or concern for public health.

Last time he was president, Trump used the Defense Production Act to force mostly brown and Black meatpackers back to work, not to keep Americans safe. As long as the factories were humming and the stock market was rising, a few hundred thousand dead Americans were just collateral damage with the 2020 election looming.

It’s not about conservatism.

They’re not interested in slowly or “cautiously” improving society, or “conserving” anything other than the balances in their own checking accounts. They like to use the word “conservative,” but they’ve rendered it meaningless at best and code for “racist” or “obsessively selfish” at worst.

It’s not about making the world a better place.

Republican politicians deny climate change, deregulate industries that poison our air and water, and do everything they can to screw working people out of unions, good wages, and decent benefits. They’re totally down with pesticides that are killing our pollinators while they poison our atmosphere with their carbon emissions, all just to make a buck.

It’s not about having a better-educated electorate or populace.

They’ve spent decades trying to destroy our public education system that was, in the 1960s, the envy of the world. When they did away with free and low-cost college education during the Reagan years they kicked off almost $2 trillion worth of student debt which is preventing young people from starting families, opening small businesses, or even buying their first house. But it sure is profitable for Republican-donor banksters!

It isn’t about “culture.”

They do a good-old-boy NASCAR/Duck Dynasty routine to bring in the rubes, but there’s no way Trump would ever invite the average Republican voter with a giant flag and a pickup truck to any of his golf clubs, nor would Ted Cruz want to vacation with one of them or their families in Cancun. And if any of their daughters were raped, they’d be getting an abortion in a New York minute.

It’s not about “gun violence.”

As long as their investments in weapons manufacturers are profitable and the problem of gun violence is limited to poor- and working-class Americans, Republican politicians don’t give a rat’s ass about “gun safety.” Although they’re happy to use guns as a wedge issue to bring in male voters who are insecure about their own masculinity. As California Governor Gavin Newsom wrote on Wednesday:

“We cannot even make it through the first week of school without mass shootings. And the @GOP will continue to do absolutely nothing while our kids are being gunned down. This is sick.”

It’s not about “protecting our children.”

The main through-story of the GOP attacks on queer people is that “they’re coming for your kids.” If Republican politicians actually cared about our kids, they’d do something about America being the only country in the world where gun violence is the leading cause of childhood death.

Republican politicians know that most pedophiles are straight men, but attacking defenseless minorities has been the cheap trick of craven demagogues from the eras of crusades, pogroms, and witch burnings to this day. And don’t get me started on the damage Bobby Kennedy Jr. is inflicting on our public health system and programs to vaccinate our children and grandchildren.

It’s not about immigrants taking jobs from working-class Americans.

After “reforming” our immigration laws in 1986, Reagan stopped enforcing the laws against wealthy white employers hiring people who are here without documentation (even though those employers were — and are — committing a crime by hiring undocumented workers). This was part-and-parcel of the GOP’s war on unions.

As a result, entire industries like construction and meatpacking that once provided good union jobs have been de-unionized, their former American-citizen union employees replaced by low-wage workers without documentation.

And when the spotlight gets shined on those industries, Republicans are more than happy to put poor, hard-working brown people in jail, but there’s no way they’re ever going to go after wealthy white employers. Not a single wealthy white employer ever goes to jail, although they’re the ones who initiated the “crime.”

Republican politicians don’t give a damn about your job, particularly when they can find somebody else to do it cheaper, although they do have to put on a little show from time to time to keep the racists happy.

It’s not about putting America or Americans “first.”

Reagan and Bush the Elder negotiated NAFTA and revived the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) so businesses could offshore entire factories. Since the Reagan administration instituted neoliberalism in 1981, over 60,000 factories have left America, taking along with them at least 15 million jobs.

Trump’s rewrite of NAFTA even gave American companies a huge new tax break if they’d move their factories from America to Mexico.

At the end of the day, all Republican politicians care about is money. Greed is their principle animating force, and is what binds them to their morbidly rich donors.

The greed embraced by Republican politicians — and the billionaires and CEOs who fund them — is why average Americans can’t have nice things. It’s why we and our children must walk the tightrope of life without the same safety net other countries — from Canada to Costa Rica, France to Taiwan — offer their citizens.

It’s why children are dead this week in Minneapolis as Republican politicians happily pocket NRA cash.

It doesn’t matter to Republican politicians how many Americans die unnecessarily, how many of our fellow citizens struggle in misery and poverty, how many children’s growth is stunted or bodies and brains are poisoned by industrial and mining waste being poured into our air and rivers, or terrified by active shooter drills in our schools.

It’s a safe bet that over the next three years Trump and Republicans in Congress will not give my listeners an opportunity to win that contest.

As long as the money keeps rolling in and the GOP’s billionaire patrons keep paying less than 3 percent in income taxes, greed and their own wealth and power are all Republican politicians care about or are willing to fight for.

The real reason for this brutal Trump move will chill you to the bone

Monday night, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker came right out and said it. Trump sending troops into American cities has nothing whatsoever to do with crime or policing but, instead, is all about stealing the 2026 election:

“Eight of the top 10 states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans. None of those states is Illinois.”

In fact, the cities with the highest crime and homicide rates are, respectively, Memphis, Tennessee, and St. Louis, Missouri — both in red states.

So, if this isn’t about crime, why is Trump working so hard to get Americans used to heavily armed troops — who aren’t trained in policing but can be very effective at crowd control — in our blue cities?

The simple answer is that he and his cronies are terrified of suffering Richard Nixon’s fate (40 of his senior officials were indicted; many went to prison including his Attorney General and White House Counsel). That’s why they’re planning to steal the 2026 and 2028 elections by any means necessary, and the troops are part of their plan.

Because they know that one of the most common causes of people pouring out into the streets — including in ways that brought down authoritarian governments — was the regime in power stealing an election.

Pritzker said it clearly and emphatically:

“This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey, Stephen Miller, searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities, and end elections.”

Let that roll around in your head: “Militarize our cities, and end elections.”

Pritzker is no wild-eyed leftie or crazed conspiracy theorist. He’s the billionaire heir to the Hyatt fortune so he knows the billionaire circles Trump travels in well. He’s the governor of America’s sixth-largest state, with a population larger than 170 nations or 87 percent of all UN member states.

He’s an attorney who knows the law, and a successful businessman who’s founded multiple companies, including backstopping tech companies, starting a venture capital operation, and building a private equity firm from scratch. He was elected in 2022 with the highest vote share of any Democratic governor anywhere in the nation in over 60 years.

And he’s watching what Trump is doing far better, apparently, than our mainstream press. He’s tracking Trump’s executive order giving the president the power to direct the military to seize voting machines (and thus nullify their votes) in blue cities that may swing states away from the GOP. And Trump’s executive order to end mail-in voting.

Trump’s statement this week that Americans “want a dictator,” was almost certainly cribbed from his mentor, Vladimir Putin. His new order for the National Guard to work with ICE (eventually, presumably, to work for ICE, Trump’s personal secret masked police force) to create a “Rapid Reaction Force” to deal with civil disturbances reveals his end game.

Its mandate is to assist “local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order whenever the circumstances necessitate, as appropriate under law.”

It appears to be modeled almost exactly after the Rosgvardiya National Guard rapid reaction force Putin created in 2016 to put down anti-Putin and pro-Alexei Navalny protests. Today the Rosgvardiya numbers over 600,000 men under arms. Putin probably told him about it in the car in Alaska, as this EO came right after that meeting.

Additionally, Trump‘s executive order essentially invites Proud Boys and other white supremacist militia into the tent to help with election intimidation efforts. It creates “an online portal for Americans with law enforcement or other relevant backgrounds and experience” who National Guard leaders “shall each deputize the members of this unit to enforce federal law.”

As Alec Karakatsanis of the Civil Rights Corps, wrote on X, this will “permit random fascist vigilantes to join soldiers.” It’s a 21st-century echo of the GOP’s Operation Eagle Eye, which enlisted white men to threaten people of color at voting polls in the 1960s and 1970s, or Hitler’s SA, the Sturmabteilung.

So what sort of civil disturbance is it that Trump’s anticipating putting down with his Rapid Reaction Force?

Here’s a partial list of countries where a recent stolen or apparently stolen election caused citizens to pour out into the streets to challenge the regime in power:

Russia, Belarus, Hungary, Serbia, Ukraine, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Algeria, Panama, Philippines, Georgia, Mozambique, Serbia, Malawi, Hong Kong, Comoros, Pakistan, Indonesia, Mauritania, Tunisia, Ghana, Senegal, Tanzania, Peru.

Stolen elections and the protests they provoke are one of the most common features of countries that are in the process of sliding from democracy into authoritarian fascism and strongman rule.

And if you think Trump doesn’t believe people will turn out in the streets — sometimes violently — to demand the overturn of a stolen election, just remember January 6. If you truly believed that an election had been stolen in broad daylight, might you have been among those protestors, too? Given that example, you can add the United States to the list above.

And Trump definitely doesn’t want Americans — particularly Democrats — out in the streets protesting a stolen election again (unless Republicans lose so decisively he can’t steal the election, in which case he’ll try to repeat January 6).

Make no mistake: this is what Trump’s militarization of blue cities is all about. If he can confiscate enough voting machines, refuse to count enough votes, intimidate enough voters, and disqualify enough mail-in ballots to invalidate Democratic majorities in a few dozen big cities, he can flip as many blue states to red as he wants. And keep the GOP in power forever.

And he has to. In his mind, he has no choice.

After then Attorney General Merrick Garland finally got off his ass following two years of worried thumb-sucking, just the smallest and most tentative efforts to hold Trump to account for a tiny percentage of the many crimes he committed both in and after his first term would have sent him to prison for the rest of his life.

Trump knows this well. He was arrested and mug-shot photographed in Georgia, convicted of fraud and adjudicated liable for sexual abuse in New York, and was looking at dozens of other lawsuits and potential criminal and civil charges that are now on suspension, since his election as president last year.

He can’t go back. His life and his fortune literally depend on his holding power and never allowing Democrats to have subpoena ability in the House or Senate again, at least as long as he’s alive.

It might explain why he just appointed 2020 election denier/activist and Cleta Mitchell protégé Heather Honey to a senior position charged with “overseeing” the 2026 and 2028 elections, particularly, as Miles Taylor points out, the overseas mail-in votes that tend to trend Democratic.

As ProPublica noted:

“Honey has led at least three organizations devoted to transforming election systems in ways championed by conservatives, such as tightening eligibility requirements for people to be on voter rolls. Members of Honey’s Pennsylvania Fair Elections, a state chapter of Mitchell’s nationwide Election Integrity Network, have challenged the eligibility of thousands of residents to be on voter rolls.

“Honey has also been involved in numerous other efforts to transform elections around the country, including a successful push to get many states with Republican leadership to pull out of a bipartisan interstate partnership to share data to make voting more secure.”

He’s getting ready.

After all, Trump is the man who cheered as his followers killed three police officers and smeared feces on the walls of America’s Capitol while trying to overturn the 2020 election.

He’s the guy who routinely lies to the American people while threatening and castigating reporters who dare call him out on it.

He’s the one who openly admires Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan, Kim, Xi, and pretty much every other tinpot and major dictator in the world.

And the people who work for him — looking at the fates of John Mitchell, John Dean, G. Gordon Liddy and others who were busted for following the illegal and unconstitutional orders of a corrupt president, Richard Nixon — are equally emphatic that they’re never going to spend a day in a federal prison, either.

So, get ready because Trump’s already well more than halfway down the road toward fascism and, in his mind, there’s no stopping until America’s democracy is buried under the old Rose Garden and our dissenters are as quiet and terrified as are those few still remaining in Russia, Hungary, and Turkey.

If Democratic governors and mayors are going to stop Trump from having his armed forces pre-positioned to help Republicans steal the 2026 elections, they need to get an infusion of Pritzker’s and Newsom’s courage and begin to seriously fight.

A coalition or interstate compact — formal or informal — will be absolutely necessary to resist Trump’s armed forces. Perhaps even a sort of soft succession, openly defying Trump’s illegal orders and threatened violence.

Governors are not without resources, as both Pritzker and Newsom have pointed out. They just need to use them. Let your state’s governor know!

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